New Orleans has to get out of the marketing mindset all together. If there is no reason for all of us to be here doing our thing other than to sell some of that thing to tourists, we deserve to drown anyway. Our culture is in crisis because the only direction it has been able to move in is toward the marketplace. And the marketplace is in shambles, and we need to turn to culture to find a way out of this marketplace of collapse and disaster.

What is the role of government in the arts community you ask? In a corrupt and capitalist society, the best you can do is have it be totally incompetent and distracted. Historically, New Orleans has had vibrant arts community because of our unprecedented level of incompetence and because of the endemic racism that caused no attention to be payed to African-American neighborhoods (certainly for ill as well as good.) The real-estate boom of the last 10 years and of course Katrina have opened up more formerly ghetto neighborhoods for gentrification. And the gentry are certainly much more into their preserved houses (a commodity form) than real community-based artistic expression (remember when the Treme was a very fertile musical landscape–it wasn’t that long ago.) Steeply rising rents (as Andre Codrescu has succinctly pointed out, the history of 20th Century art could be written as the history of cheap 20th Century rents, from Paris in the 20’s to the Lower East side in the 50’s and 60’s to New Orleans up to the late 90’s) puts added pressure on economically marginal cultural activity as it makes getting paid the number one consideration of most artists. And now the government has stepped in a big way to make some bucks off of “culture.” Just like every other city in America. It used to be convention centers, now its culture. Of course, unlike almost everywhere else in America, we do have culture (remember, mostly because of the incompetence and corruption of our authorities, because if they had efficiently exercised their authority they would have stamped out most traces of that culture by now,) but the attempts to exploit it mostly end up crushing it. It’s a no win game, and it’s a game that is out-of-date anyway.

While the government now wants to open a “jazz museum,” most of their energy directed with music is directed at shutting it down in the streets and the clubs. Remember, a museum ain’t nothing but mausoleum. When they want to put you in a museum, run the other way, fast. There is nothing the government can do to help the arts–except to be destroyed by a revolution!!!