Art crawls: Locating artists and audiences in the creative city

Abstract

This article reconsiders creative city planning strategies in light of a Bourdieuian field model of cultural production. Creative city discourse imagines street-level artistic scenes as tolerant milieus that attract creative human capital and promote growth, whereas a field perspective views art scenes as generating logics and practices of exclusion. Using ethnographic observation and interviews with artists and other stakeholders in art crawl events in Portland, Oregon, and Nashville, Tennessee, this article describes how artists interact with their audiences in new urban contexts. Art crawls are monthly, coordinated, gallery-opening events that bring together art scenes and new audiences in particular times and districts, and they have proliferated in cities of all sizes in recent years, notably in places without rich traditions in the arts. This article finds that artistic professionals work to attract crowds, but the logics of their field then require sorting and selecting between them.

Keywords

art artists creative class field of cultural production urban planning and development

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