Scribe

2014

 
 

Yeah, which is my point in promoting them [a particular art market here] as much as I can. When they first got rolling, they had initially a good number of high quality artists with unique, upscale art merchandise. They still have a few there, along with the more costume jewelry/art vendors. The lack of sales disincentivized a good number of artists to stay on, preferring to go where the grass is greener.


The problem in Prescott: there is no greener grass, even with the nation’s economy booming again. Galleries have come and gone. Despite The Arts Prescott Cooperative Gallery, Mountain Artist’s Guild, and Tis Gallery, I doubt any local artists can ever give up their “day jobs” here. The exception probably being those transplants that came here already bestowed with recognition and having deep pockets.


The same goes for the glut of writers in Prescott. Prescott is a town of food and drink, not of the buying and selling of art. Literary interest in a small town is going to be primarily generated from the local higher education institutions. As far as any national-focused literary opportunity goes here, aside from Prescott College’s anual Alligator Juniper (literary magazine) contest, there is none. And typically, colleges’ literary faculty and students choose their winners with nepotistic regularity from other faculty and students of other colleges/universities.


They go to great lengths to affect the impression of strict impartiality in their contests, but not so. When you research the full background of the "little lady" raising two children, writing from her homespun lifestyle of bucolic existence, it turns out she is a career academician with a litany of professorships at different colleges and/or universities.


Sidebar: Lani’s second year English instructor at YC was so taken by Tim O’Brien’s fictional, semi-autobiographical, Vietnam War-based book, “The Things They Carried," that she made it required reading. Lani was never able to get her to take a look at my book. O’Brien’s iconic status in academia, as the authoritative last word in all things Nam, apparently too high a hurdle for her instructor to venture into the wild unknown and entertain another point of view on a war whose era she was too young to have witnessed.


With the bulk of the literary-minded here being primarily groomed and graduated by the writing faculty of the two colleges in the area, Prescott’s book interests and sales are skewed decidedly toward the tastes and habits of the 18 – 34 yr. olds who drive popular culture. The retirement population, which forms the bulk of Prescott, doesn’t read, and values primarily food, drink, nature, conservative religious tenets, cheap labor and low taxes. Not the fertile soil for free-thinking writers to flourish in.


When contrasted with larger populations of readership both degreed and non, there is a lesser influence of the 18 – 34 age group on defining the standard for good art and writing, what is cutting edge that demands attention. Academia of course defines what is mostly taught but not so much what becomes popular by choice. Academia is almost always behind the innovation curve, and in some cases actively inhibits it. You know that from art curriculum.


All other things equal then, Prescott is not art friendly (that is, conducive to making a living by art) by virtue of its demographic. These are critical years for us … to modify a movie title as a metaphoric analogy, I would rather go Sleepless in Santa Fe doing art than in Prescott.