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Who Gets to Be “Chicago Culture”? Michelin Stars, Museum Walls and the Economics of Cultural Legitimacy

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Chicago has never lacked culture. It spills out of storefront restaurants, basement studios, neighborhood festivals, music clubs, churches, galleries and kitchens. It is painted on viaducts and cooked over grills. It arrives with immigrants carrying recipes and traditions, and it emerges from artists turning the experience of the city into something new. But there is a difference between creating culture and being recognized as culturally important. That distinction matters economically. Consider two hypothetical Chicago creators. A painter spends six months producing a canvas that eventually sells for $40,000. Across town, a chef spends six months refining a dish that sells for $40. Their mediums are different, but their creative processes may be surprisingly similar. Both work with composition, color, memory, history, technique and emotion. Both may spend years developing a distinctive style. Both depend on suppliers, spaces, audiences and reputations. Both can create work that tells...
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Patron Economy: Who Really Pays for Chicago’s Culture?

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 CHICAGO — Walk through Chicago on a Saturday night and much of the city’s economy looks like a market operating exactly as markets are supposed to. Diners pay for tables at restaurants. Tourists buy museum tickets. Couples purchase theater seats. Collectors acquire paintings. Audiences fill concert halls. Behind each transaction is an apparently straightforward exchange: Someone wants culture, and someone else is willing to sell it. But follow the money far enough and the economics become considerably more complicated. Many of the institutions that make Chicago culturally valuable cannot survive on customers alone. Museums need donors. Theaters need subscribers and benefactors. Orchestras need patrons. Artists depend on galleries, collectors, foundations and grants. Even restaurants — perhaps the most overtly commercial component of urban culture — exist within an ecosystem supported by tourism promotion, neighborhood investment, corporate spending and the cultural reputation of t...
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New Patrons of Chicago: Money, Taste and the Quiet Competition to Shape the City’s Cultural Legacy

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  Chicago’s great cultural institutions were never built by institutions alone. Behind the museums, orchestras, theaters, universities, architectural landmarks and collections were people with money, opinions and, frequently, a highly developed sense that the first might give permanence to the second. The city’s cultural history is therefore also a history of private ambition translated into public form. Industrialists who had made fortunes from railroads, meatpacking, machinery, retailing, real estate and commodities eventually confronted a problem peculiar to successful people: once you have acquired more than you can reasonably consume, what exactly is the money for? Chicago’s answer, more often than one might expect from a city historically associated with hogs and wheat futures, was culture. Families collected paintings, financed museums, supported orchestras, endowed universities and attached their names to buildings intended to survive them. They were generous, certainly, bu...
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Collecting Chicago: Why Sophisticated Buyers Should Look Beyond New York, London and Los Angeles

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 There is a particular kind of art collector who arrives in New York with a list. The list contains the correct galleries, the correct artists, the correct auction results and, perhaps most importantly, the correct people whose approval will confirm that the collector has purchased correctly. This is an efficient way to spend a considerable amount of money. It is not necessarily a good way to build a collection. The distinction matters because art collecting, at its most serious, has never been merely the acquisition of expensive objects. Anyone with sufficient capital can buy an expensive painting; auction houses have spent generations making the procedure nearly frictionless. Building an important collection requires something more difficult: judgment exercised consistently over time, relationships that produce access and knowledge, an understanding of provenance and art history, a willingness to buy before consensus becomes comfortable, and enough intellectual independence to oc...
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Can Art Turn Forgotten Real Estate Into Cultural Capital?

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   Real estate has a vocabulary for almost everything except imagination. A building is occupied or vacant, improved or distressed, stabilized or transitional, as though the fate of a place could be deduced from a spreadsheet and a sufficiently expensive aerial photograph. Culture is usually introduced later, once the architects have finished and someone notices that the lobby requires a mural. Theaster Gates has spent much of his career reversing that sequence. His work on Chicago’s South Side begins with the proposition that culture is not an amenity added to real estate after value has been created; culture can itself be one of the mechanisms by which value is created. Few projects make that argument more vividly than the Stony Island Arts Bank, the former Stony Island Trust & Savings Bank at 6760 South Stony Island Avenue, a once-vacant building that Gates acquired from the City of Chicago in 2013 and transformed into a hybrid cultural institution devoted to exhibition...
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Remarkable Cultural Economy Surrounding Ravinia and Chicago’s North Shore

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 There is a particular kind of summer evening on Chicago’s North Shore when culture ceases to be an event and becomes a form of choreography. Cars turn toward Highland Park. Restaurant tables fill earlier than usual. Wine is selected with considerably more forethought than most people devote to municipal elections. Friends negotiate who is bringing dinner, who has the tickets, who remembered the folding table and whether the person promising dessert can be trusted. Somewhere in Winnetka or Glencoe, a host is deciding whether dinner should precede the concert or simply be transported to it in enough containers to suggest a minor military exercise. By the time the music begins at Ravinia, the performance is only one element in an evening that may have started hours earlier and will continue afterward over drinks, introductions and plans for the next concert. This is why Ravinia is more interesting as an economic institution than merely as a music venue. The festival sits in Highland ...
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