Chicago Leader Hirsh Mohindra: Expertise in Multiple Industries

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...

 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...

  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...

 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...

   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...