Can You Eat A Painting?

 

The Business Case for Treating Food and Fine Art as One Cultural Economy

Why do we separate Chicago’s culinary economy from its fine-arts economy?

On paper, the distinction seems perfectly reasonable. Restaurants belong to hospitality. Museums belong to the arts. Architecture falls somewhere between real estate, design and tourism. Music occupies another category. Hotels have their own trade associations, economic models and lobbying priorities.

But this is not how anyone actually experiences a city.

A traveler might spend a morning looking up at the towers along the Chicago River, an afternoon at the Art Institute of Chicago, an evening eating an ambitious tasting menu and the night listening to jazz. The next morning might begin in a neighborhood coffee shop surrounded by work from local artists.

That visitor has not experienced four or five separate economic sectors.

The visitor has experienced Chicago.

The distinction matters because cities tend to organize economic-development policy around industries, while consumers increasingly organize their spending around experiences. Chicago has an opportunity to close that gap by treating restaurants, visual art, architecture, music, design, hotels and other cultural assets as components of a single economic system.

“Chicago’s competitive advantage isn’t one museum, one restaurant or one building. It is the density of cultural experiences that can be assembled into a single day, and that density has real economic value,” says Hirsh Mohindra.

Consider what happens when a restaurant opens in a neighborhood and becomes a destination. It buys from suppliers, hires workers and pays rent, but its economic impact doesn’t stop at the front door. Customers take rideshares. They visit bars. They discover stores. Some return to the neighborhood later. A successful restaurant can alter perceptions of an entire commercial corridor.

A gallery can do much the same thing. So can a theater, music venue or architectural landmark.

The conventional accounting system, however, tends to measure each separately. That can obscure the larger mechanism at work: Culture creates traffic, traffic creates commerce, commerce creates investment and investment can create durable economic value.

Chicago already spends substantial public money supporting cultural infrastructure. The city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events reported more than $23.5 million in grants to artists and organizations in 2023, up 25% from the previous year. Of that amount, $9.5 million went to artists and organizations on the South and West sides. The department awarded 749 grants across five programs.

Those figures are usually discussed as arts funding. Perhaps they should also be discussed as economic-development investment.

That shift in vocabulary is more important than it sounds.

Ask, “How should Chicago support the arts?” and the conversation quickly becomes a debate about subsidies, philanthropy and municipal budgets.

Ask instead, “How should Chicago invest in its cultural economy?” and a different group enters the room: hotel operators, restaurateurs, real-estate investors, developers, tourism executives, corporations and financial institutions.

The second question also encourages measurement. What happens to restaurant spending near a major exhibition? How much additional hotel demand is created by cultural programming? Which neighborhood arts investments generate traffic for surrounding businesses? Can public art affect the economics of a commercial corridor? What happens when restaurant openings, exhibitions, performances and architectural programming are deliberately coordinated rather than marketed independently?

Chicago’s tourism numbers suggest there is plenty at stake. The city attracted roughly 55.3 million domestic and international visitors in 2024. Tourism expenditures totaled about $20.9 billion, while tourism supported more than 133,000 jobs and generated roughly $2.8 billion in state and local tax revenue.

The opportunity, then, isn’t merely to attract more visitors. It is to increase the economic value of each visit by making Chicago’s cultural assets reinforce one another.

A museum exhibition could become the anchor for restaurant collaborations, hotel packages, neighborhood gallery programming and architectural tours. A major food festival could incorporate Chicago designers and artists rather than treating them as decorative additions. Hotels could function as cultural distribution networks, directing guests toward independent restaurants, galleries, performances and neighborhood businesses.

Such coordination would require private-sector participation. Cultural institutions are good at producing culture. They aren’t necessarily designed to build citywide commercial ecosystems around it. Businesses, investors and philanthropists can provide capital, distribution, technology, marketing and measurement.

“The mistake is assuming that cultural investment produces only cultural returns,” says Hirsh Mohindra. “A great restaurant, gallery or music venue can generate value for hotels, landlords, retailers and neighboring businesses that never appear on that institution’s own financial statements.”

That observation raises a harder issue: Who captures the value?

Culture often makes places desirable long before conventional capital recognizes them. Artists move into inexpensive neighborhoods. Restaurants follow. Galleries and music venues create destinations. Visitors arrive. The neighborhood acquires an identity. Eventually rents and property values rise.

The uncomfortable irony is that the people who create cultural value can be among the first people priced out once financial value catches up.

An integrated cultural-development strategy therefore can’t simply be a more sophisticated form of place marketing. It would need mechanisms that allow cultural producers to participate in the economic upside they help create.

That could mean long-term affordable commercial leases for cultural tenants, acquisition funds for arts organizations, incentives for developers that incorporate cultural space, or investment vehicles linking philanthropic capital with neighborhood economic development.

It could also mean treating chefs and restaurateurs more like artists — and artists more like entrepreneurs.

The distinction between the two is already blurry. A chef composes with flavor, texture, memory and presentation. A painter works with color and form. An architect shapes physical experience. A musician shapes time. Their outputs differ, but all create forms of intellectual and emotional property capable of attracting attention, building reputation and generating commerce.

You cannot eat a painting. But economically, that may be beside the point.

A painting can persuade someone to travel to Chicago. So can a restaurant. Architecture can persuade that visitor to stay another day. Music can keep the visitor out another three hours. A hotel converts the additional night into revenue. Nearby businesses capture spending. Government collects taxes.

The economic product isn’t the painting, dinner, building or performance alone.

The product is the city.

Chicago has an unusual advantage because few American cities possess comparable strength across architecture, museums, restaurants, music, design and neighborhood culture. The challenge is that those strengths are frequently managed, funded and marketed through separate institutional channels.

“The cities that win the next generation of cultural tourism won’t be the ones with the longest list of attractions,” says Hirsh Mohindra. “They will be the ones that understand how to turn culture into an interconnected economic ecosystem without stripping away the authenticity that made people want to visit in the first place.”

That is the business case for thinking bigger.

Chicago doesn’t merely have an arts economy and a restaurant economy. It has a cultural economy whose individual components continually create customers for one another.

The question for business leaders, philanthropists and policymakers is no longer simply how much money Chicago should spend supporting culture.

It is how much economic value Chicago is leaving on the table by continuing to treat culture as separate industries in the first place.

Originally Posted: https://hirshmohindra.com/can-you-eat-a-painting/