Boyfriend: when I graduated art school, my current neighborhood, I’m a townie I’ve lived in the same neighborhood my whole life, was actually artist central. All the houses and apartments within my radius have actually been fitted to allow for basement shows and galleries, you can tour if you hook up with an agent and see for yourself. There used to be gallery parties inside houses, five or six per block, and they would say you have to go up the back stairs because the front stairs have so many people, we fear they might collapse. And then the city shut it all down and said you need a license for this
Me: I think I came in on the tail end of the second stage of this process. I lived in illegal artist housing inside a commercial warehouse and there were mice but they weren’t bad if you shot off an airsoft gun towards the ceiling every so often, I never hurt or tried to hurt a mouse but it’s just gunshots reducing the rent but with mice. We also had art parties with thousands of people and then same thing, the city cracked down and said you need a license for this. Idk what artists do now
Boyfriend: I’m eccentric but I think the government is actually the greatest enemy of artists. If you removed the regulations and licenses from it we would all be hosting shows and promoting our friends. But now if you want to do that you need to go through a two year process and pay six thousand dollars a month for an approved hosting space, and the fire department is watching the entire time eager to shut you down. I’ve actually tried this. If you took the regulations out of the picture or gave people the option to waive liability and say I’m willing to die in an improvised gallery if it means showing my art, the regional art world would thrive
one of the primary issues in the Beauty Privilege discourse is that every word for beauty/attractiveness that we now use as synonyms used to, as recently as a half century ago, be very strongly-defined semantic sisters meaning different things. you find this out quickly when reading victorian novels. “attractive” for instance didn’t refer to physical appearance, but “beauty” and “prettiness” did, but weren’t synonyms of each other, either. “handsome” was distinct from “beauty” and both were used to refer to men and women but meaning different things. “charming” was something else. etc. this created a healthy semantic ecology where people had stronger self-identification with various categories. maybe you weren’t beautiful but you were absolutely charming. maybe you were a handsome woman (these still exist thank GOD). in modernity it’s all been flattened into “hot or not” which is a category error because it’s far more subjective than more granular and numerous definitions
