Eigen + Art Does It Right

I mentioned that I liked the Eigen booth at the Armory a lot. I came across this old story on that gallery that has increased my respect for them even more. It gives a nice short history of the gallery's origins in the depressed post industrial city of Leipzig. What knocks you out is the support and commitment that the gallery has shown in supporting it's artists.

"While many contemporary dealers poach established artists from their rivals or make money on the secondary market (buying and selling already known works), Lybke, the son of a former brothel-owner turned carpenter, is interested in artists whose careers he can nurture from early on, even providing some with studio space."

In return of course the dealer demands a lot of loyalty. I did a post that touched on that issue of gallery loyalty a long while ago. This guy gets loyalty the old fashioned way -- He earns it. The twist is that Lybke's first gallery was in Leipzig, the cheapest city in Europe which makes one wonder if galleries paying New York type bills can afford to nurture artists or take risks.

Shrinking Cities

Leipzig
Detroit
Detroit

I have to admit to just becoming aware of this facinating project called shrinking cities.
The project was started in Germany and I think that the first lines of the web intro imply that all cities are shrinking-- which is not close to being true and even the website has to slip that in.
(6.1 billion people currently live on the earth, 3 billion of them in cities. By 2030, the population of the world will have increased by 2 billion (+33%). This increase will be stem almost exclusively from the growth in urban population. Every day, 190,000 new city-dwellers are added all over the world, 2 in every second. In the year 2030, 4.9 billion people will live in cities)
The shrinking city is however an important area for study.

Intro from the Website:

The Project ///
Shrinking Cities, a three-year initiative project of Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, seeks to expand Germany's city-planning debate - until now concentrated on questions of demolishing surplus apartments and improving residential quarters - to address new questions and perspectives. The project also places developments in eastern Germany in an international context, involving various artistic, design, and research disciplines in the search for strategies for action. The emphases of the research and exhibition project, Shrinking Cities, are, first, an international study of processes of shrinking (first project phase) and, second, the development of strategies for action for eastern Germany (second project phase).International Study /// Since 2002, four local interdisciplinary teams have been commissioned to study and document urban shrinking processes in the urban regions of Detroit (USA), Manchester/Liverpool (Britain), Ivanovo (Russia), and Halle/Leipzig (Germany). Each site stands as an example of a specific form of shrinking: In Detroit, the issue is the consequences of suburbanization; in Manchester/Liverpool, of deindustralization; in Ivanavo, of postsocialism; and in the greater Halle/Leipzig region, several of these factors are compounded. People from various disciplines, including urban geographers, cultural experts, architects, journalists, and artists, take part in the work.

The project has also developed a touring exhibition.