September 11, 2003
Design Festival Tries To Boost (Or Bootstrap) Portland's Creative Reputation
This item will be less than it ought to have been, since I managed to skip the opening events of the Portland Design Festival, a two-week event under the auspices of the Design Collaborative, which is itself "an element of the Cultural Economy Initiative for the City of Portland."
In the absence of first-hand accounts from me, I'll pass along some of what others have written about the Festival, starting with parts of today's missive out of the Mayor's office, whichh you can read in full (pdf):
The Mayor opened the event at the Portland Art Museum where designer and author Eames Demetrios, gave the keynote address and branded Portland as a "Design City."
Mayor Katz said that designation was appropriate, noting that Portland is reported to have more designers per capita than any other city. Portland has a great advantage over most cities, Mayor Katz said, in that it is already home to great creativity and innovation.
Let's backtrack a bit to a piece in the current Willamette Week:
At the heart of DNA PDX is the "Design Genome," which organizers--a.k.a. the Design Collaborative--refer to as "a juried exhibit of Portland designers' best works." Please note the careful wording. Not "Portland's best design," or even "work by Portland's best designers."
...
But even if in theory it were possible to build momentum by making Portland's creative community internally competitive, nothing about DNA PDX seems able to pull that off. Exclusive and embarrassingly elitist, the festival's "open call" for submissions was quietly announced and, therefore, quietly answered, largely by a corporate in-crowd.
You can also read a Randy Gragg article about the festival.
Now, regular readers here will of course remember that, technically, I support the premise of pimping Portland as a cultural and artistic hub. But there are, to my mind, a couple of important points.
Elitist and narrow is not quite the way to go. In reality, one of the ways in which Portland excells in this arena is in DIY arts and culture, which has little to do with websites for Weiden+Kennedy clients or shoe designs for Nike. While there's no inherent reason to avoid pimping that sort of art or culture, especially since it's the most easily and readily recognizable to outsiders, any so-called "cultural economy initiative" ought not to limit itself to such a small sliver of the City's cultural pie.
Actually, what underlies perhaps too much of some aspects of the City's somewhat below-the-radar conversation about "cultural creatives" is a sort of classism. Slick and corporate arts and culture is acceptable for recognition, since it's more easily marketed to outside forces -- and, in the end, the "cultural economy initiative" is about marketing Portland as a "place to be" for the sorts of people who love the culture of corporate ads and logo'd sneakers and have lots of money to spend while so loving these things.
But DIY arts and culture -- let alone the (forgive me) "micro-economies" that the various creative (sub)cultures in Portland create and sustain on their own -- just doesn't seem to factor very often into the higher-profile regions of this "creative class" conversation around here.
Attracting (again, forgive me) "consumers" of arts and culture to the region is surely one of those thigns that must be done. Better to attract people who spend money on arts and culture than on less interesting and energetic things. But that simply isn't (or shouldn't be) the terminus of how we define the "creative class" conversation.
None of this is meant to shortchange -- or exalt, for that matter -- the designers whose work is featured in the festival. Obviously, I can't make that particular and specific judgement until and unless I've actually gone and absorbed the work itself. So I'll hit that matter at a later date.
In the meantime, we'll have to see if the festival opens it arms at all, since Mayor Katz "announced that the Festival was such a success that it would become an annual event in the city." How one can judge a success based upon the very first day, I'm not sure. But at least we have a year to decide if we can do more with this idea next time.
Note: This entry has been double-posted -- and therefore inaugurates -- the Portland and the Creative Class special weblog section.