by Justin Davidson
Justin.Davidson@nymag.com
A collapse in the New York real estate market will . . .
a) never materialize.
b) finally produce housing in Manhattan even artists and musicians can afford.
c) produce a glut of empty megamillion dollar condos, but leave regular-people housing just as scarce and expensive as ever.
Rising oil prices will . . .
a) slow expansion in car-dependent suburbs, thereby concentrating growth in cities and bringing audiences closer to urban arts venues.
b) force oil conglomerates to find creative ways to spend their trillion-dollar windfall, some of which will flow into the arts.
c) cause worldwide panic, supplying apocalypse-minded artists with plenty of fresh material.
d) All of the above.
The weakening dollar will . . .
a) raise costs of foreign travel, making it prohibitive for American orchestras to go on tour.
b) make a weekend at the Metropolitan Opera seem like a bargain for Spaniards, who offset the defections of Bear Stearns opera fans
c) give Asian and European companies a bigger bang for their sponsorship buck than they would get at home; watch for more “global sponsorships” like Credit Suisse's deal with the New York Philharmonic.
d) All of the above
Wall St. losses will . . .
a) deprive the arts of sponsorship money and wealthy ticket-buyers, causing some organizations to go out of business and others to scale back dramatically.
b) relieve visual artists of the pressure to churn out work that functions as high-priced investment tools, allowing them to go back to making plain old art.
c) temporarily loosen materialism’s headlock on culture, creating breathing room for the arts.
d) All of the above.
A drop in public money available for the arts will . . .
a) be partially offset by increases in spending by the National Endowment for the Arts if a Democrat becomes president.
b) have little effect on major arts organizations, which reduced their dependence on government funds – and the concomitant political problems – to a bare minimum years ago.
c) be devastating for small arts organizations that depend heavily on state and local grants.
d) All of the above.
Answers in late 2009.
