Popular street artist Shepard Fairey — who created the “Hope” posters widely used during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign — says New York City’s high cost of living is driving artists out of town to Los Angeles, and making LA the country’s new cultural hub.
“You can’t be in New York and not have either a trust fund or a good enough job to live,” Fairey explained at a Hennessy V.S luncheon at Soho House New York celebrating his label design for a limited-edition bottle. “Artists are screwed in New York right now,” he said.
Asked about LA’s growing popularity as a center for emerging artists, Fairey noted, “The reason why LA is becoming a hub is because LA still has affordable spaces for artists to have studios.”
He continued, “New York was a hub for so long [because] high-low culture, high-low economics co-mingled very fluidly for years.” But artists have been priced out of former lower-cost enclaves Soho, the Bowery, Greenwich Village and Williamsburg, with high-rent condos and office buildings moving into what were previously artist lofts.
“New York is incredibly successful, and one of the things that’s suffering is space for people to be struggling to make something that nobody’s seen before, or hear something nobody’s seen before, where they have no money and it’s not commercially viable yet, but it’s going to be the next thing. That’s happening in LA,” he observed.
Fairey, who lives in LA, is also completing a mural at 161 Bowery as part of the Little Italy Street Art Project. He added that LA has benefited from the influence of new media outlets covering more than just Hollywood.
He said, “New media has meant it’s not just the dominant few stations that are only interested in what Tom Cruise is doing, [saying] ‘Like, this is LA.’ Now there’s opportunities to put attention towards things that are happening in the underground scene.”