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>>> Almost any creative pursuit you can think of has found a supportive audience right here.
But what comes next?
Is Seattle evolving fast enough to support its local art and organization.
>> I checked in with city arts magazine editor Leah Baltus.
[CHEERING]
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>> I think it's important for the magazine to be more than just a magazine.
We joke sometimes like did these trees deserve to die for this purpose?
And I think the purpose has to be greater than just publishing stories about arts things.
There has to be some kind of underlying current.
I'm Leah Baltus and I'm the editor in chief of city arts magazine.
I have an amazing team, you know.
The core team that's here in the office with me.
>> Hey, dan, I want to check in with some of these photos.
>> They want to believe they are part of a community that they want to see grow and develop and get stronger.
And lead in some way.
And offer something to the creative landscape on an international level that isn't being provided already by other cities.
So in the same way that we look at Seattle as an innovator in technology or in lefty thinking or whatever, there's something in that spirit that also influences the artistic perspective that we have.
We're not trying to be New York and we're not trying to be London, we're not trying to be Paris, we're not trying to be Chicago or Los Angeles, we're trying to be Seattle in a bigger way.
So when we sometimes sort of position it as if we have to shed our D-I-Y, make it happen, do whatever you want, no boundaries.
We don't have to lose that spirit in order to put down more infrastructure.
And I think what we've accomplished as a city in terms of music, it's the perfect evidence of that.
Because we've been a music city for, you know, almost a century.
And we have a lot of infrastructure there.
We've learned how to economize or turn into dollars what musicians are doing.
We have successful labels.
We have successful bands.
There's no reason why we can't do that in other disciplines as well.
You have like your Mike daisies, right?
Mike was a big part of the '90s garage theater in Seattle as he found more success with his monologues, he's now based in New York.
Reggie watts, once he kind of segued out of music into comedy, he couldn't really do what we wanted to do here, so he's in New York.
It happens all the time. And not necessarily even with names that people recognize, but even, you know, before the name is even recognizable, people max out, and they have to leave.
The next generation of support for the arts in Seattle is a puzzle that has to be solved, in many ways, more from the idea of what generation these people are a part of than it has to do with the fact that they work in the tech industry versus the industrial, you know.
It's not Amazon versus Boeing.
It's that there is a change throughout the country, no matter where you go, in terms of how people envision patronage.
There's a change in where people get their entertainment in terms of live stuff versus on your couch stuff.
And you know, those big cultural changes have to be addressed.
Seattle is a huge leader in terms of institutional change.
Think of PNB, which has new leadership in Peter Bole in the last few years, which puts it in a completely different place, has completely reinvigorated the organization, embraces the kind of edgier style alongside classical ballet, and makes the whole organization much more vibrant.
You see the symphony doing the same thing.
You see Sam with its total transformation going from being widely considered this kind of crusty institution through the '90s, into something that people feel really connected to.
And a free sculpture park, you know.
And if those major institutions are leading the way, and we can see it at that highest level, and we certainly see it at the scrappy level with indie, indie, indie, now, it's just about how we kind of keep filling in toward the middle so that we get that arts ecology worked out, where all the different elements are happening, like a thriving forest, you know.
And it's going to take a while.
It's a lifetime's work for a whole community of people.
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>> You can pick up a free copy of city arts magazine just about anywhere in the Puget Sound lowlands, or visit their website at cityartsonline.com.
>> Seahawks!
>> Want to have pie anytime?
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