Artists at Block T earlier this month
After six years.
Another victim of “Artist-cleansing” rent hikes.
Block T writes:
“We will have to vacate our premises [housing 120 artists] at the end of March. A larger conversation about the value of creative spaces in this city [Dublin] needs to happen.
Thanks to those of you who have already reached out for support and solidarity, it is greatly appreciated. If anyone would like to extend their support please get in touch with us.”
Related: As rent rises, Block T faces exit from Smithfield (Lois Kapila, Dublin Inquirer)
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Do what the rest of us did and still do, work from the kitchen, bedroom, shed, anywhere. True artists don’t need “creative spaces”, only the wanna be and the poseur seek that.
Okay grandpa.
He remembers when Bacon was an artist not a hipster accessory.
Yeah, you’re not a gate-keeping poseur telling people what the only true way to be an artist is.
the world is awash with people who are ‘passionately creative’. unfortunately very few of them have any talent.
So? People with the wrong talent in the wrong vocations are everywhere. Why complain about an area where they’ll do the least harm?
ah cheers i’ll just use this shed out the back of my box room in a balcony-less 4th-floor apartment. why didnt i think of that before?!
Yep because we all have our own houses and not small rooms in shared houses or shoebox apartments.
The coffee shops will close now as they will be unable to afford their chai almond milk half pressed freshly roasted orange twist skinny lattés with pumpkin spice….
For someone so defensive about things you are interested in, you don’t half like to sneer at others.
Ooooohhhhhhhh……
Harsh but fair
“If anyone would like to extend their support please get in touch with us.”
Please don’t.
If someone’s looking to give property-related charity, please consider the homeless.
Maybe cheap ‘creative spaces’ (offices to plebs like us) in the heart of the city centre are slightly less of a crucial humanitarian necessity.
i really love it when people say “your problems are wrong because i deem these other problems to be more valid”
I really love it when ‘creatives’ think the fate of struggling coffee shops or DIY shops who have to leave premises is beneath their creative selves. They’re always the special case – the irreplaceable ones, the ones we all need to have a conversation about giving special treatment and rates to. If they’re forced to move, OUR quality of life is diminished somehow.
Would an architects studio or an engineering firm whine like this? Are ‘graphic designers and web developers’ poor garretted artists now and not design professionals working in a commercial world?
Don’t worry, there’s always people like you standing ready to remind them how awful they are. Good job.
Oh shove it up yer hoop, I’m in the ‘creative’ business myself, though that very term used as a demonym devalues most other types of work and contribution.
I don’t knock into my neighbour asking them to help me out with the rent because it would suck for them for me to have to move farther out. I don’t need the tenants committee to convene a meeting to discuss the value of having people like me living in the block.
You are so much better than them in every way! Slap those others down! Slap ’em hard!
“I don’t knock into my neighbour asking them to help me out with the rent because it would suck for them for me to have to move farther out.”
So the issue here is that they deem themselves to be more valuable than you are? Isn’t that just your ego talking?
“A larger conversation about the value of creative spaces in this city [Dublin] needs to happen.”
o_O
and the reply to that is…..the landlord has had that conversation and has deemed the value of your creative space to be higher than what you are paying now…
“So the issue here is that they deem themselves to be more valuable than you are? Isn’t that just your ego talking?”
Um, no, it’s theirs. Like I said, I work in the same industry as some of them, this is an attitude I see all the time – that they’re special, more valuable, that other industries exist purely to free up their time for Creativity. Their Tinder profiles tend to say ‘Creative seeking Creative’ – it’s so unnervingly up-their-own-holes. You’re a fupping graphic designer/web developer, not Yeats.
So you know some people who work in a similar industry in a different country who you don’t like so fupp these people because whatever. They probably deserve it because you know some people who are a bit vapid. You sound lovely.
I’ll give you graphic designers but the key word there was ‘some’. Is it really all graphic designers in these spaces? Anyone I know using them is a painter. An actual artist; someone who creates for their own pleasure/pathological need. They *are* valuable to society. The problem is though that they aren’t creating money which is why they have, and *need*, appeals like this. What’s a town without artists but a sterile dump full of bitter depressives?
““A larger conversation about the value of creative spaces in this city [Dublin] needs to happen.”
o_O”
They are referring to the lack of artist spaces in Dublin. 5 closed in the last year. Not everyone lives in places where they have the space to be able to practice their art. But fupp em. You know some people working in creative sector you don’t like so thats a good enough reason for them to close.
““A larger conversation about the value of creative spaces in this city [Dublin] needs to happen.”
o_O”
They are referring to the lack of artist spaces in Dublin. 5 closed in the last year. Not everyone lives in places where they have the space to be able to practice their art. But fupp em. You know some people working in creative sector in a different country you don’t like so that’s a good enough reason for them to close and for nobody to help them.
Then call yourselves artists. That word actually has currency and is a descripter and not a setting-abover like a ‘Creative’.
I agree with you on that. But lumping, as their site does, artists in with graphic designers, a commercial skill, web developers a SUPER commercial skill, and the like is what drives me mental. I’ve worked with junior furniture specifiers with “Creative @ Company” on their LinkedIn. I know we worship the ‘start-up’ now as though they’re great works of art, but they’re not, they’re small businesses that didn’t exist a short while ago.
You are one talking about graphic designers, I presume because are one so therefore everyone in block t must be.
From the block t website:
“From our modest beginnings in Tully’s Tiles warehouse with only 12 artist studios, it has grown into a 26,000 square ft studio and workshop space with Hotdesks, Classrooms, Photography Darkroom, Meeting Rooms and over 70 creative studio spaces that currently house over 120 Members.”
If it has grown as much as that, then they should have a business plan in place to prevent things like this surely?
For the record, I completely agree with Ahjayzis on this. They are not all warhols and yeats. Stop acting like it.
There are literally two artists in all of history allowed to take themselves and their work seriously and that’s it. Quota’s up.
How very right-wing of you, ahjayzis. Paul Murphy would be horrified.
you seem to forget that some artists primarily make art for artistic satisfaction, and are not corporate graphic designers or architects. nothing wrong with corporate graphic designers or architects but that’s not all that’s left in the creative world.
Surely they thought this was going happen and could have prepared alternative venues in other parts of town. A recession = cheap rents. End of recession + a now “cool” neighbourhood = rising rents.
There’s probably a million case studies like this from NYC to Portland to Barcelona. It always happens in every creative quarter in every hipster city in the world.
So it’s definitely gentrification that’s causing the rent rise?
I ask because I don’t know the area.
Rents have gone up?! Why didn’t anyone warn us!
…no messy studio muck… where’s the messy studio muck…. I demand to see the messy studio muck !
Can’t they all move to Lisbon …. Cheap coffee & free WiFi
^This^
Expressarios for 60 cent, apparently
Lovely Caffay’s
” Their Tinder profiles tend to say ‘Creative seeking Creative’ – it’s so unnervingly up-their-own-holes. You’re a fupping graphic designer/web developer, not Yeats.
Titter . Titter . Love it Ahjaysis:)
These are mostly artist’s studios. See the post above. The word artist is used twice nowhere does it say “web designer”.
Winner!
Sur we’ll do a bitta’ve send off
“Artists” teehee
how much is the rent between 120 people and how much is the increase?
Eternal artists complaining about rising rent – this is how gentrification works, everywhere, always.
Take Temple Bar or Shoreditch for example – a largely derelict area earmarked for demolition which in the meantime is let at a low rate for short terms – the kind of lease that suits artists and start ups. This brings an incredible diversity and excitement to the area so a new range of businesses providing services (over priced coffee) moves in followed by the young professional who would like to think of themself as a creative type, likes the bohemian feel and lower rent (me). As demand from the likes of me rises the rent rises and the artists and start ups that made the neighbourhood can no longer afford to renew their now valuable leases. These are now taken by Starbucks and UrbanOutfitters and global brands who can afford them. The area becomes filled by moneyed idiots, McDonalds moves in and then the area begins to die. Meanwhile in Smithfield or Peckham the artists find spaces for low rent …
Until poor artists own the properties or can leverage public ownerships (as happened to a certain extent in Temple Bar) or go into partnership with a developer who wants the cache of this kind of regeneration it will always be thus. Perhaps this is what artists need to look for in finding their next space.
Good comment.
Peckham is so 2013! :)
You are entirely right, though. Great synopsis. What’s an artist without a bit of struggle, anyway?
well said, Lu. this has been happening to a grotesque extent in San Francisco in the last ten years too.
I think you’ll find it has been happening for a lot longer than that
It’s incredible that this needs to be spelled out to people.
It’s incredible people feel the need to patronisingly spell it out to the people actually experiencing it and trying to deal with it. It’s very important for people to feel superior to people who they imagine must be feeling superior to them.
Every single comment you have left on this thread has been a sneering attack on another poster without even the slightest attempt to treat the points validly raised.
No valid points have been raised, he sneered at the other poster.
(If I’m sneering at anything it’s not at practical points about rent and gentrification, it’s at attitudes and dismissal, snobbery and contempt all shown for a group of people which, as far as I can tell, none of the commenters are personally familiar except as a ‘type’ who have the temerity to claim to be creative and artistic, claims which, apparently, since they are neither Yeats nor Warhol, have to be stamped on with all the vigour of stamping on cockroaches. It rubs me up the wrong way, as it were.)
+1
need another Vietnam to thin out their ranks
€20 a week x 120 people = €125k a year
am sure they could find somewhere for that
True dat.
You don’t seem to understand property rental very well. What is each person going to get for €20 a week?Nothing.
before the “creatives” freak out, nearly every sports club in the country has subs or membership fees to keep the lights on
The 120 people pay rent.
wher AER TH€Y G0IGn to do there colurinG in Now!!?!!11!!!!!!!!
I laughed
10/10 me too.
I’m still laughing 10 seconds later.
I hope Nilbert has a great weekend. Brilliant
I’d say there’s a major bang of spliff in there.
God I’d love a spliff now.
I had the misfortune of getting involved with that organisation and it was a disgrace from start to finish. If you’re in the arts or starting off a new creative venture then avoid at all costs.
Also, the rent isn’t going up. They knew a year ago they had to be out of there.
This. Flakey people who see good business sense as “square”.
Agreed on this, too. First hand, some serious gangster boogie went on with Block T. No morals. No loss.
This is the life cycle of a city I’m afraid, as Lu said above. Its always been happening. Move along to the next spot.
An awful lot of d1ck heads generically commenting about ‘Artists’ here today. Tiresome stuff
I’m all for supporting the arts but Block T was a sham. They got rates exempt by being an arts space, charged people rent and then called it a not-for-profit ‘collaboration’ so no one asked where the grant money went.
God help any artist or small business who went there for advice, they either ended up handing over a chunk of their business or got invoiced for thousands for a ‘start-up’ consultancy.
If that’s supporting the creative arts then Dublin is better off without it.
You’re all terrible people.
Not really, just seen too many well-intentioned people get burnt by a few cowboys.