The residents of Rhinoceropolis were . City officials claimed that all residents were able to secure temporary housing. But that did little to obscure the hypocrisy of people forced into a desperate scramble to avoid freezing to death under the pretense of fire safety.
Rhinoceropolis is one of the country’s longest running do-it-yourself venues. Inhabited for over a decade by artists, visited by thousands of performers and easily a hundred thousand concertgoers over that period, it is at the center of Denver’s vibrant DIY and arts community.
One might think that economic remuneration naturally follows this type of acclaim and influence. But part of what has made venues like Rhinoceropolis so successful has been a single minded focus on their art, a purity of ethos that often neglects, and sometimes scorns, what can be the corrupting influence of monetary incentives. While the community has produced many successful artist, the human interest and demand for Rhinceropolis has always far outstripped the moneyed interest.
That is not to say that others, and the city as a whole, have not profited in dollars and cents from Rhinocoropolis’ incredible success. Denver has moved to rebrand much of the neighborhood around Rhinoceropolis ‘The Rino Arts District’ for instance. As part of the efforts to spur commerce, the city ably traded on this branding to attract artists and artisan shops that ‘revitalized’ the neighborhood. Many of these artists, riding this wave of gentrification, have had the economic means to practice their craft in state-of-the-art facilities. The artists at Rhinoceropolis on the other hand, far ahead of the curve and less willing to compromise their art, had to take what they could find and afford. Unsafe conditions are only one of the many costs that the economically marginal bear to do the often great work that they love.
The artists and concert goers in Oakland took these same risks, risks imposed upon them by a grossly unequal and classed society, and paid the price for their poverty. One would think that the celebration of their lives, and the somber meditation on their deaths, would be an opportunity for cities to reflect on and ameliorate these injustices. A city that respects the tragedy in Oakland asks itself what artists would need, given the circumstances in which they find themselves, to practice their art safely without having to make such ominous trade-offs. For sure, the support needed for vanguard artists to practice their art in safety may be quite modest; though beyond the means of the artists inhabiting the spaces, installing sprinklers and smoke detectors is a relative pittance from the city’s perspective.
Certainly, the appropriate response is not to further disadvantage those artists who endure these conditions because they cannot afford better. The appropriate response, for sure, is not to blame the victims, to seek out those in closest cultural kinship with the people who suffered the tragedy in Oakland, and punish them for the deaths of their friends and their sisters and their brothers.
That is what Denver is doing, of course. Rather than bringing the underlying issues of economic injustice to the fore, the city preferred the cowardly, easy route of maintaining the status quo, shutting the venues down, and forgetting about poverty and its consequences. At Rhinoceropolis last week, many were still packing their bags at midnight, in 10 degrees, seeking out a friend’s couch on which to crash, willing to brave an even more desperate situation to continue pursuing their art.
Bodhi Shane Melnitzer is a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Colorado Boulder.
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