(In June, four gallery directors - Aaron Timlin of the Detroit Artists Market, Phaedra Robinson of detroit contemporary, Dick Goody of Meadowbrook and John Cynar of Paint Creek - collaborated to create "Detroit Now," a unique 4-gallery showcase of 16 Detroit artists, which garnered considerable attention from the public and in the local media. Click here for initial reviews).

In a recent issue of The Nation, film critic Stuart Klawans wrote that the difference between a review and criticism is that the latter tends to follow the former by about a week. This piece is a little behind Klawans' curve, but before "Detroit Now" fades into memory it deserves one more look. What I want to offer is not another "thumb's up/thumb's down" judgment on particular artists or individual works so much as a consideration of the strategies used in mounting the show.

In his introduction to the catalog, Director of the Meadow Brook Art Gallery Dick Goody noted that the curators were tinged with "reserve about committing to a particular schema." If the show wasn't a statement about the "emerging, young, gifted, new, best, vital, and so on" in Detroit art, then what was it? In a conversation I had with him, Goody said "Detroit Now" was "just a catchy name." In other words, the project was more or less an exercise in packaging, a cooperative effort at marketing on behalf of the local art scene. And, actually, that wasn't a bad thing at all.

Four curators selected a total of 16 artists to present extended bodies of work at their respective spaces. Besides Goody at Meadow Brook (part of Oakland University), the other curators were John Cynar at Paint Creek Center for the Arts in downtown Rochester, Aaron Timlin at the Detroit Artists Market and Phaedra Robinson at detroit contemporary. The show received excellent local media coverage, with both the major dailies and the two weekly alternatives doing feature stories. (Not to mention the tag-team reporting of thedetroiter.com's own Nick Sousanis and Christina Hill). Thus the co-op approach did in fact work; enough buzz was created to get attention outside the hermetically sealed wrapper of the Detroit art world.
"Detroit Now" also demonstrated what the suits like to call "synergy." By pooling their resources along with some in-kind assistance from the Livonia-based FCS Advertising & Marketing, the four organizations produced a slick announcement poster and a handsome four-color catalog, adding a certain authority to an essentially grassroots endeavor. In this day and age of postmodern promotional culture in which special effects rule, production values matter, from the computer-enhanced entertainment screened at the neighborhood cineplex to the stage-managed news broadcast from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln anchored off the coast of San Diego. And with public arts funding being set even further adrift in the ocean of state and municipal budgetary red ink, squeezing out added value as effectively as the "Detroit Now" curators did was a classic example of how to get a lot of bang for the buck.

One of the significant achievements of "Detroit Now" was fostering a heightened sense of community, which can be hard to maintain in the physical isolation one often feels living and working in the Motor City. And that's no minor thing: I clocked nearly 65 miles in the round trip from my house in Royal Oak up to the galleries in the Rochester area then down to the Detroit venues and back home again. By contrast, Manhattan is less than 14 miles from top to bottom, Chelsea 20 short city blocks.

Community is more than just a matter of geography, however; it's social as well. The curators all spoke of the rush they felt in working with one another, an enthusiasm that seemed to spill over to the artists and the audience too. The openings were mobbed, particularly noteworthy for a summer show. What's more, the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art looks to be on board for bringing the four installations together later this year in their space in Grand Rapids. Plus the curators are already planning a new-and-improved "Detroit Now" targeted for the 2004-2005 exhibition season.

So on to the pesky stuff. The catalog, attractive as it is, was a bit of a missed opportunity. More artists' information and an exhibition checklist would have made it more useful as a historical document for future reference and in helping to promote project to a larger audience. And while the diversity of artists chosen was admirable, a show purporting to be about the current moment in Detroit art that featured only one African American seemed a little whack. Finally, some kind of event, like a roundtable or symposium, could have helped to stimulate much-needed dialog about the state of cultural production in Detroit, especially since the curators themselves seemed hesitant about doing so in the catalog interview.

Still, "Detroit Now" reminded me of the art-school truism about the whole being more than the sum of its parts. It reflected the stylistic variety of art being made in the area; although I'm not sure it supported Goody's catalog statement that "Detroit regionalism has probably expired." (For one thing, Detroit artists are still far more concerned with craft, and not theory, than their counterparts in New York, LA, Chicago or London.) The curators of "Detroit Now" showed that a little entrepreneurial attitude goes a long way. Some might call that hype. I call it thinking outside the white cube.

- Vince Carducci has written extensively about art and culture, most recently for Art & Australia, Bridge Online, The MetroTimes and PopMatters.com. He can be reached at cultureindustries@yahoo.com.