When Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York last November, much of the art world welcomed the news with hope. The fact that his wife, Rama Duwaji, is herself an artist deepened expectations that the new administration might finally step up for a cultural sector that helped make New York what it is, but is now caught between rampant gentrification and the drastic funding cuts imposed by the current federal administration. It took a few months, but just ahead of Independence Day, Mamdani delivered his first major move. On July 2, he approved a record $323.8 million budget for the Department of Cultural Affairs, up from last year’s then-record $299.6 million allocation. The budget, shaped via months of negotiation between City Council and the Mayor’s Office, came in more than $100 million above what the Council had initially proposed in its preliminary plan for the 2027 budget.
The agreed-upon budget also establishes a Cultural Stability Fund, making $10 million available each year through fiscal year 2029 to support eligible cultural organizations facing unexpected or emergency circumstances. The fund will be administered by DCLA.
In a statement to Hyperallergic, Mamdani called the city’s artists and cultural institutions New York’s beating heart. “They fill our streets, stages, galleries, and neighborhoods with art and ideas that draw people from around the world,” he said, while acknowledging that the city’s crushing affordability crisis is threatening to drive out the very artists who have long defined its life.
That is the crucial point. Earlier this year, New York-based artist Josh Kline gave this issue one of its most forceful recent articulations in his now-viral essay “New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art,” published in the magazine October. Kline’s argument is not merely that New York has become expensive, but that real estate has become a structural force shaping who gets to be an artist, what kind of art gets made, where it can be shown and what careers remain possible. The piece was a lucid examination of how class, real estate and the unspoken rules and dynamics of an America-centered art industry have effectively forced artists seeking institutional or commercial careers to remain in one of the most expensive cities in the world.
The problem is not limited to New York: from London and Paris to Milan, Seoul and Tokyo, rising real estate costs and the broader cost-of-living crisis, amid a generational and geographic restructuring of capital flows, are shared pressures across every global city where artists and creatives gravitate. Still, New York remains a crucial observatory and case study—not only as the world’s biggest art hub, but especially within the broader institutional and cultural crisis now unfolding across the United States, as arts funding is slashed at every level.
Artists are being pushed not only farther from Manhattan and Brooklyn but further up into the Bronx and Queens. The conditions of production themselves have become nearly unsustainable, given the costs of materials and fabrication. The effects are becoming visible not only in artists’ life choices but in the work itself: thinner production budgets, cheaper or reused materials and more improvised fabrication have proliferated in the city’s most important and scene-defining biennials. The problem is not only about artists or the market; it is also about institutions that are increasingly unable to provide production budgets for the more ambitious work we see in other art scenes and biennials.
The current aesthetic in New York—as in L.A. and other major art centers—already appears to reveal a broader infrastructural crisis the art world is confronting today, at both the market and institutional levels. When artists cannot afford studios, fabricators, assistants, storage, transport, child care or simply free time, the entire creative space narrows. New York may still have many world-leading museums and the largest concentration of art galleries and collectors, but without the material conditions that allow artists to experiment, it risks becoming a fictional stage of cultural prestige—at best a leading art market hub, but no longer a living cultural engine where contemporary art is being made, circulated and championed. This is especially true as more experimental galleries, independent spaces and organizations that have long supported ambitious work are already beginning to disappear: see, most recently, Canal Projects, or galleries like Lyles & King and CLEARING before it.
At the time, DCLA Commissioner Diya Vij acknowledged Kline’s essay as mapping “what’s at stake when we lose spaces where artists can actually experiment and take big risks,” while noting that the city’s artist population has decreased 4.4 percent since 2019 and its share of creative jobs has fallen in seven of ten industries. An article by Dale Berning Sawa in the Art Newspaper, written in response to Kline’s essay, pushed the debate in a crucial direction. Leaving expensive cities, as Kline seemed to suggest, is not automatically a form of liberation from the conditions and dynamics imposed by a hegemonically capital-led global art system. The fuller and more expensive our major cities become, the emptier the places between them risk becoming—drained of the kinds of capital, infrastructure and opportunity that communities need to thrive, Berning Sawa argues. When artists relocate to smaller cities or peripheral areas, they can also become agents of a second wave of gentrification, squeezing existing communities that cannot simply choose to leave. From those reflections, one further step is needed in this debate.
A more useful focus is probably how to rebuild the civic function of culture wherever artists and institutions are located. This requires an infrastructure of organizations, spaces, policies and incentives that can reposition art at the center of urban policy for local and community development—not as entertainment, urban decoration or an ancillary to the tourism sector, but as a source of capability-building and, therefore, one of the most reliable drivers of innovation and economic growth.
Exploring new models of fundraising, production and circulation is urgently needed across today’s art industry, as traditional business and governance models have repeatedly proven inadequate to today’s fast-shifting societal and economic environment. Some galleries and institutions are already experimenting with more collaborative networks of shared resources. One example on the museum side is the Vanguard Award for Innovative Arts Leaders, newly launched by Remuseum, an independent think tank created by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and led by Stephen Reily, former director of the Speed Art Museum in Kentucky. Created in partnership with the Doris Duke Foundation, the program begins from an acknowledgment that many cultural institutions are facing structural crisis, from declining audiences and rising costs to shifting philanthropic priorities. Its goal is to counter the institutional risk aversion that now shadows much of the field by giving selected leaders a year-long residency and a $100,000 grant to develop ideas through a 12-month accelerator program.
The model adopted by this program already points to something essential: funding matters for institutions, but funding alone is not a strategy. An institution can have more money to spend and still fail to improve its impact without a broader long-term strategic direction integrated with local policies. Similarly, a city might invest more in culture and still fail to create a true impact if it does not structure the conditions and a precise long-term strategy that allow culture to become a real driver of local development. This is where the conversation needs to move beyond emergency support and public subsidy, toward a broader culture-led development policy.
Amartya Sen’s capability approach offers a useful framework for understanding these dynamics. Development, in Sen’s sense, is not merely the accumulation of wealth or resources but the expansion of people’s real freedoms—understood as their actual capacity to do and become what they have reason to value. Capabilities are not abstract rights on paper but genuine freedoms shaped by material, social and institutional conditions. Applied to the art sector, this means the question is not simply whether New York funds museums, but whether artists, cultural workers and communities have the real capacity to create, participate, gather, organize, learn, take risks and sustain a life in the city. That depends on economic, social and infrastructural factors, but at its core it depends on the role culture plays in the city’s agenda.
Sen also famously challenged development models that reduce well-being to income or GDP, arguing that resources matter only insofar as people have the real freedom and conditions to convert them into meaningful forms of life. The same logic applies to cultural policy. A larger budget may stabilize institutions, but it does not automatically produce artistic experimentation, civic participation or equitable cultural access. Institutions, as much as entire local communities, need both resources and capabilities: skilled human resources, production infrastructure, cross-sector partnerships and a strategic framework that enables those initiatives to be integrated into and have an impact within the broader urban ecosystem.
Pier Luigi Sacco, a leading voice in cultural economics and policy, argues in his “Culture 3.0” model that culture should not be understood only as a subsidized sector or as a creative-industry engine producing economic returns, but as a system-wide force capable of generating social, civic and economic value through participation. In his model, the distinction between producers and audiences becomes less rigid, suggesting forms of co-creation in which cultural participation becomes part of how cities build skills and knowledge, as well as social cohesion, innovation and active citizenship—with culture and the arts understood as key drivers of a cohesive strategy of local development operating at multiple levels.
Seen through that lens, the question for Mamdani’s administration is not whether $323.8 million will be enough to revitalize New York’s cultural scene. It is whether these funds are part of broader urban policies that integrate culture as a key element of the city’s economic growth, competitiveness, innovation and social development.
This might mean coordinating DCLA funding with housing, zoning, vacant-space policy, workforce development, education, public health, small-business support and neighborhood planning. It would mean creating long-term leases and land trusts for studios and small organizations. It would mean using cultural district strategies not for real estate benefit but as genuine capability-building clusters, where local communities gain access to tools, training, employment, gathering spaces and cultural agency that can enhance well-being and generate new economic opportunities.
Other cities have understood this, whether through long-term cultural planning, creative-district strategies or state-backed cultural infrastructure that actively try to avoid the mistakes of the past. Abu Dhabi, Doha and Hong Kong, despite their very different political and civic contexts, have already begun treating culture as part of a broader urban and economic strategy. European cultural funding schemes have likewise coherently integrated the cultural sector into broader social and economic goals—as a strategic source for social cohesion, innovation, urban regeneration, education, democratic participation, sustainable development and competitiveness. New York, paradoxically, still often behaves as if its cultural dominance were a natural resource to be endlessly extracted rather than a fragile ecosystem to be constantly nourished.
This is not to say that Mamdani’s budget lacks measures to improve the social and economic conditions of New Yorkers, including artists and cultural workers. The broader $125.8 billion FY2027 plan includes the largest-ever expansion of Fair Fares, expanded housing voucher access, a new $175 million rental assistance program for New Yorkers facing eviction or homelessness, investments in parks, libraries, CUNY and essential services, and $1,000 college savings accounts for every public school kindergartner. The administration is clearly trying to address affordability, mobility, education and public infrastructure—but culture is still being treated largely as a parallel budget line, a sector to subsidize, rather than as part of a coherent urban strategy.
Mamdani’s record culture budget is therefore an important sign of hope, but it should be understood as a beginning, not a solution to the ongoing hemorrhage affecting New York and the broader American art ecosystem. Emergency funding can keep institutions alive. It cannot, by itself, answer the deeper question of whether artists and cultural workers can still afford to live, work and take risks in the city—or whether they can be fully recognized for the role they can play within it.
In the end, Kline’s essay, Berning Sawa’s response and the most useful cultural policy literature available today all point to the same conclusion: the future of art in New York cannot be reduced to whether artists stay or leave, or whether institutions receive more or less money. The real question is whether culture can be acknowledged in its fundamental role as a capability-building tool—something that expands what artists, workers and communities are actually able to do. New York’s cultural system has been given more money. Now it needs a cultural strategy serious enough to make that money matter and, hopefully, to shape the city’s next chapter.
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