The collective cultural wealth continues to grow in Santa Fe and the more we embrace different kinds of expression, entrepreneurial activity and novel thinking, the more that wealth has a tangible impact across the community. This has been the evolution of Santa Fe for a century now. In terms of arts and culture, we once had a small trade in weavings and craft. When landscape painting was added as a hallmark of Southwestern art, the entire game was elevated. When Spanish Colonial crafts were celebrated, our cultural treasure pile grew. When opera came to town, whole new worlds opened. Modernist painters upped the ante again. It took 20 years for contemporary art to become a real force in Santa Fe, but now it's an undeniable part of the city's identity. The Museum of New Mexico system has quantified the state's history in relation to indigenous arts, modern and contemporary art and folk art from around the world.
Each time Santa Fe has made a cultural shift, there is an overt or covert shift in sensibilities and tolerance. Positive cultural change never comes without side effects that can be seen as bad: More people, more houses, more cars. The city loses some charm, surrenders some acreage to poor planning, but also gains broader perspectives and increased cultural vitality. Santa Fe remains a highly desirable place to live, but we need to understand that it isn't so for any one reason. People don't live here just for the character found in the historic districts; not only for quick access to hiking trails and mountains; not for the sole reason of the art scene; not just because they're addicted to fresh chile or rolfing-people live here, obviously, because of a combination of factors that makes it feel right in sum. Every time a change looms-A modern building! Contemporary Hispanic Market! SITE Santa Fe! Downtown infill!-we fret that our identity as the City Different will be lost. In fact, our recipe-our secret blend of herbs and spices-is what keeps us unique. It is embracing change and new additions and feeding the stew, not regressive refusal to accept the new, that makes Santa Fe special.
Club Alegria has been a great microcosmic example lately-under new ownership, the club refuses to turn its back on a regular crowd of Mexican nationals, but has found a way to open up to a young hipster scene, an Indian Market crowd and a whole mélange of unexpected, um, Bud-fellows. Who knows the future result of mixing, rather than isolating, these ingredients?
The quietly gurgling soup with an ever adaptive flavor also popped the Jason Vass Gallery (429 Sandoval St., 986-6161) to the surface recently. The gallery, which exhibits vintage posters and works on paper, may not seem like anything out of the ordinary, but it's
not really something that has existed here before. The collection of posters, the scope of subject matter and the manner in which they are presented and stored indicates, again in microcosm, a new grain of cultural flavor. Vass counts on a post-modern aesthetic, an appreciation of his vintage, often marketing-themed, goods not only for their beauty, but because of how they enliven our own self-conscious awareness of culture and its evolution. From a "This is Nazi Brutality" poster-which could not look more like an Abu Ghraib image-issued by the United States Office of War Information in the '40s, to a nearly 9' tall vamping Alida Valli and a French language poster for John Waters'
Polyester
, the gallery is a wealth of telling illustration, conflicting eras and intriguing personal and societal pulls. The new joint is worth a visit, for sure, and your bona fide SFR inside tip is to ask to see
La Loteria
.
It's for all these same reasons-the important evolution of aesthetics and culture in Santa Fe, the need to see the city as an unfurling story rather than a one-liner-that I've been riding this issue of dialogue with the Historic Design Review Board. It comes to mind because at the Jason Vass Gallery opening, a guy named Richard Buckley stared at me with fury in his eyes. Buckley, a journalist who is designer Tom Ford's partner, didn't tell me why he was so upset, but he didn't have to. In the course of dialogue about the H-Board, I implied approval for Ford's massive Talaya Hill house might have something to with approval for Ford's massive Gucci wallet. In a letter to the editor last week [Letters, Aug. 23:
], H-Board member Debbie Shapiro defended Ford, at least in relation to architect Trey Jordan, who had a project denied by the board for not being "harmonious" enough with the East Side Historic District. Shapiro said money is too simple an explanation-and she's right. Ford and Buckley worked hard to come to agreement with many of their neighbors and their treatment of the building site is, in fact, relatively sensitive. Still, one of the reasons money is too simple an answer is that celebrity also has plenty to do with it: A starstruck review board is no kind of review at all.
Shapiro also argued passionately that Ford's design was more sustainable in terms of the environment than Jordan's. Without getting into the H-Board's almost complete lack of purview over "sustainability," I'm choking on the idea that a more than 8,000-square-foot house plus, as Shapiro says, "6,006 square feet of garage, portals, pergolas..." with 270 new trees planted, is-on any planet-sustainable. It doesn't matter how many cisterns you include, the size of the garage alone means sustainability is not a word you can use in the same sentence with Ford's house, unless you're working on your comedy routine.
Fortunately for everyone, this dialogue doesn't have to continue between Shapiro and I, alone. She's agreed that Santa Fe's Historic Styles Ordinance needs a complete rewrite and that there should be a broad dialogue about it, beginning with how to address issues of sustainability. The only question now is how to formally begin this dialogue with as much public input as possible. A few months ago, an editorial in the New Mexican called on the mayor to host a summit regarding the role of the Historic Design Review Board and the Historic Ordinance. Mr. Mayor? It sounds like the H-Board is ready to embrace an assessment of just how well they've performed their task as described in the ordinance: "...to promote the economic, cultural, and general welfare of the people of the City and to ensure the harmonious, orderly and efficient growth and development of the City."
