Posted by Jack Bryant '16
The Arts District of Beekman Street on the west side of Saratoga Springs is home to consumer institutions serving a range of needs. From food, to fine arts and handmade goods, to salons and boutiques, the Arts District has a distinctly residential and welcoming feel to its commercial space. Since 2005, several businesses have come and gone. Their turnover is in itself a representation of the change in the mission of the Arts Distric as well as the larger economic trends that guide businesses in this area.
The building at 30 Beekman Street provides a thorough representation of this change in the Arts District. This historic building is now inhabited by an antique store and consignment shop called “Rose’s Repeats” as well as a few residential spaces in the upstairs of the building. (Image 1) Commercial institutions like “Rose’s Repeats” offer the community a particular form of creative expression through the purchasing of used goods and the inevitable home furnishing. While this does not offer the same connection of overt moral or intellectual value which handmade works of art seem to carry, antiques truly offer a connection to the past, which for the customer, offers them a means of inheriting history.
The building at 30 Beekman Street provides a thorough representation of this change in the Arts District. This historic building is now inhabited by an antique store and consignment shop called “Rose’s Repeats” as well as a few residential spaces in the upstairs of the building. (Image 1) Commercial institutions like “Rose’s Repeats” offer the community a particular form of creative expression through the purchasing of used goods and the inevitable home furnishing. While this does not offer the same connection of overt moral or intellectual value which handmade works of art seem to carry, antiques truly offer a connection to the past, which for the customer, offers them a means of inheriting history.
The consumer’s exchange here also represents the collective and personal imagination of this past of Saratoga Springs. Antique and consignment stores possess an inherent function to sort through the material past to furnish the present with new creative possibilities. In “Rose’s Repeats”, we see an exchange between the owner’s tastes in the past in the objects he chooses to display, as well as what he sees as probably valuable for the customers. What the customers choose to buy displays their own desires to see themselves situated within the collective history of the west side.
That this consignment store appears now in the Arts District’s short history suggests that the decoration of houses with quality used goods has become part of a successful model for this community at this specific moment than solely supporting artists who produce handmade goods, many of which can be quite costly. This development in itself creates a present furnished by “Rose’s Repeats” vision of what is valuable from the past in nexus with the customers own agreement with that vision. This creative vision of the owner and the customer takes from the past to create and reorganizes it for some form of “newness”. But it is also different in that the customers’ desires and agency is more heavily considered in this process of selection. This shifting from the original model of the Arts District based on the particular creativity of individuals is still present in “Rose’s Repeats”, though it may not exactly be on the surface. Using an anthropological perspective, we can reframe what we typically think of as a creative institution to arrive at a more encompassing definition of creativity. |