I left out my main point about the significance of the Third Coast. It’s of the moment to report the US has lost its edge. It is declining empire. The current financial crisis and the last eight years of White House led turbulence shore up that easy and lazy argument. The Heartland (Third Coast) project goes someway towards arming us in refuting that claim. It shows the USA is not simply a market. It is a cultural entity.

It can be argued that the original culture wars started the moment the Pilgrims set sail from Europe (more on them soon). And at its heart America is a cultural entity. The current financial events are merely the latest in a series that started with the Boston Tea Party. It’s easy so to get the financial, cultural and political history of the US confused.

And this is the reason, ultimately, that America will continue to matter after China and India fly by it on the IMF and even UNESCO charts. It will matter for its culture; its sport, its academia and its art.

Marjetica Portc

All eyes on the US. The capital of capitalism, the birth place of the biggest economic shock in 80 years and a country at the end of political history. Or something like that.
We Make Money Not Art gives notice of a super project taking place in Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. The Third Coast is that tract of land slap in the middle of the USA, the Heartland.

Heartland roughly follows the Mississippi River, taking in an area from New Orleans up to Minneapolis in the north and including Omaha, Kansas City, Detroit and Chicago. The curatorial team, a collaboration between the Van Abbemuseum and the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago, commissioned new pieces and selected existing works by contemporary artists who live in the region or have undertaken residencies there in order to produce new work. The programme includes musical events at the Muziekcentrum Frits Philips, debates, lectures, a photo exhibition, a magazine and publications.

That sounds totally worthy, but the work looks like it stands up, check it, it features projects from Detroit ghetto palms, to New Orleans shotgun houses. News media in Europe writes off the space between US coasts as full of rednecks with bibles and ghettoized minorities. Well art shit ain’t like that.There’s 3,000 miles between New York and LA, it’s good to see some of it exposed, even if one does have to be in Holland to see it.