I'm not really hating on NYC so much as the pretentious gravitas machine that seems to be permanently stuck on early-mid 20th century avant garde tropes and derivatives of them. There just happens to be a crapload of that in New York, and a ton of people who want to be in and around that scene, so much so that an anti-NYC filter would be useful.

Years ago I lived in a little town called Asheville, NC. I've heard it's not as good as it used to be but back then... the sheer number of unbelievable artists that nobody had ever heard of and were living at or near poverty was staggering. I miss strolling through downtown and stopping into galleries and routinely seeing pieces that were moving. I really wish I'd collected more of it or at least taken notes and written down names. The place was also covered in graffiti far more interesting and clever than most of Banksy. I photographed a little of it. Should have photographed more.

Apparently there's a number of small towns and medium sized cities with concentrations like this, because seldom can artists genuinely committed to their own visions afford to live in a place like NYC. The reason you saw a lot of genuinely innovative art there once was that it was cheap because it was dirty and crime-ridden. Now people like that go to little towns, medium sized cities in the interior, and the middle of nowhere.

I do think going to NYC can be actively harmful though... there's been two musicians I genuinely loved who made incredible original visionary stuff in places like Ann Arbor MI and Mississippi and then moved to NYC and their stuff became dull atonal ambient click-noise junk. Cause that's avant garde, I guess.

Tangentially...

I've heard there is now a quietly but explicitly well-funded detachment of far-right and "alt-right" New Yorker artists and intellectuals making right-wing coded pretentious crap. (Most pretentious crap is left-coded but it does not have to be.) Maybe this is what will finally kill the thing I'm talking about.