If you thought the sin tax Jimmy Haslam just defrauded county taxpayers into renewing through Issue 7 was corrupt to the core, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Wait’ll you get a good gander at the arts sin tax, which dwarfs Haslam’s, in both cost to the smoker and corruption. We’ll all be asked to renew the arts sin tax soon, too.
The 40 cents a pack, $14 million a year sin tax which goes to the digestably named “Cuyahoga Arts & Culture” gravy train is rife with cronyism & back room deals, featuring the rich getting richer. Before we get to the fattest pigs at this trough (WVIZ, WCPN, the Orchestra, the Museums, and assorted glitterati living off giant endowments already before the smoker tosses ‘em a half dollar a pack) lets take a stroll through the Cleveland Flea.
The Cleveland Flea passes the peripheral vision of the disinterested passerby with maximum touchie feelie nostalgia. I liked it too, until I spent a couple viscerally depressing days helping my friend, artist Bridget Ginley, prep and staff her tent in spring 2013.
First, we scoured abandoned industrial lots for debris to sell. To make it extra digestable for the grant application (we’ll get to that) collecting debris to sell on the street is now called “upcycling.” In the Depression, it was called being a hobo. Or homeless/on the brink thereof. Or perhaps begging. No matter - people like old rusty railroad nails and will pay a dollar for them. Random bits of bent metal sell too. Luckily, Cleveland is covered with those.
The next day, Bridget & I filled her Cleveland Flea tent with our finds, plus some of her finest collage art (for which Bridget is justly well known) and waited. And waited. Like normal flea markets back in the day, people bought nostalgia, few bought any actual art, no matter how much hard sell I mustered.
“Did you know Bridget is in the Progressive Art Collection? She is! Did you know Bridget’s volunteered on college radio once a week for 7 years? She does!” Markup for actual skill applied to filth to make it art WILL NOT SELL. The hottest seller was a series of metal nostalgia drenched lunch boxes Bridget found at a thrift shop. One or two of her art pieces sold. Two solid days of work, some of it hard labor scraping around train tracks for nails, 80 bucks. Economic development!
It reminded me of Armenia, so I got depressed. Since the collapse of the USSR, people have been selling their possessions on the streets to feed their families for decades. (starting to sound familiar?) At the Armenian Flea, an old lady sold lovely handmade dolls in traditional Armenian dress as Christmas ornaments. Being American, I simply had to show my stuff (ideology!) and negotiate her down from a dollar a piece. By the time I got her down to 50 cents, she was nearly in tears. I took it as an Ugly American badge of negotiating honor (my system beats yours!), until my interpreter explained to me what a hideous monster I was being, my pockets bulging with dollars, badgering a penniless old grandmother through an interpreter for pennies. Once THAT sunk in (free market purist cancer dies hard), my Catholic guilt sent me to her regularly to pay full price for more ornaments. They hang on the Christmas trees of my whole family to this day.
In the Armenian Flea, the hoodlums shakedown every penniless old lady with a bag of knitting for their ten square feet. From there, the Mafiosi bribe the Yerevan mayor for use of the vast square in which the Armenian Flea sits. The only people who make money off the entire thing are the Mafiosi.
Armenians are too proud to turn street groveling into a grant application to the UN or USAID. Not Cleveland! The only current identified Flea funder is the arts sin tax – Cuyahoga Arts & Culture (CAC), which granted $15,077 to St. Clair Superior Community Development Corporation for 2014 for something called…wait for it…
“Hello My Name Is Upcycle.” Synergy.
The “Hello My Name Is Upcycle” CAC grant describes the goal of the $15K as follows; “Our CAC project aims to introduce community members in the St. Clair neighborhood to upcycling as an accessible, affordable art form.” Guess they haven’t heard of hobo art from the 1930’s, which is now quite valuable, and wasn’t “introduced” to those fellas at all!
A Michigan native and 2009 Wolverine alum named Stephanie Sheldon is listed as the “proprietor” and “curator” of the Cleveland Flea on St. Clair Superior’s Fall 2013 CAC grant application. Like clockwork, the prerequisite “Most Interesting” Cleveland Magazine puff piece on Stephanie appeared in January 2014, right before Cleveland Flea LLC was incorporated in March 2014.
This ain’t your grandaddy’s flea market though. No siree. Unlike the old timer at Memphis Drive-In who took wads of cash at the flea market when you were a kid, Stephanie told Cleveland Magazine in her “Most Interesting” pose that, she is of course, an art-teest.
“When it comes to events such as the Flea and her upcoming February bridal event Supa Fresh, Sheldon considers herself less of an organizer and more of a curator. ‘I theme [these events] and bring the pieces together in a harmonious way,’ she says.”
She themes. How can Thom Shorgl resist.
Stephanie says the Cleveland Flea is her business, she owns it, charging $75 per space, which she keeps. Stephanie, however, told me she did not even know she was listed on St. Clair Superior’s CAC application.
Neither Stephanie, nor Michael Fleming of St. Clair Superior CDC, will elaborate on how their relationship came to exist, despite Stephanie being mentioned by name in the CAC grant application, just months before Stephanie files on LLC by the same name. Fleming says St. Clair Superior CDC takes no money from the Flea, nor has any role in its management. And, just like Jimmy Haslam, Dan Gilbert, and Larry Dolan’s businesses, the Flea is of course “private”, so it’s all as opaque as can be. Kinda like the Armenian Mafia.
Perhaps I’m just a cranky old buzzkill. Or perhaps I’d prefer to see my friends not scraping the streets for a living and having their leaders call that “economic development”, or “an affordable art form,” onto which they can justify a 40 cents a pack tax on smokers, the poorest people in the county, so someone from Michigan can be the one making the most money as Clevelanders sell off their possessions on the street.
Whatever the case, a private business claiming to have nothing to do with the CAC grant in which her “private business” is named over 17 times in pursuit of government money is not, frankly, a private business. Multiply this shady $15K arrangement by 100,000, and that’s your arts sin tax. At least with Jimmy Haslam, we knew the scoreboard got built.