I waited until my work meetings were over to check out my Spotify Wrapped. Could hear the young creatives comparing theirs, but I held firm. Receipts: I'm 50++ y.o. Listening age apparently: 20. 336 genres. K-pop at #1. 🙇‍♀️ Subway thots as the 4,5,6 were busted slow: There's an assumption that u need to be *somewhere* to access generative culture. That was true when distribution required physical proximity to scenes, venues, labels, galleries. It's decreasingly true now. The bottleneck nostalgia is interesting (and I'm not immune). A good question is not "how do we revive NYC as cultural center." (And I've been living in WBurg, Bushwick, and now LES). It's "what do cultural centers even do anymore?" Maybe they're becoming Trade Shows. Seasonal, periodic, Transaction Layers that sit on top of distributed production. Periodic gathering points for an industry that is otherwise operating distributed. U go to close deals and be seen. Not make the work. To your multi-polar point: trade shows are the architecture of a world without a single center. You don't need to be in NYC to make important work. But showing up periodically... being seen at the right opening, the right dinner, the right panel... signals that you're in the game. It's credentialing, not creating. Theory: creatives who are actually making vital work have already figured this out. They live in cheaper cities (or cheaper countries), maintain NYC gallery representation or publishing relationships, and show up when it's time to transact. The creative generation is elsewhere. Plural, distributed, global. Maybe. (Or I've just convinced myself from a sample size of one weird Spotify Wrapped.)