The Passing of Passerby

Felix Salmon submits:

Once upon a time, even the proprietors of the trendiest art-scene bars could write in English.

One of the things I love about my bar is its ability to chameleonize from a rock 'n' roll dive bar to an annoyingly elitist art-world clubhouse to a fashion-model/coke-whore hang to a gay bar to a bridge-and-tunnel frat party, sometimes incorporating three such incarnations in a night.

All bars, even annoyingly elitist art-world clubhouses – especially annoyingly elitist art-world clubhouses – become tired, and close. But if they're annoyingly elitist art-world clubhouses, then they unfortunately have to get this kind of thing out of their system first:

Halcyon days involved lyricism as an institution, with all sorts of romanticized vagrancy: high culture and tenement culture made merry, got married and watched the next generation follow suit. The bohemian laundry being: that as long as the promise of the city remained all remained pure –in that decidedly indigent yet exultant way. Maybe we learned it through cultural osmosis, as wartime Europe brought Paris and Berlin to Manhattan and then its environs. Because the voice was indeed the streets themselves, the forum that breeds itself, regardless of creeds of knowledge: passions surged because they were sanctioned to do just that. The public city somehow, however privatized, and stratified.

Apparently we have another nine months or so of Passerby to go. Must art-world deaths really be this protracted?