Michael Pitt: on Found Art and the Price of Coffee in Brooklyn
Right. It’s funny, because it seems almost agrarian, but it’s going on in the middle of the city.
Yeah. Which I think is good. I know there are a lot of people who grew up in Brooklyn [for whom] sometimes all the attention can be annoying. The prices go up. Even for me, the first time I went into Williamsburg I got in an argument at a café about the price of a cup of coffee because I wasn’t prepared for the price. I was like, “You can’t do that!” But, you know, like anything else, there’s good and there’s bad.
Right now if you’re an artist and you’re born and raised in Brooklyn, there are a million outlets that are being formed for you to realize your art, which is amazing. That’s a good thing. The bad thing is that, you know, the food chain is: It’s a low-income neighborhood; the artists come in because it’s cheap; they make it chic; then inevitably the yuppies come in and buy up all the lofts and then you have a new neighborhood. It’s changed.
But that’s one of the great things about New York; that it’s changing. And if it doesn’t change, then it’s… London, you know? But I have to remind myself of that, because even though I was born in Jersey I find myself a purist in some ways. Like—you can’t charge seven dollars for a cup of fucking coffee in Brooklyn. That’s just… unpatriotic or something, you know what I mean? But the flip side is that you’ve got some kid from Idaho who’s like, well, I happened to set up a coffee farm upstate and we’re bringing this shit down here and doing something that’s amazing.