Some owners of empty buildings with big shop windows are allowing them to be used as temporary art-gallery space. The alternatives seem to be leaving them vacant and renting them out essentially as billboards.
Whether or not the gallery-space option is preferable for the owner of the building, it’s clearly better for the owners of neighboring buildings, and for the entire commercial district of which the building forms a part. This is a classic “external-benefit” problem: easy enough to resolve when there’s a single beneficiary – orchard owners are happy to pay beekeepers – but hard when there are multiple beneficiaries because of the “free-rider” problem.
Encouraging this sort of activity is a natural role for Business Improvement Districts (associations of building owners given taxing power to promote local amenities) and for city art departments or arts councils. Somehow I doubt that the National Endowment for the Arts will show much interest, but it should.
Why wouldn’t the NEA jump on this? Is the cliquishness I’ve read about still the norm over there?