Follow the money: local artists didn't feel the benefit of the Super Bowl this year (photo copyright: Ellis Anderson)
Bowled Over: The Inequality of the Super Bowl Economic Bounce
By Jamie Chiarello
In early February New Orleans hosted the 2025 Super Bowl. What words come to mind when you think of a host? My first thought is that of a party host. I imagine someone inviting me into their space and they'll probably offer food, drink and music. Even if they are catering and not cooking for the event, I assume that the host will be the person responsible for and in control of what is offered.
The next image I picture related to the word host is the word parasite. A parasite relates a bit differently to its host than a party goer is expected to behave towards their host. There is obviously a give and a take in both dynamics. While some parasites manage a symbiotic, harmless relationship to their hosts, most parasites exist at the expense of their hosts, depleting their essential life forces for their own existence.
If you were to ask the majority of the middle and working class how their experience was this weekend, they would say 'drained'. I know this because I am one of them, and we exchanged weary knowing nods all weekend. Now, in many respects we are used to being drained, there is even a pleasure that comes with the exhaustion after an incredibly busy work day. But this particular pleasure exhaustion exists because through out the course of whatever we provided for others we also gain nourishment for ourselves to get through another day. In our context this obviously means dollars.
The Super Bowl was hyped and sold to us as a great boon for our economy and sure to bring in plenty of dollars. We saw the crowds, we saw the spectacle, but who saw the dollars?
Jackson Square, in the center of the French Quarter, is where I do business drawing portraits and selling paintings. I relate to this space as a vortex, like a living medieval square, where people come from all over and bring their along their hopes and fears and curiosity and hangovers. They all get mixed up with one another, with tarot readers, the catholic church, the church choir, the brass bands, the cops, the shop keepers, the lucky dog sellers, the street bums, the magicians, the shoe shine guys, everyone swirling around, trying to find a dollar to get through another day.
For anyone walking into this it is obviously chaos, but for those of us who inhabit this space regularly it is more of an ecosystem. We have our internal riffs, but generally we manage to stay in check and create a space that on the best days is full of live music, art, top shelf people-watching and beautiful random interactions between strangers that otherwise, simply don't happen.
America is an extremely alienating place. With an infrastructure designed around car travel and post-industrial building methods we have ended up with something somehow both homogenous and discomforting. I can't think of anyone I've met that feels particularly endeared to our miles and miles of repeating strip malls, gas stations and sprawling suburbs.
There has long been a joke that New Orleans isn't really America, but rather, the northernmost Caribbean town. This is because New Orleans has managed to exist and offer itself in all its chaotic beauty despite every CEO's dream of molding it into the perfect bite size, dollar-shaped tourism package. If you visited New Orleans for the 2025 Super Bowl, you did not see New Orleans- you experienced a facsimile of the city. You got a sneak peak of what this place would be if corporate powers could somehow put your soul in a bottle and hire a focus group to sell it back to you.
So while we all stood around dazed as football fans whooped it up, everyone munching free chips and soda (because we are even cheaper these days than bread and circuses) as we basically watched the super rich exchange money back and forth. The small silver lining I personally experienced in all this was the compassion and absolute generosity of locals, of other middle and working class people. The off-shift waiter who I spoke with at a bar and bought me a drink to commiserate. My fellow artists on Jackson Square who shared their resources when they themselves were limited. The shopkeeper who came out to check on me and offer me a piece of chocolate after the Christians set up shop on top of us and screamed at us through amplified megaphones for hours.
At the end of the day, I would describe my experience of the Super Bowl is what I imagine it would be like to be a street artist in a low district during the hunger games. It felt like having a neighbor take over your house to throw a party and not really consulting or compensating you. To expect that the people that make this city run on its ground level be able to live, to have access to affordable housing, health care, drinkable water and transportation doesn't seem like some pie in the sky idealism. Working the Super Bowl certainly wasn't worth the free bag of pizza-flavored chips and I don't think I'd need a corporate-sponsored tarot reader to tell me that.
Jamie Chiarello is an artist working in New Orleans. Click here to support her via her art: www.namelessart.com
By Jamie Chiarello
In early February New Orleans hosted the 2025 Super Bowl. What words come to mind when you think of a host? My first thought is that of a party host. I imagine someone inviting me into their space and they'll probably offer food, drink and music. Even if they are catering and not cooking for the event, I assume that the host will be the person responsible for and in control of what is offered.
The next image I picture related to the word host is the word parasite. A parasite relates a bit differently to its host than a party goer is expected to behave towards their host. There is obviously a give and a take in both dynamics. While some parasites manage a symbiotic, harmless relationship to their hosts, most parasites exist at the expense of their hosts, depleting their essential life forces for their own existence.
If you were to ask the majority of the middle and working class how their experience was this weekend, they would say 'drained'. I know this because I am one of them, and we exchanged weary knowing nods all weekend. Now, in many respects we are used to being drained, there is even a pleasure that comes with the exhaustion after an incredibly busy work day. But this particular pleasure exhaustion exists because through out the course of whatever we provided for others we also gain nourishment for ourselves to get through another day. In our context this obviously means dollars.
The Super Bowl was hyped and sold to us as a great boon for our economy and sure to bring in plenty of dollars. We saw the crowds, we saw the spectacle, but who saw the dollars?
Jackson Square, in the center of the French Quarter, is where I do business drawing portraits and selling paintings. I relate to this space as a vortex, like a living medieval square, where people come from all over and bring their along their hopes and fears and curiosity and hangovers. They all get mixed up with one another, with tarot readers, the catholic church, the church choir, the brass bands, the cops, the shop keepers, the lucky dog sellers, the street bums, the magicians, the shoe shine guys, everyone swirling around, trying to find a dollar to get through another day.
For anyone walking into this it is obviously chaos, but for those of us who inhabit this space regularly it is more of an ecosystem. We have our internal riffs, but generally we manage to stay in check and create a space that on the best days is full of live music, art, top shelf people-watching and beautiful random interactions between strangers that otherwise, simply don't happen.
America is an extremely alienating place. With an infrastructure designed around car travel and post-industrial building methods we have ended up with something somehow both homogenous and discomforting. I can't think of anyone I've met that feels particularly endeared to our miles and miles of repeating strip malls, gas stations and sprawling suburbs.
There has long been a joke that New Orleans isn't really America, but rather, the northernmost Caribbean town. This is because New Orleans has managed to exist and offer itself in all its chaotic beauty despite every CEO's dream of molding it into the perfect bite size, dollar-shaped tourism package. If you visited New Orleans for the 2025 Super Bowl, you did not see New Orleans- you experienced a facsimile of the city. You got a sneak peak of what this place would be if corporate powers could somehow put your soul in a bottle and hire a focus group to sell it back to you.
So while we all stood around dazed as football fans whooped it up, everyone munching free chips and soda (because we are even cheaper these days than bread and circuses) as we basically watched the super rich exchange money back and forth. The small silver lining I personally experienced in all this was the compassion and absolute generosity of locals, of other middle and working class people. The off-shift waiter who I spoke with at a bar and bought me a drink to commiserate. My fellow artists on Jackson Square who shared their resources when they themselves were limited. The shopkeeper who came out to check on me and offer me a piece of chocolate after the Christians set up shop on top of us and screamed at us through amplified megaphones for hours.
At the end of the day, I would describe my experience of the Super Bowl is what I imagine it would be like to be a street artist in a low district during the hunger games. It felt like having a neighbor take over your house to throw a party and not really consulting or compensating you. To expect that the people that make this city run on its ground level be able to live, to have access to affordable housing, health care, drinkable water and transportation doesn't seem like some pie in the sky idealism. Working the Super Bowl certainly wasn't worth the free bag of pizza-flavored chips and I don't think I'd need a corporate-sponsored tarot reader to tell me that.
Jamie Chiarello is an artist working in New Orleans. Click here to support her via her art: www.namelessart.com
