As someone who is an extended member of the New Orleans art community, one of my homes being Baton Rouge/New Orleans, this hits home hard.
As noted, I don't think that people realize the oppressive throwaway culture that New Orleans is built on. So much of the arts culture there was built on the poor (often Black) communities, which have been all but discarded. In addition, the State Division for the Arts has been given a mandate by Lt Gov Mitch Landrieu to structure most new state art projects under the rubric of economic rebuilding, often in higher dollar value terms.
The odd thing to me in looking at Louisiana and rebuilding in the arts is that likewise some of its most vibrant artists are also some of its lowest paid, by and large. And, when cultural rebuilding in mentioned, the hard linkage between culture and capital ignores the foundations that New Orleans as a cultural milieu is based on. There are some grass-roots programs on the way, but I think that there is the possibility for clearing and rebuilding New Orleans in a way that could fundamentally integrate the arts and the fundamental infrastructure of the city that fuels is, and thereby creating the desired environment for the State. However, this would mean funding of contracting, artists, calls, etc. Honestly, I don't see the US government bein a hard-weather friend enough to make this investment.
The other odd thing is that the low-income population is becoming hispanic, so instead of blues and jazz, one is as likely to hear salsa or cojuntao nowadays. It _was_ under Spanish rule once, which makes the shift even more interesting.
The bead issue - with all respect possibly a little less crucial in the short term than the problems of the NO diaspora, I think could have some solutions.
Could there be a culture of beads, in many ways like Art Cars, or painted street statuary?
Two ideas come to mind.
The first is to challeng ethat artists to come up with ways to make new beads, like Glass (a tradtional New Orleans form) or ceramic (easy to do), or others. More or less, turn the bead culture into a populist art culture.
The other comes from contemporary African forms. So much African art incorporates recycling of cast off materials, and it isn't if there aren't entire wards of material there, wire, metal, plastic. It's not easy to get good material that isn't degraded, but I think of the local artists and their extensive use of found materials, and I don't see a problem.
This may not specifically address the Chinese problem. Far from it. The limiting or elimination of the production of Chinese Mardi Gras beadmaking displaces workforces who should not have been in that work in the first place. I have few answers, but perhaps also creating a grass-roots effort like the college student uprising against Nike towards the beadmakers, and New Orleans is brittle enough that any dissent that could disrupt the flow of tourist capital is very likely to be heard.
I hope that some of this makes sense.
-Patrick
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