Our museums are full to overflowing with antiworks of art and works of antiart. More astute than Rome, the religion of art has absorbed all the schisms.”

-Octavio Paz
 Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship

Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class, is highlighting a new breed of American worker. According to Florida, this “creative class” of 20- and 30-something artists, scientists, writers, and computer programmers makes up 30% of the workforce and is concerned with the “scene” surrounding their neighborhoods. Florida has also said that these workers are valuable because they embody the three T’s (must there always be alliteration?): technology, talent, and tolerance. These are the people Florida believes drive economies and foster growth.

A visit to CreativeClass.org, Richard Florida’s website, can reveal the “coolness” of your city, you can take a “12-item creativity quiz” to assess the creativity of your company, as well as subscribe to the Creative Intelligence newsletter to assure that the creative illuminati won’t leave you behind (“What, you didn’t get the newsletter?”).

Richard Florida has become a recent celebrity with state politicians who are seeking civic renewal. After reading Florida’s book, the mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper, hired an $80,000/year public-relations specialist to makeover the city’s image into a creative center. Jennifer M. Granholm, the governor of Michigan, has encouraged over 200 city mayors to form “Cool City” advisory boards to nurture hipness in Michigan. Most government funded arts organizations sing the praises of Mr. Florida because he supports what they “knew all along” — the arts fuel the economy.

What Florida is selling is beyond the usual flim-flam and snake oil, he’s selling the gentrification of creativity and “art.” He’s selling definitions of “creative,” “cool,” and “art” to politicians who don’t need more encouragement to sponsor more boring urban renewal projects.

I went shop hopping with my wife this weekend to see what the local boutique scene was like. She’s trying to find some decent venues where she can sell her handbags. We hit store after store meeting only with slick replicas of what someone saw in ReadyMade magazine and heavy price tags for items designed to look like a thrift store purchase, but without all that dirty history. We overheard conversations like, “Oh, that’s like Sex in the City sexy,” and, “So, I just bought this new condo and I…,” and, “…the only scarf I found that I liked was like £200 which is like $400 American.”

“Arts districts” like the one my wife and I visited are what Florida refers to when he talks about burgeoning neighborhoods where up-and-coming professionals want to live. However, neighborhoods like this are not hotbeds of creativity. Neighborhoods like this were probably hotbeds of creativity 15 years ago when young artists, the shock-troops of gentrification, moved into primarily minority neighborhoods for the cheap rent. But the rest of the white, upper-middle-class followed leaving a trail of rehabbed condos and coffeehouses behind them. The real creative class is squatting in the areas that have yet to be recognized as hotbeds — where the real art heretics have escaped being absorbed into the mainstream.

What Richard Florida is encouraging is the slow elimination of affordable housing for the real creative class. The formation of “Cool City” advisory boards, “12-item creativity quizzes”, and city coolness rankings based upon compiled statistics is completely antithetical to what Richard Florida claims to espouse. Yet this hipster nation is just a new boundary against which the next generation of young heretics trying to escape the gentrification of their neighborhoods and ideas are defining themselves. From the late 70’s disco came punk, from which came late 80’s pop and hair bands, from which came grunge, from which emerged Creed and Staind, from which came Britney and Justin, from which came the White Stripes and the Strokes, etc. The cycle just continues.

Bibliography:
A Tale of Cool Cities
The Road to Riches?
The New American Dream
The Curse of the Creative Class