One of the reasons for studying the creative class, and the super-creative core especially, is that many social, economic, consumer, workplace, and cultural changes begin there and filter out to broader segments of society.
In Rise, Richard begins the book with his famous time-traveler thought experiment. Young people with tattoos and piercings were one of the elements of the modern workplace that would have thrown our time traveler off. Is this still the case?
According to WSJ writer Ann Zimmerman, tattoo parlors are coming to a mall near you! There are a handful of entrepreneurs trying to make tattoo parlors “less edgy” and easier to get to by locating them in suburban malls! From the article:
So far, some traditional mall customers have responded well to the tattoo parlors. Geralyn Stanley, a 32-year-old high-school art teacher and mother of two young girls, wanted a tattoo but was leery of patronizing traditional parlors. When she came across the white-tiled, rock-music-playing Tattoo Nation in the Woodbridge Center Mall, she felt more at ease – so much so that she has gotten three tattoos in the past year. On one visit, she brought along her mother, a 52-year-old librarian, who got her first tattoo.
I am not sure what this means as we already know there are plenty of members of the creative class living in suburbia (including art teachers and librarians), but there is something here isn’t there? There is something going on when tattoo parlors locate between a Disney Store and a Gap Store.
An interesting side note in the story is that some tattoo artists are resistant to working in such environments - until they find out about health insurance, paid vacations, and retirement plans.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Is that the only reason tattoo artists are reluctant to work in such environments? A shop like this may not feel “authentic” to the tried-and-true ink lovers. And I can’t blame them. It’s their art – I wouldn’t want my work to be as mainstream as the Gap either. I love the idea that tattoos are being made available to a wider audience because this is the kind of art I can appreciate, but I can imagine that the die-hards aren’t happy about their life’s blood being so commercial. And really, isn’t it more fun to tell the story about getting your tat from a big, bad, bald, inked-up dude who makes his living in the little shop over the liquor store?
October 30th, 2008 at 4:46 am
This is hilarious.
Tattoos are “edgy” precisely because of the many signifieds of the concept of “tattoo”, not because of the tattoo itself. Part of that concept of “tattoo” includes the inhospitable tattoo parlour in a no-go part of town. I’m no tattoo expert, and I’m sure there are lots of books on the cultural interpretation of tattoos over the centuries. The very idea of tattoos being mainstream is a nice allegory of how the cult of the individual and of “cool” is now subverting itself. When “subcultural” becomes “normal” what happens to “subculural”? Does it go deeper underground and turn into paedophilia, high-school massacres or fundamentalism?
In other words, again people are here confusing “creativity” with being docile, gullible, obsequious, tedious, selfish, self-centred and lacking any kind of creativity whatsoever. Getting a tattoo is no longer a badge of subculture, it is a badge of lacking the courage to do something genuinely subcultural, but still wanting to be seen to be subcultural. There a whole lot of paradoxes and ironies there…
Notwithstanding the irony of being so uncool that you need to be told what cool is, people who get tattoos are ultimately selfish – why spend £100 on a tattoo when you could give that to charity and provide clean drinking water for a family or two in some Sub-Saharan community? Has our self-image become so important? Is this precisely because we have no other ways of expressing ourselves, because we are paradoxically so conservative in our prejudices against the poor, immigrants, the dispossessed, those who don’t conform to the mainstream? Are we again falling into the trap of equating “the creative class” with cultural and moral zombies who are only good for consuming a lot of rubbish, creating a lot of waste, running up the stock of trends, places, activities and goods in an unsustainable way?
I’ve said this before on here but Zygmunt Bauman makes a good point when he explains “cool” as simply being that – cool in the sense of not warm, as in the opposite of passion, excitement, anger and strong emotion. “Cool” is simply a detachment from society – too lazy and selfish to commit to friends, family, community, relationships, beliefs, causes – the “cool” people have no beliefs, ditch their friends and family at the drop of the hat for the latest fad, fashion, job (or the next “creative city”….). “Cool” is anti-social, nihilistic and apathetic – which is surely the opposite of someone who is genuinely creative.
Again, there’s a major issue here with what we mean when we write about the “creative” class. Are we talking about innovation, enterprise and creating new forms, designs, models and concepts – or are we talking about people who want to hang out in bars they are told are cool, listen to the latest tunes that they are told are cool, live in the most fashionable neighbourhoods that they are told are cool and fellate the latest celebrities that they are told are cool? Because that’s not creative at all, and I really don’t see how on earth that is a model for economic growth or regeneration.
October 30th, 2008 at 8:00 am
I have to respectfully disagree – people who get tattoos aren’t automatically selfish. Some people get tattoos to alter their body and make a statement that they feel can’t be said another way. Some people do it because it’s trendy. Some people get tattoos to honor the memory of a friend or loved one. Some just do it and they can’t explain why. It’s no more selfish than spending $150 to get your hair done, get a massage, a facial, a manicure, a new suit… Tattoos aren’t the kind of consumption that’s for everyone, but it’s not fair to categorize and dismiss the people who have them as selfish.
October 30th, 2008 at 8:16 am
Altruism can also be selfish (in that “I give to charity, aren’t I great”), so yes you’re right Elizabeth. The point I was trying to make is that I see tattoos as evidence of rampant individualism in society where people increasingly see actions as meaningless unless other people witness them.
Hence people are becoming more public and vocal with expressing their emotions (for example there’s a growing trend here in the UK of people putting flowers on roads on spots where relatives have been killed in accidents – the emotion has to be visible, because thoughts on their own are meaningless; along with blogs and comments on the internet…!), people seem to be increasingly desperate to be “famous” even if that’s setting up a myspace page (a survey of teenagers done in the UK a few years back found the favoured career was “to be famous”) and culture as a whole seems to be more and more “visual” to the detriment of aural, oral and cerebral cultures (just think of how quick people are to sacrifice sound quality on MP3 files so they can store more and more “stuff” on their iPods – as long as they have stuff, they don’t care what it sounds like…).
That’s how I explain tattoos. All of these reasons can be lumped together as being about putting the self over and above the other, which to me is “selfish”.
Besides, not knowing the reason why we do things doesn’t justify them – there may be a host of subconscious reasons, or reasons we can’t bring ourselves to admit in public or in our own heads. These people are advertisers’ dreams – people who are too stupid or lazy to justify their impulses! Let’s sell them sub-prime mortgages!
October 30th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Ah, now I see your point. And I do agree with you there.
I recently read an article (http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0930/p09s01-coop.html) where it was said that those who favor the YouTube, MySpace “here is my life for all the world to see” tendencies should be respected as people who are “participating” and “engaging” and becoming part of something that is larger than they are individually. I just don’t buy it – like you say above, these people want to be famous, and they’re pulling off stunts and making themselves look as unusual and odd as possible so that they’ll be “discovered” – they’re not doing it to say they’re part of something bigger than themselves. They spend time trying to find the magic formula that will get them plucked out of oblivion (or, rather, out of cyberspace) and settled in Hollywood or what have you so they can begin making the millions they “deserve” for creating what? A parody on YouTube? Yeesh.
But I digress. Back to skin art…
October 30th, 2008 at 11:37 am
Interesting thoughts. I agree that we are now in a world where everyone wants to be famous. I think this stuff really accelerated with the rise of reality tv, blogs, youtube (as mentioned)… i don’t know where exactly tattoos fit into all of this, but Dan is right in that lots of young kids just want to be ’stars/celebrities’ as a career. Paris helped with that I think.
one the point of expressing emotions publicly… i have no doubt Oprah and others have played a role in this… As Tony Soprano once lamented,
“Let me tell ya something. Nowadays, everybody’s gotta go to shrinks, and counselors, and go on “Sally Jessy Raphael” and talk about their problems. What happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do. See, what they didn’t know was once they got Gary Cooper in touch with his feelings that they wouldn’t be able to shut him up! And then it’s dysfunction this, and dysfunction that, and dysfunction ma f*ng*l!”
October 31st, 2008 at 11:52 am
Thank you, Mr. Carins, for giving me some valid reasons for my “young adult” not to get another tattoo.