Creative Class

My last few postings have been criticized by many for appearing to be angry. To be honest with you, I am angry. Things I care about such as homelessness, mass transit, food stamps, the arts, and education are getting short shrift. Moreover, all over Europe and increasingly in Asia, people who feel they have gotten short shrift are angry and showing up in the streets to articulate that anger. Good for them. We will not be heard unless we express our disappointment and anger. Squeaky wheels get oiled.

In an article in the Guardian today it was revealed that the Labour government in the UK will announce a grant of 40 million pounds for charities that are being slammed by the global depression. The Guardian contrasted that with the already 500 billion pounds that have been devoted to saving the UK banks. UK banks being quite stingy with their executives have already provided in excess of 1.8 billion pounds for their bankers’ bonuses.

Consider the Obama stimulus, which, when all is said and done, will be mostly tax breaks for the wealthy, significant funds for the military department, and what is left of the funds for education, mass transit, etc., will be chicken feed to what will be forked over to the wealthy. Whether the stimulus turns out to be $800 million or $1 billion, it is nothing compared to what the bank bailout bill to follow will cost. Already, the Fed, Treasury, FDIC, etc. have committed in excess of $8 trillion in subsidies, guarantees, interest rate cuts, ad infinitum to financial institutions. A substantial portion of this has already been skimmed off in dividends, bonuses, and perks. But the next tranche aimed at protecting the foolish investors, incompetent managers, and greedy executives will be far in excess what remains in the “stimulus” for us.

Do you really believe the arts and other creative endeavors can survive this massive transfer of the remaining wealth to a select few? What could we do to increase creativity? Under Roosevelt, musicians, artists, architects, and other creative folks received funds to be creative. The great Woody Guthrie wrote songs for the WPA, Alan Lomax toured the South recording folk music and blues, and painters created paintings in post offices and federal building across the nation. This was good stuff. Check some of it out at this site.

Consider the new media that allow ways of reaching out that we have never even thought about before. Why not stimulate things like this? What are your ideas on how we could stimulate new ideas and directions? How can we take this opportunity to have the government support people using old and new forms of creativity?

Today, CEO-Read announced it’s “100 Best Business Books of All Time.” Among the top 100, The Rise of the Creative Class.

Congrats, Rich!

How has The Rise of the Creative Class shaped your area’s approach to community and economic development? Has the book changed your perspective on creativity and talent management? How? Share your stories with our team.

To learn more about the guide for the top 100, click here. The guide is set to be released in February 2009.

Richard writes at great length in his work about the effect of clustering, particularly in understanding why the mega-region is a seminal concept of the urban age. Clustering is vital at the micro-level as well. In Christian Norberg-Schulz’s Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture, he makes the argument that space and place create the context for gathering and that it’s only through gathering that things like culture and representative art can begin to happen.

My experience as a journalist and DJ echo his observations. When I first began to interview the artists that I grew up listening to, the thing that impressed upon me most was how interconnected their communities were – particularly the hip hop artists from the New York area. We couldn’t understand it properly as kids listening to the music from a distance, but from visiting New York and talking to these artists you begin to understand what the neighborhoods meant to cultural production. Before they were legends, they were kids who liked music or dancing or art, and lived down the street from each other, so they got together to do it.

Although artists formed separate groups professionally, before they were in the public eye they all went record shopping in the same places, hung out in the same clubs, painted on the same walls, bounced ideas off of each other, and shared a sense of community that was defined very much by the urban terrain upon which it was cultivated. As a DJ in a city that is pretty arts-intensive, I can see the parallels in my own environment. There are places where we go and cluster and as artists we get together to just hang out and exchange ideas.

I say all of that to underscore this: I was at an art gallery the other day and I saw a call for public art from the city along with a submission form. A street that traverses Little Italy is being torn up and repaired, and the BIA is taking proposals for designs on some of the the buildings/space before the street reopens. Having worked in an art gallery for a couple of years, it occurred to me that this was not the first time I had seen a form like this and, while artists do frequent galleries, that there might be more effective places to put these forms. A street intersecting the road under repair has become a locust for young creative business enterprise centered around the arts. Young artists forming co-ops and running cafés, or specialty fashion stores where creative people came to do their thing. In the week as I went about my business in and out of these places and checked around, there were no forms to be found.

It made me wonder – are cities aware of their creative geographies?  Do they know where their artists cluster? If they need to address them, do cities have any real on-the-ground information, or do they guess at places like art galleries when the artists are hanging out right across the street?

And now, as always, some music.

Status symbols are important. They’re a shortcut to letting everyone know how important we are.

When someone is rolling in their $200K 8mpg Italian supercar or hanging in their 15,000-square-foot crypto-Tuscan crib, they’re making a statement that they have money to burn.

So what’s going to happen when waste is out and green is the new cool?

Is there going to be a mass movement to smaller, more efficient cars and homes? This might be a struggle, because it would mean a fundamental shift in how we spend our money and are perceived by others.

I’ve been trying to figure how this will play out. Perhaps our new status symbols can be compact, efficient, and green… as long as they are very expensive. (Blue jeans are hip, as long as they cost $300.)

What do you think? Will people willingly downsize their lifestyle to reduce their carbon footprint, if it means appearing less important and elite? Will there be new indicators of social status, other than a big house and an expensive car? Could it be the start of a movement towards qualitative values like creativity, and away from today’s worship of wealth?