strike terror, and yet he’s describing a
set of possibilities that for many young
people are exhilarating.
A
few years ago, I found myself at a
party in an empty lot in a condo-
less part of Brooklyn. It was the kind
of event where someone is at the en-
trance checking for your name on a
clipboard. All around us were giant con-
crete slabs that had been painted by
some of the city’s best-known street
artists. I didn’t understand the nature
of the gathering until I noticed that it
was being sponsored by a real-estate
developer. Graffiti, once a scourge, was
being used to get people to think about
the growth possibilities of this unfan-
cied city block. The art lent our sur-
roundings a frisson of creativity.
One of the reasons there was once
a more robust spectrum of working art-
ists is that it used to be much cheaper
to live in cities like New York. The com-
ing-of-age biographies of famous art-
ists are filled with moments of desire
and vision, but they are, more often
than not, stories about resourcefulness
in an era of affordable rents. By the time
the punk singer Patti Smith published
her memoir “Just Kids,” in 2010, her de-
scriptions of seventies Manhattan, where
one could support two artistic careers
by working at a bookstore, seemed an
impossible fantasy. Smith has since sug-
gested that aspiring young artists move
to someplace like Poughkeepsie.
A few years ago, locals in Los An-
geles’s predominantly Chicano neigh-
borhood of Boyle Heights began no-
ticing the sudden appearance of art
galleries opened mostly by fashionable
young white people. There were rumors
that developers had provided them with
cheap, stable rents, as long as they stayed
in their location for a set number of
years. They would be shock troops for
gentrification, bringing other hip young
white people to the area. Local activists
organized and eventually drove the gal-
leries out. (In a bizarre twist, there were
claims that the constituents in this move-
ment included older white artists, retal-
iating against the white newcomers.)
In 2002, the urban theorist Richard
Florida published “The Rise of the
Creative Class: And How It’s Trans-
forming Work, Leisure, and Everyday
Life.” Deresiewicz laments Florida’s
rise to fame and the way his book be-
came a manifesto and an instruction
manual for developers and city plan-
ners. The creative class that Florida be-
lieved would shape the future was made
up of those whose work possessed some
kind of intellectual dimension: scien-tists, engineers, architects, designers,
writers, artists, musicians (the “creative
core”), along with people in law, finance,
education, health care, and so on (“cre-
ative professionals”). Deresiewicz re-
marks that the plutocrats of yore, such
as the Rockefellers and the Carnegies,
“built the museums and libraries and
concert halls” and “supported culture
as an end in itself.” In contrast, Flor-
ida and creative-class evangelists value
art for more mercenary reasons. Flor-
ida’s work convinced city leaders that
this class brought with it disposable
income, a youthful, cosmopolitan en-
ergy, and entrepreneurial spirit. Cities
began trying to lure creative types, by
rebranding around a cool musical leg-
acy, say, or designing creativity-friendly
office parks, or investing in public art
and festivals. Often, Florida’s ideas were
merely the narrative cover for gentrifi-
cation. Tech workers were creative; the
minority entrepreneurs already there
were not.
That Florida called it a “class” sug-
gests how meaningless that word often
becomes in the American context. Class
can be a vector for organizing and po-
litical action. Here it had little to do
with shared political values or a col-
lective alienation from power; it meant
a kind of life style. One persistent cri-
tique of Florida’s work arises from its
suggestion that creativity is hampered
by too many rules, or outdated mod-
els of collective action, like unions. Job
security was its enemy. While tech com-
panies adopted the mantra of creativ-
ity, they also discouraged workplace
organizing. At Kickstarter, which was
founded to make the lives of artists
and designers less precarious, tensions
over a union’s formation simmered for
months. (The Kickstarter Union was
eventually formed earlier this year.) “In
the context of corporate work,” Dere-
siewicz writes, creativity “is basically a
form of propaganda, a way to make
people feel better about their jobs—
or, in the case of the ‘independent con-
tractors’ who increasingly perform this
kind of work, their lack of jobs.”T
hroughout “The Death of the Art-
ist,” you get the feeling that De-
resiewicz is passionately relitigating ar-
guments he once had with a Pollyannaish
friend. It’s like overhearing one half of“What bothers me the most is the implication that ‘real boys’
have some keen sense of objective truth.”