Creativity—as an expression of originality, experimentation, innovation—is not a viable product. It has been priced out into irrelevance—both by the professionalization of the industries that claim it, and the soaring cost of entry to those professions.
The “creative class” is a frozen archetype—one that does not boost the economy of global cities, as urban studies theorist Richard Florida argues, but is a product of their takeover by elites. The creative class plays by the rules of the rich, because those are the only rules left. Adaptation is a form of survival. But adaptation is a form of abandonment as well.
Bias Against Creativity
In an article for Slate, Jessica Olien debunks the myth that originality and inventiveness are valued in U.S. society: “This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it.”
She cites academic studies indicating that people are biased against creative minds. They crave the success of the result, but shun the process that produces it: the experimentation that may yield to failure, the rejection of social norms that breeds rejection of the artist herself.
Today, creative industries are structured to minimize the diversity of their participants—economically, racially, and ideologically. Credentialism, not creativity, is the passport to entry.
Over the past decade, as digital media made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to share their ideas and work, barriers to professional entry tightened and geographical proximity became valued. Fields where advanced degrees were once a rarity—art, creative writing—now view them as a requirement. Unpaid internships and unpaid labor are rampant, blocking off industry access for those who cannot work without pay in the world’s most expensive cities.
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As digital media made it possible for anyone, anywhere, to share their ideas and work, barriers to professional entry tightened and geographical proximity became valued.
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Yet to discuss it, as artist Molly Crabapple notes in her brilliant essay “Filthy Lucre,” is verboten. Recalling her years as a struggling artist, she remembers being told by a fellow artist—a successful man living off his inherited money—that a “real artist” must live in poverty.
“What the artist was pretending he didn’t know is that money is the passport to success,” she writes. “We may be free beings, but we are constrained by an economic system rigged against us. What ladders we have are being yanked away. Some of us will succeed. The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures.”
Failure, in an economy of extreme inequalities, is a source of fear. To fail in an expensive city is not to fall but to plummet. In expensive cities, the career ladder comes with a drop-off to hell, where the fiscal punishment for risk gone wrong is more than the average person can endure. As a result, innovation is stifled, conformity encouraged. The creative class becomes the leisure class—or they work to serve the latter’s needs, or they abandon their fields entirely.
Nothing to Fear …
But creative people should not fear failure. Creative people should fear the prescribed path to success—its narrowness, its specificity, its reliance on wealth and elite approval. When success is a stranglehold, true freedom is failure. The freedom to fail is the freedom to innovate, to experiment, to challenge.
In 2012, St. Louis artist Martin Brief debuted his drawing “Success.” The drawing consisted only of a dictionary definition of success, with each word broken down into its own definition, until, as he writes, “the language can be read but will not yield any greater understanding of what the word means.”
It is a mockery of careerism made all the more salient by Brief’s residence in St. Louis—where success, by definition, is supposed to be impossible. To “succeed,” one is supposed to leave a city like St. Louis—a Middle-American city associated with poverty and crime. To “succeed” is to embody the definition of contemporary success: sanctioned, sanitized, solvent.
But sanctioned success is dependent on survival, and it is hard for most people to survive in an art world capital like New York, where some homeless people work two jobs. Success by geographical proxy comes with a price: purchased freedom for the rich, serving the rich for the rest. But what happens when we veer off that path? Is it failure? Or is it redefined, recognized anew?
Creativity is sometimes described as thinking outside the box. Today the box is a gilded cage. In a climate of careerist conformity, cheap cities with bad reputations—where, as art critic James McAnally notes, “no one knows whether it is possible for one to pursue a career”—may have their own advantage. “In the absence of hype, ideas gather, connections build, jagged at first, inarticulate,” McAnally writes of St. Louis. “Then, all of a sudden, worlds emerge.”
Perhaps it is time to reject the “gated citadels”—the cities powered by the exploitation of ambition, the cities where so much rides on so little opportunity. Reject their prescribed and purchased paths, as Smith implored, for cheaper and more fertile terrain. Reject the places where you cannot speak out, and create, and think, and fail. Open your eyes to where you are, and see where you can go.
—Originally published December 17, 2013
The Peril of Hipster Economics
On May 16, an artist, a railway service and a government agency spent $291,978 to block poverty from the public eye.
Called “psychylustro,” German artist Katharina Grosse’s project is a large-scale work designed to distract Amtrak train riders from the dilapidated buildings and fallen factories of north Philadelphia. The city has a 28 percent poverty rate—the highest of any major U.S. city—with much of it concentrated in the north. In some north Philadelphia elementary schools, nearly every child is living below the poverty line.
Grosse partnered with the National Endowment of the Arts and Amtrak to mask north Philadelphia’s hardship with a delightful view. A Wall Street Journal headline calls this “Fighting Urban Blight With Art.” Liz Thomas, the curator of the project, calls it “an experience that asks people to think about this space that they hurtle through every day.”
The project is not actually fighting blight, of course—only the ability of Amtrak customers to see it.
“I need the brilliance of color to get close to people, to stir up a sense of life experience and heighten their sense of presence,” Grosse proclaims.
“People,” in Grosse and Thomas’s formulation, are not those who actually live in north Philadelphia and bear the brunt of its burdens. “People” are those who can afford to view poverty through the lens of aesthetics as they pass it by.
Urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodeled or romanticized. This is hipster economics.
Influx of Hipsters
In February, director Spike Lee delivered an impassioned critique—derisively characterized as a “rant” by U.S. media outlets—on the gentrification of New York City. Arguing that an influx of “… hipsters” had driven up rent in most neighborhoods—and in turn driven out the African-American communities that once called them home—he noted how long-dormant city services suddenly reappeared:
“Why does it take an influx of white New Yorkers in the south Bronx, in Harlem, in Bed Stuy, in Crown Heights for the facilities to get better? The garbage wasn’t picked up every … day when I was living in 165 Washington Park … So, why did it take this great influx of white people to get the schools better? Why’s there more police protection in Bed Stuy and Harlem now? Why’s the garbage getting picked up more regularly? We been here!”
Lee was criticized by many for “hipster-bashing,” including African-American professor John McWhorter, who claimed that “hipster” was a “sneaky way of saying ‘honkey’” and compared Lee to television character George Jefferson.
These dismissals, which focus on gentrification as culture, ignore that Lee’s was a critique of the racist allocation of resources. Black communities whose complaints about poor schools and city services go unheeded find these complaints a
re readily addressed when wealthier, whiter people move in. Meanwhile, longtime locals are treated as contagions on the landscape, targeted by police for annoying the new arrivals.
Gentrifiers focus on aesthetics, not people. Because people, to them, are aesthetics.
Proponents of gentrification will vouch for its benevolence by noting it “cleaned up the neighborhood.” This is often code for a literal whitewashing. The problems that existed in the neighborhood—poverty, lack of opportunity, struggling populations denied city services—did not go away. They were simply priced out to a new location.
That new location is often an impoverished suburb, which lacks the glamour to make it the object of future renewal efforts. There is no history to attract preservationists because there is nothing in poor suburbs viewed as worth preserving, including the futures of the people forced to live in them. This is blight without beauty, ruin without romance: payday loan stores, dollar stores, unassuming homes, and unpaid bills. In the suburbs, poverty looks banal and is overlooked.
In cities, gentrifiers have the political clout—and accompanying racial privilege—to reallocate resources and repair infrastructure. The neighborhood is “cleaned up” through the removal of its residents. Gentrifiers can then bask in “urban life”—the storied history, the selective nostalgia, the carefully sprinkled grit—while avoiding responsibility to those they displaced.
Hipsters want rubble with guarantee of renewal. They want to move into a memory they have already made.
Impoverished Suburbs
In a sweeping analysis of displacement in San Francisco and its increasingly impoverished suburbs, journalist Adam Hudson notes that “gentrification is trickle-down economics applied to urban development: the idea being that as long as a neighborhood is made suitable for rich and predominantly white people, the benefits will trickle down to everyone else.” Like trickle-down economics itself, this theory does not play out in practice.
Rich cities such as New York and San Francisco have become what journalist Simon Kuper calls gated citadels, “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.”
Struggling U.S. cities of the Rust Belt and heartland lack the investment of coastal contemporaries, but have in turn been spared the rapid displacement of hipster economics. Buffered by their eternal uncoolness, these slow-changing cities have a chance to make better choices—choices that value the lives of people over the aesthetics of place.
In an April blog post, Umar Lee, a St. Louis writer and full-time taxi driver, bemoaned the economic model of ride-share services, which are trying to establish themselves in the city. Noting that they hurt not only taxi drivers but poor residents who have neither cars nor public transport and thus depend on taxis willing to serve dangerous neighborhoods, he dismisses Uber and Lyft as hipster elitists masquerading as innovators:
“I’ve heard several young hipsters tell me they’re socially-liberal and economic-conservative, a popular trend in American politics,” he writes. “Well, I hate to break it to you, buddy, but it’s economics and the role of the state that defines politics. If you’re an economic conservative, despite how ironic and sarcastic you may be or how tight your jeans are, you, my friend, are a conservative…”
Lee tells me he has his own plan to try to mitigate the negative effects of gentrification, which he calls “50-50-20-15.” All employers who launch businesses in gentrifying neighborhoods should have a workforce that is at least 50 percent minorities, 50 percent people from the local neighborhood, and 20 percent ex-offenders. The employees should be paid at least $15 per hour.
Gentrification spreads the myth of native incompetence: that people need to be imported to be important, that a sign of a neighborhood’s “success” is the removal of its poorest residents. True success lies in giving those residents the services and opportunities they have long been denied.
When neighborhoods experience business development, priority in hiring should go to locals who have long struggled to find nearby jobs that pay a decent wage. Let us learn from the mistakes of New York and San Francisco, and build cities that reflect more than surface values.
—Originally published May 29, 2014
Mourn the Fall of the Mall
In 1978, George Romero debuted Dawn of the Dead, a movie about flesh-eating zombies who converge on a U.S. shopping mall. Released when malls had begun to supplant downtowns as centers of commerce, Dawn of the Dead critiqued the conformity and consumerism of 1970s America.
“It’s some kind of instinct,” one character explains, as brain-dead zombies stumble past escalators and chain stores. “Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”
In 2012, Gillian Flynn released Gone Girl, a thriller that—in its portrayal of economic desperation, desolation, and deception—is arguably the great novel of the recession. Like Dawn of the Dead, Gone Girl stages a key scene in a mall, only here the mall itself is the horror. Returning to his Midwest hometown, Gone Girl’s narrator visits his old shopping grounds only to find a graveyard of U.S. enterprise, a shattered structure of shuttered stores where the unemployed seek shelter and drugs.
“I’d expected the mall smell as we entered: the temperature-controlled hollowness,” the narrator observes. “Instead, I smelled old grass and dirt … It was suburbia, post-comet, post-zombie, post-humanity.”
Malls no longer breed zombie shoppers. Instead, they are graveyards of the U.S. economy. Gone are the brain-dead consumers of a more decadent past, when there were things to buy and buyers to sell them and places with people inside.
Now we are zombies with nothing to eat.
Since 2008, hundreds of malls across the U.S. have shut down, and half of all U.S. malls are predicted to close within the next ten years. Thwarted shoppers visit online mall mortuaries like DeadMalls and Labelscar, where they post photos of their decimated economic landscapes. Others strip the malls for parts, stealing scrap material found inside.
Who would have guessed, a decade ago, that the most valuable part of the mall’s brick-and-mortar economy would be the brick and mortar?
Mall Memories
Some rejoice at the fall of the mall, hopeful that it will lead to the revitalization of downtown commercial districts. This is a faulty assumption. Cities doing well enough to rebuild their downtowns likely did not depend on the mall in the first place.
The mall has long been derided by those with the luxury of an alternative. When the U.S. industrial economy faltered in the 1970s, downtowns in many cities crumbled, and shopping malls—homogeneous, enclosed, and sterile—both enabled and compensated for their demise.
In the media, malls were pilloried as monoliths devoid of character. Mockery of the mall spurred pop culture prototypes: vacuous Valley girls, meandering mall rats. Underlying the mockery was grief for the loss of a seemingly more connected and welcoming urban life: the independent businesses, local markets, and community ties built around them.
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Advice by algorithm, delivery by drone: this is what a dehumanized landscape looks like.
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But while these were memories for some, for others they were merely rumors. A functional local economy was a story our parents told us.
For U.S. citizens raised in cities of post-industrial blight, there was the mall and the mall alone. We did not “choose” between supporting the mall or the local businesses, because by the time we came of age there were few local businesses left to support. There were no independent boutiques and bookstores to protect from corporate takeover: such battles were plot devices of movies set in more cultured places. We watched from afar, wondering what it was like to have something to lose. Our rundown towns had little anyone wanted: empty lots, boarded windows, vacant stores.
Decades passed, and no one rebuilt them. Now the malls follow, and no one will rebuild them either.
My generation watches the malls fall like our parents watched the downtowns die. To our children, the mall will be a
nostalgic abstraction, a 404 in concrete.
Online Substitute?
The rise in online shopping has been blamed for the demise of the mall. But some economic analysts see a more basic problem.
“What’s going on is the customers don’t have the […] money,” notes longtime retail consultant Howard Davidowitz. “That’s it. This isn’t rocket science.”
Between 2000 and 2011, suburban poverty surged 67 percent, as gentrification forced city residents from their homes. Mid-tier malls that depended on middle-class shoppers faltered, as the middle class shrank.
“They’re marginal malls because they’re in marginal areas, in many cases,” says retail analyst Kenneth Dalto, noting how demographic shifts have drained the revenue base.
The fall of the mall is a problem for the consumer: with local businesses decimated and chain stores departed, those without Internet access and credit cards can struggle to procure goods. But the fall of the mall is a bigger problem for low-skill workers.
Materialism may remain rampant, but now its spaces are secret. Retail work has been replaced with jobs in online shopping warehouses where “pickers” labor unseen in brutal conditions.
“We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves. We don’t think for ourselves, maybe they don’t trust us to think for ourselves as human beings, I don’t know,” says Adam Littler, who worked undercover at an Amazon warehouse to witness conditions firsthand. On a given night shift he walked ten miles and was expected to collect an order every thirty-three seconds.
Malls were once castigated for turning consumers into zombies. Now, the zombie is the ideal online retail employee, unthinking and robotic. Advice by algorithm, delivery by drone: this is what a dehumanized landscape looks like.
The View from Flyover Country Page 2