Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism, Part II

Markusen had in fact been asked to frame political questions by the university president himself. Markusen's paper is centered on a critique of Florida's creative-class thesis; see Ann Markusen, “Urban Development and the Politics of a Creative Class: Evidence from the Study of Artists,” Environment and Planning A, Vol. 38, Issue 10, 2006. See →.

I use this term here to signify ironical posers and lifestyle, particularly sartorial, devotees.

Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City (New York: Routledge, 2006). Lloyd’s estimation of the work role of the creatives is counter to the generally benign role accorded them not only by Ray and Anderson but also by such varied commentators as Markusen and all the centrist and right-wing observers.

Zukin, Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1982).

George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 48.

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217—252.

I am thinking of such US-based companies such as the phone company CREDO, which has increasingly positioned itself as a left-wing, “social justice”-oriented advocacy group that happens to sell you phone services, but also of the Fair Trade Coffee “movement” and even mainstream groups as AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) and the nonprofit magazine Consumer Reports, which sell services but also run advocacy and lobbying organizations. And then there is the religious sector, which maintains tax exemption while deeply implicated in politics.

Peter Drucker, Landmarks of Tomorrow: A Report on the New “Post-Modern” World (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1959); Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1991).

Clark Kerr, Godkin Lectures, given at Harvard University, 1963. The Free Speech Movement recognized the blueprint for the new technocratic, pragmatic, and politically disciplined and hegemonic nation, for what it was and erupted accordingly.

Clark Kerr, The Uses of the University (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), based on his Harvard lectures, 66.

Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (New York: Basic Books, 1973); The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).

This note is simply to acknowledge that—no surprise here—not all labor theorists accept the term post-Fordism and its periodization of capitalist production processes, or the notion of “immaterial labor,” explored below, although they are much favored in the European art world.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 103–115.

Lazzarato, “Strategies of the Political Entrepreneur,” SubStance 112, vol. 36, no. 1 (2007): 89–90.

Andrew Ross, "Nice Work If You Can Get It: The Mercurial Career of Creative Industries Policy," in Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, eds. My Creativity Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007), 19.

Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System (New York: Ballantine, 1983); David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). On his website, →, Florida engages in excoriations of Brooks and presents himself as the good observer while Brooks is the bad.

Zukin, Loft Living, op. cit. See note 4. To my knowledge, the concept of the artistic mode of production was first articulated by Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, published in 1981, which develops the thesis of the historical grounding of narrative frameworks.

Ibid., 98.

Ibid., citing Ronald Berman, “Art vs. the Arts,” Commentary, November 1979: 48.

See, for example, Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 8.

Doug Henwood, After the New Economy (New York: The New Press, 2003).

Edward Glaeser, “Review of Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class,” 3. See →.

Ibid., 4.

Ibid., 5.

Max Nathan, “The Wrong Stuff? Creative Class Theory and Economic Performance in UK Cities.” See →.

Ann Markusen, “Urban Development and the Politics of a Creative Class: Evidence from the Study of Artists,” op. cit. See →.

Alan Blum, “The Imaginary of Self-Satisfaction: Reflections on the Platitude of the “Creative City,” in Alexandra Boutros and Will Straw, eds., Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (Montreal and Kingston, London, and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010).

Douglas McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960).

William G. Ouchi, Theory Z (New York: Avon Books, 1982).

W. Edwards Deming and J. M. Juran, Quality Control Handbook (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951).

Hiroko Tabuchi, “Japanese Playing a New Video Game: Catch-Up,” New York Times, September 20, 2010, →.

Matthew Stewart, “The Management Myth,” The Atlantic, June 2006. See →.

Elton Mayo, The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933).

Frederick Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management (New York and London: Harper & Brothers, 1911); Frank Gilbreth, Motion Study (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1911).

David Graeber, Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire (Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2007).

Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophy of 'As If': A System of the Theoretical, Practical and Religious Fictions of Mankind (London: Routledge, 1924).

Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism (London and New York: Verso, 2006). This book is handy for laying out and following statistically what should be readily apparent to observers.

Chantal Mouffe, “The Museum Revisited,” Artforum, vol. 48, no. 10 (Summer 2010): 326–330. See →.

Zukin, Loft Living, 190.

Sharon Zukin, The Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

Ibid., 142.

Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp, In Search of New Public Domain (Rotterdam: NAi, 2001).

Zukin, Naked City, 142.

Ibid., 142–143.

Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture; Antonio Muniz Sodré, O social irradiado: Violencia urbana, neogrotesco e midia (Sao Paolo: Cortez Editora, 1992); Nestor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

Grant Kester, “Aesthetic Evangelists: Conversion and Empowerment in Contemporary Art,” Afterimage 22:6 (January 1995), 5–11; Hal Foster, “The Artist as Ethnographer?” The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995). See →.

Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (Fall 2004), 51–79.

Jane Alexander and Gary O. Larson, American Canvas: An Arts Legacy for Our Communities (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 1997). How easily that term “utilitarian” slides into discussions of a dimension that during the Cold War was always explicitly denied →.

Yúdice, op. cit., 245.

Alexander and Larson, American Canvas. Emphasis in the original.

Markusen, “Urban Development and the Politics of a Creative Class,” op. cit., 22—23. In this paper, Markusen acknowledges artists’ role in gentrification, remarking they are “sometimes caught up in gentrification,” but she sees their role in most cities as not different from that of other middle- and working-class people migrating into working-class neighborhoods and on this account criticizes both Zukin, with whom she otherwise generally agrees, and Rosalyn Deutsche.