Martha Rosler

Culture Class:Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part I

PART ONE: ART AND URBANISMWhen Abstract Expressionists explored theterrain of the canvas and Pollock createdsomething of a disorientation map by putting hisunstretched canvases on the floor, few observersand doubtless fewer painters would haveacknowledged a relationship between theirconcerns and real estate, let alone transnationalcapital flows.          Space, as many observers have noted, hasdisplaced time as the operative dimension ofadvanced, globalizing (and post-industrial?)capitalism.1 Time itself, under this economicregime, has been differentiated, spatialized, anddivided into increasingly smaller units.2 Even invirtual regimes, space entails visuality in oneway or another. The connection betweenRenaissance perspective and the enclosures oflate medieval Europe, together with the new ideaof terrain as a real-world space to be negotiated,supplying crossing points for commerce, wasonly belatedly apparent. Similarly, the rise ofphotography has been traced to suchphenomena as the encoding of earthly space andthe enclosing of land in the interest of groundrent. For a long time now, art and commerce havenot simply taken place side by side, but haveactively set the terms for one another, creatingand securing worlds and spaces in turn.

Jackson Pollock in his studio.

          My task here is to explore the positioning ofwhat urban business evangelist Richard Floridahas branded the “creative class,” and its role,ascribed and anointed, in reshaping economies

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Paris, May '68.

Meeting of the Situationist International, Göteborg, 1961.

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in cities, regions, and societies. In pursuit of thataim, I will consider a number of theories – someof them conflicting – of the urban and of forms ofsubjectivity. In reviewing the history of postwarurban transformations, I consider the culture ofthe art world on the one hand, and, on the other,the ways in which the shape of experience andidentity under the regime of the urban renderchimerical the search for certain desirableattributes in the spaces we visit or inhabit.Considering the creative-class hypothesis ofRichard Florida and others requires us first totease apart and then rejoin the urbanist and thecultural strains of this argument. I wouldmaintain, along with many observers, that in anyunderstanding of postwar capitalism, the role ofculture has become pivotal.          I open the discussion with the Frenchphilosopher and sometime Surrealist HenriLefebvre, whose theorization of the creation andcapitalization of types of space has beenenormously productive. Lefebvre begins his bookof 1970, The Urban Revolution, as follows:

I’ll begin with the following hypothesis:Society has been completely urbanized.This hypothesis implies a definition: Anurban society is a society that results froma process of complete urbanization. Thisurbanization is virtual today, but willbecome real in the future.3

Lefebvre’s book helped usher in a modern versionof political geography, influencing FredricJameson, David Harvey, and Manuel Castells,among other prominent writers and theorists ofboth culture and the urban (Harvey, in turn, iscited as an influence by Richard Florida). In hisintroduction to Lefebvre’s book, geographer NeilSmith writes that Lefebvre “put the urban on theagenda as an explicit locus and target of politicalorganizing.”4

          Succumbing to neither empiricism norpositivism, Lefebvre did not hesitate to describethe urban as a virtual state whose fullinstantiation in human societies still lay in thefuture. In Lefebvre’s typology, the earliest citieswere political, organized around institutions ofgovernance. The political city was eventuallysupplanted in the Middle Ages by the mercantilecity, organized around the marketplace, and thenby the industrial city, finally entering a criticalzone on the way to a full absorption of theagrarian by the urban. Even in less developed,agrarian societies that do not (yet) appear to beeither industrialized or urban, agriculture issubject to the demands and constraints ofindustrialization. In other words, the urbanparadigm has overtaken and subsumed allothers, determining the social relations and the

conduct of daily life within them. (Indeed, thevery concept of “daily life” is itself a product ofindustrialism and the urban.)          Lefebvre’s emphasis on the citycontradicted the orderliness of Le Corbusier,whom he charged with having failed to recognizethat the street is the site of a living disorder, aplace, in his words, to play and learn; it is a siteof “the informative function, the symbolicfunction, the ludic function.”5 Lefebvre cites theobservations of the foundational urban observerJane Jacobs, and identifies the street itself, withits bustle and life, as the only security againstviolence and criminality. Finally, Lefebvre notes –soon after the events and discourses of May ‘68in France – that revolution takes place in thestreet, creating a new order out of disorder.          The complexity of city life often appears,from a governmental standpoint, to be atroublesome Gordian knot to be disentangled orsliced through. A central task of modernity hasbeen the amelioration and pacification of thecities of the industrializing metropolitan core;the need was already apparent by the middle ofthe nineteenth century, when the primeexamples were those at the epicenter ofindustrialism, London and Manchester.6 Controlof these newly urbanizing populations alsorequired raising them to subsistence level, whichhappened gradually over the succeedingdecades, and not without tremendous strugglesand upheaval. Industrialization also vastlyincreased the flow of people to cities, as itcontinues to do – even in poor countries withvery low-income levels per capita – to the extentthat Lefebvre’s prediction regarding fullurbanization is soon to come true; since 2005,there are more people living in cities than in thecountryside.7

          In the advanced industrial economies,twentieth-century urban planning encompassednot only the engineering of new transportationmodalities but also the creation of newneighborhoods with improved housing for theworking classes and the poor. For a few briefdecades, the future seemed within the grasp ofthe modern. After the Second World War,bombed-out European cities provided somethingof a blank canvas, delighting the likes of W.G.Witteveen, a Rotterdam civil engineer andarchitect who exulted in the possibilitiesprovided by the near-total destruction of thatport city by Nazi bombing in May 1940. In manyintact or nearly intact cities in the US andWestern Europe, both urban renewal andpostwar reconstruction followed a similar plan:clear out the old and narrow, divide or replacethe dilapidated neighborhoods with better roadsand public transport.8 While small industrialproduction continued as the urban economic

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backbone, many cities also invited theburgeoning corporate and financial servicessectors to locate their headquarters there,sweetening their appeal through zoningadjustments and tax breaks. International Stylecommercial skyscrapers sprouted around theworld as cities became concentrations, real andsymbolic, of state and corporate administration.          

Paris.

          The theoretical underpinning for arenovated cityscape came primarily from theearlier, utopian “millennial” and interwar designsof forward-looking, albeit totalizing, plans forremaking the built environment. It was not loston the city poor that so-called urban renewalprojects targeted their neighborhoods and thecultural traditions that enlivened them. Citieswere being remade for the benefit of the middleand upper classes, and the destruction of theolder neighborhoods – whether in the interest ofcommercial, civic, or other forces, such asenhanced mobility for trucks and private cars –extirpated the haunts of those beyond the reachof law and bourgeois proclivities, adverselyaffecting the lives and culture of the poorerresidents.          One may trace the grounding of the mid-century European group the SituationistInternational in a recognition of the growing roleof the visual – and its relation to spatiality – inmodern capitalism, and thus the complicit role ofart in systems of exploitation. The core Frenchgroup of Situationists – Lefebvre’s sometimestudents (and, some might say, collaborators andcertainly occasional adversaries) – attacked, asLefebvre had done, the radiant-city visions of LeCorbusier (and by implication other utopianmodernists) for designing a carceral city in whichthe poor are locked up and thrust into a strangelynarrow utopia of light and space, but removedfrom a free social life in the streets. (LeCorbusier’s housing projects called “Unitésd’Habitation,” the most famous of which is inMarseille, were elevated above their gardensurrounds on pilotis. The floors were called rues,or streets, and one such “street” was to bedevoted to shops; kindergartens and – at least inthe one I visited, in Firminy, near St. Etienne – alow-powered radio station were also located

within the building, together suggesting theconditions of a walled city.)

We will leave Monsieur Le Corbusier’s styleto him, a style suitable for factories andhospitals, and no doubt eventually forprisons. (Doesn’t he already buildchurches?) Some sort of psychologicalrepression dominates this individual –whose face is as ugly as his conceptions ofthe world – such that he wants to squashpeople under ignoble masses of reinforcedconcrete, a noble material that shouldrather be used to enable an aerialarticulation of space that could surpass theflamboyant Gothic style. His cretinizinginfluence is immense. A Le Corbusier modelis the only image that arouses in me theidea of immediate suicide. He is destroyingthe last remnants of joy. And of love,passion, freedom.

– Ivan Chetcheglov9

Paul Gavarni,Le Flâneur, 1842.

Perhaps it is the primacy of the spatial register,with its emphasis on visuality, but also its turn to

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Photograph by Richard Laymanof poster in the collection of theWashington, DC, Department ofTransportation.

virtuality, to representation, that also accountsfor architecture’s return to prominence in theimaginary of the arts, displacing not only musicbut architecture’s spectral double, the cinema.This change in the conduct of everyday life, andthe centrality of the city to such changes, wereapparent to the Situationists, and Debord’sconcept of what he termed “the society of thespectacle” is larger than any particular instancesof architecture or real estate, and certainly largerthan questions of cinema or television. Debord’s“spectacle” denotes the all-encompassing,controlling nature of modern industrial and“post-industrial” culture. Thus, Debord definesthe spectacle not in terms of representationalone but also in terms of the social relations ofcapitalism and its ability to subsume all intorepresentation: “The spectacle is not a collectionof images; rather, it is a social relationshipbetween people that is mediated by images.”10

Elements of culture were in the forefront, but thefocus was quite properly on the dominant modeof production.          The Situationists’ engagement with city lifeincluded a practice they called the dérive. Thedérive, an exploration of urban neighborhoods, aversion of the nineteenth-century tradition of theflâneur, and an inversion of the bourgeois

promenade of the boulevards (concerned as thelatter was with visibility to others, while theflâneur’s was directed toward his ownexperience), hinged on the relatively free flow oforganic life in the neighborhoods, a freedom frombureaucratic control, that dynamic element oflife also powerfully detailed by Lefebvre and JaneJacobs. Both Baudelaire and Benjamin gave theflâneur prominence, and by the end of thetwentieth century the flâneur was adopted as afavored, if minor, figure for architects wishing toadd pedestrian cachet to projects such asshopping malls that mimic public plazas – thusclosing the book on the unadministered spacesthat the Situationists, at least, were concernedwith defending.          The Western art world has periodicallyrediscovered the Situationists, who presentlyoccupy what a friend has described as a quasi-religious position, embodying every aspiringartist/revolutionary’s deepest wish – to be inboth the political and the artistic vanguardsimultaneously. The ghostly presence of theSituationists, including Debord, Asger Jorn,Raoul Vaneigem, and Constant, predictably tookup residence at the moment the very idea of theartistic vanguard disappeared. The cautionarydilemma they pose is how to combat the power

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of “spectacle culture” under advancedcapitalism without following their decision toabandon the terrain of art (as Duchamp had doneearlier). To address this question, context andhistory are required. Let us continue with theevents of the 1960s, in the Situationists’ moment– characterized by rising economic expectationsfor the postwar generation in the West andbeyond, but also by riot and revolt, both internaland external.          By the 1960s, deindustrializa!tion was onthe horizon of many cities in the US andelsewhere as the flight of manufacturing capitalto nonunion areas and overseas was gatheringsteam, often abetted by state policy. In an era ofdecline for central cities, thanks tosuburbanization and corporate, as well asmiddle-class (white) flight, a new transformationwas required. Dilapidated downtownneighborhoods became the focus of cityadministrations seeking ways to revive themwhile simultaneously withdraw!ing city servicesfrom the remaining poor residents, ideallywithout fomenting disorder. In Paris, riven byunrest during the Algerian War, the chosensolution encompassed pacification throughpolice mobilization and the evacuation of poorresidents to a new, outer ring of suburbs, orbanlieues, yoking the utopian high-rise schemeto the postwar banishment of the urban poor andthe dangerous classes.11 By 1967, the lack ofeconomic viability of these banlieues, and theparticular stress that put on housewives, waswidely recognized, becoming the subject ofJean-Luc Godard’s brilliant film Two or ThreeThings I Know About Her.          In other countries, conversely, the viabilityof “housing projects” or “council housing” inimproving the lives of the urban poor has beenincreasingly challenged, and it is an article ofneoliberal faith that such projects cannotsucceed – a prophecy fulfilled by the covertracial policies underlying the siting of theseprojects and the selection of residents, followed,in cities that wish to tear them down, byconsistent underfunding of maintenance andservices. In Britain the Thatcherist solution wasto sell the flats to the residents, with therationale of making the poor into stakeholders,with results yet to be determined (although thepitfalls seem obvious). With the failure of manystate-initiated postwar housing schemes for thepoor supplying a key exhibit in neoliberal urbandoctrine, postmodern architecture showed itselfwilling to jettison humanism in the wake of theruin of the grand claims of utopian modernism. Inthe US, commentator Charles Jencks famouslyidentified as “the moment of postmodernism”the phased implosion in 1972 – in a bemusingchoreography often replayed today – of the

Pruitt-Igoe housing project, a 33-buildingmodernist complex in St. Louis, Missouri. Pruitt-Igoe, commissioned in 1950 during an era ofpostwar optimism, had been built to house thosewho had moved to the city for war work –primarily proletarianized African-Americans fromthe rural South.          

Pruitt-Igoe housing project in the 1950s and in the process ofimplosion.

                    The abandonment of the widely heldtwentieth-century paradigm of state- andmunicipality-sponsored housing thus properlyjoined the other retreats from utopianism thatconstituted the narratives of postmodernism.Either blowing up or selling off housing projectshas subsequently been adopted enthusiasticallyby many US cities, such as Newark, New Jersey,which happily supplied a mediatized spectacle ofeviction and displacement – but so far has notreached my home city, New York, primarilybecause, as a matter of policy, New York’shousing projects have never occupied the centerof town. In post-Katrina New Orleans, however,the moment of Schumpeterian creativedestruction allowed for the closure tout court ofthe largely undamaged, 1200-home LafittePublic Housing Development in the Lower NinthWard (the project was demolished withoutfanfare or fireworks in 2008).          Throughout the 1960s, as formermetropolitan empires schemed, struggled, andstrong-armed to secure alternative ways tomaintain cheap access to productive resourcesand raw materials in the post-colonial world, theWestern democracies, because of unrest amongyoung people and minorities centering onincreasing demands for political agency, werediagnosed by policy elites as ungovernable. In anumber of cities, as middle-class adults, andsome young “hippies,” were leaving, groups ofother people, including students and workingclass families, took part in poor people’s housinginitiatives that included sweat equity (in whichthe municipality grants ownership rights to thosewho form collectives to rehabilitate decayedtenement properties, generally the ones in whichthey are living) or squatting. In cities that havenot succeeded, as New York and London have

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done, in turning themselves into centers ofcapital concentration through finance,insurance, and real estate, the squattermovement has had a long tail and still figures inmany European cities. In the US, the urbanhomesteading movement, primarilyaccomplished through the individual purchase ofdistressed homes, quickly became recognized asa new, more benign way of colonizingneighborhoods and driving out the poor. Suchnew middle-class residents were often referredto by real-estate interests and their newspaperflacks – not to mention an enthusiastic Mayor EdKoch – as “urban pioneers,” as though the oldneighborhoods could be understood according tothe model of the Wild West. These developmentssurely seemed organic to the individuals movingin; as threatened communities began to resist,however, the process of change quickly enoughgained a name: gentrification.          In some major cities, some of the colonizerswere artists, writers, actors, dancers, and poets.Many lived in old tenements; but artists did notso much want apartments as places to work andlive, and the ideal spaces were disused factoriesor manufacturing lofts. In New York, while poets,actors, dancers, and writers were moving to suchold working-class residential areas as the LowerEast Side, many artists took up residence innearby manufacturing-loft neighborhoods.Artists had been living in lofts since at least the1950s, and while the city winked at suchresidents, it still considered their situation to beboth temporary and illegal. But loft-dwellingartists continued agitating for city recognitionand protection, which appeared increasingly

likely to be granted as the 1960s advanced.          A canny observer of this process was NewYork City-based urban sociologist Sharon Zukin.In her book Loft Living: Culture and Capital inUrban Change, published in 1982, Zukin writesabout the role of artists in making “loft living”comprehensible, even desirable. She focuses onthe transformation, beginning in the mid-1960s,of New York’s cast-iron district into an “artistdistrict” that was eventually dubbed Soho. In thisremarkable book, Zukin lays out a theory ofurban change in which artists and the entirevisual art sector – especially commercialgalleries, artist-run spaces, and museums – area main engine for the repurposing of the post-industrial city and the renegotiation of realestate for the benefit of elites. She writes:

Looking at loft living in terms of terrain andmarkets rather than “lifestyle” linkschanges in the built environment with thecollective appropriation of public goods. …studying the formation of markets …directs attention to investors rather thanconsumers as the source of change.12

Zukin demonstrates how this policy change wascarried forward by city officials, art supporters,and well-placed art patrons serving on land-usecommissions and occupying other seats ofpower.

The creation of constituencies for historicpreservation and the arts carried over afascination with old buildings and artists’studios into a collective appropriation of

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VALS chart.

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these spaces for modern residential andcommercial use. In the grand scheme ofthings, loft living gave the coup de grâce tothe old manufacturing base of cities likeNew York and brought on the final stage oftheir transformation into service-sectorcapitals.13

Reminding us that “by the 1970s, art suggested anew platform to politicians who were tired ofdealing with urban poverty,” Zukin quotes anartist looking back ruefully at the creation ofSoho as a district that addressed the needs ofartists rather than those of the poor:

At the final hearing where the Board ofEstimate voted to approve SoHo as anartists’ district, there were lots of othergroups giving testimony on other matters.Poor people from the South Bronx and Bed-Stuy complaining about rats, rent control,and things like that. The board just shelvedthose matters and moved right along. Theydidn’t know how to proceed. Then theycame to us. All the press secretaries werethere, and the journalists. The klieg lightswent on, and the cameras started to roll.And all these guys started makingspeeches about the importance of art toNew York City.14

One of Zukin’s many exhibits is this publishedremark by Dick Netzer, a prominent member ofNew York’s Municipal Assistance Corporation,the rescue agency set up during New York City’sfiscal near-default:

The arts may be small in economic termseven in this region, but the arts “industry”is one of our few growth industries … Theconcentration of the arts in New York is oneof the attributes that makes it distinctive,and distinctive in a positive sense: the artsin New York are a magnet for the rest of theworld.15

Many cities, especially those lacking significantcultural sectors, established other revitalizationstrategies. Efforts to attract desirablecorporations to post-industrial cities soonprovoked the realization that it was the humancapital in the persons of the managerial eliteswere the ones whose needs and desires shouldbe addressed. The provision of so-called quality-of-life enhancements to attract these highearners became urban doctrine, a formulaconsisting of providing delights for the malemanagers in the form of convention centers andsports stadia, and for the wives, museums,dance, and the symphony. An early, high-profile

example of the edifice complex as proposedurban enhancement is provided by the JohnPortman–designed Detroit Renaissance Centerof 1977 – a seven-skyscraper riverfront complexowned by General Motors and housing its worldheadquarters, and including the tallest buildingin Michigan – meant as a revitalizing engine inthe car city that has more recently been cast asthe poster child for deindustrialization. Buteventually, despite all the bond-funded taxbreaks paradoxically given to these edifices, andall the money devoted to support of the arts,cities were failing to build an adequate corporatetax base, even after the trend toward flight fromcity living had long been reversed. This strategyhas continued to be instituted despite itsfailures, but a better way had to be found. Thesearch for more and better revitalization, andmore and better magnets for high earners andtourists, eventually took a cultural turn, buildingon the success of artists’ districts in post-industrial economies.

Detroit Renaissance Center.

          During the turbulent 1960s, the risingmiddle-class members of the postwar “babyboom” constituted a huge cohort of youngpeople. Whereas the older generation lived livesthat seemed primarily to revolve around familyand work, the upcoming generation seemed tocenter theirs primarily on other, more personaland consumerist sources, including thecounterculture: music, newspapers, cheapfashion, and the like, coupled with rejection ofthe corporate “rat race,” majoritarian rule,repressive behavioral codes, and “death culture,”or militarism (nuclear war and Vietnam) – andoften rejection of urbanism itself. This highlyvisible group was closely watched for its tastes.Advertising and marketing, already at whatseemed like saturation levels, could segment themarket, aiming one set of messages attraditionalist consumers and the other at young

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Advertisement for a RoyLichtenstein exhibition at theWalters Art Museum, Baltimore,in late 2006.

people, and “culture” was transformed into anassemblage of purchases. The youth theme was“revolution” – political “revolution,” whetherreal, imaginary, or, as it gradually became, onecentered on consumerism.          Constellations of consumer choice werestudied by research institutes such as theStanford Research Institute (SRI) based atStanford, an elite private California university.Founded by Stanford trustees in 1946 to supporteconomic development in the region, SRIInternational, as it is now officially known,currently describes its mission as “discovery andthe application of science and technology forknowledge, commerce, prosperity, and peace.” Itwas forced off the university campus into stand-alone status in 1970 by students protestingagainst its military research.          “Lifestyle,” an index to the changes in theterrain of consumerism, was a neologism of the1960s that quickly became comfortable ineveryone’s mouth. In 1978, SRI announced alifestyle metric, the Values and Lifestyles (VALS)“psychographic,” dubbed by Advertising Age as“one of the ten top market researchbreakthroughs of the 1980s.”16 VALS today seeks“to find out about a person’s product ownership,media preferences, hobbies, additional

demographics, or attitudes (for example, aboutglobal warming).”17 (Its categories are innovators,thinkers, achievers, experiencers, believers,strivers, makers, and survivors, which articulatein primary and secondary dimensions.) The VALSwebsite establishes its connection to othersurvey vehicles that provide in-depthinformation, among other preferences, abouthow each of the eight VALS types uses, invests,and saves money. Such detailed data helpedmarketers early on to determine how to tailortheir pitches – even for matters that should besubjects of debate in the public square.          Thus, the concept of taste, one of the keymarkers of social class – understood here asdetermined by one’s economic relation to themeans of production – became transformed intosomething apparently lacking in hierarchicalimportance or relationship to power. Rather thanrepresenting membership in an economic or evena social group, taste aligns a person with otherconsumer affinities. In the 1960s, theGreenbergian paradigm based in a Kantianschema of faculties in which taste is the keyoperator for people of sensibility, also fell. Whileit would be absurd to conflate the Kantianfaculty of taste with consumer taste, thereremains a case to be made that the ideas

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energizing vanguard art shift along with shifts inthe social worldview. In a pre-postmodernmoment, so to speak, when artists wereexhibiting a certain panic over the relentlesslyascending tide of consumerism and massculture, and Pop art was bidding for a massaudience, the terms of culture shifted.18

Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, 1969.

          A great deal has been asked of artists, inevery modern age. In previous eras artists wereasked to edify society by showing forth the good,the true, and the beautiful. But suchexpectations have increasingly come to seemquaint as art has lost its firm connections to thepowers of church and state. Especially since theromantics, artists have routinely harboredmessianic desires, the longing to take a highposition in social matters, to play atransformative role in political affairs; this maybe finally understood as a necessary – thoughperhaps only imaginary – corrective to theirroles, both uncomfortable and insecure, ashandmaidens to wealth and power. Artistsworking under patronage conditions hadproduced according to command, which leftthem to express their personal dimensionprimarily through the formal elements of thechosen themes. By the nineteenth century,artists, now no longer supported by patronage,were free to devise and follow many differentapproaches both to form and to content,including realism and direct socialcommentary.19 Still, the new middle-classcustomers, as well as the state, had their ownpreferences and demands, even if a certaindegree of transgression was both anticipatedand accepted, however provisionally (the Salondes Refusés was, after all, established byNapoléon III). The fin de siècle refuge in formalistarguments, in aestheticism, or “art for art’ssake,” has been called by such scholars as JohnFekete a defensive maneuver on the part of theera’s advanced artists, establishing aprofessional distance from the social andhonoring the preferences of their high-bourgeoismarket following a century marked by European

revolutions and in the midst of industrial-labormilitancy.20 In the US, the lionization of art bysocial and political elites in the new century’sfirst fifty years had been effective in theacculturation of immigrants, and of the nativeworking class to some degree. Especially in thepostwar period, the ramping up of advanced,formalist art provided a secular approach to thetranscendent. The mid-twentieth-centuryrhetorics of artistic autonomy, in the US at least,reassured the knowing public that formalism,and, all the more so, abstraction, wouldconstitute a bulwark against totalitarianleanings. This tacit understanding had beenespecially persuasive in keeping prudent artistsaway from political engagement during the ColdWar in the 1950s. Under those conditions, onlyautonomous art could claim to be an art ofcritique, but advanced, let alone abstract, artcould hardly expect to address large numbers ofpeople. Thus, the “professionalization” of artalso doomed it to be a highly restricteddiscourse.21

          Let us look at taste not as a decisionreflecting the well-formedness or virtue of anartistic utterance but through the wider popularmeaning of the exercise of choice among a rangeof goods, tangible and intangible (but mostly theformer) – that is, as an expression of “lifestyle.”Taste has expressed class membership andsocial status in every modern industrial society.In 1983, the American cultural historian andEnglish professor Paul Fussell, author of theacclaimed book The Great War and ModernMemory (1975), published a slim, acerbicallyacute book called Class: A Guide Through theAmerican Status System.22 There were earliertreatises on ruling elites, such as American

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sociologist C. Wright Mills’s Power Elite or Britishlinguist Alan Ross’s 1954 article on distinctionsbetween U and non-U speech patterns, in whichU refers to the “upper class” (a discussion thatcaused an Anglo-American stir when picked upby Nancy Mitford) and Arthur Marwick’s Class:Image and Reality (1980), cited by Fussell.23

Fussell meant his book as a popular exposé thattaste is not a personal attribute so much as anexpression of a definable “socioeconomic”grouping, and in his preface he gleefullydescribes the horrified, even explosive, reactionsmiddle-class people displayed to the meremention of class. His scathing description of themissteps of the non-elite are well situated ineconomic class categories; it is only when hearrives at a class of taste he calls Class X – ofwhich he considers himself a member – that heloses his bearings, besotted by this motley groupof self-actualizing people who are mostlyuniversity-based and float free of the demandsof social codes of dress and behavior, pleasingonly themselves. We should recognize in thisgroup not just the expression of thecounterculture, now grown up and collegeeducated, but also of the gold mine that had justbegun to be intensively lobbied by nichemarketers, the “creative class” – a socialformation and process that seems to haveescaped Fussell’s notice.          A couple of decades later in 2000, theconservative ideologue and US media figureDavid Brooks, in his best-selling book Bobos inParadise: The New Upper Class and How They GotThere, quipped that “counter-cultural valueshave infused the business world – the onesphere of US life where people still talk aboutfomenting ‘revolution’ and are taken seriously.”24

His thesis is that in this new information age,members of the highly educated elite “have onefoot in the bohemian world of creativity andanother foot in the bourgeois realm of ambitionand worldly success.”25 Brooks’s barbedwitticisms claim the triumph of capital over anypossible other political world that young peopledifferent from him, in the Western democraciesand particularly the US, had hoped to create:

We’re by now all familiar with modern-dayexecutives who have moved from SDS toCEO, from LSD to IPO. Indeed, sometimesyou get the impression the Free Speechmovement produced more corporateexecutives than Harvard Business School.26

To decode a bit: “SDS” denotes the emblematic1960s radical group Students for a DemocraticSociety; “IPO” stands for a corporation’s initialpublic offering; and the Free Speech movementwas the student movement at the elite (though

public) University of California, Berkeley, thatagitated on several fronts, sparking theworldwide student movements of the 1960s.          The French intelligentsia have derisivelyextracted Brooks’s neologism “Bobos” from hiscelebratory analysis, and the book is worthdwelling on here only because of itsconcentration on taste classes and theirrelationship to power and influence, and, lesscentrally, their relevance to literature andcriticism.27 Brooks traces his own intellectualforebears to “the world and ideas of the mid-1950s,” remarking regressively:          

[W]hile the fever and froth of the 1960shave largely burned away, the ideas ofthese 1950s intellectuals [William Whyte,Jane Jacobs, J. K. Galbraith, VancePackard, E. Digby Baltzell] continue toresonate.28

Lowering expectations of rigor, Brooks refers tohis work as “comic sociology.” He complimentshis readers on their quirky tastes while ignoringthose who do not fit his consumer taste class.The “conspicuous consumption” pattern firstdescribed by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory ofthe Leisure Class, published in 1899 during therobber baron era, seemingly does not fit thepreferences of the Bobos, who unlike the gilded-age business (but not, it should be noted,technical) class, prefer to spend lots of money onthings that appear to be useful and “virtuous” –an adjective often employed ironically in Bobos.          A decade later, the laid-back, tolerantwisdom of the benign “Bobo” class-in-ascendancy now appears ephemeral, since in theinterim the ostentatious rich have led us intocrushingly expensive wars, destroyed thefinancial markets, restored nepotism, andmobilized the old working class and ruraldwellers using a dangerous breed of hater-malarkey to grab and keep political control, allthe while becoming vastly richer. ReviewingBrooks, Russell Mokhiber writes,

Most people in the United States (let alonethe world) do not share [the Bobos’]expanding wealth and may have markedlydifferent views on important issues,including concepts of “deservedness,”fairness, government regulation, andequitable distribution of wealth. For thismajority of the population, moreconfrontation, not less, could be just whatis in order.29

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Richard Florida on TV.

Soon after the collapse of the millennial NewEconomy that was supposed to raise all boats,Richard Florida, in his best-selling book The Riseof the Creative Class (2002), instituted a way oftalking about the effects of the needs andchoices of Sharon Zukin’s, as well as, morebroadly, Brooks’s and Fussell’s, target group thatframed the positioning of the “creative class” –that cooperative group – as a living blueprint forurban planners.30

          Turn-of-the-century changes in thecomposition of the productive classes in theUnited States and Western Europe as a result of“globalization” – in which mass industrial workshifted East and South and white-collartechnical labor in the developed industries roseto ascendancy during the dot-com boom – led tofurther speculation on the nature of theseworkers, but seemingly these were more solidlyempirical efforts than Brooks’s mischievousrendition. Enter Richard Florida, professor atpostindustrial Pittsburgh’s Carnegie MellonUniversity, with theories catering to thecontinuing desire of municipalities such asPittsburgh to attract those middle-class high-wage earners.          The next installment of this article willaddress Florida’s hypotheses and prescriptions.          "          ! Continued in Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part II: Creativity and Its Discontents.           This essay is an expanded version of a talk given at the thirdHermes Lecture at Provinciehuis Den Bosch on November 14,2010, arising from a suggestion by Camiel van Winkel toconsider the work of Richard Florida. I thank Stephen Squibbfor his invaluable assistance during the research and editingprocess. Thanks also to Alexander Alberro and StephenWright for their helpful responses.

Martha Rosler is an artist who works with multiplemedia, including photography, sculpture, video, andinstallation. Her interests are centered on the publicsphere and landscapes of everyday life – actual andvirtual – especially as they affect women. Relatedprojects focus on housing, on the one hand, andsystems of transportation, on the other. She has longproduced works on war and the “national securityclimate,” connecting everyday experiences at homewith the conduct of war abroad. Other works, from bustours to sculptural recreations of architectural details,are excavations of history.

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      1See, for example, HenriLefebvre, The Production ofSpace, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991),passim. See also Georg Lukács,History and ClassConsciousness: Studies inMarxist Dialectics, trans. RodneyLivingstone (London: MerlinPress, 1971); Lukács,interpreting Marx on thedevelopment of abstract laborunder capitalism, writes that“time sheds its qualitative,variable, flowing nature; itfreezes into an exactlydelimited, quantifiablecontinuum filled withquantifiable ‘things’ ... in short,it becomes space,” 90.

      2A more substantial discussionwould need to take account ofhow the space-time continuumprivileges one or the otherdimension and how the primacyof each changes with economicregimes.

      3Henri Lefebvre, The UrbanRevolution (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,2003), 1.

      4Ibid., vii.

      5Ibid., 18.

      6Consider such basic matters asthe management of violentcrime, prostitution, sanitation,and disease.

      7See Mike Davis, “Planet ofSlums,” New Left Review 26(March–April 2004): 6. “Thepresent urban population (3.2billion) is larger than the totalpopulation of the world in 1960.The global countryside,meanwhile, has reached itsmaximum population (3.2 billion)and will begin to shrink after2020. As a result, cities willaccount for all future worldpopulation growth, which isexpected to peak at about 10billion in 2050.” (See also Davis’ssubsequent book, Planet ofSlums [London: Verso, 2006] forfurther data crunching.)Concomitantly, urban poverty isalso increasing faster than ruralpoverty.

      8I leave out of consideration herethe reconstruction of cities andcountrysides that served –primarily or secondarily –military and police functions,whether local ones on the orderof Baron Haussmann's mid-nineteenth-centuryreconfiguring of Paris, amongother things securing it againstinsurrections, or more ambitiousnational ones such as theconstruction, under PresidentEisenhower, of the US’s ColdWar-oriented interstate highwaysystem.

      9

Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary fora New Urbanism,” trans. KennKnabb, InternationaleSituationnis te, no. 1 (June1958). Seehttp://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/formulary.html.

      10Guy Debord, The Society of theSpectacle, trans. DonaldNicholson-Smith (New York:Zone Books, 1994), 12.

      11Today, a few generations on, thedystopian effects of therelegation of the poor and theimmigrant to these high-riseghettos, are there for all to see,if not understood by Frenchxenophobes, in the regulareruptions of fire and revoltamong unemployed young menwith no future. (Today, however,the young of France andelsewhere recognize in this onlya more extreme version of theirown condition of economic“precarity.”)

      12Sharon Zukin, Loft Living:Culture and Capital in UrbanChange (New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press, 1989),190–191.

      13Ibid., 190.

      14Ibid., 117–118.

      15“The Arts: New York’s BestExport Industry,” New YorkAffairs 5, no. 2 (1978): 51. Quotedin Zukin, Loft Living, 112.

      16Seehttp://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/about.shtm l.

      17Seehttp://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/presurvey.shtml.

      18See Alvin Gouldner, The Dialecticof Ideology and Technology: TheOrigins, Grammar, and Future ofIdeology (New York: SeaburyPress, 1976).

      19See Caroline A. Jones’sinteresting study, EyesightAlone: Clement Greenberg’sModernism and theBureaucratization of the Senses(Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2006).

      20John Fekete, The CriticalTwilight: Explorations in theIdeology of Anglo-AmericanLiterary Theory from Eliot toMcLuhan (Boston: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1977).

      21See the analyses of PierreBourdieu in many works,including Distinction: A SocialCritique of the Judgement ofTaste and “The Market of

Symbolic Goods,” Part One,Chapter One, of The Field ofCultural Production: Essays onArt and Literature (New York:Columbia University Press,1984); as well as, following him,Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity,An Incomplete Project,” in HalFoster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic.Essays on Postmodern Culture(Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press,1983).

      22Paul Fussell, Class (New York:Ballantine, 1983). The cover ofthe firstpaper back edition says“Class: A Painfully AccurateGuide Through the AmericanStatus System.”

      23Alan S. C. Ross, “Linguisticclass-indicator s in present-dayEnglish,” NeuphilologischeMitteilung en (Helsinki) 55(1954), 113–149; Nancy Mitford,ed. Noblesse Oblige (London:Hamish Hamilton, 1956); ArthurMarwick: Class: Image andReality in Britain, France and theU.S.A. Since 1930 (New York:Oxford University Press, 1980).

      24David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise:The New Upper Class and HowThey Got There (New York: Simonand Schuster, 2000). Thequotation is taken from a reviewby Russell Mokhiber, YES!magazine, posted Oct 27, 2000,at http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-new-culture-emerges/review-bobos-in-paradise-by-david-brooks.

      25Brooks, Bobos, 11.

      26Ibid., 39.

      27…and art. In the section “How toBe an Intellectual Giant” Brookspoints out that rather thanwriting, say, War and Peace, it isbetter to seek success bypresenting “a catchy new idea ina lively format and casting lighton what it all means,” a formuladominating art reviewing andinfesting art production, the artssection of periodicals, and muchelse.

      28“Books like The OrganizationMan, The Death and Life of GreatAmerican Cities, The AffluentSociety, The Status Seekers, andThe Protestant Establishmentwere the first expressions of thenew educated class ethos, andwhile the fever and froth of the1960s have largely burned away,the ideas of these 1950sintellectuals continue toresonate.” Brooks, Bobos,Introduction, 11–12. Brooks isselective in those whom hecites; several reviews havesuggested his indebtedness tothe work of César Graña, aprofessor at UC San Diego,especially Bohemian vs.Bourgeois (New York: BasicBooks, 1964); Graña, who hadstudied sociology, anthropology,and urban planning, published

several other works centering onbohemianism and authenticitybut died in a car accident in1986.

      29Russell Mokhiber, YES!magazine, posted Oct 27, 2000,at http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-new-culture-emerges/review-bobos-in-paradise-by-david-brooks.

      30Richard Florida, The Rise of theCreative Class: And How It'sTransforming Work, Leisure,Community and Everyday Life(New York: Basic Books, 2002).

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Martha Rosler

Culture Class:Art, Creativity,Urbanism, PartII

! Continued from “Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part I” in issue 21.          

          PART TWO: CREATIVITY AND ITSDISCONTENTS

Culture is the commodity that sells all theothers.– Situationist slogan

Soon after the collapse of the millennial NewEconomy that was supposed to raise all boats,Richard Florida, in his best-selling book The Riseof the Creative Class (2002), instituted a way oftalking about the “creative class” – the sameclass put center stage by Sharon Zukin, DavidBrooks, and Paul Fussell – in a way that framedit as a target group and a living blueprint forurban planners.

          Florida may see this class, and its needsand choices, as the savior of cities, but heharbors no apparent interest in its potential forhuman liberation. When Robert Bruininks, thepresident of the University of Minnesota, askedhim in an onstage interview, “What do you see asthe political role of the creative class – will theyhelp lead society in a better, fairer direction?”Florida was, according to faculty member AnnMarkusen, completely at a loss for a reply.1 Somewho frame the notion of a powerful class ofcreative people – a class dubbed the “culturalcreatives” by Paul H. Ray and Sherry RuthAnderson in their book of that name published in2000 – see this group as progressive, sociallyengaged, and spiritual, if generally withoutreligious affiliation, and thus as active inmovements for political and social change. Ingeneral, however, most observers of “creatives”concentrate on taste classes and lifestylematters, and are evasive with respect to the

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Judith Butler

creatives’ relation to social organization andcontrol.          Richard Lloyd, in Neo-Bohemia: Art andCommerce in the Postindustrial City, in contrastto Ray and Anderson, finds not only that artistsand hipsters2 are complicit with capital in therealm of consumption but, further, that in theirrole as casual labor (“useful labor,” in Lloyd’sterms), whether as service workers or asfreelance designers, they also serve capital quitewell.3 The Situationists, of course, were insistenton tying cultural regimes to urban change andthe organization and regulation of labor. SharonZukin, in her ground-breaking book Loft Living,provided a sociological analysis of the role ofartists in urban settings, their customaryhabitat.4 But urban affairs, sociological andcultural analysis, and the frameworks ofjudgment have changed and expanded sinceZukin’s work of 1982. In his book The Expediencyof Culture (2001), George Yúdice leads us toconsider the broad issue of the “culturalization”of politics and the uses and counter-uses ofculture.5 Concentrating especially on the UnitedStates and Latin America, Yúdice’s concern iswith explicating how culture has beentransformed into a resource, available both togovernmental entities and to population groups.

He cites Fredric Jameson’s work on “the culturalturn” from the early 1990s, which claims that thecultural has exploded “throughout the socialrealm, to the point at which everything in oursocial life – from economic value and statepower to social and political practices and thevery structure of the psyche itself – can be saidto have become ‘cultural.’”6 Yúdice invokesMichel Foucault’s concept of governmentality,namely, the management of populations, or “theconduct of conduct,” as the matrix for the shift ofservices under neoliberalism from state tocultural sectors. Foucault’s theories ofinternalization of authority (as well as those ofLefebvre and Freud) are surely useful indiscussing the apparent passivity of knowledgeworkers and the educated classes in general.Yúdice privileges theories of performativity,particularly those of Judith Butler and EveKosovsky Sedgwick, over the Situationists’“society of the spectacle,” describing howidentities, including identities of “difference,” areperformed on the stage set by various mediatinginstitutions.7 Indeed, he positions the postwarmarketing model – “the engineering of consent,”in Edward Bernays’s potent, widely quotedphrase – at the heart of contemporary politicsand invokes the aestheticization of politics

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(shades of Walter Benjamin!) that has been fullyapparent in the US since the Reaganadministration.8 As I have suggested, thischannels much political contestation inadvanced societies to consumer realms, frombuying appropriate items from firms thatadvance political activism and send money toNGOs,9 to the corporate tactic of appealing toidentity-based markets, such as gay, female, orLatino publics; but also to the corporate need tofoster such identities in hiring practices in thename of social responsibility.          In considering the role of culture incontemporary societies, it may be helpful to lookat the lineage and derivation of the creative-class concept, beginning with observationsabout the growing economic and socialimportance of information production andmanipulation. The importance of the group ofworkers variously known as knowledge workers,symbolic analysts, or, latterly, creatives, wasrecognized by the late 1950s or early 1960s.Peter Drucker, the much-lionized management“guru,” is credited with coining the term“knowledge worker” in 1959, while the later term“symbolic analysts” comes from economistRobert Reich.10           

          Clark Kerr, a former labor lawyer, becamepresident of the University of California, in themid-1960s. This state university system, whichhad a masterplan for aggressive growthstretching to the turn of the twenty-first centuryand beyond, was the flagship of US publicuniversities and established the benchmarks forpublic educational institutions in the US andelsewhere; it was intended as the incubator ofthe rank-and file middle class and the elites of amodern superpower among nations in apolitically divided world. Kerr’s transformativeeducational vision was based on the productionof knowledge workers. Kerr – the man againstwhom was directed much of the energy ofBerkeley’s Free Speech Movement, derisivelyinvoked by David Brooks – coined the term the“multiversity” in a series of lectures he gave atHarvard in 1963.11 It was Kerr’s belief that theuniversity was a “prime instrument of nationalpurpose.” In his influential book The Uses of theUniversity,Kerr wrote,

What the railroads did for the second halfof the last century and the automobile forthe first half of this century may be done forthe second half of this century by theknowledge industry.12

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Sociologist Daniel Bell, in his books The Comingof Post-Industrial Society (1973), and CulturalContradictions of Capitalism (1976), set theterms of the discourse on the organization ofproductive labor (although the visionaryeducational reformer Ivan Illich apparently usedthe term “post-industrial” earlier); RichardFlorida claims Bell as a powerful influence.13 Theterm post-Fordism, which primarily describeschanges in command and control in theorganization of the production process, is apreferred term of art for the present organizationof labor in advanced economies, retaining thesense of continuity with earlier phases ofcapitalist organization rather than suggesting aradical break resulting from the rise ofinformation economies and changes in the modeof conducting and managing the labor process.14           Theories of post-Fordism fall into differentschools, which I cannot explore here, but theygenerally include an emphasis on the rise ofknowledge industries, on the one hand, andservice industries on the other; on consumptionand consumers as well as on productive workers;on the fragmentation of mass production and themass market into production aimed at morespecialized consumer groups, especially thosewith higher-level demands; and on a decline inthe role of the state and the rise of globalcorporations and markets. Work performedunder post-Fordist conditions in the so-calledknowledge industries and creative fields hasbeen characterized as “immaterial labor,” a(somewhat contested) term put forward byItalian autonomist philosopher MaurizioLazzarato. Within or overlapping with the broadcategory of immaterial labor are types of labordeemed “affective labor” (Hardt and Negri);these include not only advertising and publicrelations – and, many artists would argue, art –but all levels of labor in which the worker faces

the public, which include many serviceindustries, and eventually permeates society atlarge.15 In “Strategies of the PoliticalEntrepreneur,” Lazzarato writes:

If the factory can no longer be seen, this isnot because it has disappeared butbecause it has been socialized, and in thissense it has become immaterial: animmateriality that nevertheless continuesto produce social relations, values, andprofits.16

These categories look very different fromFlorida’s.          Andrew Ross writes that the creative-classconcept derives from Prime Minister PaulKeating’s Australia in early 1990s, under therubric “cultural industries.”17 Tony Blair’s NewLabour government used the term “creativeindustries” in 1997 in the rebranding of the UK asCool Britannia. The Department of NationalHeritage was renamed the Department forCulture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and promotedtechnological optimism, a youth cult, and, inRoss’s words, “self-directed innovation in thearts and knowledge sectors.” Both Ross and thesocial psychologist Alan Blum refer to thecentrality of the idea of constant reinvention – ofthe firm and of the person – as a hallmark of theideal conditions of the creative class. Rosspoints to the allure of the “creative industries”idea for a wide array of nations, large and small,of which he names Canada, the US, and Russiaand China – we should add the Netherlands tothis list – long before Florida’s particularconfiguration shifted emphasis away from theindustries and to the very person of theirdenizens, and to biopolitics.          In describing the “creative class,” Floridacredits Paul Fussell and gives David Brooks abrief nod.18 Despite building on writers like DavidHarvey and perhaps other, unnamed theorists onthe left, Florida offers the prospect of a categoryof “human resources” who will, all unbidden, andat virtually no cost to anyone but themselves,remake your city quite to your liking. Rather thanportraying the right to the city, as Harvey hadtermed it, as the outcome of struggle, Florida’spath to action is predicated on the inevitability ofsocial change, in which the working class and thepoor have already lost. I will say more about thata bit later, but first, I’ll consider the creativeclass itself.          What Florida has called the rise of thecreative class Sharon Zukin called, in Loft Living,the artistic mode of production.19 Zukin, whonever quite explains her phrase, describes theproduction of value and of space itself,interpretable in Lefebvre’s terms. Whereas Zukin

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Douglas McGregor's diagrams for Theories X and Y identifying different attitudes in the workplace.

Maslow chart based on Abraham Maslow's theories of human self-actualization.

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traced the entire process from its inception to itspresent outcome, teasing out the structuralelements necessary to bring about urban changeand demonstrating how such change affectsresidents and interested classes, in Florida’saccount the process disappears in a welter ofstatistical number-crunching and empiricalmarkers by which to index the success of thecreative class. Crucial to Zukin’s analysis is theeventual displacement of artists, a developmentnot addressed by Florida, whose creative classencompasses high earners in industriesextending far beyond artists, the vast number ofwhom do not command big incomes.          Zukin had already shown that integral to theartistic mode of production is the gradualexpansion of the “artistic class,” suggesting howthe definition of “artist” expanded and how theepistemology of art changed to fit thesensibilities of the rising middle class. Zukin –writing in 1982 – asserts:

The new view of art as “a way of doing”rather than a distinctive “way of seeing”also affects the way art is taught. On theone hand, the “tremendous productionemphasis” that [modernist critic] HaroldRosenberg decries gave rise to a generationof practitioners rather than visionaries, ofimitators instead of innovators. Asprofessional artists became facile inpulling out visual techniques from theiraesthetic and social context, they gliblydefended themselves with talk of conceptsand methodology. On the other hand, theteaching of art as “doing” made art seemless elitist.… Anyone, anywhere canlegitimately expect to be an artist … makingart both more “professionalized” and more“democratized.”… This opened art as acareer.20

Zukin offers a sour observation made in 1979 byRonald Berman, former chairman of the USNational Endowment for the Humanities:

Art is anything with creative intentions,where the word “creative” has … beenremoved from the realm of achievementand applied to another realm entirely. Whatit means now is an attitude toward the self;and it belongs not to aesthetics but to poppsychology.21

I cannot address the changes in theunderstanding of art here, or the way its modelsof teaching changed through the postwar period– a subject of perpetual scrutiny andcontestation both within the academy andoutside it. A central point, however, is that the

numbers of people calling themselves artists hasvastly increased since the 1960s as theparameters of this identity have changed.          Florida enters at a pivot point in thisprocess, where what is essential for cities is nolonger art, or the people who make it, but theappearance of its being made somewherenearby. As a policy academic, Florida repeatedlypays lip service to the economic, not lifestyle,grounding of class groupings, as he must, sincehis definition of “creative class” is based onmodes of economically productive activity.Economic data, however, turn out not to beparticularly integral to his analyses, while theuse to which he puts this category dependsheavily on lifestyle and consumer choices, andFlorida includes in the creative class thesubcategory of gay people as well as categoriesof “difference,” which are both racial/ethnic andinclude other identity-related groupingsindependent of employment or economic activity.This does not contradict the fact that we aretalking about class and income. Although thetolerance of “difference” that figures in Florida’sscenario must certainly include of people ofcolor working in low-level service categories whoappear in significant concentrations in urbanlocales (even if they go home to some otherlocale), the creative class are not low-wage, low-level service-sector employees, and artists,certainly, are still disproportionately white.          Florida’s schema is influenced by basicAmerican economic and sociological texts –including Erik Olin Wright’s powerful descriptionof the new professional-managerial class(sometimes called the new petite bourgeoisie todifferentiate it from the “old petite bourgeoisie,”a class of small shopkeepers and the like whosedeclining fortunes and traditionalist world viewhave left them disaffected or enraged).22 ButFlorida’s categories are more directly derivedfrom the US government’s StandardOccupational Classification, or SOC, codes. Hiscreative-class grouping includes “a broad groupof creative professionals in business andfinance, law, health care and related fields,” who“engage in complex problem solving that involvesa great deal of independent judgment andrequires high levels of education or humancapital.”23 Within it is a “super-creative core [of]people in science and engineering, architectureand design, education, arts, music, andentertainment … [whose] job is to create newideas, new technology and/or new creativecontent.”          Doug Henwood, in a critique from the left,notes that Florida’s creative class constitutesabout 30 percent of the workforce, and the“super creative core” about 12 percent.Examining one category of super-creatives,

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“those in all computer and mathematicaloccupations,” Henwood remarks that some ofthese jobs “can only be tendentiously classed assuper creative.”24 SOC categories put both call-center tech-support workers and computerprogrammers in the IT category, but call-centerworkers would surely not experience their jobsas creative but “more likely as monotonous andeven deskilled.” What is striking in Florida’spicture is, first, not just the insistence onwinners and losers, on the creatives and theuncreatives – recalling the social divisions withinAldous Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World– but on the implicit conviction that jobcategories finally do provide the only source ofreal agency regardless of their content. Second,the value of the noncreatives is that they arenature to the creatives’ culture, female to theirmale, operating as backdrop and raw material,and finally as necessary support, as serviceworkers. Stressing the utility of randomconversations in the street, à la Jane Jacobs,Florida treats the little people of the streets as apotent source of ideas, a touchingly modern[ist]point of view.

          In an online consideration of Florida’sthesis, Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, aright-leaning mainstream critic, expressesadmiration for Florida’s book as an engaginglywritten popularization of the generally acceptedurbanist maxim that human capital drivesgrowth, but he fails to find any value added fromlooking at creative capital as a separatecategory. Glaeser writes:

[T]he presence of skills in the metropolitanarea may increase new idea production andthe growth rate of city-specific productivitylevels, but if Florida wants to argue thatthere is an [effect] of bohemian, creativetypes, over and above the effect of humancapital, then presumably that should show

up in the data.25

Glaeser ran statistical regressions on thepopulation-growth data on four measures: (1) theshare of local workers in the “super creativecore”; (2) patents per capita in 1990; (3) the GayIndex, or the number of coupled gay people in thearea relative to the total population; and (4) theBohemian Index – the number of artistic typesrelative to the overall population.          Glaeser concludes that in all theregressions the primary effects on city growthresult from education level rather than any ofFlorida’s measures and that in fact in all but twocities, “the gay population has a negativeimpact.” He concludes:

I would certainly not interpret this assuggesting that gays are bad for growth,but I would be awfully suspicious ofsuggesting to mayors that the right way tofuel economic development is to attract alarger gay population. There are many goodreasons to be tolerant, without spinning anunfounded story about how Bohemianismhelps urban development.26

Further:

There is no evidence to suggest that thereis anything to this diversity orBohemianism, once you control for humancapital. As such, mayors are better servedby focusing on the basic commoditiesdesired by those with skills, than bythinking that there is a quick fix involved increating a funky, hip, Bohemiandowntown.27

Max Nathan, an English urbanist at the Centrefor Cities, an independent research institute inLondon, observes that “there’s not muchevidence for a single creative class in the US orthe UK. And although knowledge, creativity, andhuman capital are becoming more important intoday’s economy, more than 20 years ofendogenous growth theory already tells us this.”He concludes, “Creativity and cool are the icing,not the cake.” 28           American sociologist Ann Markusen, left-leaning but agreeing with Glaeser, furthercautions that “human creativity cannot beconflated with years of schooling.”29 Some of theoccupations included in Florida’s sample do notcall upon creative thinking, while many manualtasks do just that; furthermore, it hardly needs tobe noted that human qualities and attributes arenot themselves merely produced by schooling.          Florida’s use of the US government’s SOCcategories, lumping together artists and

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Guy Debord, Naked City, 1957.

bohemians with all kinds of IT workers andothers not remotely interested in art or bohemia,has been identified by many other observers –perhaps especially those involved in the artworld – as a glaring fault. Florida fails to note thedivergent interests of employees and managers,or younger and older workers, in choices aboutwhere to live: it seems, for example, that theyoung move into the city while somewhat olderworkers move out to the suburbs, wheremanagers tend to cluster. But Florida’s bookfound its ready audience not among politicaleconomists but in some subset of municipalpolicy makers and rainmakers for governmentgrants, and in business groups.          As Alan Blum suggests, Florida’s work isdirected at “second tier” cities pursuing “an‘identity’ (as if merchandise) that is to befashioned from the materials of the present.”30

Second tier cities tend to glorify theaccumulation of amenities as a means ofsalvation from an undistinguished history, achance to develop and establish flexibility.Blum’s critique emphasizes the platitudinousbanality of Florida’s city vision, its undialecticalquality and its erasure of difference in favor oftranquility and predictability as it instantiates aspolicy the infantile dream of perpetually creating

oneself anew. In my estimation, Scandinaviansocieties seem to have faced the postwar worldby effacing history and re-presenting themselvesas factories of design; visiting Copenhagen’sdesign museum, I was amazed that a large wallinscription in the exhibition of the great designerArne Jacobsen emphasized both his completelack of “interest in Utopia” and his fondness forwhite tennis flannels. One can think of manycities, regions, and nations that would prefer totranscend an earlier mode of economicorganization, whether agricultural or Fordist, infavor of a bright new picture of postindustrialviability. The collective failure of imagination canbe extended to entire peoples, through theselective re-creation, or frank erasure, ofhistorical memory. The entire cast of thecreative-class thesis is centered on the implicitmanagement of populations, throughinternalized controls: in essence, Foucault’sgovernmentality.          Florida was teaching at Carnegie Mellon inthe Rust Belt city of Pittsburgh when heformulated his thesis, but subsequently movedto the University of Toronto, where he now headsthe Martin Prosperity Institute at the RotmanSchool of Management, and is Professor ofBusiness and Creativity. His website tags him as

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“author and thought-leader.” Florida hasdeveloped a robust career as a pundit and as amanagement consultant to entities moreinclusive than individual firms or industries.Management consulting is a highly lucrative fieldthat centers on the identification of structures ofwork organization and methods of organizingworkers in a manner persuasive to management.Management theory, however, even in theindustrializing 1920s, has often claimed thatcreativity and interpersonal relations wouldtransform management, leading to an end totop-down hierarchies and a harmonizing ofinterests of workers and management.          Speaking personally, in the early 1970s Iworked in a small, Peter Drucker–advisedpublishing company in Southern California towhich Drucker, the management idol then ridingthe crest of his fame, made regular visits. Wewere schooled to regard the management toolcalled Group Y, widely used by Japanesecompanies, as the new gospel of employee-management relations. As a concept, Group Y istraceable to Douglas McGregor, a professor atMIT’s school of management. Influenced by thesocial psychologist Abraham Maslow’s thenwidely popular theories of human self-actualization, McGregor promoted the idea ofemployees and workers as human resources. InThe Human Side of Enterprise (1960), McGregordeveloped his highly influential paradigm ofemployee management and motivation in whichmanagement is characterized by one of twoopposed models, Theory X and Theory Y.31 InTheory X, people are seen as work-averse andrisk-averse, uninterested in organizational goals,and requiring strong leadership and monetaryincentives. Theory Y, in contrast, sees work asenjoyable and people as naturally creative andself-directed if committed to work objectives.(McGregor, unrealistically, hoped his book wouldbe used as a self-diagnostic tool for managersrather than as a rigid prescription.) Building onMcGregor’s theory, and long after I left my bliss-seeking editorial shop, William G. Ouchi invokedTheory Z to call attention to Japanesemanagement style.32           Starting in the early 1960s, Japanesemanagement made extensive use of “qualitycircles,” which were inspired by the postwarlectures of American statisticians W. EdwardsDeming and J. M. Juran, who recommendedinverting the US proportion of responsibility forquality control given to line managers andengineers, which stood at 85 percent formanagers and 15 percent for workers.33 As theBusiness Encyclopedia explains, Japanesequality circles meet weekly, often on the workers’own time and often led by foremen. “Qualitycircles provide a means for workers to

participate in company affairs and formanagement to benefit from worker suggestions.… [E]mployee suggestions reportedly createbillions of dollars’ worth of benefits forcompanies.” Now, however, according to the NewYork Times, Japanese business organization isfast approaching the norms and practicesprevailing in the US.34

Quotation from Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management.

          Management is always looking for a newedge; after all, managers’ advancement andcompensation depend on the appearance ofinnovation. A few years ago, in an amusing“exposé” in the Atlantic magazine, MatthewStewart, a former partner in a consulting firm,characterized management theory as a jumped-up and highly profitable philosophy of humansociety rather than an informed scientific view ofthe social relations of productive activities,which is how it advertises itself.35 Stewartcompares the dominant theory of productionknown as Taylorism with that of Elton Mayo.36

Taylorism, named for the turn-of-the-twentieth-century consultant Frederick Taylor, was amethod (that of motion study, which was soonmarried to the marginally more humanistic timestudy of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth) for analyzingthe labor process so as to get more work out ofworkers.37 Mayo’s management theory,formulated somewhat later, is based on fosteringworkers’ cooperation. Characterizing the first asthe rationalist and the second as the humaniststrain of management philosophy, Stewartclaims that they simply continue in these twoage-old camps. Anthropologist David Graeberwrites that fields like politics, religion, and artdepend not on externally derived values and databut upon group consensus.38 Like many boldideas in economics and politics, empiricalinadequacy and faulty predictive power are nobarriers to success. A new narrative is always a

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Installation view of Thomas Hirschhorn exhibition Stand-alone at Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, 2008.

powerful means of stirring things up; as thetwentieth-century Austrian psychologist HansVaihinger termed it in his book Philosophie desAls Ob (“Philosophy of As If”), a person needs aruling story, regardless of its relationship toreality, and so, it seems, does any other entity ororganization, especially when it requirespersuasive power to obtain resources fromothers.39 Since the advent of neoliberalism in the1980s, for example, those newly hired corporateheads who immediately fire about 20 percent ofthe workforce have been shown to do best forthemselves regardless of outcome, despite thefact that this strategy has long been proven todamage a distressed company’s profitability,since it destroys corporate knowledge andworking culture, if nothing else. Psychologicalstudies are constantly being adduced to provethat many consumers are uninterested in thedisproof of claims, whether for miracle cures,better material goods, political nostrums, and soon; sociologists from Merton to Adorno long agocommented in some frustration about people’sbelief in luck (as in the lottery) or astrology in theface of reason. Ideology offers a powerful sievethrough which to strain truth claims.          What matters, then, is not whether Florida’sbohemian index is good or bad for urban growth

but that the gospel of creativity offers somethingfor mayors and urban planners to hang onto – anew episteme, if you will. But Florida’s thesisalso finds enthusiastic support in managementsectors in the art world that seek support frommunicipal and foundation sources whilepretending that the creative class refers to thearts.          European art critics and theorists, however,were far more likely to be reading Boltanski andChiapello’s New Spirit of Capitalism, whichprovides an exhaustive analysis of the newknowledge-based classes (or class fractions)and the way in which the language of liberation,as well as the new insistence on lessauthoritarian and hierarchical workingconditions, has been repurposed.40 Here is aprécis, by Chantal Mouffe, addressing anAmerican art audience in the pages of Artforum:

As Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapellopersuasively demonstrated in The NewSpirit of Capitalism (1999/2005), themanagerial class successfully co-opted thevarious demands for autonomy of socialmovements that arose in the 1960s,harnessing them only to secure theconditions required by the new,

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postindustrial mode of capitalistregulation. Capital was able, they showed,to neutralize the subversive potential of theaesthetic strategies and ethos of thecounterculture – the search forauthenticity, the ideal of self-management,and the antihierarchical imperative –transforming them from instruments ofliberation into new forms of control thatwould ultimately replace the disciplinaryframework of the Fordist period.41

This brings us to the question of authenticity andthe creative class.           In the words of the American vaudevillianturned radio personality and actor, George Burns,“The secret of acting is sincerity. If you can fakethat, you've got it made.”          In Loft Living, Sharon Zukin had already puther finger on an unanswerable paradox, namely,the simulacral effect of neatening everything up,of the desired pacification of the city, which, as Ihave explained, will conveniently replacedifficult, unruly populations with artists, who cangenerally (though not uniformly) be counted on tobe relatively docile.           Zukin writes:

Seeking inspiration in loft living, the newstrategy of urban revitalization aims for aless problematic sort of integration thancities have recently known. It aspires to asynthesis of art and industry, or culture andcapital, in which diversity is acknowledged,controlled, and even harnessed. [But] first,the apparent reconquest of the urban corefor the middle class actually reconquers itfor upper-class users. Second, thedowntowns become simulacra, throughgussied up preservation venues. … Third,the revitalization projects that claimdistinctiveness – because of specifichistoric or aesthetic traits – become aparody of the unique.42

The search among artists, creatives, and soforth, for a way of life that does not pave overolder neighborhoods but infiltrates them withcoffee shops, hipster bars, and clothing shopscatering to their tastes, is a sad echo of thetourist paradigm centering on the indigenousauthenticity of the place they have colonized.The authenticity of these urban neighborhoods,with their largely working-class populations, ischaracterized not by bars and bodegas so muchas by what the press calls grit, signifying the lackof bourgeois polish, and a kind of remainder ofincommensurable nature in the midst of thecity’s unnatural state. The arrival in numbers ofartists, hipsters, and those who follow – no

surprise here! – brings about the eradication ofthis initial appeal. And, as detailed in Loft Living,the artists and hipsters are in due course drivenout by wealthier folk, by the abundant vacantlofts converted to luxury dwellings or the newconstruction in the evacuated manufacturingzones. Unfortunately, many artists who seethemselves evicted in this process fail to see, orpersist in ignoring, the role that artists haveplayed in occupying these formerly “alien”precincts.          Zukin’s recent book, The Naked City: TheDeath and Life of Authentic Urban Places (2010),is aimed squarely at the lifestyle argumentstypified by Florida’s work. It traces the trajectoryof the idea and content of urban cool, with theirrepeated emphasis on those two terms,authenticity and grit.43 As she has donethroughout her career, Zukin addresses theefforts of the powers-that-be to hang ontoworking-class cachet while simultaneouslybenefiting from its erasure. Zukin’s book focuseson three New York neighborhoods – the LowerEast Side, or East Village; Harlem; and Brooklyn’sWilliamsburg, the present epicenter of cool,walking us painfully through regional history andtransformation.          Zukin also considers Manhattan’s venerableUnion Square, which – with its history ofparades, marches, soap-box oratory, andexpressions of urban unrest and decay – hasbeen the focus of twenty years of efforts to tameit. Zukin quotes the promotional slogan of theUnion Square Partnership, a “public-privatepartnership”: “Eat. Shop. Visit. Union Square.”44           The Square is part of the “archipelago ofenclaves” described by Dutch urbanists MaartenHajer and Arnold Reijdorp45 as typical of newpublic spaces, providing, in Zukin’s words,

Special events in pleasant surroundings …re-creating urban life as a civilized ideal …[with] both explicit and subtle strategies toencourage docility of a public that by now isused to paying for a quality experience.46

Furthermore,

[T]hese places break with the past not justby passively relying on city dwellers’ civicinattention when they calmly ignore thestranger sitting on the next bench, but byactively enabling them to avoid strangerswhom they think of as ”aliens”: thehomeless, psychologically disoriented,borderline criminal, and merely loud andannoying .47

I note in passing that Zukin persistently faultsJane Jacobs, otherwise treated in the field as the

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Mother Teresa of the Neighborhood, for her owninattention to the needs and preferences ofpeople other than the middle classes.          The disenfranchisement of those outsidethe groups who benefit from life in the newlyrenovated city is replicated in the split betweenthe developed and less developed world; just asthe paradigm of urbanism has subsumed allothers, so has the globalized knowledgeeconomy done so, and those who are not part ofit are nevertheless forced to take a position inrelation to it.

          The postindustrial shift in Westerneconomies from a welfare-state model to aneoliberal one has resulted in the erosion of theclassical working-class base that had provided apolitical counterpoint during the so-calledgolden age of capital (1945–1970). The resulting“cultural turn,” in which conflicting claims areplayed out in the cultural arena – mediatedthrough institutions that include the state, themedia, and the market – represents a relocationof political antagonism to the only realm thatremains mutually recognizable. In less developedeconomies, the global reach of aggressiveconsumer capitalism and theinternationalization of (neo-imperialist)corporate control have provided significantchallenges to the efforts of grassrootsmovements to secure first-world rights throughpolitical contestation. George Yúdice describeslocal organizing efforts of poor youth, such as RioFunk, begun in Brazil in the 90s, and others; buthe cites Brazilian commentator Antonio MunizSodré and Nestor García Canclini in noting thatreliance on grassroots self-empowermentmovements to bring about change absolves thestates of responsibility and puts the burdens onthe subordinated themselves.48           In considering the social presence ofcreative-class members in general and artists inparticular, I have focused on the tendency toward

passivity and complicity in questions of thedifferential power of others. But a significantnumber of artists do not fit this categorization.There is a divide, perhaps, between those whosepractices are well-recognized by the art worldand those whose efforts are treated as beyondthe pale. I want to focus my attention here on theformer group. Yúdice, concerned with thepower/wealth divide, assembles an array ofcritical arguments, drawing on Grant Kester’scritique of the artist as service provider, alwayspositioned from a higher to a lower cultural level,as well as Hal Foster’s 1990s critique of theartist as ethnographer.49 The problems of artists’working in poor urban neighborhoods lie partly inthe possibility, however undesired, ofexploitation, and partly in a divergence in the artworld audience’s understanding of the projectand that of the local community, as a result ofthe different life worlds each inhabit. A numberof artists he quotes insist that they are not“social workers” but rather seek to expand theframe of art. This suggests that intendedreadings must occur at least partly in terms of anaesthetic and symbolic dimension. This sits wellwith commentators such as Claire Bishop, who ina much-noted article winds up favoring therather vicious projects of Santiago Sierra andthose of Thomas Hirschhorn above more benignand perhaps socially useful, “service” efforts.50

Suspicious of the possible use and meaning ofsocially invested works, Bishop seems to regardpositively the fact that the lack of social effect inSierra’s heavily symbolic works, and the appealto philosophical and other models inHirschhorn’s, make them legible primarily totheir “proper” art world observers. As relationalaesthetics seems to be carried out on the terrainof service, it is worth noting that these worksremove judgment from universal categories orthe individually located faculty of taste to theuncertain and presumably unrepeatablereception by a particular audience or group(shades of Allan Kaprow!).          Yúdice joins other commentators in pointingout that art-as-service is the end of the avant-garde, removing as it does the artists’ actionsfrom the realm of critique to melioration. In asection that has garnered some comment,Yúdice outlines how artists, even those who havelooked beyond institutions and markets, havebeen placed in a position to perform as agents ofthe state. This reinterpretation of thevanguardist desire for “blurring of theboundaries of art and everyday life,” for “reality”over critique, exposes the conversion of art into afunnel or regulator for governmentalized“managed diversity.” Worse, an imperative toeffectiveness has derived from artsadministrators. A 1997 report for the US National

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Endowment for the Arts titled American Canvasinsists that for the arts to survive (presumably,after the assaults of the then-newly instigated,now newly revived, right-wing driven assault onUS art and culture known as the “culture wars”)they must take a new pragmatic approach,“translating the value of the arts into moregeneral civic, social, and educational terms” thatwould be convincing to the public and electedofficials alike:

...suffused throughout the civic structure –finding a home in a variety of communityservice and economic developmentactivities – from youth programs and crimeprevention to job training and race relations– far afield from the traditional aestheticfunctions of the arts. This extended role forculture can also be seen in the many newpartners that arts organizations have takenon in recent years, with school districts,parks and recreation departments,convention and visitor bureaus, chambersof commerce, and a host of social welfareagencies all serving to highlight theutilitarian aspects of the arts incontemporary society.51

Combine this with the aim of funding museumsspecifically to end elitism. In the 1990s, thefederal funding agency the National Endowmentfor the Arts increased its commitment to“diversity” while museums, pressed by suchpowerful funders as the Rockefeller, Carnegie,and Ford foundations and the Reader’s DigestFund, tried to achieve wider public “access.”52

The operative term was “community”; art was toserve the interests of “communities” – by whichwe must understand poor, excluded, and non-elite, non-creative-class communities – ratherthan promote the universalist values ofmodernist doctrine, which many thought simplysupported the elite-driven status quo. Thisleaves artists interested in audiences beyond thegallery with something of a dilemma: serveinstrumental needs of states and governments oreschew art-world visibility entirely.           To close this section of Culture Class, let meput into play two further quotations. From theintroduction to American Canvas:

The closing years of the 20th centurypresent an opportunity ... for speculationon the formation of a new support system[of the nonprofit arts]: one based less ontraditional charitable practices and more onthe exchange of goods and services.American artists and arts organizations canmake valuable contributions – fromaddressing social issues to enhancing

education to providing “content” for thenew information superhighway – toAmerican society.53

And from Ann Markusen:

Artists may enjoy limited and directpatronage from elites, but as a group, theyare far more progressive than most otheroccupational groups Florida labels ascreative. While elites tend to beconservative politically, artists are thepolar opposite. Artists vote in high numbersand heavily for left and democraticcandidates. They are often active inpolitical campaigns, using their visual,performance, and writing talents to carrythe banner. Many sociologists and socialtheorists argue that artists serve as theconscience of the society, the most likelysource of merciless critique and support forunpopular issues like peace, theenvironment, tolerance and freedom ofexpression.54

!          ! Continued in Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part III: In the Service of Experience(s)in issue 25.           This essay is an expanded version of a talk given at the thirdHermes Lecture at Provinciehuis Den Bosch on November 14,2010, arising from a suggestion by Camiel van Winkel toconsider the work of Richard Florida. I thank Stephen Squibbfor his invaluable assistance during the research and editingprocess. Thanks also to Alexander Alberro and StephenWright for their helpful responses.

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Martha Rosler is an artist who works with multiplemedia, including photography, sculpture, video, andinstallation. Her interests are centered on the publicsphere and landscapes of everyday life – actual andvirtual – especially as they affect women. Relatedprojects focus on housing, on the one hand, andsystems of transportation, on the other. She has longproduced works on war and the “national securityclimate,” connecting everyday experiences at homewith the conduct of war abroad. Other works, from bustours to sculptural recreations of architectural details,are excavations of history.

      1Markusen had in fact beenasked to frame politicalquestions by the universitypresident himself. Markusen'spaper is centered on a critique ofFlorida's creative-class thesis;see Ann Markusen, “UrbanDevelopment and the Politics ofa Creative Class: Evidence fromthe Study of Artists,”Environment and Planning A, Vol.38, Issue 10, 2006. Seehttp://www.hhh.umn.edu/projects/prie/pdf/266_creativity_class_politics.pdf.

      2I use this term here to signifyironical posers and lifestyle,particularly sartorial, devotees.

      3Lloyd, Neo-Bohemia: Art andCommerce in the PostindustrialCity (New York: Routledge, 2006).Lloyd’s estimation of the workrole of the creatives is counter tothe generally benign roleaccorded them not only by Rayand Anderson but also by suchvaried commentators asMarkusen and all the centristand right-wing observers.

      4Zukin, Loft Living: Culture andCapital in Urban Change (NewBrunswick, NJ: RutgersUniversity Press, 1982).

      5George Yúdice, The Expediencyof Culture: Uses of Culture in theGlobal Era (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2001).

      6Fredric Jameson,Postmodernism, or, The CulturalLogic of Late Capitalism(Durham, NC: Duke UniversityPress, 1991), 48. 

      7Judith Butler, Bodies ThatMatter: On the Discursive Limitsof “Sex” (New York: Routledge,1993); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,Epistemology of the Closet(Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1991).

      8Walter Benjamin, “The Work ofArt in the Age of MechanicalReproduction,” in Illuminations:Essays and Reflections (NewYork: Schocken, 1969), 217 –252.

      9I am thinking of such US-basedcompanies such as the phonecompany CREDO, which hasincreasingly positioned itself asa left-wing, “social justice”-oriented advocacy group thathappens to sell you phoneservices, but also of the FairTrade Coffee “movement” andeven mainstream groups asAARP (American Association ofRetired Persons) and thenonprofit magazine ConsumerReports, which sell services butalso run advocacy and lobbyingorganizations. And then there isthe religious sector, whichmaintains tax exemption whiledeeply implicated in politics.

      10Peter Drucker, Landmarks ofTomorrow: A Report on the New“Post-Modern” World (New York:Harper Colophon Books, 1959);Robert Reich, The Work ofNations: Preparing Ourselves for21st Century Capitalism (NewYork: Vintage, 1991).

      11Clark Kerr, Godkin Lectures,given at Harvard University,1963. The Free SpeechMovement recognized theblueprint for the newtechnocratic, pragmatic, andpolitically disciplined andhegemonic nation, for what itwas and erupted accordingly.

      12Clark Kerr, The Uses of theUniversity (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1963),based on his Harvard lectures,66.

      13Daniel Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture inSocial Forecasting (New York:Basic Books, 1973); The CulturalContradictions of Capitalism(New York: Basic Books, 1976).

      14This note is simply toacknowledge that – no surprisehere – not all labor theoristsaccept the term post-Fordismand its periodization ofcapitalist production processes,or the notion of “immateriallabor,” explored below, althoughthey are much favored in theEuropean art world.

      15Michael Hardt and AntonioNegri, Multitude: War andDemocracy in the Age of Empire(Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000),103–115.

      16Lazzarato, “Strategies of thePolitical Entrepreneur,”SubStance 112, vol. 36, no. 1(2007): 89–90.

      17Andrew Ross, “Nice Work If YouCan Get It: The Mercurial Careerof Creative Industries Policy,” inGeert Lovink and Ned Rossiter,eds, My Creativity Reader(Amsterdam: Institute ofNetwork Cultures, 2007), 19. Seehttp://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/32.pdf.

      18Paul Fussell, Class: A GuideThrough the American StatusSystem (New York: Ballantine,1983); David Brooks, Bobos inParadise: The New Upper Classand How They Got There (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 2000).On his website,http://creativeclass.com, Florida engages in excoriations ofBrooks and presents himself asthe good observer while Brooksis the bad.

      19Zukin, Loft Living, op. cit. See

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note 4. To my knowledge, theconcept of the artistic mode ofproduction was first articulatedby Fredric Jameson in ThePolitical Unconscious: Narrativeas a Socially Symbolic Act,published in 1981, whichdevelops the thesis of thehistorical grounding of narrativeframeworks.

      20Ibid., 98.

      21Ibid., citing Ronald Berman, “Artvs. the Arts,” Commentary,November 1979: 48.

      22See, for example, Erik OlinWright, Class Counts:Comparative Studies in ClassAnalysis (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1997).

      23Richard Florida, The Rise of theCreative Class: And How It'sTransforming Work, Leisure andEveryday Life (New York: BasicBooks, 2002), 8.

      24Doug Henwood, After the NewEconomy (New York: The NewPress, 2003).

      25Edward Glaeser, “Review ofRichard Florida’s The Rise of theCreative Class,” 3. Seehttp://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/glaeser/files/Review_Florida.pdf.

      26Ibid., 4.

      27Ibid., 5.

      28Max Nathan, “The Wrong Stuff?Creative Class Theory andEconomic Performance in UKCities.” See http://cjrs-rcsr.org/archive s/30-3/NATHAN.pdf.

      29Ann Markusen, “UrbanDevelopment and the Politics ofa Creative Class: Evidence fromthe Study of Artists,” op. cit. Seehttp://www.hhh.umn.edu/projects/prie/pdf/266_creativity_class_politics.pdf.

      30Alan Blum, “The Imaginary ofSelf-Satisfaction: Reflections onthe Platitude of the “CreativeCity,” in Alexandra Boutros andWill Straw, eds., Circulation andthe City: Essays on Urban Culture(Montreal and Kingston, London,and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’sUniversity Press, 2010).

      31Douglas McGregor, The HumanSide of Enterprise (New York:McGraw-Hill, 1960).

      32William G. Ouchi, Theory Z (NewYork: Avon Books, 1982).

      33W. Edwards Deming and J. M.

Juran, Quality Control Handbook(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951).

      34Hiroko Tabuchi, “JapanesePlaying a New Video Game:Catch-Up,” New York Times,September 20, 2010,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/technology/20game.html?pagewanted=1&sq=japan%20business%20sept.%2020%202010&st=cse&scp=1.

      35Matthew Stewart, “TheManagement Myth,” TheAtlantic, June 2006. Seehttp://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/06/the-management-myth/4883/.

      36Elton Mayo, The HumanProblems of an IndustrialCivilization (New York: TheMacmillan Company, 1933).

      37Frederick Taylor, Principles ofScientific Management (NewYork and London: Harper &Brothers, 1911); Frank Gilbreth,Motion Study (New York: D. VanNostrand Co., 1911).

      38David Graeber, Possibilities:Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellionand Desire (Oakland, CA: AKPress, 2007).

      39Hans Vaihinger, The Philosophyof 'As If': A System of theTheoretical, Practical andReligious Fictions of Mankind(London: Routledge, 1924).

      40Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello,New Spirit of Capitalism (Londonand New York: Verso, 2006). Thisbook is handy for laying out andfollowing statistically whatshould be readily apparent toobservers.

      41Chantal Mouffe, “The MuseumRevisited,” Artforum, vol. 48, no.10 (Summer 2010): 326–330. Seehttp://artforum.com/inprint/id=25710.

      42Zukin, Loft Living, 190.

      43Sharon Zukin, The Naked City:The Death and Life of AuthenticUrban Places (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2010).

      44Ibid., 142.

      45Maarten Hajer and ArnoldReijndorp, In Search of NewPublic Domain (Rotterdam: NAi,2001).

      46Zukin, Naked City, 142.

      47Ibid., 142–143.

      48Yúdice, The Expediency ofCulture; Antonio Muniz Sodré, O

social irradiado: Violenciaurbana, neogrotesco e midia(Sao Paolo: Cortez Editora,1992); Nestor García Canclini,Consumers and Citizens:Globalization and MulticulturalConflicts (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,2001).

      49Grant Kester, “AestheticEvangelists: Conversion andEmpowerment in ContemporaryArt,” Afterimage 22:6 (January1995), 5–11; Hal Foster, “TheArtist as Ethnographer?” TheReturn of the Real (Cambridge:MIT Press, 1995). Seehttp://www.corner-college.com/udb/cpro2ZgGKfArtist_As_Ethnographer.pdf.

      50Claire Bishop, “Antagonism andRelational Aesthetics,” October110 (Fall 2004), 51–79.

      51Jane Alexander and Gary O.Larson, American Canvas: AnArts Legacy for Our Communities(Washington, DC: NationalEndowment for the Arts, 1997).How easily that term “utilitarian”slides into discussions of adimension that during the ColdWar was always explicitlydenied. Seehttp://www.nea.gov/pub/AmCan/AmericanCanvas.pdf.

      52Yúdice, op. cit., 245.

      53Alexander and Larson, AmericanCanvas. Emphasis in theoriginal.

      54Markusen, “Urban Developmentand the Politics of a CreativeClass,” op. cit., 22 – 23. In thispaper, Markusen acknowledgesartists’ role in gentrification,remarking they are “sometimescaught up in gentrification,” butshe sees their role in most citiesas not different from that ofother middle- and working-classpeople migrating into working-class neighborhoods and on thisaccount criticizes both Zukin,with whom she otherwisegenerally agrees, and RosalynDeutsche.

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Martha Rosler

Culture Class:Art, Creativity,Urbanism, PartIII

! Continued from “Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part II: Creativity and Its Discontents”in issue 23 and “Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part I: Art and Urbanism” in issue 21.

PART THREE: IN THE SERVICE OFEXPERIENCE(S)

1. Jungle into GardenIn the not-so-distant New York past, tenementroofs, and even those of lower-middle-classapartment buildings – ones without doormen,say – were where women went with theirwashing and their children, in good or justtolerable weather, to hang the damp laundry onthe line, thus joining a larger community ofwomen in performing the necessary and normal,good and useful, labor of reproduction andmaintenance of family life. (The clothesthemselves, and the hanging of the laundry, weresignals easily interpretable by other women as towealth, status, moral character, and even maritalharmony.) For men, many an apartment roof heldthe lofts of racing pigeons, the raising of which isan intergenerational hobby. Before airconditioning, you went to the roof for solitude,and for some prized “fresh air,” and if you werelucky you could catch sight of the nearest bodyof water. The roofs of loft buildings, of course,served no familial functions. Roofs with gardenswere pleasant idylls for luxury penthousespaces, absent of the gloss of use value attachedto urban farming or green roofs.

Sketch of the proposed new Whitney Museum at the High Lineterminus, in the gallery district of Chelsea, New York City.

          The new, and newly relaxed, attitude to the(apparently) natural world in New York – incontradistinction to a city like Helsinki, wherewildness is not appreciated1 – is reflected in theresurrection of the city’s High Line, a disusedelevated industrial rail line in lower Manhattan’sfar-west former industrial zone.2 Its salvage and

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John Sloan, Sun and Wind on the Roof, 1915. Oil on canvas.

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Camilo José Vergara, Detroit Skyline, View South Along Park Avenue, 1989.

conversion into a Chelsea park, with its(re)importation of frank wild(er)ness into the city,began as a quixotic effort by a couple ofarchitects but soon became a patrician project,and then a municipal one.3 It marks a furtherstep in the long transformation of urbanwaterfronts, formerly the filthy and periloushaunts of poor, often transient and foreign-born,workers servicing the ports into recreational andresidential zones beckoning the mostly youngand decidedly upper middle class. The water’sedge, which once figured as the dangerous dividebetween this-world and underworld, betweensafety and the unknown, now promisespleasurable adventures in travel or beach-going.           In another register, the city has now decidedto embrace neighborhood community gardens,especially in places where the working class hasbeen effectively priced out, a contrast to the1990s when hard-line suburbanite mayor RudyGiuliani tried to destroy many of these oases(which he considered “socialistic”), oftenpainstakingly reclaimed from trash-strewnwastelands that had fallen off the city’s tax rollsand into public receivership, by selling off theplots to developers at bargain rates. The city nowalso permits the formerly banned keeping ofchickens (but never roosters) and bees anywhere

in the city.4 In my neighborhood, the still-slightly-gritty-but-on-the-way-to-becoming-hipsterland Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, someenterprising young women have started a well-publicized commercial rooftop “farm.”5 Otherincipient hipster neighborhoods are poised tocopy. Please try not to think of Marie Antoinette’sPetite Hameau, her little farm on the grounds ofVersailles, for creatives are not aristocrats, andpoor people too are finally allowed to keep suchanimals and grow cash mini-crops.

          Though they may not be aristocrats,accustomed to hereditary rank and privilege,creatives belong to the first generation to have

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grown up within an almost entirely suburbanizedAmerica.6 US political scientist J. Eric Oliver, inDemocracy in Suburbia, spells out the linksbetween the suburban retreat to “private life”and the removal of conflict and competition overresources among urban groups:

When municipal zoning authority and otheradvantages of smaller size are used tocreate pockets of economic homogeneityand affluence, the civic benefits of smallersize are undermined. The racial bifurcationof cities and suburbs also has civic costs,partly through concentrating the problemsof urban areas in racially mixed settings. Bytaking much of the competition forresources and much of the political conflictthat naturally exists among members of aninterdependent metropolitan communityand separating them with municipalboundaries, suburbanization alsoeliminates many of the incentives that drawcitizens into the public realm.7

Thus we should read the “becoming creative” ofthe post-industrial urban core as the formationof a homogenous space drained of the incentivesfor political engagement. Philosopher andpolitical scientist Seyla Benhabib hascharacterized, and criticized, Hannah Arendt forthe limitations in considering the public in termsof agonistic and associational spheres. Theformer, Benhabib maintains, is out of step withthe “sociological reality of modernity, as well aswith modern political struggles for justice,”through its preference for theatricality, forpolitics as action undertaken at least partiallyfor its own sake and distinct from considerationsof instrumental reason. Even without takingsides, it is possible to read the decline of bothmodels of politics, of association and agonism, inthe new “creative sphere” of the upper-middle-class urban elite. The public stage of civic actionis increasingly coterminous with the preferencesof a specific class, preventing both associationand agonism – at least to the extent that eitherof those would be worthy of the term “politics.” Itis in this sense that we must consider thenewfound municipal enthusiasm for parks andpark-like experiences, and the sanctioning of“neo-hippie” chicken-keeping and urban androoftop farming, along with many of theexamples to follow, as bound up with the shift inthe class composition of the urban fabric.          The greenmarkets sited around New YorkCity, the bicycle lanes, and the outdoor patiosbuilt in the middle of busy streets, express theconviction that the city is no longer a concretejungle but a cultivated garden enclosing a well-managed zoo or kindergarten, in which everyone

and his or her neighbor is placed on display, inthe act of self-creation, whether you choose tolook or not. The gardens, urban and rooftopfarms, water slides, and climbable sculpturesthat have replaced the modernist model of publicart works (which had itself displaced the state-sanctioned monumentalism of previous eras)must be understood as of a piece with theincreasingly suburban character of creative-class politics.

          If we consider the issue in terms of the roleof art sited in public spaces, it would seemindisputable that the “public art” (or “art inpublic”) sector in the US has turned to aservice/experience model. The modernist modelof public art, which relied heavily on what wemight call abstractionist inspirationalism or onarchitectural or social critique, had elicitedincreasing incomprehension and annoyance fromthe wider public; its ship finally foundered withthe removal in 1989 of Richard Serra’s abstract,minimalist, site-specific Tilted Arc (1981),describable perhaps as an artful but rusty wall ofCOR-TEN steel, from its position in front of alower Manhattan federal courthouse.8 Incontrast, The Gates, Christo and Jean Claude’s2005 project for New York’s Central Park,underlined the role of public art as a frame fornarcissistic self-appreciation on the part ofbourgeois park-goers and city fathers, who maysee themselves perambulating through a proudand cohesive body politic. Further, watchingothers pace through The Gates permitted agrandiose self-recognition, in which participantssee each other and acknowledge the (rightful)presence of each on the grand stage with thefigure of Nature hovering o’er.9 This role offorming and framing the New York polis wasalready played by public gardens, like Brooklyn’sProspect Park and Manhattan’s Central Park, inthe nineteenth century; the modern history ofthe walk through a scenic landscape beginsmuch earlier, in the eighteenth century inWestern Europe at least, but the process now

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Aeron Bergman and Alejandra Salinas, Wildflowers, projected video loop, Henie Onstad Art Center, Oslo, 2009.

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relies more prominently on presenting the civicworld as remade, however ephemerally, by art,and as art – but with that Kodak smile. Creativeadulthood means reimagining ourselves aschildren looking to have fun in our free time; thecity no longer embodies the formal relations ofthe adult polis but is viewed by many as a seriesof overlapping fantasies of safety and adventure,as Sharon Zukin has suggested.10

          The appeal to Nature, to that which appearsas an “outside” to a society organized so thatthere is no outside, is part of the simulacraleffect that attests to the loss of distinctionbetween public and private spheres, and to theatomization of publics into individuals inBrownian motion, often conveniently invisible toone another, or, more properly, no moreconsequent than street furniture (which is whyChristo and Jean Claude’s project was seizedupon as municipally appropriate in allowing,temporarily and symbolically, the polity to comeinto view, pacing in orderly ranks through thecrown-jewel park).11 This is a step beyond theanonymity long remarked on as a simultaneouslyliberatory and alienating effect of city life,theorized by Georg Simmel in “Metropolis andMental Life,” an article of 1903 whoseacceptance came only much later.12 A furthersign of a breakdown in urban codes and ofurban/suburban boundary policing isrepresented by the casualization, eveninfantilization, of middle-class dress within citylimits that has gone hand in hand with thecomputer-creative nerds’ habit, starting in the ITshops and cultivated by management, ofdressing as though they were at the gym, atsummer camp, or on a hike.13 If the world of“nature” is fetishized, you can be sure a versionof the Übermensch is lurking somewhere in thebushes.          As Giorgio Agamben reminds us,

Arendt had already analyzed the processthat brings homo laborans – and with it,biological life as such – gradually to occupythe very center of the political scene ofmodernity. … Arendt attributes thetransformation and decadence of thepolitical realm in modern societies to thisvery primacy of natural life over politicalaction.14

We see this substitution at work in the highlyevolved politics of contemporary consumerconsciousness. The selection of consumerproducts increasingly demands to be takenseriously as a political act, asking us to producea political self-portrait as we feed, clothe, andclean ourselves.          There is also something fundamental about

the relation between gardening and thisemerging biopolitics, between gardening andmetaphors of rootedness and the uncomfortabledisplacements of modernity, the tearing away ofdeep, even unconscious connections tocommunity and place. The urban farmingmovement, a corner of the artisanal fever thatperiodically grips artists’ communities, potentlyexpresses a desire to return to a mythic,prelapsarian Eden of community and stability, ofpreindustrial, premediatic life, without the grit ofurban disconnection but with the authenticity ofGemeinschaft restored. This appealing dream isexpressed in the immortal refrain of JoniMitchell’s song Woodstock of 1969, written abouta historic event which career demands hadprevented her from attending:

We are stardust.We are golden.And we’ve got to get ourselves back to thegarden.

Here the garden is the part of the post-suburbanImaginary that governed the transition of theurban economy from industrial manufacturing toa high-end residential and commercial base. Ifwe can imagine each of the distinctive urbanspaces – industrial, residential, commercial – asmanifesting a certain politics, we canunderstand not only the cultural trends that havefollowed in their wake but also the widercharacterization of neoliberal consumercapitalism as an “experience economy.”           As the vibrancy of interclass contention hasbeen quelled by the damping off of working-class politics, a sanitized version of an industrialurban experience (or some image of one) can bemarketed to the incoming middle class, whohave the means and the willingness to pay forwhat was formerly a set of indigenous strategiesof survival, of a way of life. The rooftop evacuatedby the laundry lines and the pigeon loft becomesan urban farm, trailing clouds of glory.          The new Imaginary of New York City, like somany others’, is no longer a concrete jungle but acultivated garden, a place in which a gardenercontrols the noxious weeds and plants anddirects growth in marvelous and pious ways. LestI be taken for a romantic crank – or just an oldbohemian like Samuel Delany memorializing thedays when Times Square was simply The Deuce –I want to remind the reader that, if nothing else,as a female city-dweller I appreciate thenewfound feeling of probable safety in thestreets, especially after dark; but it is importantto discern (as Delany would wish us to) the termsof this exchange.          

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Image from Paul Elliman & Nicole Macdonald's project on the Detroit Zoo, Future Park I: Teach me to disappear, presented at Casco Office for Art, Design andTheory, Utrecht, 2010.

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2. In the Service of Experiences

George Yúdice cites Jeremy Rifkin’s article from2000, “Age of Access: The New Culture ofHypercapitalism Where All of Life Is a Paid-forExperience,” describing the “selling and buyingof human experiences” in “themed cities,common-interest developments, entertainmentdestination centers, shopping malls, globaltourism, fashion, cuisine, professional sportsand games, film, television, virtual world and[other] simulated experiences.”15 Rifkinobserves:

If the industrial era nourished our physicalbeing, the Age of Access feeds our mental,emotional, and spiritual being. Whilecontrolling the exchange of goodscharacterized the age just passing,controlling the exchange of conceptscharacterizes the new age coming. In thetwenty-first century, institutionsincreasingly trade in ideas, and people, inturn, increasingly buy access to those ideasand the physical embodiments in whichthey are contained.16

One effect of this search for meaningful – orauthentic – experience is the highlighting ofauthenticity as nothing more nor less than thecurrency of the experience economy. We shouldnot be surprised to find a business/motivationalbook entitled Authenticity, with the subtitle“What Consumers Really Want.” Written byJoseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, consultantsliving in the small city of Aurora, Ohio, the book isthe successor to their previous book, TheExperience Economy: Work Is Theatre & EveryBusiness a Stage, of 1999.17 These and similarbooks are guides not just to the creation ofspectacles but for rethinking all business activityas gerundive, providing those fantastic, perhapstransformative, experiences we all supposedlyseek, on the Disneyland model. Urbanism itselfbecomes fertile ground for precisely thesetransformations. (Zukin’s Naked City: The Death

and Life of Authentic Urban Places illustrates thisthesis through considering three signal New Yorkneighborhoods.)          The fraying of traditional ties evident in thepreferences and behaviors of the creative classalso points to the tendency to formidentifications based on consumerist, oftenephemeral, choices. Taste in lifestyle choiceswith no political commitment has hollowed outthe meaningfulness of taste – in art, music,furniture, clothing, food, schools,neighborhoods, vacation spots, leisure activities,friends – as a clear-cut indicator of theindividual’s moral worth (of the individual’s“cultivation,” to use an old-fashioned construct,drawn from gardening). (This is one more reasonwhy it is impossible to base a seriouscontemporary aesthetics on those of Kant, forwhom the faculty of taste could not be moreclearly separated from the “possessiveindividualism” that marks contemporaryconsumer choices. Kant, you may recall, in TheCritique of Aesthetic Judgment, developed atripartite system in which taste is clearlydemarcated from both reason and the urge topossess, or the “pornographic.”) Taste nowseems to be a sign of group membership withlittle resonance as a personal choice beyond acertain compass of selecting which token of therequisite type to acquire; perhaps that is whyDavid Brooks (ever a keen observer of tellingdetails while remaining completely incapable ofseeing the big picture), recognized that for thecreative class, choices must be understood asvirtuous. (That individual choices are made onthe basis of preferences already exhibited by agroup is not completely new, since members ofevery group and tribe are instantly identifiablefrom the top of the head to the bottom of thefeet, but the present context seems different,centering more on consumer acuity than onquality.) But virtue is not to be exhibited asvirtuousness but rather as dictated by someexternal force other than religion, such asecological awareness or putative health effects.Public institutions, and even royalty, have tried tobecome one with the people, exhibiting the samesentimentality through the public display ofgrief, joy, and family pride. Websites follow theexample of Facebook, with portrait photos ofeven distinguished professors and publicofficials; smaller art institutions show us theirstaff members (mostly the women) proudlyhugging their offspring or (mostly the men) theirdogs.          In general, art institutions, particularlythose smaller ones that used to form part of thealternative movement, have furthermore marriedthe provision of experiences to the culture ofcelebration by turning up their noses at

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Keith Piacezny, Demolished byNeglect, Detroit, late 1980s.Image: Center for UrbanPhotography.

One of the houses included in the Heidelberg Project, Detroit. Photo DetroitDerek Photography.

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seriousness and critique, as reviewers, if notcritics, have as well.18 We can see the rhetoric,often vividly expressed, of service, on the onehand, and fun experiences, on the other, amongsmaller art institutions and initiatives. I offer afew excerpted examples, mostly from emailannouncements. They span the spectrum ofcontemporary exhibition venues from small,artist-run spaces, to larger, more establishedorganizations to the self-branding of cities.There are several core concepts that provide therhetorical touchstones in these self-descriptions. On the fun side, these range fromcross-fertilization in disparate “creative” user-friendly fields to an array of anti-puritanicalhooks that touch on energetic pleasure in love,dancing, or whatever, and, on the service side, tobringing culture to the lower classes, helpingheal the traumas of deindustrialization, andcovering over the catastrophes of war.          My first example is an outlier: a publicrelations and events management company for“cultural projects” in New York and Milan, calledContaminate NYC, announcing a solo cartoon andmanga show at a place called ContestaRockHair,described as:

a brand created in 1996 by a group ofhairstylists who shared the passion forfashion characterized by a rock soul thatlinks music and art with the creation of hairstyles, fostering innovation andexperimentation. Today ContestaRockHaircounts 11 salons in Rome, Florence, NewYork, Miami, and Shanghai.19

One venerable New York artist-run institution,now positioning itself as a discursive space aswell as an exhibition venue, has “partnered” witha boutique hotel in strange ways and touts the“Peace, Love & Room Service Package,” fromwhich it receives a small percentage. Another1970s New York nonprofit (listing a hotel and sixother public and private funders), expresses its“passionate belief in the power of art to createinspiring personal experiences as well as fostersocial progress.” In the economically depressed1970s, its earliest programs “invigorated vacantstorefronts.” This strategy, in which propertydevelopers rely on artists to render the emptyless so, has today become formulaic andubiquitous in the US and beyond, making theconnection between art’s appearance on thescene and the revaluing of real estateembarrassingly obvious.          Two further representatives of this trendstrike a more sober note. The first is also fromNew York: this relatively new group’s “coremission is to revitalize … areas … by bringingthoughtful, high-caliber art installations … to the

public….” A recent show in the formerly industrialzone, now “artists’ district,” of Dumbo usesconstruction materials crafted into “visualoxymorons that shift function and meaning inhighly poetic ways.”          The second, a dockside location in southernEurope, listing a dozen corporate and municipalpartners and sponsors, “targets the need torehabilitate and revitalize urban spaces, withoutlosing their identity or altering their nature….” By“taking into consideration the location of theproject” in the docks, the art space

aims to expand art into non-traditionalspaces and promote the use of places thatpreviously lacked museum-likecharacteristics. … Without culture,societies cannot have a true civicconsciousness.

Berlin is experienced in the framing discoursesof creative-industry gentrification, especiallyafter a 2007 report in Der Spiegel rated it asGermany’s top “creative class city,” based onRichard Florida’s “3T” indices: Talent,Technology, and Tolerance.20 So far, Berlin hasbeen slow to embrace becoming “the hippestdown-to-earth booming urban spot for thecreative industries,” as described by the BerlinMEA Brand Building, advertising itself as“dedicated to luxury, fashion, art, cosmetics andaccessoires [sic].” A Wall Street Journal article of2010 mocks artists’ and bohemians’ unhappinessover the arrival of Soho House, one of a string of“ultra-hip private social clubs” because manyBerliners, “proud and protective of theiranarchic, gritty brand of cool,” are “stubbornlywary of gentrification symbols.” Berlin’s SohoHouse is in a former Jewish-owned departmentstore turned Hitler Youth headquarters turnedEast German Communist Party building, a historythat fuels people’s indignation over the arrival intown of a members-only club.21

          As it once did in the repurposing of Germanreal estate contaminated by recent world history,the transformation of cities newer to theconquest of urban space can raise the eyebrowsof those to whom such things may matter. TheNew York Times, writing of the Podgorze districtin Krakow, Poland, an infamous Jewish ghettounder the Nazis that was subsequentlycommercially orphaned in the postwar years,gushes about new restaurants springing upalongside “an ambitious history museum in therenovated [Oskar] Schindler Factory” and otherpromised museums nearby. “The award forprettiest real estate goes to Galeria Starmach,one of the most celebrated contemporary artgalleries in Poland … an airy white space in a redbrick former synagogue.”22

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Historical information panel from the Soho House Club.

          But keep smiling! Mourning is consigned tonew art-like spaces, such as complex architect-or artist-designed sculptural memorials andother secular pilgrimage shrines, such asmuseums of remembrance. In other words, thosewho wish to engage in mourning are directedthere rather than to actual religious structures orto more general-purpose museums. Meanwhile,those established museums wish to makethemselves seem less like mausoleums andgrand palaces and more like parks and gardens,going beyond the typical decor of the past, ofvast floral lobby vases and discreet landscaping,toward pavilions and bamboo structuresproduced by a host of artists or journeymanarchitects in museum backyards and on theirroofs. This happy-face effort is but a short stepbeyond their efforts to justify their right to fundsfrom skeptical municipalities and donors byattracting, through various programsadministered by education departments, visitorsfrom outside their normal ambit, therebyassuming not only the role of service provider butthat of a pedagogical institution (often onepitched to lower grade levels).23 No longerpermitted to take the old-fashioned view and tosee themselves as a locus of individualizedcontemplation of worthy aesthetic objects,museums have increasingly taken responsibilityfor the entirety of visitors’ experiences,shepherding them from the shop to the artworks, with their enfolding printed and recordedand virtual texts, to the café, while also

beckoning to those formerly excluded populationgroups and informing them about the manifoldrewards that museum-going might offer them.

3. Detroit: I Do Mind DyingDetroit is a city imagined by some as an urbanwasteland reverting back to prairie. Over the pasttwenty-plus years, many projects have tried toengage with Detroit’s long slide from an iconicmetropolitan vanguard of the eponymous Fordistassembly-line production to a severelydistressed relic. As the fastest-shrinkingmetropolis in the US (it is at its lowest point in100 years, having dropped from the fourthlargest in 1950 to the eleventh in 2009 and losinga quarter of its population in the interim) andlong past hoping for salvation from itsRenaissance Center, postindustrial Detroit ispresently trying to school its residents on how togrow small gracefully.24 The city has beenshrinking for a long time, as suburban, mostlywhite, flight took hold from the 1950s onwardand as the auto industry ceased to be the mightybackbone of the US economy, dispersing itsproduction to low-wage locales in the US andelsewhere and greatly reducing its employeeranks.25 Detroit’s history as the quintessentiallyFordist industrial city (Ford is the carmaker thatpioneered the moving assembly line) is worthconsidering. Not only is its history of workerorganizing and union struggles long anddistinguished, the city government also had anumber of socialists for a good amount of time,until their support base disappeared and citygovernment was beset by corrupt politicians. Theinfamous Detroit riot (some would say uprising)of 1967, while rooted in the inequalities of race,nevertheless included some racial solidarity.26

Lowell Boileau, panorama of part of the ruins of Packard Motors,Detroit, n.d.

          Detroit has a long and distinguished culturalhistory as well, most prominently in music – jazz,classical music performance, R&B, and morerecently, the Motown sound, hip-hop, and DetroitTechno.27 But the elite, publicly supportedmainstream institutions, including the venerableDetroit Institute of the Arts, the Detroit OperaHouse (home of the Michigan Opera Theatre),and the world-famous Detroit Symphony, arestruggling for audiences and support; this year,the Symphony’s musicians, after a contentioussix-month strike and the cancellation of 75percent of the season, accepted a 23 percent pay

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cut, and the Opera House now holds amegachurch service every Sunday.

          As the locale of a new television cop show,Detroit is the very image of post-Fordist urbanabjection.28 Written off the register of civilizedAmerica, suffering from dreadful crimestatistics, inadequate policing, and municipalcorruption, the city has recently called forthunbidden an extravaganza of projects attemptingto establish the authentic street cred of bothparachuting artists and local activists. As in thecase of New Orleans, some cool people arepresently moving in – people who fit under therubric “creative class.” Some of the renewedinterest in Detroit stems from an analysis of thecity as both the model failure of (urban)capitalism and a fertile ground for the seeds ofthe future. Some other observers seem to revel inthe opportunity to pick over the ruins in a kind ofextended rubbernecking, but with thesometimes-unspecified hope that the outcometakes place in the vicinity of the art world.29

Others still seem interested in pedagogicalopportunities, whether for themselves or others.As is the case everywhere, many new arrivals arelooking for cheap rent, for places to live and workcomfortably, as Richard Florida has noticed; asFlorida also tells us, where hipsters go,restaurants are sure to follow. The New YorkTimes asks, “How much good can a restaurantdo?” and reassures us that

in this city, a much-heralded emblem ofindustrial-age decline, and home to acripplingly bad economy, a troubled schoolsystem, racial segregation and sometimesunheeded crime, there is one place wheremost everyone – black, white, poor, rich,urban, not – will invariably recommend youeat: Slows Bar B Q.30

Opened in 2005, the restaurant has, according toits owner, artist and real estate scion PhillipColler, “validated the idea that people will comeinto the city.” The reporter comments, “Anywherebut Detroit, the notion that people will show up

and pay money for barbecue and beer would notbe seen as revolutionary.”31           Detroit is home to many worthwhile publicand community projects off the art world radar,such as the long-standing urban farmingmovement partly spearheaded by beloved radicalactivist Grace Lee Boggs, now ninety-six yearsold.32 Boggs works with establishedcommunities of various income groups, using thecollective growing, planting, and harvesting ofcrops and flowers as a basis for unity and civicmobilization, and as a way to draw in children;planting and harvesting remain a potentmetaphor for self-application, communal effort,and the likelihood of a future. In a city likeDetroit, neighborhood groups proliferate.

Cadillac Motor & Fleetwood workers' strike, Detroit, 1937.

          People have been making art about Detroit’stroubles for a long time, especially through themedia of photography and film: see for example,Newsreel’s Finally Got the News (1970) andMichael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989).33 CamiloJosé Vergara, sociologist, photographer, andcogent chronicler of the ills of US cities from the1980s on, photographed and wrote aboutDetroit.34 In the 1980s, the local group UrbanCenter for Photography outraged officials andcity boosters by turning a grant they had receivedinto a public project called Demolished byNeglect, which included posting enlarged photosof burned-out homes and decrepit theaters andother grand spaces on outdoor sites.35           Detroit is the site of artist-NGO do-gooderprojects in the sphere of urban relations, someworthy, some hardly so. In the past few months Ihave met artists from around the world who havemade the sad precincts of Detroit and environstheir subject. Some of the projects restcomfortably within the tradition of salvageanthropology, such as the Canadian artist

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Union Square, New York City,2010.

Monika Berenyi’s project archiving the poetry ofthe 1960s and 1970s Detroit through the DetroitCity Poetry Project: An Oral History.36 SeveralDetroit projects have taken place in New York orhave been instituted by New York–based artists.In 2009 a small nonprofit on New York’s LowerEast Side held a show called “Art of the Crash:Art Created from the Detritus of Detroit.”37

Another project, Ice House Detroit, by anarchitect and a photographer based in Brooklyn(though the photographer was born in Detroit),consisted of laboriously (and expensively, it turnsout) spraying one of Detroit’s countlessabandoned houses with water in the dead ofwinter to make it visible and undeniablyaesthetic.38 Back in New York, a young artisthaving a solo show at the Museum of Modern Artlast year showed her symbolic set of photopanels entitled Detroit. “The thing you have tounderstand about Detroit is that ruin ispervasive. It’s not like it’s relegated to one part oftown... It’s everywhere.” The artist (who has alsovisited New Orleans) “internalized all that decay,but she also uncovered hopeful signs ofreinvention, like a group of artists turning anabandoned auto plant into studio spaces,” writesthe New York Times.          Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman,

artists based in Oslo, have been doing projects inDetroit (Bergman’s home town) for a decade incollaboration with institutions in Detroit andOslo. They will be running an“artist/poet/scholar” residency called INCA:Institute for Neo-Connotative Action, out of acenter-city apartment they own. Salinas andBergman have made animated-text films basedon audio recordings of local community andpolitical activists (including Grace Lee Boggs)and on the history of DRUM, the Detroit chapterof the League of Revolutionary Black Workers,centered on the Newsreel film Finally Got theNews.39           The Netherlands also sends art students toDetroit, but in much larger numbers and throughregularized institutional channels, under theauspices of the Dutch Art Institute, incollaboration with the University of Michigan, anelite public university.40 The university has set upa Detroit center, accessible only to AnnArbor–based students with swipe cards. Back inAnn Arbor, about an hour’s drive from Detroit,artist Danielle Abrams teaches a course called“Why Does Everyone in Ann Arbor Want to MakeWork in Detroit?” During the 2010 OpenEngagement conference sponsored by the Artand Social Practice program at Portland State

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University in Oregon, Abrams’s studentsexplained that they didn’t go to Detroit to “fix it”but rather “to get to know the community: itshistory, its people, and movements”: “The citywill teach you what you need to know.”41

Abrams’s students did not produce art projectsbut rather “research and communityengagement.”           A pair of young Australian artists receivedfunding from an Australia Council residency inChicago to do a month-long project in Gary,Indiana, an industrial satellite of Detroit andsimilarly in ruins. In conjunction with theneighborhood activist group Central DistrictOrganizing Project they planted a communitygarden and painted an all-but-abandoned housewith an absentee owner. They also recorded localinterviews for a planned film interspersing theinterviews with clips from the 1980s Hollywoodmovie The Wiz.42

          The imperative toward a manifestation ofsocial concern and respect, if not engagement,pervades most of the projects I have learnedabout. If some of this sounds like missionarysocial work in a third world city that is part of afirst world nation – much like the Ninth Ward inpost-Katrina New Orleans – other projects are,like the MoMA artist’s, framed in romantic, andsometimes futuristic terms (and what is futurismif not predicated on loss?). Let me invoke themotif of melancholy. Only through the act ofmourning something as having been lost can themelancholic possess that which he or she maynever have had; the contours of absence providea kind of echo or relief of what is imagined lost,allowing it to be held. In this respect, most art-world projects centering on decaying places likeDetroit are melancholic monuments to capital, inthe sense of depicting both the devastation leftin its absence but also the politics it provoked.Detroit was home not only to one of the greattriumphs of capitalist manufacturing but also toone of the great compromises between capitaland labor. To be upper middle class andmelancholic about Detroit is to firmly fix one’spolitical responsibilities to a now absent past;mourning Detroit is a gesture thatsimultaneously evidences one’s socialconscience and testifies to its absoluteimpotence. (Looking at Detroit also helpfullyeases the vexed question of one’s effect on one’sown neighborhood in another city somewhereelse.)          Such melancholia has nourished a post-apocalyptic futurism. A recent exhibition atCasco, the public design space in Utrecht, by aLondon-based graphic designer and a Detroitfilmmaker, seeks “to imagine a post-capitalistcity,” focusing on Detroit’s abandoned zoo, “notsimply to witness the failure of a civilization in its

state of ruin, but to encounter an abundant eco-system of flora and fauna that has since evolvedthere.”43 An associated lecture by a Scottish-born, Detroit-based professor of urban studiesargued that Detroit is a place “where a model ofopen spaces or, to use a term that comes up a lothere in Detroit, the urban prairie, starts to comeinto play.”44 (The architect of the Ice Houseproject had similarly told Dwell magazine that“Detroit is a place with a lot of potential at themoment, and there are a lot of individuals thereworking on innovative projects, such as the re-prairie-ization of inner city Detroit, urbanfarming, materials reuse and redistribution,densification of certain areas, and widespreadarchitectural reuse.”45)           The decidedly local Heidelberg Project,Tyree Guyton’s 25-year effort of decorating houseexteriors in an impoverished neighborhoodcentering on Detroit’s Heidelberg Street, fits intothe “outsider art” category. Unlike, say, theinitiative of artist-mayor Edi Rama of Tirana topaint the downtown buildings of this destitutecity in bright colors, captured by the Albanian-born artist Anri Sala in Dammi i colori, Guyton’sproject has not had a high level of art-world ormunicipal traction.46 A group of Detroit-basedartists going by the name Object Orange,however, achieved a brief moment of attention in2006/2007 when they painted abandonedbuildings in Disney’s “Tiggerific Orange” color,hoping, they finally decided, to have the city tearthem down and reduce the blight and dangerthey posed.47           I mention these projects on Detroit not topraise or to criticize them in particular butbecause they represent a movement within art,and architecture, to institute projects in thelarger community, in the built environment or inreference to it, surely as part of the “go social,”community-oriented imperative. Is ittroublesome that such works stand incontradistinction, implicit or explicit, to“political art,” to work directly concerned withaccess to power? Here it is helpful to invoke NewYork urban theorist Marshall Berman’s phrase,the “collision between abstract capitalist spaceand concrete human place.” Community groups,and community artists, are tied to a concretelocale and thus cannot stand up to those incommand of capital, which is defined by itsmobility. But even more, community groups arecomposed of members tied to each other,whereas itinerant artists remain always on theoutside, functioning as participant observers,anthropology style. Some, like Harrell Fletcher(or, earlier, filmmakers Nettie Wild and BeniMatias), have found communities where theyexpected only to do a project and leave, but haveinstead moved in.48

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Comptoir des Cotonniers storefront, Soho district, New York.

          In other cities, such as Barcelona, generallypresented as a model of humanisticredevelopment, driven by the relentless push ofmunicipal “renewal,” but also notable for its“push back” of local housing initiatives, youngactivist students work on resistance andreformation campaigns within working-classcommunities under pressure of gentrification,adding some visibility and perhapsorganizational strength to local neighborhoodgroups. Detroit has no such worries.

4. Public Practice, Social PracticeI do not know whether to be more pleased orapprehensive about art-world artists engagingin, as the sign on the door says, “social practice.”Certainly these essays into the world beyond theart world, which can include any of a spate ofpedagogical projects in ordinary communities,feed the instincts of a sector of artists, a sectorconstantly reborn, to do something “real.” It isworth noting, following Mierle Ukeles, thereplacement of the term public art by socialpractice.49 The emphasis on personal qualitiesand social networks will most likely give rise toprojects that center on the affective. I haverehearsed some of the difficulties of theseefforts. I have also alluded, throughout this

essay, to the relatively easy co-optation of artistsas an urban group in cities that simply allow usto live and work in ways we find conducive to ourconcerns – a pacification made easier by theexpansion of the definition of the artist and theadvancing professionalization of the field. Babysteps in the formation of community initiativesare treated as deserving of the moral (andprofessional) equivalent of merit badges, for ageneration raised on images and virtualcommunication and lacking a sufficient grasp ofthe sustained commitment required forcommunity immersion. These projects cancapture the attention of journalists andmunicipal authorities, all speaking the samelanguage and operating against a backdrop ofshared class understandings. (This is preciselythe situation Sharon Zukin described in LoftLiving, which, we should recall, is a case study,using Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, of thetransformation of undervalued urban space intohighly valuable real estate, a condition revisitedin the more recent Naked City, in order to addressthe process at a far more advanced stage alongthat course.50) But it renders invisible the patientorganizing and agitating, often decades long, bymembers of the local communities (a process Iwitnessed first-hand in Greenpoint, Brooklyn).

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Work for creatives. Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

          My concerns start here but extend a bitfurther, to the desire of young artists, now quiteapparent in the US, to “succeed.” Success ismeasured not especially in terms of theassessments of the communities “served,”though that may be integral to the works, butthrough the effects within the professional artworld to which these projects are reported.Success, to those whom I’ve asked, seems tomean both fame and fortune in the professionalambit. I am not alone in my disquiet over the factthat this particular rabbit seems to be slidinginside the boa, as “public practice” isincreasingly smiled upon by the art world,particularly in those demonstrationextravaganzas called biennials, which appear toreside in cities but whose globalized projects canin fact be easily disclaimed as one-offexperiments.51

          One problem with my critique of RichardFlorida’s thesis stems from the insufficiency ofsimply pointing out the obfuscatory conflation ofthe category “artist” with the larger economicgroup he has called “the creative class,” forartists increasingly have come to adopt thelatter’s entrepreneurial strategies. Witness onlythe increasingly common tactic of raising projectmoney through social media and related sites

such as Kickstarter or PitchEngine, in which theappeal to an audience beyond the professional isoften couched in the language of promotion. Likeresume writing, now strongly infused with apublic-relations mentality, the offerings arelarded with inflated claims and the heavy use ofsuperlatives.52 One should refer here to themanifold and repeated discussions of the artistas flexible personality in the post-Fordist world,forced to “sell” oneself in numerous proteandiscourses; a literature that encompasses suchwriters as Brian Holmes and Paolo Virno (I havebriefly cited this literature in an earlier essay, inrelation to the questions of the political andcritical art53). Paolo Virno writes:          

The pianist and the dancer standprecariously balanced on a watershed thatdivides two antithetical destinies: on theone hand, they may become examples of“wage-labour that is not at the same timeproductive labour”; on the other, they havea quality that is suggestive of politicalaction. Their nature is essentiallyamphibian. So far, however, each of thepotential developments inherent in thefigure of the performing artist – poiesis or

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praxis, Work or Action – seems to excludeits opposite.54

The alienation this creates is so all-pervasivethat although the alienation of labor was amuch-studied topic in mid twentieth century, thecondition has settled like a miasma over all of usand has disappeared as a topic. At the sametime, while some artists are once again occupiedwith the nature of labor and the role of artists insocial transformation, Continental theorists havefor most of the past century looked at socialtransformation through the prism of art andculture. The focus on culture itself as a means ofcritiquing and perhaps superseding class rulehas a long lineage. Perry Anderson has pointedout that Marxism on the whole was inhibitedfrom dealing with economic and politicalproblems from the 1920s on, and whenquestions concerning the surmounting ofcapitalism turned to superstructural matters,theorists did not, as might be expected,concentrate on questions of the state or on law,but on culture.55

Poster for the Festival of New Ideas found on the New York subway.

          While public practices are entered into theroster of practices legible within the art world,they are entered as well into the creative-classthesis, in which they will, along with the muchlarger group of knowledge-industry workers,transform cities, not by entering intotransformative political struggle but rather toserve as unwitting assistants to upper-classrule.           Two near-simultaneous New York Cityinitiatives, occurring as I write, provide insight onthe way this plays out, the first from the artists’vantage point, the second from the point of viewof the powers-that-be. An ambitious conference,at a not-for-profit Brooklyn gallery describingitself as “committed to organizing shows that are

critically, socially, and aesthetically aware,” isannounced as follows: “In recent years manyartists have begun to work in non-art contexts,pushing the limits of their creative practice tohelp solve social problems.” Offerings range frompresentations on “artists embedded in thegovernment, industries, and electoral politics” tothose operating beyond the cash economy. Theannouncement further elucidates:

[W]e hope to further the possibilities forartists to participate in the development ofsocial policy. Artists, art historians,museum professionals, academics, policyexperts and government officials willconsider how the art making process cancontribute to social change as well asencourage elected officials, communityleaders and the general public to think ofartists as potential partners in a variety ofcircumstances.

In direct counterpoint is the Festival of Ideas forthe New City, in Manhattan, initiated by the NewMuseum and sponsored by Goldman Sachs,American Express, Audi, The RockefellerFoundation, and New York magazine, amongothers, and with thanks to local businesses,socialites, and a clutch of New York Citycommissioners:

[This festival], a major new collaborativeinitiative ... involving scores of Downtownorganizations, from universities to artsinstitutions and community groups,working together to effect change ... willharness the power of the creativecommunity to imagine the future city ... .The Festival will serve as a platform forartists, writers, architects, engineers,designers, urban farmers, planners, andthought leaders to exchange ideas, proposesolutions, and invite the public toparticipate.

It comprises a conference, the inevitable streetfestival, and “over one hundred independentprojects and public events.”56 The conferenceproper is described (in the inflated vocabularythat we have seen some smaller institutions alsoadopt) as including:

visionaries and leaders – includingexemplary mayors, forecasters, architects,artists, economists, and technologyexperts – addressing the Festival themes:The Heterogeneous City; The NetworkedCity; The Reconfigured City; and TheSustainable City.

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These two events suggest the two registers ofpublic projects, of the creatives remaking theurban world, which only appear to be followingthe same script. While artists look for themessianic or the merely helpful moment, aimingfor “social change,” the institutional productionis centered on various trendy formulas for the“future city.” (Yet the institutional event hassecured the participation of most of lowerManhattan and Brooklyn’s project and nonprofitspaces – including some of those whose pressreleases figured in the present essay – no doubtfiguring that they can hardly afford to take apass.)

          For the business and urban planningcommunities, culture is not a social good but aninstrumentalized “strategic cultural asset.”Consultant and former UK professor of urbanpolicy Colin Mercer writes of the “strategicsignificance of intellectual property-basedcultural and creative (content) industries inurban business communities” that can “work inpartnership and synergy with existing/traditionalbusinesses to enhance footfall, offer, brandingand opportunity for consumption and diversity of

experience.”57 Mercer notes that thecharacteristics of urban life that formerly drovepeople to the suburbs – such as diversity anddensity, on the one hand, and, on the other,vacant old factories and warehouses considered“negative location factors in the old economy” –are “potentially positive factors in the neweconomy because they are attractive to those[the “knowledge-based workers of the neweconomy”] who bring with them the potential foreconomic growth.”58

          Mercer’s paper is, of course, a reading ofFlorida’s thesis; he writes:

This is not an “arts advocate” making theargument. It is an urban and regionaleconomist from Carnegie Mellon Universitywhose work has become very influential forurban and regional policy and planning inNorth America, Europe and Asia ... becausehe has recognised something distinctiveabout the contemporary make up ofsuccessful, innovative and creative citieswhich ... take account of ... what he callsthe “creative class.”59

Indeed. Florida’s paradigm is useful for cities –especially “second tier” cities, if Alan Blum iscorrect – looking to create a brand and publicityfor the purposes of attracting both capital andlabor (the right kind of labor, for service workerswill come of their own accord). As I suggested inan earlier installment, it is of little importancewhether the theory pans out empirically, since itserves as a ticket of entry to renewed discoursesof urban transformation. If and when it hasoutlived its use, another promotional package,complete with facts and figures, will succeed it,much as Florida’s urban conversation has largelyreplaced the more ominous “zero tolerance” and“broken windows” theories of the problematicsof urban governance – a replacement that hasbeen necessitated by lower crime statistics andperhaps from the success of evacuating ordepoliticizing poor and working class residents. Iam more concerned with the point of view of thebroadly defined creative classes, especially ofartists and other “cultural workers,” although Iremind myself that immaterial and flexible laborlink the creatives and those implicitly deemeduncreatives, which in the US seems to have led toa wholesale standing down from organizationand militancy.           But, from a policy point of view, as UKurbanist Max Nathan remarks,

Everywhere, culture and creativity improvethe quality of life; iconic buildings and goodpublic spaces can help places repositionand rebrand. But most cities – large and

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small – would be better off startingelsewhere: growing the economic base;sharpening skills, connectivity and accessto markets; ensuring local people canaccess new opportunities, and improvingkey public services... .60

Let me, briefly, take this discussion back to HenriLefebvre. Lefebvre, as I noted at the start of thisessay, in Part I, had posited that the urbanrepresented a qualitatively new stage in theevolution of society, from agrarian, to industrial,to urban. Thus, he reasoned, future mobilizationsagainst capitalism would have an urbancharacter. This troubled Manuel Castells, who,writing as a structuralist following Althusser,preferred to focus on the ideological function ofthe city – its role in securing the reproduction ofrelations of production – rather thanapproaching the city as an essentially newspace, one, moreover, that might be construed asendowed with quasi-metaphysical features forthe production of both alienation andemancipation. As urban theorist Andy Merrifieldwrites:

While the city, in Lefebvre’s dialectic,functioned for capitalism, it actuallythreatened capitalism more; now, inCastells’s dialectic, while the citythreatened capitalism, it somehow hadbecome more functional for capitalism.Indeed, the city, Castells writes, hadbecome the “spatial specificity of theprocesses of reproduction of labor-powerand of the processes of reproduction of themeans of production.”61

The relative clarity of European class politicscould allow Castells to write that Gaullistattempts at urban renewal were

aimed at left-wing and in particularCommunist sectors of the electorate. ...Changing this population means changingthe political tendency of the sector ... .

Urban renewal is strong where the electoraltradition of the parliamentary “majority” isweak.62

Zukin’s interpretation of urban events is similarbut tailored to American conditions. The weakand often antagonistic relation of the US studentmovement, through the 1960s and 70s, toworking class life and culture helped produce apolitics of cultural resistance in the newlydeveloping “creative class” that was cut off,culturally, physically, and existentially, fromtraditional forms of urban working classorganization. Although artists, flexible serviceworkers, and “creatives” more generally may notbe the source of capital accumulation, it isinarguable that the rising value of the builtenvironment depends on their pacification of thecity, while the severing of relations to classhistory – even of one’s own family in manyinstances – has produced at best a blindness,and at worst an objectively antagonistic relation,to the actual character of urban traditions of lifeand of struggle. What often remains is anostalgic and romanticized version of city life inwhich labor is misperceived as little more than acovert service function, for the production of“artisanal” goods, for example, and the creationof spaces of production and consumption alike(manufacturing lofts, workshops, bars, taverns,greasy spoons, barbershops) obscured by anostalgic haze.

5. Artists Seeking Inspiration – OrConsolation

Anthropologist David Graeber writes with somebemusement on a conference of several centralfigures in Italian “post-workerist” theory –Maurizio Lazzarato, Toni Negri, Bifo Berardi, andJudith Revel – held at the Tate Modern in Londonin January 2008. Graeber professes to beastonished that neither the speakers nor theorganizers have any relation to art, or even muchto say about it (except for a few historicalreferences), although the event was sponsoredby a museum and the hall was packed. He callshis review “The Sadness of Post-Workerism, orArt and Immaterial Labour Conference,” becauseof what he describes as a general feeling ofgloom on the part of speakers, traceableprimarily to Bifo, who at that moment haddecided that “all was lost.”63 Graeber seems tofind a certain congruence with the perpetualcrisis of the art world and the difficulties of post-Fordist theorizing, especially since he findsLazzarato’s concept of immaterial labor to berisible. He decides that the artists present haveinvited the speakers to perform as prophets, totell them where they are in this undoubtedhistorical rupture – which Graeber finds to be the

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perpetual state of the art world. However, hediagnoses the speakers as having, for thatmoment at least, decided that they too have lostthe future.          I am far from prepared to take this to meanthat artists have lost the future. It is not of minorconsequence that this sort of conference is astaple of the art world (Graeber probably knowsthis too). Philosophy fills in for previous sourcesof inspiration, from theology and patrons’preferences to the varieties of scientifictheorization or political revolution. A recentSwedish conference asks, “Is the artist a role-model for the contemporary, ‘post-Fordian’worker – flexible, creative, adaptable and cheap– a creative entrepreneur? Or the other wayaround – a professionalized function within anadvanced service economy?”64 A questionperhaps worth asking, and which many,particularly European, critics and theorists,along with some artists, are inclined to ask. Hereis something to consider: the cultural sphere,despite relentless co-optation by marketing, is aperpetual site of resistance and critique.Bohemian/romantic rejectionism, withdrawalinto exile, utopianism, and ideals of reform areendemic to middle-class students, forming thebasis of anti-bourgeois commitments – and noteveryone grows out of it, despite the rise offashion-driven (i.e. taste-driven) hipsterism.Sociologist Ann Markusen, in a kind of balance ofLloyd’s critique of the docile utility of bohemiansas workers, reminds us that artists areoverwhelmingly to the left on the politicalspectrum and engage at least sporadically inpolitical agitation and participation.65

          I am also not inclined to follow Debord orDuchamp and give up the terrain of art andculture. Certainly, celebration and lifestyle maniaforestall critique; a primary emphasis onenjoyment, fun, or experience precludes theformation of a robust and exigent publicdiscourse. But even ruckuses have their place asdisruption and intervention; some may see themas being less self-interested than social projectsbut as full collective projects, while fun remainsa term that refers to private experience. There isno reasonable prescription for how, and in whatregister, to engage with the present conditions ofservitude and freedom.          Brian Holmes has likened the dancebetween institutions and artists to a game ofLiar’s Poker.66 If the art world thinks the artistmight be holding aces, they let him or her in, butif she turns out actually to have them – that is, tohave living political content in the work – theartist is ejected. Although Chantal Mouffeexhorts artists (rightly, I suppose) not to abandonthe museum – which I take to mean the art worldproper – there is nothing to suggest we should

not simultaneously occupy the terrain of theurban.          ! This essay is an expanded version of a talk given at the thirdHermes Lecture at Provinciehuis Den Bosch on November 14,2010, arising from a suggestion by Camiel van Winkel toconsider the work of Richard Florida. I thank Stephen Squibbfor his invaluable and edifying assistance during the researchand editing process and Brian Kuan Wood for his editing helpand infinite patience. Thanks also to Alexander Alberro andStephen Wright for their helpful responses to earlier drafts.

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Martha Rosler is an artist who works with multiplemedia, including photography, sculpture, video, andinstallation. Her interests are centered on the publicsphere and landscapes of everyday life – actual andvirtual – especially as they affect women. Relatedprojects focus on housing, on the one hand, andsystems of transportation, on the other. She has longproduced works on war and the “national securityclimate,” connecting everyday experiences at homewith the conduct of war abroad. Other works, from bustours to sculptural recreations of architectural details,are excavations of history.

      1In the course of designing a citygarden in Helsinki, I learned thatcity planners worried I would failto distinguish the urban from therural via the forms and types ofplanting. Finland has too muchcountryside for their liking, itappears.

      2Advanced societies in thetwentieth century saw theapparent conquest of diseasesassociated with dirt and soilthrough improved sanitation andgerm-fighting technologies.Fresh air movements againstdisease were importantelements of urban reform,opening the way for renewedefforts to enlarge the playgroundalready provided to the middleclass and extended to theworking class in the early part ofthe century.

      3Paris already had such arepurposed industrial rail line,the Promenade Plantée, whosetransformation into a park beganin the late 1980s.

      4Poultry keeping was banned inNew York City in an effort toextirpate the remnants of thefarms and farm-like practicesthat survived in far-flungcorners of the city, such asGravesend, Brooklyn, or StatenIsland. New York City, likevirtually every municipality, hasdetailed laws on the keeping ofanimals, whether classed aspets, companions, or livestock,including those held forslaughter. Pets were a matter ofcontention, banned frommiddle- and working-classapartment buildings, until the1960s. Animals classified aswild are banned – the category“wild animals” defines theuncivilized zo"sphere; ergo,people who keep them are not“virtuous” but decadent or“sick.” New Yorkers may recallthe incident a decade ago inwhich Mayor Giuliani, asuburbanite longing to join theranks of the cosmopolitan,hurled personal insults(prominently and repeatedly,mentioning “an excessiveconcern with little weasels”) at acaller to his weekly radioprogram who wanted ferrets tobe legalized as household pets.The call, from David Guthartz ofthe New York Ferrets’ RightsAdvocacy, prompted a famousthree-minute tirade in whichGiuliani opined, “There’ssomething deranged about you.The excessive concern that youhave for ferrets is something youshould examine with a therapist,not with me.” Seehttp://www.concordmonitor.com/article/from-giuliani-come s-revealing-rant andhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqmbbPRDyXY&feature=related.

      5See http://rooftopfarms.org /.

      6

Here one is tempted to offer afootnote to Lefebvre’s mid-century observations on theurban frame (see Martha Rosler,“Culture Class: Art, Creativity,Urbanism, Part I: Art andUrbanism, e-flux journal, Issue21, http://e-flux.com/journal/view/190), to take account of theblowback onto the urbanparadigm of the neoliberalattributes of exurbia that wehave classed under the rubric ofsuburbanization. Asneoliberalism takes hold, evenlong-standing democraticprocesses of public decision-making, such as town meetingsthat obtained in small towns,succumb. As to the question ofaristocracy, the figure of thearistocrat – especially the one inratty old furs and draftymansions – has haunteddiscussions of the art world, forartists are still disproportionallyinfluential for the culture atlarge, while some reaphandsome financial gain fromthis excursion and others simplystand around.

      7J. Eric Oliver, Democracy inSuburbia (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2001). Ratherthan town meetings, one moretypically finds the retreat to thebackyard and the country club.

      8The work was installed in 1981,having been commissioned bythe Art-in-Architecture Percentfor Art Program, under theauspices of the federal GeneralServices Administration, whichalso oversaw its removal. Theevent is interesting because itcalled upon a probablymanufactured split between“the ordinary public” (thevictims of the art) and thepitiless elite sectors of the artworld – manufactured becausethe campaign for the removal ofthe work was in fact spurred byan aggrieved judge, Edward Re,of the arcane United StatesCustoms Court. The followingliterature on Tilted Arc may beuseful: Janet Zweig, Notes andComments column, New Yorker(Mar. 27, 1989); Harriet F. Senie,Tilted Arc Controversy:Dangerous Precedent?(Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 2001); GreggM. Horowitz, “Public Art/PublicSpace: The Spectacle of theTilted Arc Controversy,” TheJournal of Aesthetics and ArtCriticism 54, 1 (Winter 1996) (“anearly version of the strategy ofcensorship-as-liberation us edby regressive political forces inother antidemocratic projects,”8); and, by Serra’s wife, TheDestruction of Tilted Arc:Documents, eds. Martha Buskirkand Clara Weyergraf-Serra,(Cambridge, MA: The MITPress, 1990). For an immediate,partisan view, see the film TheTrial of Tilted Arc (1986),centering on the hearingsrelating to the removal of thesculpture.

      9“The Gates is the largest artwork

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since the Sphinx,” begins apromo site’s appreciative article,seehttp://wirednewyork.com/parks/central_park/christo_gates /.Mayor Bloomberg, a man knownto tout the arts for theireconomic potential, inauguratedthe work by dropping the firstcurtain. The artists call thefabric color “saffron,” a colorfuland exotic food spice but not theorange of the work. A lovelyarticle on children’s responsesto the work – upper-middleclass, upper class, and workingclass – includes the following:“Subsequent visits havesomewhat altered her view. ‘Idon't like the look of them but Ilike the way everybody is at thepark and happy,’ she said,making her the ideal experiencerof the work.” Julie Salomon,“Young Critics See ‘The Gates’and Offer Their Reviews: Mixed,”New York Times, February 17,2005. Seehttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/17/arts/design/17kids.htm l.

      10See Sharon Zukin, Naked City:The Death and Life of AuthenticUrban Places (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2010).,discussed in part II of this essay.

      11A further consideration of thisproject and its municipallysanctioned follow-up, OlafurEliasson’s Waterfalls (2008),would have to point to theinsistence of these projects onthe power of the artist, and hisgrant-getting, fund-raising , andbureaucracy-besting prowess,with urbanized nature as theground. In other words, theintellectual labor of the artist isdisclosed to cognoscenti but thespectacle suffices for themasses. This problem was partlyaddressed by Eliasson in a radiointerview describing thescaffolding of the Waterfalls asan homage to (manual) labor, atheme not otherwise muchnoted in his work.

      12Georg Simmel, “The Metropolisand Mental Life,” in TheSociology of Georg Simmel ed.Kurt Wolff (Glencoe, Il: FreePress of Glencoe, 1950).Originally published as DieGroßstadt und das Geistesleben(Dresden: Petermann, 1903).

      13Here consider the relationshipbetween street fashion, workingclass attire, and middle-classenvy of these. In addition, beforeyouth-culture demands in the1960s loosened most dresscodes (prompting outragedbusinesses to post noticesannouncing “No Shoes, No Shirt,No Service”), it was illegal towear “short shorts” and otherforms of skimpy dress on NewYork City streets.

      14Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:Sovereign Power and Bare Life(Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1998), 3–4.

      15Quoted in Yúdice, TheExpediency of Culture: Uses ofCulture in the Global Era(Durham: Duke University Press,2003), 196. (See Part II of thepresent article.) Jeremy Rifkinsubsequently published a bookwith the same title as his article.See Jeremy Rifkin, Age ofAccess: The New Culture ofHypercapitalism Where All of LifeIs a Paid-for Experience (NewYork: Tarcher, 2000).

      16Rifkin, Age of Access, 54.

      17Joseph Pine II and James H.Gilmore, Authenticity: WhatConsumers Really Want (Boston:Harvard Business School Press,2007) and The ExperienceEconomy: Work Is Theatre &Every Business a Stage (Boston:Harvard Business School Press,1999). Aurora is a tiny town ofabout 13,000 residents, inNortheastern Ohio, near Akron.Do visit Pine and Gilmore’s fun-loving website,http://www.strategichorizons.com/index.html. Rifkin citestheir first book: “Managementconsultants B. Joseph Pine andJames Gilmore advise theircorporate clients that ‘in theemerging Experience Economy,companies must realize theymake memories, not goods,’”Age of Access, 145.

      18Two reviews, by two womenreviewers, from one day’s NewYork Times Arts section makethis point. They sharply contrastthe old, “culture is seriousbusiness,” mode and the new,“culture ought to be fun” mode.A senior, front-page reviewer in“Cuddling with Little Girls, Dogsand Music,” writes skepticallyabout crowd-pleaser YoshitomoNara’s show, at the formerlystaid Asia Society, that it “addsnew wrinkles to the continuingattempts by today’s museums toattract wider, youngeraudiences, and the growingemphasis on viewerparticipation.” A few pages on, in“A Raucous Reflection onIdentity: Jewish and Feminine,” ajunior reviewer writes, “Don’t beput off by the yawn-inducingtitle of the Jewish Museum’s'Shifting the Gaze: Painting andFeminism.' The show is apuckish, punchy look at thewomen’s art movement [thatdraws] inspiration from MarciaTucker’s ‘Bad Girls’ survey of1994.” There is nothingparticularly raucous in the worksshe describes. Seehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/arts/design/10nara.htm landhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/10/arts/design/10shifting.html. The art journalist JerrySaltz, based at a localpublication, earlierdemonstrated his lack ofrecognition of the atmosphere ofexclusivity, high seriousness,and sobriety typically projectedby high-art institutions

(definitively analyzed by PierreBourdieu) by wondering in printwhy people do not visit gallerieseven though they do not chargeadmission. The need to abrogatethis forbidding atmosphere isnot what is at issue here, but theemphasis upon “the museumexperience,” or experiences,represents a new managementimperative.

      19Seehttp://www.contaminatenyc.com/?tag=contesta-rockhair.

      20See http://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,510609,00.html.

      21Vanessa Fuhrmans, “BerlinBroods over a Glitz Invasion,”Wall Street Journal, August 20,2010. Seehttp://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383312394581850.html.

      22Rachel B. Doyle, “Krakow: AddArt, Stir in Cachet,” New YorkTimes, August, 29, 2010. Seehttp://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C05EED81E31F93AA1575BC0A9669D8B63.

      23See part II of this essay.

      24Or not very gracefully. InFebruary of this year, the stateof Michigan ordered the Detroitschool superintendent to closehalf of Detroit’s schools,swelling class size to sixty insome cases. See JenniferChambers, “Michigan OrdersDPS to Make Huge Cuts,” DetroitNews, February 21, 2011. Seehttp://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2011/02/michigan_orders.php. The library systemmay also be forced to closealmost all its branches; seeChristine MacDonald andRoNeisha Mullen, “DetroitLibrary Could Close Most of ItsBranches,” Detroit News, April15, 2011. Seehttp://detnews.com/article/20110415/METRO/104150371/Detroit-library-could-close-most -of-its-branches#ixzz1JcLCtB fD.

      25The auto industry began sitingsome of its factories in thesuburbs and small townssurrounding Detroit, and autoworkers followed them there;however, black auto workerscomplained they were kept inDetroit at the dirtiest, leastdesirable jobs, while the unionbosses were complicit with theindustry.

      26See Dan Georgakas and MarvinSurkin, Detroit: I Do Mind Dying:A Study in Urban Revolution(London and New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1975; Cambridge,MA: South End Press, 1998).

      27

Berry Gordy’s Motown Recordsitself departed long ago; theBelleville Three had moved on bythe 1990s, although the DetroitElectronic Music Festivalcontinues.

      28Seehttp://abc.go.com/shows/detroit-1-8-7.

      29Fascination with ruins is a longstanding and deeply romanticfacet of mourning andmelancholy; currentmanifestations include well-established tourist pilgrimagesto sites like New York’s formerWorld Trade Center but also aninterest, no longer disavowed, inimages of accidents, death, anddestruction, and sometimes up-close, well-supervised, andpreferably well-funded short-term visits to the safer edges ofwar zones of various sorts.

      30Melena Ryzik, “Detroit’sRenewal, Slow-Cooked,” NewYork Times, October 19, 2010.The article opens, “How muchgood can a restaurant do?” andlater comments, “To make surethe positive change takes hold,Mr. Cooley has parlayed the goodwill of his barbecue joint into arestless pursuit of community-building.” Seehttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/dining/20Detroit.html.

      31Ibid.

      32Boggs’s most recent book,written with Scott Kurashige, isThe Next American Revolution:Sustainable Activism for theTwenty-First Century (Berkeley:University of California Press,2011). Among her other booksare Revolution and Evolution inthe Twentieth Century (1976) andLiving for Change: AnAutobiography (1998). In 1992,she co-founded the DetroitSummer youth program; havingmoved with her husband Jamesto Detroit, where she expectedthe working class to “rise up andreconstruct the city,” sheadapted instead to a city in avery different phase. “I think it’svery difficult for someone whodoesn’t live in Detroit to say youcan look at a vacant lot and,instead of seeing devastation,see hope, see the opportunity togrow your own food, see anopportunity to give young peoplea sense of process ... that thevacant lot represents thepossibilities for a culturalrevolution.... I think filmmakersand writers are coming to thecity and trying to spread theword.” Democracy Now! radioprogram (April 14, 2011),archived athttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/4/14/roundtable_assessing_obamas_budget_plan_state.

      33Moore is from Flint, Michigan,the site of the historic sit-downstrike of 1936–37 that led to the

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empowerment of the UnitedAuto Workers as the solebargaining representative ofGeneral Motors workers; theRoger of the title was RogerSmith, the head of GM at thetime and the executiveresponsible for huge workerlayoffs that led to the near-totaldevastation of Flint. Credits forthe film Finally Got the News are“A Film by Stewart Bird, ReneLichtman, and Peter Gessner,Produced in Association with theLeague of Revolutionary BlackWorkers.”

      34See Camilo José Vergara, TheNew American Ghetto (Newark:Rutgers University Press, 1995).

      35Parts of this project wereincluded in the exhibition “HomeFront,” the first exhibition of thecycle “If You Lived Here” that Iorganized at the Dia ArtFoundation in New York in 1989.

      36This project, two years in themaking (2008-2010), willcontinue through the auspices ofWayne State University withsome further collaboration withBerenyi and with EasternMichigan University. Seehttp://monikaberenyi.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/detroit-city-poetry-oral-history-proje ct-2010-2011.

      37Seehttp://www.fusionartsmuseum.org/ex_crash.htm.

      38See Donna Terek (columnist),“Detroit Ice House Is Really AllAbout Art,” Detroit News (Feb. 7,2010); andhttp://detnews.com/article/20100207/OPINION03/2070309/Detroit-Ice-House-is-really-al l-about-art, which includes avideo of the project. Fundingwas sought via Kickstarter. Thecreators describe the project as“An Architectural Installationand Social Change Project” ontheir blog,http://icehousedetroit.blogspot.com/ (now seeminglyinactive), detailing their Detroitactivities, a forthcoming filmand photo book, and the manymedia sites that have featuredtheir project.

      39Personal communications.Bergman supplied these links:http://www.ubu.com/film/aa_wildflowers.html andhttp://www.alejandra-aeron.com/new_center.html. See alsohttp://www.alejandra-aeron.com/wildflowers.html.

      40According to its website,http://detroitunrealestateagency.blogspot.com/2009/12/speaking-for-detroit.html, “t heDetroit Unreal Estate Agency ...is aimed at new types of urbanpractices (architecturally,artistically, institutional ly,everyday life, and so forth) that

came into existence, creating anew value system in Detroit. Theproject is an initiative byarchitects Andrew Herscher andMireille Roddier, curator FemkeLutgerink, and Partizan Publik’sChristian Ernsten and JoostJanmaat. In collaboration withthe Dutch Art Institute and theUniversity of Michigan,generously funded by theMondriaan Foundation andFonds BKVB.” I note that, bychance, Andrew Herscher is thearchitect who provided a veryworkable partnership on plansfor the building my students andcollaborators and I developed atUtopia Station at the VeniceBiennale of 2003. Another Dutch residency in pilotphase is the Utrecht-basedExpodium International ArtistsResidency Program: EuropeanPartnership, with Detroit. “Thegoal ... is to enter into a long-term collaboration with Detroitby creating an expandingnetwork ... to exchangeknowledge about urban models,shrinkage and social, politicaland artistic developments inurban transition areas. Detroitbased cultural initiativesrespond creatively to the city’scurrent situation and set to playa vital role in the redevelopmentof Detroit. It is this conditionthat has our special interest.Information gained through thisplatform provides vital input forthe Expodium program here inthe Netherlands.” Seehttp://www.newstrategiesdmc.blogspot.com.Recently, fifteen students fromthe Netherlands participated inthe Detroit City Poetry Projectpresentation at the DetroitMuseum of Contemporary Art(MOCAD); seehttp://detroitlife313.com/headlines/radio/detroit-life-r adio-w-john-sinclair. Why does theNetherlands send its art,architecture, and students tostudy cities, towns, andneighborhoods – includingDutch ones – considered to poseintractable problems? One maysurmise that the Dutch, whoseem fully engaged with thecreative-class-rescuehypothesis, are hoping thatartists and architects will assistin urban research andmelioration and further helpthem found a new consultativeindustry: a Dutch urban advisorycorps (this last solution – urbanconsultation – was proposed tome as an answer to my question“Why?” by Salomon Frausto,Head of ArchitecturalBroadcasting at the BerlageInstitute in Rotterdam).

      41See http://historyofartandsocialpractice.tumblr.com/post/633884270/shotgun-review-the-role-of-the-art-institution-in .

      42The Wiz is a version of TheWonderful Wizard of Oz (1900),journalist L. Frank Baum’simportant putatively allegoricalchildren’s book about rural farm-dwellers translocating to up-to-date metropolises and of a still-

fascinating mid-century musicalfilm The Wizard of Oz (1939),based on the Oz tales; this laterversion of 1978 has a largelyAfrican American cast andfeatures Detroit-born MichaelJackson.

      43Seehttp://www.cascoprojects.org/?entryid=376.

      44Ibid.

      45Seehttp://www.dwell.com/articles/ice-house-detroit.html. Whilevacillating between claiming itas an “architectural installation” and as a social changeendeavor, the project’s authorssuggest that the house will be,virtuously, disassembled and theland donated perhaps to acommunity garden.

      46Guyton has had some degree ofsuccess as a local, indigenous,non-elite artist of choice andwas included in the 2008 VeniceArchitecture Biennale as well asgarnering other attention. ForSala’s project, seehttp://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=80261&searchid=14785.Rama’s project, as part of hismayoral endeavors, has had adifferent trajectory. According tothe UK’s Architecturefoundation, Rama’s actionsconstituted “an aesthetic andpolitical act, which promptedsocial transformation, and muchdebate, through its visualizationof signs of change.” During the2003 edition of the TiranaBiennial, Sala and Hans UlrichObrist invited Olafur Eliasson,Liam Gillick, and DominiqueGonzalez-Foerster , among otherartists, to “turn residentialblocks into unique works of art”;see http://vimeo.com/8254763.The project continued, and in the2009 iteration included façadecontributions from Tala Madani,Adrian Paci, Tomma Abts, andothers. However, the TiranaBiennial 2009 website notes thatthe exhibition would criticallyaddress the city’s moment ofdevelopment “through ‘wild’urbanization, fast capitalinvestments and within thehorizon of a neoliberal context,[expanding] into the domain ofarchitecture and processes ofurbanization.” Seehttp://www.tica-albania.org/TICAB/.

      47Although the mayor derided thegroup as vandals, a number ofthe buildings were subsequentlytorn down. See Celeste Headlee,“Detroit Artists Paint TownOrange to Force Change,”National Public Radio radiobroadcast, December 7, 2006.Good magazine uploaded a videoof the project to YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQwKkK1bggY. One of thegroup comments: “This didn’tstart out as this social crusade;

it started as an artisticendeavor.” (That’s what they allsay, if they have any art-worldsense; see Part II of the presentarticle.)

      48For Fletcher’s testimony, seeBetween Artists: Harrell Fletcherand Michael Rakowitz (New York:A.R.T. Press, 2008).

      49The term “interventionism”streaked like a comet across theart world firmament but seemsto have been largelyextinguished.

      50Zukin, Naked City.

      51I attempted to draw attention toboth this trend’s promises andits perils with the work entitledProposed Helsinki Garden inSingapore at the latter city’sbiennale earlier this year. Theproject attemptedsimultaneously to articulate acommitment to public practiceand a serious, not to say critical,examination of it. Too often, indiscussing art, one finds theequation of criticism withrefusal, allowing the absence ofone to indict the reality of theother.

      52Facebook itself takes the form inwhich shouting into the windsmall self-promotionalmessages to an appreciativeimaginary public is encouraged,and in which the occasionalopenings for the genuineexchange of ideas seem to snapshut in an instant. At the otherpole from the particularlanguage of promotion are thegrant-writing discourses,Orwellian in their Byzantineinapplicability to most artists orprojects you might know, butwhose categorical imperativeshave only escalated over theyears. In the UK, the categoriesfor art institutions and academicdepartments are mind-boggling,but everywhere thisinstrumentalized languageframing instrumentalizedprojects is infecting the terms inwhich art exhibitions are laidout.

      53See http://e-flux.com/journal/view/107.

      54Paolo Virno, “Virtuosity andRevolution: The Political Theoryof Exodus,” trans. Ed Emory, inRadical Thought in Italy: APotential Politics (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press,1996), 188–209.

      55Perry Anderson, Considerationson Western Marxism (London:Verso, 1979), 75.

      56Seehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVRHAWiJieY andhttp://www.youtube.com/watch

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?v=JMjaGVCQS70&NR=1.

      57Colin Mercer, “Cultural Planningfor Urban Development andCreative Cities” (2006), 2–3. Seehttp://www.culturalplanning-oresund.net/PDF_activities/maj06/Shanghai_cultural_planning_paper.pdf.

      58Here, Mercer is quoting a 2004report put out by Partners forLivable Communities, whichadvises many BusinessImprovement Districts, or BIDs,with cultural elements. (A BID isa public-private partnership, astep along the path toprivatization of urban publicamenities and spaces. In NewYork they saw their genesisduring the fiscal crisis of the1970s.) Mercer also points outthat “knowledge based workers”make up half the work force ofthe European Union.

      59Ibid., 2. Mercer’s enthusiasmpresumably factored into hisown decision to leave academiafor consulting work.

      60Max Nathan, “The Wrong Stuff?Creative Class Theory andEconomic Performance in UKCities.” See http://cjrs-rcsr.org/archive s/30-3/NATHAN.pdf.

      61Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism:A Marxist Tale of the City (NewYork: Routledge, 2002), 125.

      62Manuel Castells, The UrbanQuestion: A Marxist Approach(Boston: The MIT Press, 1979),317.

      63David Graeber, “The Sadness ofPost-Workerism, or ‘Art AndImmaterial Labour’ Conference ASort of Review (Tate Britain,Saturday 19 January 2008).”Available athttp://www.commoner.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/graeber_sadness.pdf, http://www.scribd.com/doc/38093582/The-Sadness-of-Post-Workerism-David-Graeber, andhttp://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20080713130247120.

      64Seehttp://www.konstnarsnamnden.se/default.aspx?id=13909 an dhttp://www.konstnarsnamnden.se/%20default.aspx?id=13914.

      65Ann Markusen, “UrbanDevelopment and the Politics ofa Creative Class: Evidence fromthe Study of Artists,”Environment and Planning A 38,no. 10 (2006): 1921–1940;Richard Lloyd. Neo-Bohemia: Artand Commerce in thePostindustrial City (New York:Routledge, 2006). See part II ofthe present article for a furtherdiscussion of these authors’

works.

      66Brian Holmes, “Liar’s Poker,” inUnleashing the CollectivePhantoms: Essays in ReverseImagineering (New York:Autonomedia, 2008). Firstpublished as “Liar’s Poker:Representation ofPolitics/Politics ofRepresentation” in Springerin(January 2003). Seehttp://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1276&lang=en.

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