Al Jazeera carries an interesting article about capitalism and the artists, those they call the creative ‘class’, and particularly those centered in New York:-
Patti Smith - "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling,"
David Byrne - "the cultural part of the city - the mind - has been usurped by the top 1 percent".
The New York Times recently profiled Sitters Studio, a company that sends artists and musicians into the homes of New York's wealthiest families to babysit their children. "The artist-as-babysitter can be seen as a form of patronage in which lawyers, doctors and financiers become latter-day Medicis."
The creative class plays by the rules of the rich, because those are the only rules left. Credentialism, not creativity, is the passport to entry to the gated communities of the 1%.
Success is dependent on survival, and it is hard for most people to survive in an art world capital like New York, where some homeless people work two jobs. Success by geographical proxy comes with a price: purchased freedom for the rich, serving the rich for the rest.
Fields where advanced degrees were once a rarity - art, creative writing - now view them as a requirement. Unpaid internships and unpaid labour are rampant, blocking off industry access for those who cannot work without pay in the world's most expensive cities.
Artist Molly Crabapple remembers being told by a fellow artist - a successful man living off his inherited money - that a "real artist" must live in poverty. "What the artist was pretending he didn't know is that money is the passport to success," she writes. "We may be free beings, but we are constrained by an economic system rigged against us. What ladders we have, are being yanked away. Some of us will succeed. The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures."
Failure, in an economy of extreme inequalities, is a source of fear. To fail in an expensive city is not to fall but to plummet. In expensive cities, the career ladder comes with a drop-off to hell, where the fiscal punishment for risk gone wrong is more than the average person can endure. As a result, innovation is stifled, conformity encouraged. The creative class becomes the leisure class - or they work to serve their needs, or they abandon their fields entirely. But creative people should not fear failure. Creative people should fear the prescribed path to success - its narrowness, its specificity, its reliance on wealth and elite approval. When success is a stranglehold, true freedom is failure. The freedom to fail is the freedom to innovate, to experiment, to challenge.
To "succeed", one is supposed to leave a city like St Louis - a Middle-American city associated with poverty and crime. To "succeed" is to embody the definition of contemporary success: sanctioned, sanitised, solvent.
But sanctioned success is dependent on survival, and it is hard for most people to survive in an art world capital like New York, where some homeless people work two jobs. Success by geographical proxy comes with a price: purchased freedom for the rich, serving the rich for the rest.
Creativity is sometimes described as thinking outside the box. Today the box is a gilded cage. Perhaps it is time to reject the "gated citadels" - the cities powered by the exploitation of ambition, the cities where so much rides on so little opportunity. Reject their prescribed and purchased paths...Reject the places where you cannot speak out, and create, and think, and fail. Open your eyes to where you are, and see where you can go...."
The article’s author ‘imaginative’ solution is to re-locate from places like New York to the less popular cities but which are more suited to the budget of a struggling artist, such as St Louis. Surely Sarah Kendzior could have been a little more ambitious and come up with a bit more of a creative suggestion...perhaps such as changing the system and creating socialism!
Patti Smith - "New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling,"
David Byrne - "the cultural part of the city - the mind - has been usurped by the top 1 percent".
The New York Times recently profiled Sitters Studio, a company that sends artists and musicians into the homes of New York's wealthiest families to babysit their children. "The artist-as-babysitter can be seen as a form of patronage in which lawyers, doctors and financiers become latter-day Medicis."
The creative class plays by the rules of the rich, because those are the only rules left. Credentialism, not creativity, is the passport to entry to the gated communities of the 1%.
Success is dependent on survival, and it is hard for most people to survive in an art world capital like New York, where some homeless people work two jobs. Success by geographical proxy comes with a price: purchased freedom for the rich, serving the rich for the rest.
Fields where advanced degrees were once a rarity - art, creative writing - now view them as a requirement. Unpaid internships and unpaid labour are rampant, blocking off industry access for those who cannot work without pay in the world's most expensive cities.
Artist Molly Crabapple remembers being told by a fellow artist - a successful man living off his inherited money - that a "real artist" must live in poverty. "What the artist was pretending he didn't know is that money is the passport to success," she writes. "We may be free beings, but we are constrained by an economic system rigged against us. What ladders we have, are being yanked away. Some of us will succeed. The possibility of success is used to call the majority of people failures."
Failure, in an economy of extreme inequalities, is a source of fear. To fail in an expensive city is not to fall but to plummet. In expensive cities, the career ladder comes with a drop-off to hell, where the fiscal punishment for risk gone wrong is more than the average person can endure. As a result, innovation is stifled, conformity encouraged. The creative class becomes the leisure class - or they work to serve their needs, or they abandon their fields entirely. But creative people should not fear failure. Creative people should fear the prescribed path to success - its narrowness, its specificity, its reliance on wealth and elite approval. When success is a stranglehold, true freedom is failure. The freedom to fail is the freedom to innovate, to experiment, to challenge.
To "succeed", one is supposed to leave a city like St Louis - a Middle-American city associated with poverty and crime. To "succeed" is to embody the definition of contemporary success: sanctioned, sanitised, solvent.
But sanctioned success is dependent on survival, and it is hard for most people to survive in an art world capital like New York, where some homeless people work two jobs. Success by geographical proxy comes with a price: purchased freedom for the rich, serving the rich for the rest.
Creativity is sometimes described as thinking outside the box. Today the box is a gilded cage. Perhaps it is time to reject the "gated citadels" - the cities powered by the exploitation of ambition, the cities where so much rides on so little opportunity. Reject their prescribed and purchased paths...Reject the places where you cannot speak out, and create, and think, and fail. Open your eyes to where you are, and see where you can go...."
The article’s author ‘imaginative’ solution is to re-locate from places like New York to the less popular cities but which are more suited to the budget of a struggling artist, such as St Louis. Surely Sarah Kendzior could have been a little more ambitious and come up with a bit more of a creative suggestion...perhaps such as changing the system and creating socialism!
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