PHPM05: Scrutinizing the Cartography of Talent

Posted by DINP on May 25, 2007

  • Date: Tuesday, May 22, 2007
  • Location: University of the Arts - Solmssen Court (320 S. Broad St)
  • Managing Director:
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Neutrality and Palatability (DINP)
  • Attending Directors:
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Meaning (DIM)
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of the Ecological Subjectivity (DIES)
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of the Unmentionable and the authentic (DIUMa)
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Art and Social Change (DIASC)
    Director of the Dept. for the Investigation of Credible Disinformation (DICD)

Scrutinizing the Cartography of Talent - A discussion about the Creative Class in proximity to a lecture by its founder, Richard Florida is an investigation into the utilization and marketing of the creative city and the artist as economic savior. Can we interrogate “hipsterization strategies,” where artists are active in the (re)development of blighted urban spaces? How do artists participate or resist this process? Is art inherently benign? Or can art and artist cause harm?

Richard Florida discovered the creative class. Now he markets his demographic to “B” cities so they might attract the creative class, growing their city centers, spurring development and sprucing up the hood. Florida has been called the “Pioneering Cartographer of Talent.” But is this new creative city a scrim, disguising deeper seeded economic issues. Is the creative city sustainable policy and does it use artists as a tool to create wealth for others? Does the post-critical artist embrace the new commercial role of the artist?

* This discussion may implicate us.

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Attendees to the Richard Florida talk were invited to “Brand” themselves with nametags produce by DINP. The following is a list of the brandings, some of which borrowed from Florida’s language, some from his critics:

  • Homo Creativus
  • Uncreative
  • Intangible industrialist
  • Young, wannabe rebel with ambiguous motivations
  • Post-critical Artist
  • Regenerator
  • Young, urban knowledge worker
  • Canary of the Creative Economy

On the reverse side of each nametag was a quote. The following is a list of the quotes and a link to their source:

The production of authentic neighborhood cultures through deliberate public-policy interventions is a daunting, if not infeasible, task.
From: Struggling with the Creative Class by Jamie Peck - PDF
[To become a creative city you must] enable artists and other creatives to build sweat equity in emerging creative neighborhoods; promote the adaptive reuse of buildings; support festivals and other street-level events; and, above all, be ‘authentic.
From: Struggling with the Creative Class by Jamie Peck - PDF
Florida confidently asserts that any big city, with the right political will, ‘can turn it around’, and most of the other urban centers can at least have a shot, if they possess the essentials — like a good university, some ‘authentic’ neighborhoods, a handful of high-tech employers.
From: Struggling with the Creative Class by Jamie Peck - PDF
Homo creativus is an atomized subject, apparently, with a preference for intense but shallow and noncommittal relationships, mostly played out in the sphere of consumption and on the street.
From: Struggling with the Creative Class by Jamie Peck - PDF
At various points, Florida concedes that the crowding of creatives into gentrifying neighborhoods might generate inflationary housing-market pressures, that not only run the risk of eroding the diversity that the Class craves but, worse still, could smother the fragile ecology of creativity itself.
From: Struggling with the Creative Class by Jamie Peck - PDF
The uncreative population, one assumes, should merely look on, and learn.
From: Struggling with the Creative Class by Jamie Peck - PDF
Creative hipsters serve as a communicative vessel for branding projects; in between concept stores, galleries, fashion- and street art magazines, the cultural economy expands itself over the urban domain and in the public realm.
From : Back to the Future of the Creative City: Amsterdam’s creative redevelopment and the art of deception by Merijn Oudenampsen
The post-critical artist has an “uncritical embrace of the new commercial role of the artist”
From : Back to the Future of the Creative City: Amsterdam’s creative redevelopment and the art of deception by Merijn Oudenampsen
Poverty can be moved – distributed – but not remedied.
From: Extreme Makeover by Merijn Oudenampsen
Neo-bohemia isn’t just a zone of leisure consumption but also the locus for a new style of capitalist production
From: Neo-bohemian rhapsody by Andrew O’Hehir
To be neo-bohemian at all, [neighborhoods] must remain superficially hospitable to anti-establishment values while becoming both a “bohemian-themed entertainment zone” and a site of postindustrial production.
From: Neo-bohemian rhapsody by Andrew O’Hehir
Neo-bohemia is always contaminated by nostalgia, by the belief that the scene is over, and has been over since the yuppies moved in, the old bookstore closed, the Starbucks opened and so on.
From: Neo-bohemian rhapsody by Andrew O’Hehir
Bohemia dies a thousand deaths and is always reborn, and that “bohemia is always already over because it always already falls short of its adherents’ fantasies of social autonomy.” Social autonomy would mean both artistic freedom and cultural power.
From: Neo-bohemian rhapsody by Andrew O’Hehir
Should we be nostalgic for a life we ourselves transformed?
From: Neo-bohemian rhapsody by Andrew O’Hehir

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KEYWORDS: gentrification, identity, phpm