Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): John Gourley “Gringo” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

#access #technology #gentrification #class #labor #place

The recent election of Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York was hailed by many as a sign that the trend of economic displacement in major American urban centers was coming to an end. De Blasio ran on a progressive platform of government that serves the neediest, rather than campaign donors, and won handily on that message despite the city’s twelve prior years of wealth consolidation under billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. Even de Blasio’s art credentials are more populist than those of his philanthropist predecessor, whose namesake corporation appears on the donor boards of several major institutions in the city. While many have greeted his inauguration with a level of optimism not seen since President Obama’s first term, far fewer have raised the necessary question of what exactly defines the problems and the solutions we hope he will seek. Using current discussions of gentrification, shifting labor conditions, and the role of the arts in creativity and culture, I will attempt to do this here.

Artist Martha Rosler’s recent book, Culture Class (2013), is a herculean attempt to frame the scope and the terms of the gentrification debate as it concerns artists and other laborers in the new “creative economy.” Her critique centers on the influential theories of Richard Florida, whose Rise of the Creative Class (2002) is credited with establishing that term. Rosler gained prominence in the 1970s as a conceptual photographer and video artist deconstructing the implicit social conditioning conveyed by popular images in works such as The Bowery in Two Descriptive Systems (1974-75) and House Beautiful: Bringing the War Back Home (1967-72). Her extensively researched book identifies other theorists of urban renewal, addressing their perspectives from race, gender, and class angles. Her discussion of Florida’s legacy outlines how his acolytes in business, education, and urban planning have promoted an idea of contemporary white-collar labor as a creative pursuit while promoting investment in the arts as a benefit to property values. As such, wage laborers are encouraged to consider themselves engaged in fulfilling acts of creativity rather than trading their labor for compensation. Artists are supported and valued for their ability to revitalize buildings and neighborhoods rather than for their contributions to the breadth of human experience.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anonymous “Death Star Data Center” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

This strategy has successfully reversed the long-held convention that business is politically conservative and profit-oriented while art is politically liberal and concerned with the life of the mind. Instead, today one often hears that contemporary art is a space of conservatism and profiteering while industry, particularly tech, is a haven for progressive values and invention. For example, San Francisco gallerist-turned-entrepreneur Raman Frey suggests in a blog post that art insiders are a “community [that] views dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers with disdain,” while technology leaders “see how value manifests from exactly these dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers.” He laments artists’ perceived lack of interest in “bigger pie” thinking but never questions what the pie might be made of, that others do not want a slice. Frey is not alone in his opinions; rather, he is articulating a view shared by many in tech who cannot see why their stratospheric acquisitions of money and influence would be understood as anything but positive. Regular readers of this column will know I am no defender of art-world elitism, and some of Frey’s criticisms of San Francisco’s art scene ring true. However, he paints with too broad a brush, faulting artists for disdaining wealth and influence, yet conflating those same artists with the old-money bloodsuckers he terms “art-world bigwigs.” Meanwhile, the same tech leaders that he lauds for recognizing the value of dissent have yet to acknowledge the validity of criticisms leveled by many in the communities their employees are rapidly displacing.

A crucial distinction here is the one between artist and designer, which Rosler makes but Frey does not. This is best expressed by Ben Davis in his book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013). He says, “The opposition between art and design here is above all a difference between two different class-based notions of creative labor.”[i] Davis suggests that we ought to define “working class” and “middle class” based not on earnings, but on relative autonomy of the worker. By his equation, a low-paid artist might be a member of the “middle class” because she sets her own schedule, decides which projects to complete and in what order of priority, and creates products (works of art) according to her own interests and specifications, only introducing them to a market when they are complete. A highly paid engineer might be a member of the “working class” because she works assigned hours, chooses and prioritizes projects based on management imperatives, puts her labor for hire on the open market, and creates products according to the needs and conditions of clients or end users. This configuration shocks many artists who have aligned themselves politically with the working class and the poor, as it surely does many engineers endowed with cars, homes, and disposable income. However, while CEOs of technology companies and their youngest employees may wholly believe in their own autonomy and their radical break from the past, many tech workers in their 30s and 40s have come up against company hierarchies and policies designed to let them know when their quest for self-determination runs counter to the will of their superiors. The lucky few have enough money put aside to quit and pursue their own agendas, including art. The majority are just barely hanging on in cities where a low six-figure salary is barely sufficient to meet middle-class expectations of home ownership and parenthood.

Michal Wisniowski. “Guard Secrets” Google Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

Historian Michael Parenti says, “You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.” Perhaps the most resonant criticism of gentrification’s effects on urban communities is that the increased wealth of new arrivals is matched by increasing ethnic and social homogeneity. The new creative economy disproportionately benefits the same people who benefited from the old order: white, college-educated males from families already privy to some degree of economic and social influence. Given that the interests of this group are already aligned with the interests of the ruling class, it is no wonder that so many of them believe themselves unleashed. Their entire orbits circulate around the peg. This reality renders claims of “disruption” hollow, in that one cannot truly disrupt that on which one wholly depends. In this context, the only ethnic and gender minorities who can excel are those whose class status situates them near the peg as well, and the only critiques that gain traction are ones that position this privileged class as a solution to rather than a source of social problems.

Rebecca Solnit has written at length about the tangible effects of the creative economy on San Francisco, symbolized by the newly ubiquitous “Google Bus.” She links the imperialist underpinnings of contemporary tech with respect to privacy and data security to tech companies’ fraught relationships with the communities that surround them. She is undoubtedly correct to raise the alarm regarding Google, Facebook, and others’ relentless quest to monetize our attention and market our personal data. She is also on point with her assessment that the new, young creative professionals moving in are technologically wired but socially disconnected. She makes a few missteps as well, for example ascribing certain antisocial behaviors to technology workers as a class that could be explained equally by the relative youth and immaturity of the new arrivals. For someone with as long a history in San Francisco and the Bay Area as Solnit, it is surprising to hear her talk about the current rent boom as a wholly new phenomenon when it is clearly the second round of a cycle that began in the 1990s. Even so, Solnit has used her high profile to bring attention to the negative effects of San Francisco’s Richard Florida-esque transformation. Even more than New York, San Francisco is a city identified with the creative economy, and one where the very counterculture that gentrification has displaced is continually dangled in front of new recruits as evidence of their own ingenuity and autonomy within the corporate system.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen “Class War” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

The mythology of the creative economy explains much of why San Franciscans who have pioneered this approach to work are under-invested in the arts despite some apparent affinities. Why support artists with your hard-earned income when you are fully convinced you are an artist yourself, and a more valuable one? Why make the effort to understand artists’ concerns as grounded in history and social justice, when it is more comfortable to characterize them, as Raman Frey puts it, as encumbered by “suspicion of wealth, fame, and influence”? Rebecca Solnit takes the opposite position: “The problem is that we understand Silicon Valley’s values all too well, and a lot of us don’t like them.” While history has produced scores of artists who also sit close to the peg, the avant-garde tradition includes a healthy measure of informed political and social dissent. Technology and design entrepreneurs have engaged in politics to further industry interests such as net neutrality and looser immigration policies, but have done little to create a space for public dialogue and social critique that would rival the efforts put forth by artists in this regard.

 #Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

[i] Ben Davis, “Art and Class,” 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (New York: Haymarket Books, 2013), 15.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): John Gourley “Gringo” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

#access #technology #gentrification #class #labor #place

The recent election of Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York was hailed by many as a sign that the trend of economic displacement in major American urban centers was coming to an end. De Blasio ran on a progressive platform of government that serves the neediest, rather than campaign donors, and won handily on that message despite the city’s twelve prior years of wealth consolidation under billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. Even de Blasio’s art credentials are more populist than those of his philanthropist predecessor, whose namesake corporation appears on the donor boards of several major institutions in the city. While many have greeted his inauguration with a level of optimism not seen since President Obama’s first term, far fewer have raised the necessary question of what exactly defines the problems and the solutions we hope he will seek. Using current discussions of gentrification, shifting labor conditions, and the role of the arts in creativity and culture, I will attempt to do this here.

Artist Martha Rosler’s recent book, Culture Class (2013), is a herculean attempt to frame the scope and the terms of the gentrification debate as it concerns artists and other laborers in the new “creative economy.” Her critique centers on the influential theories of Richard Florida, whose Rise of the Creative Class (2002) is credited with establishing that term. Rosler gained prominence in the 1970s as a conceptual photographer and video artist deconstructing the implicit social conditioning conveyed by popular images in works such as The Bowery in Two Descriptive Systems (1974-75) and House Beautiful: Bringing the War Back Home (1967-72). Her extensively researched book identifies other theorists of urban renewal, addressing their perspectives from race, gender, and class angles. Her discussion of Florida’s legacy outlines how his acolytes in business, education, and urban planning have promoted an idea of contemporary white-collar labor as a creative pursuit while promoting investment in the arts as a benefit to property values. As such, wage laborers are encouraged to consider themselves engaged in fulfilling acts of creativity rather than trading their labor for compensation. Artists are supported and valued for their ability to revitalize buildings and neighborhoods rather than for their contributions to the breadth of human experience.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anonymous “Death Star Data Center” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

This strategy has successfully reversed the long-held convention that business is politically conservative and profit-oriented while art is politically liberal and concerned with the life of the mind. Instead, today one often hears that contemporary art is a space of conservatism and profiteering while industry, particularly tech, is a haven for progressive values and invention. For example, San Francisco gallerist turned entrepreneur Raman Frey suggests in a blog post that art insiders are a “community [that] views dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers with disdain,” while technology leaders “see how value manifests from exactly these dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers.” He laments artists’ perceived lack of interest in “bigger pie” thinking but never questions what the pie might be made of, that others do not want a slice. Frey is not alone in his opinions; rather, he is articulating a view shared by many in tech who cannot see why their stratospheric acquisitions of money and influence would be understood as anything but positive. Regular readers of this column will know I am no defender of art-world elitism, and some of Frey’s criticisms of San Francisco’s art scene ring true. However, he paints with too broad a brush, faulting artists for disdaining wealth and influence, yet conflating those same artists with the old-money bloodsuckers he terms “art world bigwigs.” Meanwhile, the same tech leaders that he lauds for recognizing the value of dissent have yet to acknowledge the validity of criticisms leveled by many in the communities their employees are rapidly displacing.

A crucial distinction here is the one between artist and designer, which Rosler makes but Frey does not. This is best expressed by Ben Davis in his book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013). He says, “The opposition between art and design here is above all a difference between two different class-based notions of creative labor.”[i] Davis suggests that we ought to define “working class” and “middle class” based not on earnings, but on relative autonomy of the worker. By his equation, a low-paid artist might be a member of the “middle class” because she sets her own schedule, decides which projects to complete and in what order of priority, and creates products (works of art) according to her own interests and specifications, only introducing them to a market when they are complete. A highly paid engineer might be a member of the “working class” because she works assigned hours, chooses and prioritizes projects based on management imperatives, puts her labor for hire on the open market, and creates products according to the needs and conditions of clients or end users. This configuration shocks many artists who have aligned themselves politically with the working class and the poor, as it surely does many engineers endowed with cars, homes, and disposable income. However, while CEOs of technology companies and their youngest employees may wholly believe in their own autonomy and their radical break from the past, many tech workers in their 30s and 40s have come up against company hierarchies and policies designed to let them know when their quest for self-determination runs counter to the will of their superiors. The lucky few have enough money put aside to quit and pursue their own agendas, including art. The majority are just barely hanging on in cities where a low six-figure salary is barely sufficient to meet middle-class expectations of home ownership and parenthood.

Michal Wisniowski. “Guard Secrets” Google Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

Historian Michael Parenti says, “You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.” Perhaps the most resonant criticism of gentrification’s effects on urban communities is that the increased wealth of new arrivals is matched by increasing ethnic and social homogeneity. The new creative economy disproportionately benefits the same people who benefited from the old order: white, college-educated males from families already privy to some degree of economic and social influence. Given that the interests of this group are already aligned with the interests of the ruling class, it is no wonder that so many of them believe themselves unleashed. Their entire orbits circulate around the peg. This reality renders claims of “disruption” hollow, in that one cannot truly disrupt that on which one wholly depends. In this context, the only ethnic and gender minorities who can excel are those whose class status situates them near the peg as well, and the only critiques that gain traction are ones that position this privileged class as a solution to rather than a source of social problems.

Rebecca Solnit has written at length about the tangible effects of the creative economy on San Francisco, symbolized by the newly ubiquitous “Google Bus.” She links the imperialist underpinnings of contemporary tech with respect to privacy and data security to tech companies’ fraught relationships with the communities that surround them. She is undoubtedly correct to raise the alarm regarding Google, Facebook, and others’ relentless quest to monetize our attention and market our personal data. She is also on point with her assessment that the new, young creative professionals moving in are technologically wired but socially disconnected. She makes a few missteps as well, for example ascribing certain antisocial behaviors to technology workers as a class that could be explained equally by the relative youth and immaturity of the new arrivals. For someone with as long a history in San Francisco and the Bay Area as Solnit, it is surprising to hear her talk about the current rent boom as a wholly new phenomenon when it is clearly the second round of a cycle that began in the 1990s. Even so, Solnit has used her high profile to bring attention to the negative effects of San Francisco’s Richard Florida-esque transformation. Even more than New York, San Francisco is a city identified with the creative economy, and one where the very counterculture that gentrification has displaced is continually dangled in front of new recruits as evidence of their own ingenuity and autonomy within the corporate system.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen “Class War” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

The mythology of the creative economy explains much of why San Franciscans who have pioneered this approach to work are under-invested in the arts despite some apparent affinities. Why support artists with your hard-earned income when you are fully convinced you are an artist yourself, and a more valuable one? Why make the effort to understand artists’ concerns as grounded in history and social justice, when it is more comfortable to characterize them, as Raman Frey puts it, as encumbered by “suspicion of wealth, fame, and influence”? Rebecca Solnit takes the opposite position: “The problem is that we understand Silicon Valley’s values all too well, and a lot of us don’t like them.” While history has produced scores of artists who also sit close to the peg, the avant-garde tradition includes a healthy measure of informed political and social dissent. Technology and design entrepreneurs have engaged in politics to further industry interests such as net neutrality and looser immigration policies, but have done little to create a space for public dialogue and social critique that would rival the efforts put forth by artists in this regard.

 #Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

[i] Ben Davis, “Art and Class,” 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (New York: Haymarket Books, 2013), 15.

The Broad under construction, view from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Broad. Photo © Iwan Baan.

#artmarket #creativeeconomy #collectors #entrepreneur #philanthropy #support

As in nearly every field of commerce, it seems that the tension between old and new models of the business of art is coming to a head. Traditional galleries see that their established methods of selling selectively and covertly to buyers of high social standing are under threat. Museums, which once were beneficiaries of philanthropic largesse from those same well-heeled collectors, now often find that their leading patrons are competitors; rather than donate their holdings, they establish private institutions instead—like LA’s new Broad Museum—that rival the scale and scope of the Moderns and Contemporaries, which are left empty-handed. Even major gifts to museums, such as the unrivaled Fisher Collection now entrusted to SFMOMA, come with strict and costly requirements, such as new buildings and capital campaigns. Meanwhile, the most visible and valuable contemporary artists are no longer those who have been vetted by scholars and curators, but those whose works can be most readily flipped on the secondary and auction markets. Under these circumstances, the art object is purely a marker of exchange value upon which certain complicit thinkers heap vague claims of cultural use value that seem to apply only to the acquisitive culture of the 1%.

The anxiety of the old guard toward the new manifests most clearly in the recent New York Times and New York Observer profiles of art impresario Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz has a venture-capital background, a Los Angeles aesthetic, and a start-up approach to artists, dumping money into new and unproven talent so as to play the odds that some of the artists he supports will reach the upper echelons of the market and bear out his investments as a group. Both profiles describe a man who sees himself as an underdog and, as belies his tech-funding background, a “disrupter” of established systems. His critics, who include several prominent dealers, call him a “flipper” who takes advantage of emerging artists while devaluing their output for personal profit. His champions see him as a person willing to take a risk on an unproven artist in an era when few collectors seem to value that kind of patronage.

Occupy London Stock Exchange. Capitalism Is Crisis, 2013.

Simchowitz’s methods can be troubling. His relationship to emerging artists is more paternalistic than paternal, and his tendency to hoard artists’ works and then liquidate them in large numbers when an artist’s market peaks (known as “flooding the market”) is potentially damaging to a young artist’s longevity. Still, his claim in the Observer that the art world “weaponized me” rings true. After all, Simchowitz did not create an art-school system that neglects to teach young artists how to manage their financial and personal affairs, or a gallery system that treats artists as freelance content creators without health care or a steady source of income. He is simply exploiting structures that were engineered to engender exploitation. Jerry Saltz, with typically dated bluster, called Simchowitz a “Sith Lord.” The implication that Saltz (whom the public may remember from that paragon of integrity “Work of Art”) is a Jedi knight by comparison conveniently obscures the critic’s track record of championing artists of what Hito Steyerl calls “shiny instability,” “baffled and mesmerized” by “the not-so-discreet consumer-friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.” In other words, the debate is less black hat/white hat, and more shades of gray.

2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy: The Fast Facts.

Meanwhile, the onslaught of the “creative economy” continues unabated. Lumping artists in with designers, entertainers, and producers, this line of thinking focuses exclusively on the economic power of creative work while eliding questions of culture, ethics, and precarious or contingent labor. Artists are valued because they create economic value, not because the work they do is valuable. Government and foundation grants are increasingly bound up in this rhetoric and the related discourse of “creative placemaking,” which essentially codifies artists’ heretofore inadvertent role in the march of urban gentrification. Meanwhile, artists are rarely the beneficiaries of the economic growth they are credited with generating. According to the 2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy, “In the visual and performing arts, there were nearly 2.7 self-employed persons in Los Angeles County for every salaried worker.” In 2012, the report shows that 64,108 self-employed visual artists and writers earned a cumulative total of $2,645,500,000, or an average of $41,266 per capita in annual earnings in a county where the median household income was $55,909 according to the US Census. This means that more than two-thirds of the self-employed artists and writers in Los Angeles county, representing almost 1.75 workers to every 1 salaried worker in the visual and performing arts, are earning lower-than-average wages. “Creativity” is being celebrated as a profit center, but artists are still being starved.

Ray Beldner. Moneybags, 2008; sewn US currency. Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery.

What, then, is the alternative for artists who wants to control their own careers and finances? One option is to embrace the label of “entrepreneur,” which some have done, such as stARTup Fair organizers Steve Zavattero and Ray Beldner, though not without criticism. Writing for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, Bean Gilsdorf and Joseph del Pesco critiqued that San Francisco “independent” hotel fair not only for a pay-to-play model that charges artists exhibitor fees based on the cost of gallery fairs, but for lacking “a sense of dignity,” calling self-identification by artists as “‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘creative visionaries’” “hollow self-nominations” and “clichés of corporate culture.” Certainly, the promise of entrepreneurship puts a positive gloss on numbers like the ones cited above, framing precarious employment as a choice rather than a condition of, as the Otis report puts it, “competitive pressures stemming from globalization” that “continue to exert enormous pressure on firms to cut costs,” leading to “companies seeking efficiencies by using more part-time labor, more temporary labor, and outsourcing non-core tasks to independent contractors.” Convincing artists that they are entrepreneurs can be a way of flattering them while exploiting them, as Gilsdorf and del Pesco suggest.

Oscar Murillo. A Mercantile Novel, 2014; promotional photo of workers from Columbina Chocolate Factory. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

At the same time, critics like Ben Davis have pointed out that artists have long operated in the economic space of entrepreneurs: self-employed, running sole proprietorships or small workshops, retaining intellectual-property rights, seeking angel investors, and ultimately rejecting a corporate mentality that values true entrepreneurship only when it can acquire and consume independent actors, subjugating them to hierarchies of rank and social privilege that are hardly alien to the institutional art world. What, then, of the artist who aspires to loftier goals than mere economic success? This is a particularly thorny challenge given that art objects and, increasingly, performative and intervention-based events are readily commoditized in our culture. In his 2012 Avenali Lecture for the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley, Frederic Jameson spoke of how the art object is no longer the focal point of creative production, but rather functions in the marketplace as a derivative of an event-based spectacle much like pork futures operate as derivatives of factory pig-farming. This perspective goes a long way toward explaining both why a corporate raider like Simchowitz would turn from tech funding to contemporary art speculation, and why an artist like Oscar Murillo, whom Simchowitz claims to have discovered, would downplay the popularity of his market-friendly abstract paintings of late and turn to creating spectacles of labor such as a facsimile of a Colombian chocolate factory which he staged, complete with imported workers, at David Zwirner in 2014. Installations of this kind allow an artist like Murillo, raised in the working class, to engage with issues of class and race that resurface in the context of artistic labor, while creating a pretense of social responsibility that a savvy gallerist can use as large-scale promotion for the artist’s lucrative paintings. At the same time, one can see the 28-year-old Murillo struggling to bolster himself against the capricious market, which he knows will toss him aside as quickly as it lauded him, by branching out into more academically respectable spaces of artistic production than the trendy abstractions that have branded him “a new Basquiat.”

Steve Lambert. Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011; aluminum and electrical; 9 x 20 x 7 ft.

A safe haven for artists would relieve them of such anxieties by providing adequate economic support for creative labor to liberate it from market whims, but that is not currently a possibility in these United States. Without a guarantee of health care, basic sustenance, and social investment in artists and art institutions—as one finds in Germany or Canada—artists are left to negotiate a winner-take-all system of profit and speculation to the best of their ability. In this country, the art economy mirrors the whole of the economy, while the academic art establishment remains heavily invested in denying the presence of business concerns as relevant to artists’ education while prioritizing those concerns in every other aspect of their operations. Questions of the business of being an artist, from managing personal finances to finding a gallery that will actually work for their 50 percent cut, to juggling part-time employment and a daily studio practice, are neglected in favor of idealism in most art departments despite the unsustainable number of newly minted MFA graduates and the exorbitant cost of an art education. Instead, debt becomes another way that young artists are disciplined into toeing the neoliberal line and abandoning the radical politics of many of their predecessors. I can’t see how artists could be further harmed by seizing control of the business apparatus that is clearly going to affect them whether or not they take an active role in their own financial affairs. If the future of art patronage resembles Stefan Simchowitz, the most successful artist will be the one who knows how to make capital work for her, rather than working for capital.

The Broad under construction, view from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Broad. Photo © Iwan Baan.

#artmarket #creativeeconomy #collectors #entrepreneur #philanthropy #support

As in nearly every field of commerce, it seems that the tension between old and new models of the business of art is coming to a head. Traditional galleries see that their established methods of selling selectively and covertly to buyers of high social standing are under threat. Museums, which once were beneficiaries of philanthropic largesse from those same well-heeled collectors, now often find that their leading patrons are competitors; rather than donate their holdings, they establish private institutions instead—like LA’s new Broad Museum—that rival the scale and scope of the Moderns and Contemporaries, which are left empty-handed. Even major gifts to museums, such as the unrivaled Fisher Collection now entrusted to SFMOMA, come with strict and costly requirements, such as new buildings and capital campaigns. Meanwhile, the most visible and valuable contemporary artists are no longer those who have been vetted by scholars and curators, but those whose works can be most readily flipped on the secondary and auction markets. Under these circumstances, the art object is purely a marker of exchange value upon which certain complicit thinkers heap vague claims of cultural use value that seem to apply only to the acquisitive culture of the 1%.

The anxiety of the old guard toward the new manifests most clearly in the recent New York Times and New York Observer profiles of art impresario Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz has a venture-capital background, a Los Angeles aesthetic, and a start-up approach to artists, dumping money into new and unproven talent so as to play the odds that some of the artists he supports will reach the upper echelons of the market and bear out his investments as a group. Both profiles describe a man who sees himself as an underdog and, as belies his tech-funding background, a “disrupter” of established systems. His critics, who include several prominent dealers, call him a “flipper” who takes advantage of emerging artists while devaluing their output for personal profit. His champions see him as a person willing to take a risk on an unproven artist in an era when few collectors seem to value that kind of patronage.

Occupy London Stock Exchange. Capitalism Is Crisis, 2013.

Simchowitz’s methods can be troubling. His relationship to emerging artists is more paternalistic than paternal, and his tendency to hoard artists’ works and then liquidate them in large numbers when an artist’s market peaks (known as “flooding the market”) is potentially damaging to a young artist’s longevity. Still, his claim in the Observer that the art world “weaponized me” rings true. After all, Simchowitz did not create an art-school system that neglects to teach young artists how to manage their financial and personal affairs, or a gallery system that treats artists as freelance content creators without health care or a steady source of income. He is simply exploiting structures that were engineered to engender exploitation. Jerry Saltz, with typically dated bluster, called Simchowitz a “Sith Lord.” The implication that Saltz (whom the public may remember from that paragon of integrity “Work of Art”) is a Jedi knight by comparison conveniently obscures the critic’s track record of championing artists of what Hito Steyerl calls “shiny instability,” “baffled and mesmerized” by “the not-so-discreet consumer-friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.” In other words, the debate is less black hat/white hat, and more shades of gray.

2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy: The Fast Facts.

Meanwhile, the onslaught of the “creative economy” continues unabated. Lumping artists in with designers, entertainers, and producers, this line of thinking focuses exclusively on the economic power of creative work while eliding questions of culture, ethics, and precarious or contingent labor. Artists are valued because they create economic value, not because the work they do is valuable. Government and foundation grants are increasingly bound up in this rhetoric and the related discourse of “creative placemaking,” which essentially codifies artists’ heretofore inadvertent role in the march of urban gentrification. Meanwhile, artists are rarely the beneficiaries of the economic growth they are credited with generating. According to the 2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy, “In the visual and performing arts, there were nearly 2.7 self-employed persons in Los Angeles County for every salaried worker.” In 2012, the report shows that 64,108 self-employed visual artists and writers earned a cumulative total of $2,645,500,000, or an average of $41,266 per capita in annual earnings in a county where the median household income was $55,909 according to the US Census. This means that more than two-thirds of the self-employed artists and writers in Los Angeles county, representing almost 1.75 workers to every 1 salaried worker in the visual and performing arts, are earning lower-than-average wages. “Creativity” is being celebrated as a profit center, but artists are still being starved.

Ray Beldner. Moneybags, 2008; sewn US currency. Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery.

What, then, is the alternative for artists who wants to control their own careers and finances? One option is to embrace the label of “entrepreneur,” which some have done, such as stARTup Fair organizers Steve Zavattero and Ray Beldner, though not without criticism. Writing for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, Bean Gilsdorf and Joseph del Pesco critiqued that San Francisco “independent” hotel fair not only for a pay-to-play model that charges artists exhibitor fees based on the cost of gallery fairs, but for lacking “a sense of dignity,” calling self-identification by artists as “‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘creative visionaries’” “hollow self-nominations” and “clichés of corporate culture.” Certainly, the promise of entrepreneurship puts a positive gloss on numbers like the ones cited above, framing precarious employment as a choice rather than a condition of, as the Otis report puts it, “competitive pressures stemming from globalization” that “continue to exert enormous pressure on firms to cut costs,” leading to “companies seeking efficiencies by using more part-time labor, more temporary labor, and outsourcing non-core tasks to independent contractors.” Convincing artists that they are entrepreneurs can be a way of flattering them while exploiting them, as Gilsdorf and del Pesco suggest.

Oscar Murillo. A Mercantile Novel, 2014; promotional photo of workers from Columbina Chocolate Factory. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

At the same time, critics like Ben Davis have pointed out that artists have long operated in the economic space of entrepreneurs: self-employed, running sole proprietorships or small workshops, retaining intellectual-property rights, seeking angel investors, and ultimately rejecting a corporate mentality that values true entrepreneurship only when it can acquire and consume independent actors, subjugating them to hierarchies of rank and social privilege that are hardly alien to the institutional art world. What, then, of the artist who aspires to loftier goals than mere economic success? This is a particularly thorny challenge given that art objects and, increasingly, performative and intervention-based events are readily commoditized in our culture. In his 2012 Avenali Lecture for the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley, Frederic Jameson spoke of how the art object is no longer the focal point of creative production, but rather functions in the marketplace as a derivative of an event-based spectacle much like pork futures operate as derivatives of factory pig-farming. This perspective goes a long way toward explaining both why a corporate raider like Simchowitz would turn from tech funding to contemporary art speculation, and why an artist like Oscar Murillo, whom Simchowitz claims to have discovered, would downplay the popularity of his market-friendly abstract paintings of late and turn to creating spectacles of labor such as a facsimile of a Colombian chocolate factory which he staged, complete with imported workers, at David Zwirner in 2014. Installations of this kind allow an artist like Murillo, raised in the working class, to engage with issues of class and race that resurface in the context of artistic labor, while creating a pretense of social responsibility that a savvy gallerist can use as large-scale promotion for the artist’s lucrative paintings. At the same time, one can see the 28-year-old Murillo struggling to bolster himself against the capricious market, which he knows will toss him aside as quickly as it lauded him, by branching out into more academically respectable spaces of artistic production than the trendy abstractions that have branded him “a new Basquiat.”

Steve Lambert. Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011; aluminum and electrical; 9 x 20 x 7 ft.

A safe haven for artists would relieve them of such anxieties by providing adequate economic support for creative labor to liberate it from market whims, but that is not currently a possibility in these United States. Without a guarantee of health care, basic sustenance, and social investment in artists and art institutions—as one finds in Germany or Canada—artists are left to negotiate a winner-take-all system of profit and speculation to the best of their ability. In this country, the art economy mirrors the whole of the economy, while the academic art establishment remains heavily invested in denying the presence of business concerns as relevant to artists’ education while prioritizing those concerns in every other aspect of their operations. Questions of the business of being an artist, from managing personal finances to finding a gallery that will actually work for their 50 percent cut, to juggling part-time employment and a daily studio practice, are neglected in favor of idealism in most art departments despite the unsustainable number of newly minted MFA graduates and the exorbitant cost of an art education. Instead, debt becomes another way that young artists are disciplined into toeing the neoliberal line and abandoning the radical politics of many of their predecessors. I can’t see how artists could be further harmed by seizing control of the business apparatus that is clearly going to affect them whether or not they take an active role in their own financial affairs. If the future of art patronage resembles Stefan Simchowitz, the most successful artist will be the one who knows how to make capital work for her, rather than working for capital.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.

As in nearly every field of commerce, it seems that the tension between old and new models of the business of art is coming to a head. Traditional galleries see that their established methods of selling selectively and covertly to buyers of high social standing are under threat. Museums, which once were beneficiaries of philanthropic largesse from those same well-heeled collectors, now often find that their leading patrons are competitors; rather than donate their holdings, they establish private institutions instead—like LA’s new Broad Museum—that rival the scale and scope of the Moderns and Contemporaries, which are left empty-handed. Even major gifts to museums, such as the unrivaled Fisher Collection now entrusted to SFMOMA, come with strict and costly requirements, such as new buildings and capital campaigns. Meanwhile, the most visible and valuable contemporary artists are no longer those who have been vetted by scholars and curators, but those whose works can be most readily flipped on the secondary and auction markets. Under these circumstances, the art object is purely a marker of exchange value upon which certain complicit thinkers heap vague claims of cultural use value that seem to apply only to the acquisitive culture of the 1%.

The Broad under construction, view from Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. Courtesy of the Broad. Photo © Iwan Baan.

The anxiety of the old guard toward the new manifests most clearly in the recent New York Times and New York Observer profiles of art impresario Stefan Simchowitz. Simchowitz has a venture-capital background, a Los Angeles aesthetic, and a start-up approach to artists, dumping money into new and unproven talent so as to play the odds that some of the artists he supports will reach the upper echelons of the market and bear out his investments as a group. Both profiles describe a man who sees himself as an underdog and, as belies his tech-funding background, a “disrupter” of established systems. His critics, who include several prominent dealers, call him a “flipper” who takes advantage of emerging artists while devaluing their output for personal profit. His champions see him as a person willing to take a risk on an unproven artist in an era when few collectors seem to value that kind of patronage.

Occupy London Stock Exchange. Capitalism Is Crisis, 2013.

Simchowitz’s methods can be troubling. His relationship to emerging artists is more paternalistic than paternal, and his tendency to hoard artists’ works and then liquidate them in large numbers when an artist’s market peaks (known as “flooding the market”) is potentially damaging to a young artist’s longevity. Still, his claim in the Observer that the art world “weaponized me” rings true. After all, Simchowitz did not create an art-school system that neglects to teach young artists how to manage their financial and personal affairs, or a gallery system that treats artists as freelance content creators without health care or a steady source of income. He is simply exploiting structures that were engineered to engender exploitation. Jerry Saltz, with typically dated bluster, called Simchowitz a “Sith Lord.” The implication that Saltz (whom the public may remember from that paragon of integrity “Work of Art”) is a Jedi knight by comparison conveniently obscures the critic’s track record of championing artists of what Hito Steyerl calls “shiny instability,” “baffled and mesmerized” by “the not-so-discreet consumer-friendly veneer of new and old oligarchies, and plutotechnocracies.” In other words, the debate is less black hat/white hat, and more shades of gray.

2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy: The Fast Facts.

Meanwhile, the onslaught of the “creative economy” continues unabated. Lumping artists in with designers, entertainers, and producers, this line of thinking focuses exclusively on the economic power of creative work while eliding questions of culture, ethics, and precarious or contingent labor. Artists are valued because they create economic value, not because the work they do is valuable. Government and foundation grants are increasingly bound up in this rhetoric and the related discourse of “creative placemaking,” which essentially codifies artists’ heretofore inadvertent role in the march of urban gentrification. Meanwhile, artists are rarely the beneficiaries of the economic growth they are credited with generating. According to the 2014 Otis Report on the Creative Economy, “In the visual and performing arts, there were nearly 2.7 self-employed persons in Los Angeles County for every salaried worker.” In 2012, the report shows that 64,108 self-employed visual artists and writers earned a cumulative total of $2,645,500,000, or an average of $41,266 per capita in annual earnings in a county where the median household income was $55,909 according to the US Census. This means that more than two-thirds of the self-employed artists and writers in Los Angeles county, representing almost 1.75 workers to every 1 salaried worker in the visual and performing arts, are earning lower-than-average wages. “Creativity” is being celebrated as a profit center, but artists are still being starved.

Ray Beldner. Moneybags, 2008; sewn US currency. Courtesy of Charlie James Gallery.

What, then, is the alternative for artists who wants to control their own careers and finances? One option is to embrace the label of “entrepreneur,” which some have done, such as stARTup Fair organizers Steve Zavattero and Ray Beldner, though not without criticism. Writing for SFMOMA’s Open Space blog, Bean Gilsdorf and Joseph del Pesco critiqued that San Francisco “independent” hotel fair not only for a pay-to-play model that charges artists exhibitor fees based on the cost of gallery fairs, but for lacking “a sense of dignity,” calling self-identification by artists as “‘entrepreneurs’ or ‘creative visionaries’” “hollow self-nominations” and “clichés of corporate culture.” Certainly, the promise of entrepreneurship puts a positive gloss on numbers like the ones cited above, framing precarious employment as a choice rather than a condition of, as the Otis report puts it, “competitive pressures stemming from globalization” that “continue to exert enormous pressure on firms to cut costs,” leading to “companies seeking efficiencies by using more part-time labor, more temporary labor, and outsourcing non-core tasks to independent contractors.” Convincing artists that they are entrepreneurs can be a way of flattering them while exploiting them, as Gilsdorf and del Pesco suggest.

Oscar Murillo. A Mercantile Novel, 2014; promotional photo of workers from Columbina Chocolate Factory. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

At the same time, critics like Ben Davis have pointed out that artists have long operated in the economic space of entrepreneurs: self-employed, running sole proprietorships or small workshops, retaining intellectual-property rights, seeking angel investors, and ultimately rejecting a corporate mentality that values true entrepreneurship only when it can acquire and consume independent actors, subjugating them to hierarchies of rank and social privilege that are hardly alien to the institutional art world. What, then, of the artist who aspires to loftier goals than mere economic success? This is a particularly thorny challenge given that art objects and, increasingly, performative and intervention-based events are readily commoditized in our culture. In his 2012 Avenali Lecture for the Townsend Center at UC Berkeley, Frederic Jameson spoke of how the art object is no longer the focal point of creative production, but rather functions in the marketplace as a derivative of an event-based spectacle much like pork futures operate as derivatives of factory pig-farming. This perspective goes a long way toward explaining both why a corporate raider like Simchowitz would turn from tech funding to contemporary art speculation, and why an artist like Oscar Murillo, whom Simchowitz claims to have discovered, would downplay the popularity of his market-friendly abstract paintings of late and turn to creating spectacles of labor such as a facsimile of a Colombian chocolate factory which he staged, complete with imported workers, at David Zwirner in 2014. Installations of this kind allow an artist like Murillo, raised in the working class, to engage with issues of class and race that resurface in the context of artistic labor, while creating a pretense of social responsibility that a savvy gallerist can use as large-scale promotion for the artist’s lucrative paintings. At the same time, one can see the 28-year-old Murillo struggling to bolster himself against the capricious market, which he knows will toss him aside as quickly as it lauded him, by branching out into more academically respectable spaces of artistic production than the trendy abstractions that have branded him “a new Basquiat.”

Steve Lambert. Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011; aluminum and electrical; 9 x 20 x 7 ft.

A safe haven for artists would relieve them of such anxieties by providing adequate economic support for creative labor to liberate it from market whims, but that is not currently a possibility in these United States. Without a guarantee of health care, basic sustenance, and social investment in artists and art institutions—as one finds in Germany or Canada—artists are left to negotiate a winner-take-all system of profit and speculation to the best of their ability. In this country, the art economy mirrors the whole of the economy, while the academic art establishment remains heavily invested in denying the presence of business concerns as relevant to artists’ education while prioritizing those concerns in every other aspect of their operations. Questions of the business of being an artist, from managing personal finances to finding a gallery that will actually work for their 50 percent cut, to juggling part-time employment and a daily studio practice, are neglected in favor of idealism in most art departments despite the unsustainable number of newly minted MFA graduates and the exorbitant cost of an art education. Instead, debt becomes another way that young artists are disciplined into toeing the neoliberal line and abandoning the radical politics of many of their predecessors. I can’t see how artists could be further harmed by seizing control of the business apparatus that is clearly going to affect them whether or not they take an active role in their own financial affairs. If the future of art patronage resembles Stefan Simchowitz, the most successful artist will be the one who knows how to make capital work for her, rather than working for capital.

Artwork by William Powhida, from the cover of 9.5 Theses on Art and Class by Ben Davis.

In 2010, Ben Davis, a young art critic and regular contributor to Art Papers, ArtReview, Adbusters, The Brooklyn Rail, Slate, and the Village Voice, produced a pamphlet, “9.5 Theses on Art and Class,” that pointed out that the discussion of artist economics had stagnated. In it, he boldly outlines the paradoxes and struggles inherent in the art world through the lens of class. Last year, he published his first book, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class, named for and containing the original pamphlet, alongside a collection of essays on politics, inequality, commerce, and hipster aesthetics in art. He posits that artists are middle-class creative laborers, only mildly distinct from their non-artist peers in that their autonomy stems from a singular, individual talent.

Guernica: The ongoing, central tension of the art empire is that between creativity and money. The parameters of this conflict vary wildly, depending on whom you speak to. Can you define it from your personal point of view?

Ben Davis: I guess I’d challenge the premise of the question. I don’t think that the ongoing tension of the “art empire”—if by this we mean the top tier of the international “art world,” museums, galleries, and auction houses—is actually between money and creativity, in the sense that there is a hard choice between what sells and artists getting to express themselves in some authentic creative way.

That certainly happens, and the very rich control the art market, which means a minority taste—often a pretty stupid and crass taste—has a disproportionate amount of influence over what succeeds. But throughout history, the very rich have also patronized, funded, and wanted to associate themselves with creative things. If things were as simple as the equation “success = corruption” then you wouldn’t need criticism.

[…]

Guernica: Artistic practice is most often defined as a privileged activity, whereas “creative expression” is something that transcends social, political, and economic barriers. What kind of traction does exceptional individual power—charisma, talent, skill, unusual perspective—really have? Who/what is the authority?

Ben Davis: I mean, this only becomes an issue because some people actually make their living off of their creativity, and what’s more, some people who make their living off their creativity, contemporary artists, seem to get a particularly good deal. Otherwise, it would be enough to say that, well, we all are creative in our own ways, what’s wrong with that?

But that having been said, there’s a whole interesting debate right now about whether creative labor actually is a “privileged” activity. There’s very much this sense that the “privilege” of art is being used to seduce people into doing work for free, to get away with not paying people who are creating something of value, and who have to survive.

Read the full article here.

The recent election of Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York was hailed by many as a sign that the trend of economic displacement in major American urban centers was coming to an end. De Blasio ran on a progressive platform of government that serves the neediest, rather than campaign donors, and won handily on that message despite the city’s twelve prior years of wealth consolidation under billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg. Even de Blasio’s art credentials are more populist than those of his philanthropist predecessor, whose namesake corporation appears on the donor boards of several major institutions in the city. While many have greeted his inauguration with a level of optimism not seen since President Obama’s first term, far fewer have raised the necessary question of what exactly defines the problems and the solutions we hope he will seek. Using current discussions of gentrification, shifting labor conditions, and the role of the arts in creativity and culture, I will attempt to do this here.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): John Gourley “Gringo” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

Artist Martha Rosler’s recent book, Culture Class (2013), is a herculean attempt to frame the scope and the terms of the gentrification debate as it concerns artists and other laborers in the new “creative economy.” Her critique centers on the influential theories of Richard Florida, whose Rise of the Creative Class (2002) is credited with establishing that term. Rosler gained prominence in the 1970s as a conceptual photographer and video artist deconstructing the implicit social conditioning conveyed by popular images in works such as The Bowery in Two Descriptive Systems (1974-75) and House Beautiful: Bringing the War Back Home (1967-72). Her extensively researched book identifies other theorists of urban renewal, addressing their perspectives from race, gender, and class angles. Her discussion of Florida’s legacy outlines how his acolytes in business, education, and urban planning have promoted an idea of contemporary white-collar labor as a creative pursuit while promoting investment in the arts as a benefit to property values. As such, wage laborers are encouraged to consider themselves engaged in fulfilling acts of creativity rather than trading their labor for compensation. Artists are supported and valued for their ability to revitalize buildings and neighborhoods rather than for their contributions to the breadth of human experience.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anonymous “Death Star Data Center” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

This strategy has successfully reversed the long-held convention that business is politically conservative and profit-oriented while art is politically liberal and concerned with the life of the mind. Instead, today one often hears that contemporary art is a space of conservatism and profiteering while industry, particularly tech, is a haven for progressive values and invention. For example, San Francisco gallerist turned entrepreneur Raman Frey suggests in a blog post that art insiders are a “community [that] views dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers with disdain,” while technology leaders “see how value manifests from exactly these dissenters, contrarians, and critical thinkers.” He laments artists’ perceived lack of interest in “bigger pie” thinking but never questions what the pie might be made of, that others do not want a slice. Frey is not alone in his opinions; rather, he is articulating a view shared by many in tech who cannot see why their stratospheric acquisitions of money and influence would be understood as anything but positive. Regular readers of this column will know I am no defender of art-world elitism, and some of Frey’s criticisms of San Francisco’s art scene ring true. However, he paints with too broad a brush, faulting artists for disdaining wealth and influence, yet conflating those same artists with the old-money bloodsuckers he terms “art world bigwigs.” Meanwhile, the same tech leaders that he lauds for recognizing the value of dissent have yet to acknowledge the validity of criticisms leveled by many in the communities their employees are rapidly displacing.

A crucial distinction here is the one between artist and designer, which Rosler makes but Frey does not. This is best expressed by Ben Davis in his book 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (2013). He says, “The opposition between art and design here is above all a difference between two different class-based notions of creative labor.”[i] Davis suggests that we ought to define “working class” and “middle class” based not on earnings, but on relative autonomy of the worker. By his equation, a low-paid artist might be a member of the “middle class” because she sets her own schedule, decides which projects to complete and in what order of priority, and creates products (works of art) according to her own interests and specifications, only introducing them to a market when they are complete. A highly paid engineer might be a member of the “working class” because she works assigned hours, chooses and prioritizes projects based on management imperatives, puts her labor for hire on the open market, and creates products according to the needs and conditions of clients or end users. This configuration shocks many artists who have aligned themselves politically with the working class and the poor, as it surely does many engineers endowed with cars, homes, and disposable income. However, while CEOs of technology companies and their youngest employees may wholly believe in their own autonomy and their radical break from the past, many tech workers in their 30s and 40s have come up against company hierarchies and policies designed to let them know when their quest for self-determination runs counter to the will of their superiors. The lucky few have enough money put aside to quit and pursue their own agendas, including art. The majority are just barely hanging on in cities where a low six-figure salary is barely sufficient to meet middle-class expectations of home ownership and parenthood.

Michal Wisniowski. “Guard Secrets” Google Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

Historian Michael Parenti says, “You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg. It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.” Perhaps the most resonant criticism of gentrification’s effects on urban communities is that the increased wealth of new arrivals is matched by increasing ethnic and social homogeneity. The new creative economy disproportionately benefits the same people who benefited from the old order: white, college-educated males from families already privy to some degree of economic and social influence. Given that the interests of this group are already aligned with the interests of the ruling class, it is no wonder that so many of them believe themselves unleashed. Their entire orbits circulate around the peg. This reality renders claims of “disruption” hollow, in that one cannot truly disrupt that on which one wholly depends. In this context, the only ethnic and gender minorities who can excel are those whose class status situates them near the peg as well, and the only critiques that gain traction are ones that position this privileged class as a solution to rather than a source of social problems.

Rebecca Solnit has written at length about the tangible effects of the creative economy on San Francisco, symbolized by the newly ubiquitous “Google Bus.” She links the imperialist underpinnings of contemporary tech with respect to privacy and data security to tech companies’ fraught relationships with the communities that surround them. She is undoubtedly correct to raise the alarm regarding Google, Facebook, and others’ relentless quest to monetize our attention and market our personal data. She is also on point with her assessment that the new, young creative professionals moving in are technologically wired but socially disconnected. She makes a few missteps as well, for example ascribing certain antisocial behaviors to technology workers as a class that could be explained equally by the relative youth and immaturity of the new arrivals. For someone with as long a history in San Francisco and the Bay Area as Solnit, it is surprising to hear her talk about the current rent boom as a wholly new phenomenon when it is clearly the second round of a cycle that began in the 1990s. Even so, Solnit has used her high profile to bring attention to the negative effects of San Francisco’s Richard Florida-esque transformation. Even more than New York, San Francisco is a city identified with the creative economy, and one where the very counterculture that gentrification has displaced is continually dangled in front of new recruits as evidence of their own ingenuity and autonomy within the corporate system.

Stephanie Syjuco. Bedazzle a Tech Bus (I Mock Up Your Ideas): Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen “Class War” Bus, 2014. Digital image. Submission to Mission Local’s “Bedazzle a Tech Bus” Call for Entries.

The mythology of the creative economy explains much of why San Franciscans who have pioneered this approach to work are under-invested in the arts despite some apparent affinities. Why support artists with your hard-earned income when you are fully convinced you are an artist yourself, and a more valuable one? Why make the effort to understand artists’ concerns as grounded in history and social justice, when it is more comfortable to characterize them, as Raman Frey puts it, as encumbered by “suspicion of wealth, fame, and influence”? Rebecca Solnit takes the opposite position: “The problem is that we understand Silicon Valley’s values all too well, and a lot of us don’t like them.” While history has produced scores of artists who also sit close to the peg, the avant-garde tradition includes a healthy measure of informed political and social dissent. Technology and design entrepreneurs have engaged in politics to further industry interests such as net neutrality and looser immigration policies, but have done little to create a space for public dialogue and social critique that would rival the efforts put forth by artists in this regard.

 #Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.