Thursday, November 10, 2005

The New Aesthetocracy

The New Aesthetocracy 1: Chris Barsanto ~ Bohemia Revisited

from InTheseTimes

Mainstream commodification of alternative culture hardly seems noteworthy these days. While it may be infuriating to see corporations routinely boost their profits by mining rebellion from the fringe and repackaging it for the middlebrow, how are you going to stop TimeWarner, short of taking over its Manhattan offices and hauling the suits off in tumbrels?

Instead of spewing bile, Vanderbilt sociology professor Richard Lloyd takes a different tack on the subject: Just how does this culturally aware fringe create and live in their own spaces outside of the mainstream? His engaging but sometimes unfocused study, Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City, takes as its subject Chicago’s West Side neighborhood Wicker Park—stomping ground of aspiring artists and musicians, not to mention hungry real estate agents and journalists looking for an easy local color piece. His goal? To “make sense of the role that the new bohemia plays in the context of flexible, global capitalism.”

Fortunately for the reader, this involves Lloyd—a University of Chicago graduate student in the ’90s—schmoozing scensters in a lot of coffeehouses and bars. While his approach provides a welcome sprinkling of color in what could have been a tedious economics slog, it also means Lloyd spends a fair amount of time listening to bartenders bitch about how Gold Coast yuppies and Schaumburg suburbanites don’t know how to act or tip.

Lloyd’s historical portrait of Wicker Park is spottily interesting, but likely slow going for anybody who knows the area even slightly. Once a European melting pot, the neighborhood became mostly Polish during the Depression before attracting waves of Mexican and Puerto Rican immigrants in the ’60s. After spiraling down due to white flight (and the disappearance of industrial jobs), Wicker Park began to turn around in the ’80s when artists seeking cheap rents and easy access to public transportation started moving in, grooving on the gritty character memorialized decades earlier by Nelson Algren. By the ’90s, music industry scouts were luring away neighborhood acts like Liz Phair, while art galleries and coffee shops opened at an alarming pace.

Lloyd crisply illustrates the neighborhood’s epochs though the dramatic history of the nondescript building at 1934 North Avenue: A dressmakers’ sweatshop in the early 20th century, it became a storage facility in the ’70s, then fell into disrepair in the ’80s, haunted by addicts and dealers. The space was occupied from 1989 to 1998 by Urbis Orbis Café, a classic hipster hangout remembered nostalgically by interviewees, then an antique shop and finally, in 2001, by the cast of MTV’s “The Real World,” whose members were treated to memorable demonstrations by locals irate at the mass media invasion.

Why were they so upset? Because Wicker Park had evolved into a “bohemia”—a state of mind/geography that in theory can hardly co-exist with mainstream capitalist society. For an example of bohemia in the classical Parisian sense, Lloyd references Balzac’s quip that bohemia is “a stimulating interlude until the chance for real work arrives.” Current-day bohemia is somewhat different: For all the lip service anti-capitalist viewpoints may be given in such alternative outposts, they are in fact capitalist enclaves producing not widgets or services, but culture. MTV didn’t show up for the coffee. They literally came to consume the cool—a phenomena detailed in depth by Lloyd’s fellow alums in The Baffler.

more here

The New Aesthetocracy 2: Joel Kotkin ~ Uncool Cities

from ProspectMagazine

From London and Berlin to Sydney and San Francisco, civic authorities agree that the key to urban prosperity is appealing to the "hipster set" of gays, twentysomethings and young creatives. But the only evidence for this idea comes from the dot-com boom of the late 1990s—and that time is over.

The world’s great cities face serious, even catastrophic problems. Terrorists have planted bombs in London’s Underground and bus systems. Floods have wiped out New Orleans, and fires incinerated scores of impoverished Africans living in crowded, seamy Paris apartments.

Everywhere—from New Orleans to London and Paris—the middle classes, whatever their colour, are deserting the core for safer and more affordable suburbs, following in the footsteps of high-tech industries and major corporations.

Yet rather than address serious issues like housing, schools, transport, jobs and security, mayors and policy gurus from Berlin and London to Sydney and San Francisco have adopted what can be best be described as the "cool city strategy." If you can somehow make your city the rage of the hipster set, they insist, all will be well.
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