They’re pampered, privileged, indulged – part of the “cultural elite.” They spend all their time smoking pot and sipping absinthe. To use a term that’s acquired currency lately, they’re entitled. And they’re not – after all – real Americans.
This what we hear about artists, architects, musicians, writers and others like them. And it’s part of the reason the struggles of the creative class in the 21st century – a period in which an economic crash, social shifts and technological change have put everyone from graphic artists to jazz musicians to book publishers out of work – has gone largely untold. Or been shrugged off.
Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen write anthems about the travails of the working man; we line up for the revival of “Death of a Salesman.” John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson hold festivals and fundraisers when farmers suffer. Taxpayers bail out the auto industry and Wall Street and the banks. There’s a sense that manufacturing, or the agrarian economy, is what this country is really about. But culture was, for a while, what America did best: We produce and export creativity around the world. So why aren’t we lamenting the plight of its practitioners? Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm that creative industries have been some of the hardest hit during the Bush years and the Great Recession. But when someone employed in the world of culture loses a job, he or she feels easier to sneer at than a steel worker or auto worker. (Check out, for example, the unsympathetic comments to a Salon story about job losses among architects, or the backlash to HBO’s “Girls,” for daring to focus on young New Yorkers with artistic dreams and good educations.)
The musicians, actors and other artists we hear about tend to be fabulously successful. But the daily reality for the vast majority of the working artists in this country has little to do with Angelina Jolie or her perfectly toned right leg. “Artists in the Workforce,” a National Endowment for the Arts report released in 2008, before the Great Recession sliced and diced this class, showed the reality of the creative life. While most of the artists surveyed had college degrees, they earned — with a median income, in 2003-’05, of $34,800 — less than the average professional. Dancers made, on average, a mere $15,000. (More than a quarter of the artists in the 11 fields surveyed live in New York and California, two of the nation’s most expensive states, where that money runs out fast. The report has not been updated since 2008.)
“What does it mean in America to be a successful artist?” asks Dana Gioia, the poet who oversaw the study while NEA chairman. “Essentially, these are working-class people – a lot of them have second jobs. They’re highly trained – dancers, singers, actors – and they don’t make a lot of money. They make tremendous sacrifices for their work. They’re people who should have our respect, the same as a farmer. We don’t want a society without them.”
Many of them, in fact, are effectively entrepreneurs, but have little of the regard of the lavishly paid, mythically potent CEO. A working artist is seen neither as the salt of the earth by the left, nor as a “job creator” by the right — but as a kind of self-indulgent parasite by both sides. Why the disconnect?
“There’s always this sense that art is just play,” says Peter Plagens, a New York painter and art critic. “Art is what children do and what retired people do. Your mom puts your work up on the refrigerator. Or the way Dwight Eisenhower said, ‘Now that I’ve fought my battles, I can put my easel up outside.’”
The reality is different. An ecology of churches, chamber series, libraries, on-call studio work and small and mid-size orchestras that neither pay a salary nor offer medical coverage keep musicians like Adriana Zoppo going: A hardworking freelance violinist who performs across Southern California, she’s played, over the last year or so, at a church chamber series, on “American Idol,” a Glenn Frey standards record and a scene of background music for “Mad Men,” and with her own Baroque chamber group. She’s also a regular player in the Santa Barbara Symphony, for which she drives 100 miles each way for four rehearsals and two concerts a month. “I just do a lot of driving, like every freelancer I know,” she says; every week, students come to her apartment for lessons. The economy — and the loss of audience and donors — mean her work is down by about a third. “There’s more and more time between jobs.”
It’s even tougher, she says, for people who rely on the movie studios. “Even before the economy went down, studios started doing more outside California; a lot of it is in Eastern Europe.” For those who made their living playing on records and movie soundtracks, “All of a sudden, they’re making about 60 percent of what they did. What I see is a lot of people looking for things outside music — a lot of people have gotten real estate licenses. I know people who’ve added massage therapist.” Some have dropped medical coverage they can’t afford, taking their chances.
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Of course, those who continue to work in the creative class are the lucky ones. Employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show just how badly the press and media have missed the story. For some fields, the damage tracks, in an extreme way, along with the Great Recession. Jobs in graphic design, photographic services, architectural services – the bureau’s phrasing indicates that it is looking at all of the jobs within a field, including the people who, say, answer the phone at a design studio – all peaked before the market crash and and fell, 19.8 percent over four years for graphic design, 25.6 percent over seven years for photography and a brutal 29.8 percent, for architecture, over just three years. “Theater, dance and other performing arts companies” – this includes everything from Celine Dion’s Vegas shows to groups that put on Pinter plays – down 21.9 percent over five years.
Other fields show how the recession aggravated existing trends, but reveal that an implosion arrived before the market crash and has continued through our supposed recovery. “Musical groups and artists” plummeted by 45.3 percent between August 2002 and August of 2011. “Newspaper, book and directory publishers” are down 35.9 percent between January 2002 and a decade later; jobs among “periodical publishers” fell by 31.6 percent during the same period.
So why aren’t we talking about it?
Creative types, we suspect, are supposed to struggle. Artists themselves often romanticize their fraught early years: Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” and the various versions of the busker’s tale “Once” show how powerful this can be. But these stories often stop before the reality that follows artistic inspiration begins: Smith was ultimately able to commit her life to music because of a network of clubs, music labels and publishers. And however romantic life on the edge seems when viewed from a distance, “Once’s” Guy can’t keep busking forever.
Yes, the Internet makes it possible to connect artists directly to fans and patrons. There are stories of fans funding the next album by a favorite musician — but those musicians, as well, acquired that audience in part through the now-melted creative-class infrastructure that boosted Smith. And yes, there have been success stories on Kickstarter, as well — but even Kickstarter accepts just 60 percent of all proposals, and only about 43 percent of those end up being crowd-funded.
Our image of the creative class comes from a strange mix of sources, among them faux-populist politics, changing values, technological rewiring, and the media’s relationship to culture – as well as good old-fashioned American anti-intellectualism.
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It was only relatively late in the evolution of the species – after we settled down into cities and began to accumulate private property – that food surpluses, and with them, specialization, developed and allowed the existence of a creative class for the first time. The resentment may have started there, in the Bronze Age.
We’ll probably never know its deepest origins, but we can clearly document the roots of anti-aestheticism in the very founding of this country: The Puritans who settled the Atlantic shores were austerity-loving religious fanatics who saw art not just as frivolous or womanly, but as idolatry: Before sailing here they’d become notorious across England for smashing stained glass windows and ripping the benches from church choirs. Much of this aggression was directed against the Catholic Church, but the Puritans were no more fond of the church’s support for painting and music than they were of other instances of papery.
And while much of the landed gentry who founded the nation were intellectuals and aesthetes, the frontier myth resonates much more loudly. “Noble savage”-loving Rousseau, critic Leslie Fiedler wrote, is our real founding father, and our early literature is about men fleeing civilization and book learnin’ for an unmediated experience with nature at its most raw. When – decades later — vaudeville, circuses and early motion pictures began to spread, they were denounced for their corrupting influence on the young and working classes. “They were considered a threat to the American way of life,” says popular culture historian Robert J. Thompson.
Europeans, says Plagens, have a very different relationship to the arts because of a high culture going back to the Renaissance and before. “Over here, America is more tied to pragmatism – clearing the land, putting the railroad through … And artists don’t really help with that, so we’re suspect.”
Novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose father was what the writer describes as “a non-famous artist,” sees the American artist as living in internal exile. American history is stamped with “a distrust of the urban, the historical, the bookish in favor of a fantasy of frontier libertarian purity. And the Protestant work ethic has a distrust of what’s perceived as decadence.”
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We don’t wear buckles on our hats anymore; even coonskin caps have fallen out of style. But these latent notions in human nature and the American mind have taken a great step forward – or backward – recently. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew were demonizing long-haired bohemians, know-it-all professors, journalists and other seditious types since around the time of Woodstock. But these seeds of paranoia really blossomed with the invention of the term the “cultural elite.” During the “Murphy Brown” wars of 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California, connecting the Los Angeles riots to a group sitting “in newsrooms, sitcom studios, and faculty lounges all over America,” jeering at regular people. “We have two cultures,” he said, “the cultural elite and the rest of us.”
This term redefined “elite” from its previous associations (many of them positive) with skill and accomplishment, or wealth and explicit power. (And Quayle was, after all, not only a vice president but a wealthy man from several generations of money.) It also oriented the resented group around education, culinary tastes (they always seemed to be described drinking white wine or lattes) and attraction to culture. Presumably this cultural elite was driving to the opera in its Volvos – somehow managing to both sip a cappuccino and laugh at regular people at the same time — while dreaming up ways to undermine the American way. While the cultural left has led assaults on the literary canon, or the race and gender of artists whose work hangs in museums, and so on, it’s rarely duplicated the anti-intellectual populism of the far right quite so well.
“Cultural elite,” says Lethem, is “a code word for people who are getting away with something for far too long. It’s a term of distrust – you can almost hear a plan for vengeance in it. Republican politics hardened these impulses and made them more virulent and paranoid.”
If someone who takes in culture – or who writes about it or teaches it, as in Quayle’s original formulation – is somehow “not like us,” the only person more discredited is someone who spends his life producing this stuff.
“There is a pampered class of artists in the United States,” concedes Gioia, who got to know a wide range of creative types during his years as NEA chair. “But it’s tiny. And they make insignificant money compared to sports people. We have this Puritan, practical tradition in the United States. Puritans would give to the poor, but not to the idle. Artists are seen as these idle dreamers.”
More typical than a celebrity artist feasting on enormous grants, he says, is someone like Morton Lauridsen, who is now one of the most performed living composers – after decades of scraping by, teaching and writing choral works. Or a writer like Kay Ryan, who, until becoming U.S. poet laureate in 2008 was known to only a small few. “She never applied for a grant, never taught writing,” Gioia says. “She taught remedial reading at a community college.”
It was the Coast Guard Academy band, in New London, Conn., that allowed Kelli O’Connor, a conservatory-trained clarinet and saxophone player, to make a living. These days she’s a principal in a nearby orchestra, plays with a chamber group at a Boston church, coaches at area high schools and teaches at the University of Rhode Island: None of these pay a full salary or significant benefits. “Freelancing is a hustle all the time,” she says. “You master the art of scheduling. Squeezing in as much as possible. There are some days when I’m not done until 11 or 12 at night, and then I have to get up at 7 in the morning.”
Like most musicians, she teaches private lessons, but her students have fallen by more than half. “Because of the economy, it’s really gone downhill. People are afraid to spend their money. You’re constantly sending your C.V. to local schools to stir up interest.”
“More than any other group of artists, musicians are getting a raw deal,” said a rare story on the crisis, in Crain’s New York Business.
The story of the struggling musician is nothing new, but with smaller orchestras like the Long Island Philharmonic and the Queens Symphony scaling back, and musicals and dance productions using fewer players or none at all, professional musicians — many who studied for years at prestigious schools like Juilliard — are facing an increasingly tough time. They are being forced to piece together bits of freelance work, take on heavy teaching schedules or leave the business altogether. Over the past decade, the number of members of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York Local 802 has shrunk to 8,500 from about 15,000.
Tino Gagliardi, president of Local 802, told Crain’s, “There are fewer opportunities for musicians, and as the work diminishes, people move on.”
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Most people get their ideas about artists and entertainers from the media – TV, the newspapers, radio and so on. When we see actors, musicians, and architects on the covers of magazines or on television, we think we’re getting a look at the creative class. But most often, we don’t see them at all.
Newspapers, especially, have long felt a romanticism, and sense of duty, toward a “man in the street,” a kind of salt-of-the-earth figure who could – depending on the location or era – come out of Springsteen or Steinbeck. “There’s the old saw about afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted,” says James Rainey, who reports on the press for the Los Angeles Times and is one of few journos who has written well on the damage to his own industry.
Coverage of the most vulnerable is among the noble things the press still does. But it means that some strata get overlooked. When papers have written about the recession, for instance, they’ve leaned very heavily on coverage of the poor and working class; professionals, say, losing their homes because of the unemployment or falling housing values hardly show up. One mainstay in recession-era stories about the creative class has been pieces about artists who have “reinvented” themselves – an architect brewing a perfect cup of coffee — in difficult times. Or artsy types who have pursued their “Plan B” – making vegan cupcakes or running a groovy ice cream truck. Fun to read, counterintuitive, more colorful than dreary unemployment statistics – and deeply unrepresentative of what’s really going on.
More honest – and harder to find — is the kind of thing veteran food writer Amanda Hesser just conceded on the blog Food52: That she can no longer advise even talented and diligent young journalists to follow her path. “Except for a very small group of people (some of whom are clinging to jobs at magazines that pay more than the magazines’ business models can actually afford), it’s nearly impossible to make a living as a food writer,” she writes, “and I think it’s only going to get worse.”
One side of the equation, though, is well represented. The celebrity-industrial complex has all but exploded since the 1980s: Rainey recently spoke to a magazine editor who complained about being held hostage by a marketplace that demanded more and more coverage of people famous for being famous.
“Part of this is because there are so many more news outlets than 30 years ago,” he says. “When I started out, you didn’t have Us, OK, so many supermarket tabloids that are big sellers and all about celebrity. On the TV side, there are hundreds of channels about celebrities, and you’ve got TMZ on the Web, Perez Hilton … That’s pulled some of the mainstream outlets in that direction.”
But newspapers, who by some estimates laid off as many as 50 percent of their arts writers in the years after the 2008 crash, may not be in the best position to document the crumbling of non-corporate culture outside Hollywood and television (both of which consume the lion’s share of media coverage). In their urge not to seem elitist, they may shy away from the struggles of folks in the fine and performing arts especially.
It’s nothing as craven or cynical as “media bias,” but the full picture of culture in this country doesn’t get told. Says Rainey: “There’s more attention to celebrities than to everyday people who put together productions, or who struggle to make a living in the arts.”
To most Americans, this middle class of the creative class might as well be invisible.
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Technology has reshaped this issue in another way. “The stereotype of the creative genius has not let go when we look at people out of the past,” says Thompson, the Syracuse University historian. He lists a number of costume-drama images – crazy-brilliant figures like Mozart and Van Gogh – whose prestige is undiminished and whose work is still widely revered.
“But we are much less willing to apply this to people who are still alive. Because distribution has been democratized by the Internet, we tend to think that talent has been democratized as well.” If everyone can post their videos on YouTube, why are some filmmakers richer and more famous than others?
“I think it’s changed the way we look at the contemporary creative class. A lot of it is resentment: Why are you up there when I can do this too?”
This backlash against the creative class – when is the last time we’ve seen an artist or an intellectual in a mainstream film, set in the present rather than a romanticized past, who was not evil or pretentious? – is part of a larger revolt against experts and expertise. We’ve come a long way since the days of Sputnik, when education and intelligence were valorized in a burst of Cold War chauvinism.
Steve Jobs and technological heroes are still worshiped, says Thompson, but it doesn’t translate to creative people who do things that are intangible or hard to understand. “I’ve seen people walk into a museum and say, ‘I can do that,’” he says. “They can’t, of course. But when their computer breaks down, they know they can’t fix it. Creativity is a form of expertise,” something a nation that keeps insisting on its status as a democracy has never been entirely comfortable with.
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There are other changes in sensibility besides rabid faux-populism that spell hostility to the arts and those who work in them. One of them is a kind of market fundamentalism – the idea that everything, whether education, culture or the state of our souls can be bought, sold and measured. “What Isn’t for Sale?” asks an article in the April Atlantic. (You can now buy “access to the car pool lane while driving solo,” rent a woman’s womb, “shoot an endangered black rhino,” and get your doctor’s cellphone number if you’re willing to pay for it, Michael J. Sandel points out. The growth of for-profit hospitals, warfare, community security and schools – which have recently gotten a sweet tax break – show how far we’ve gone in the last few decades.)
We see this same point of view in economic impact studies of the arts and the push for what’s called “cultural tourism” – museums and philharmonics arguing their worth based on the capital they generate. You see it, from the opposite side, when a cultural entity goes bankrupt. When a Kentucky paper reported the Chapter 11 filings of the Louisville Orchestra, the accompanying comments gave a sense of the way we think about culture and the market.
“Get rid of them, the Ballet and any other useless tax funded ‘entertainment’ that isnt self supporting,” one said. “Pack up your fiddles and go home boys and girls. Maybe find real jobs. Go to Nashville and vie for some sessions work.” A third: “Sale all of assets to pay these people off, fire them all and get rid of the Orchestra. It isnt popular with the residents or they would have packed crowds and not have to worry about $$$.” And unambiguous in its market fundamentalism: “The orchestra creates a product. That product has lost public appeal. Just like any business, this one needs to shut down. If your product isn’t selling there is no reason to continue in business.” Needless to say, classical music and other art forms originated and evolved in the age of patronage, well before the market economy.
It brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s line: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
“Everything now has to be fully accountable,” says Plagens. “An English department has to show it brings in enough money, that it holds its own with the business side. Public schools are held accountable in various bean-counting ways. The senator can point to the ‘pointy-headed professor’ teaching poetry and ask, ‘Is this doing any good? Can we measure this?’ It’s a culture now measured by quantities rather than qualities. We don’t have any faith any more in the experts when they say, ‘Trust us.’”
Says Lethem: “These days everything has to have a clear market value, a proven use for mercantile culture. Well, art doesn’t pass that test very naturally. You can make the art gesture into something the marketplace values. But it’s always distorting and grotesque.” (The awkward fit reminds him of the Philip K. Dick story “The Preserving Machine,” about a scientist who tries to convert treasured musical scores into animals that can survive an apocalypse – with unpleasant results.)
In some ways, the obsession with economics – both inside and outside the arts – is driven by economics itself. “Forty years ago,” says Plagens, who chronicled the West Coast art scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s in a gem of a book, “Sunshine Muse,” “you rented an art gallery for not much money, and bought a few gallons of white paint. Now you need investors and backers and all sorts of digital technology. So there’s a bigger emphasis on having a business plan than the old bohemian model.”
The final irony is that these are times when we most need the arts but seem the most resistant to culture and the people who produce it.
Despite the crisis in the creative fields in general, mass-distributed entertainment is in a boom cycle. (Movies, because they cost consumers less than most live entertainment, is typically counter-cyclical.) “Popular art and commercial art is a form of escape,” says Plagens. “It’s what people want, especially in hard times; it’s what you got in the ‘30s, with movies about the heiress who disguises herself as a poor working girl, and so on,” which he sees as the precursor to the tidal wave of sequels, remakes and lame romantic comedies.
“Serious art – novels, what you have in the galleries – brings you back to reality and makes you look at your life. Serious art makes people uncomfortable – and during these times, we don’t need more discomfort.”
When the Great Recession dawned, architecture was the glamour profession of the creative class. Extravagant, signature buildings – Frank Gehry’s titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Spain’s Basque Country, Richard Meier’s white-travertine Getty Center in Los Angeles, and multimillion-dollar concert halls in seemingly every city in the U.S. – drew not only press attention but the kind of architectural tourists who once visited Italian duomos.
Brash, individualistic “starchitects” – cerebral urbanist Rem Koolhaas, Iraq-born diva Zaha Hadid, gracious, serene Renzo Piano and others hailed in the press as visionaries – became the new rock stars. Though much of the cast was international, the image built on a long-standing heroism of the architect in the United States, dating back to the magnetic Frank Lloyd Wright and the valiant, uncompromising Howard Roark in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” New shelter magazines like Dwell brought sustainable and modernist design to a wider public, and websites reveled in the eye candy. Graduate programs in architecture and design swelled with applicants.
For an era supposedly defined by bourgeois bohemianism, architecture – a synthesis of aesthetics with hardheaded pragmatism — was the perfect field.
But for all its soaring lines and innovative solutions, architecture is exposed to the realities of the marketplace like few other fields: The surging sense of possibility that lasted through the ‘90s and the early 2000s flagged when the housing market crashed and turned the U.S. economy upside-down. Gehry, whose Walt Disney Concert Hall has become an iconic part of downtown Los Angeles and whose widespread fame led him to a gig designing jewelry for Tiffany, complained recently about the lack of work in the States and grumbled that he wishes he could move his staff to China, where there are more opportunities. Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect (the field’s top prize) who has gone from one of the field’s rebels to one of its most successful, joked grimly about the need for a party for depressed architects.
It isn’t just the celebrity figures who are frustrated, however. A once-thriving profession, one that requires considerable education and work ethic, and which has traditionally served a wide range of functions — designing mansions for the 1 percent as well as public libraries — is in trouble.
The ups and downs became very tangible for Guy Horton, a Boston native who dropped out of an academic program studying Chinese history and literature to become an architect, entranced by both the field’s energy and seeming stability. “I thought I was being pragmatic,” he says now. “Architecture was booming, the starchitects were getting a lot of attention. I was taken by the excitement of the field,” especially the study of urbanism. “Travels in China and around Asia, and stints living over there, got me more interested in cities and how they transform.”
After graduating from the cutting-edge Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles, he was scooped up by the L.A. offices of Perkins + Will, the large Chicago-based firm with a track record for sustainable projects. In 2008, as the market was crashing, he was laid off.
He bounced checks. He strained to pay student loans. Most of his income went to cover a health plan, but he avoided doctors or dentists because of high deductibles. He was pulled over by the police for his car’s expired tags. He was demoralized and frightened for his family, which included a 1-year-old daughter. After working hard to break into what seemed to be a burgeoning profession, unemployment was like being buried alive.
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Horton wasn’t alone: According to the U.S. Department of Labor, employment at architectural firms nationwide dropped from 224,500 to 184,600 between July and November of 2009, and the numbers have kept falling. In some cases, firms went dormant while remaining open. Gensler, the nation’s biggest firm, laid off 750 of a staff of about 3,000; British Pritzker-winner Norman Foster laid off a quarter of his. Gehry – whose Brooklyn Yards project and condo/shopping hybrid in downtown Los Angeles wilted – cut Gehry Partners to ribbons, slicing more than half his staff of 250. All over the world, even in once-vigorous regions, ambitious projects stalled. That process has continued: In November, Gehry saw the projected Guggenheim Abu Dhabi museum go into deep freeze.
Many architects running smaller firms were lucky enough to keep their jobs but saw their fees – linked to falling construction costs – decline. Numbers are hard to come by and the upbeat American Institute of Architects does not track unemployment, but many thousands certainly left the field altogether. Sometimes they luck out: A former architect has become one of the best-loved baristas in Los Angeles; another runs the Coolhaus ice cream truck. Others have lost their homes and their medical insurance. “It’s the new English major,” says Horton.
Those who remain in the profession find design work scarce and are teaching, lecturing, entering competitions and moving into Hollywood production design. These gigs have always been part of the field, which revels in its synthesis of theory and practice, but the balance has shifted in a way that leads to architects doing less and less architecture.
“The recession has affected everyone, for sure,” says Kevin Daly, an established Santa Monica architect whose firm, Daly Genik, employs 10 people when at full strength. “Generally there’s a lot less work than people are accustomed to having. Clients are doing feasibility studies and then keeping their options open.”
Architect Marcelo Spina is a member of the creative class who serves the creative class: His boutique firm, Patterns, aims to design art galleries and small museums, and saw some early success. But many of those projects are drying up.
These days, he can only keep himself afloat through university teaching, and it’s the same for his architect wife, Georgina Huljich. “It’s a hugely important factor for us financially,” he says. “We’re proud academics, but we don’t want to be purely academics – we don’t want to be part of the paper architecture world. My colleagues are struggling the same way. Right now what you have is full-time employment with internship wages. There is much less meat for the same amount of animals. You see a whole lot of talented people not getting jobs.”
Spina is one of the lucky ones: He has strong connections in his native Argentina, where residential and civic projects have not died off. Because of a recent history of runaway and credit busts, designers are usually paid with real money. “You know someone is going to show up with a bag of cash.”
But those stuck working in the States are in a tight spot. In January, the New York Times ran a piece called “Want a Job? Go to College, and Don’t Major in Architecture.” The article charted a report by Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce that showed architecture graduates, of all college majors, the most likely to be out of work. The survey reported that a whopping 13.9 percent of architecture students between 22 and 26 were unemployed. Experience helped only a little bit: Among experienced architects between 30 and 54, a full 9.2 percent remained out of work. Even humanities and arts majors – often the least career-obsessed of students – fared better.
The Times story, Horton says, angered many of the architects he knew. “People were getting defensive about it. ‘It’s not about that – it’s about the passion!’ People were irate!” He knows architects who’ve left the state, closed their firms, moved back in with their parents. “People don’t want to talk about unemployment anymore … we are supposed to be in recovery optimistic power mode.”
It’s part of a professional ethos, he says, that stresses idealism, dues paying, hierarchy, optimism and a heroic self-image while ignoring financial realities. It’s something he’s become intimately familiar with as he tries to chronicle the damage the recession has exacted on the field. “I’m trying to talk to architects about the economy,” Horton says. “Forget it! It’s hard to get real information. They’re so conscious of P.R. – they’re worried about what’s going to get tweeted.”
A lot of the profession, he says, has spent years in denial.
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Part of the problem with tracking the state of any creative class employment is that the numbers don’t tell the real story. Nor do the Horatio Alger stories that newspapers and magazines love running about the tiny minority of laid-off creatives who manage to “reinvent” themselves and turn their misfortune into an opportunity.
Not everyone is suffering. Eric Owen Moss and Barbara Bestor are very different kinds of designers, with sharply different lists of clients, but they show what is possible when talent and good fortune line up.
Moss has some major advantages over even the typical successful architect: He is the director of an architecture school, which provides him with a hefty salary. He has connections in China and has several projects cooking in a country that considers a redesign of the coastline within the art of the possible. And he has an architectural patron who has financed a daring series of design projects – asymmetric office buildings and an “art tower” in Culver City — that earned a 2011 rave in the New Yorker.
Though he calls himself “temperamentally optimistic,” Moss knows what’s happening around him. “If you look at the numbers, architecture graduates are looking for opportunities in other fields. Overall, commercial building has slowed to almost nothing.”
Bestor, whose hair is cut in a kind of ‘70s shag, has for years been the indie queen of Silverlake, the bohemian neighborhood on L.A.’s east side. Sitting in her retro-cool Airstream trailer, parked outside an open-plan plywood office that buzzes with activity, she compares herself to a culinary locavore: She’s tapped into the neighborhood – its boutique small businesses and pop-culture spirit — and is the first call for cool coffee shops (Intelligentsia), wine bars (Lou) and record label offices (Dangerbird) in Hollywood and points east. “People know me; they know what I do.”
But even Bestor has struggled: After laying off most of her staff after the crash, she took a university teaching gig in 2009, working, effectively, two full-time jobs. “Very much like an immigrant worker,” she says. “I sold the house I had, bought a cheaper house and worked harder.” She’s coming back, but things are still tight. “It’s a shell game: This will pay for that; this will pay for that this month.”
Olivier Touraine, a Frenchman working in Los Angeles, helped design a Japanese airport for Renzo Piano soon after graduating from architecture school in the late ‘80s. He later taught at Columbia University and worked for future Pritzker winners Koolhaas and Jean Nouvel. In 2007 the New York Times profiled Touraine and his wife, Deborah Richmond, as a green-design power couple who had recently completed a home refurb for director Wim Wenders. Living in a sleek and sustainable new house made of redwood and corrugated steel that the couple designed, not far from Venice Beach, the gentlemanly, intellectual Touraine seemed like someone destined to thrive.
These days, “We are making less than a cleaning lady,” Touraine says, sitting in Wurstkuche, the high-design gastropub that serves the architecture students of SCI-Arc. The dried-up residential work hit his firm especially hard. “Architects’ fees are based on construction costs; those are going down. When you do the math at the end, you end up with less. You have to get more work, but you have fewer employees. It was six employees, plus us. Now we have an intern two mornings a week.”
When he looks around at his colleagues, things don’t look much brighter. “Everybody has been massively laying off. Massively.” But the pain is not evenly distributed. “The bigger you are, the better you can pass through the storm. And if you are rich enough, even if [your firm] is very small, you can be OK, even if you are losing ridiculous money. They are trust-fund babies: Somehow the recession has been good for them; it has exterminated the competition.”
Another reason numbers are deceptive is that small firms often don’t technically die. “They can’t exactly close,” he says. “They freeze. Or they close their professional space and move into their backyard or garage.” Others buy cheap land in developing countries and design self-funded projects of their own to give clients a sense of forward motion. “It’s completely staged.”
For small firms who keep struggling, the pain bleeds into a marriage. “I’m almost more surprised when I hear people are still together,” says Touraine, who recently separated from his wife. “It’s like having two guinea pigs in the same cage – night and day, you bring the stress back.”
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Even Bestor, who is lucky enough to have boundless energy and talents that sync nicely with the state of the marketplace, worries about what awaits the younger generation.
Architecture has always been a tough field for newcomers. “Your salary starts at the schoolteacher level,” she says, “but then you watch your friends who went to other professional schools go up and up, while yours stay the same. If they went to dental school they make more than you.” It forces students to be cautious at the time in their careers when they should be taking chances.
The current uncertainty makes the old model – poverty in youth, payday sometime in middle age – harder to count on. She fears that after being a profession, architecture will return to the patronage system, in a day of dwindling patrons. Or a system where “only rich kids can do quirky stuff and everyone else has to work for corporate firms.”
Spooked by the marketplace, more and more students are going right into teaching from grad school, getting little or no professional experience. It’s hard to blame students who graduate with significant financial pressure. “If you go to a private school, you can easily come out with $100,000 in debt,” Horton says. “For a graduate program, it’s hardly unheard of to have $50,000 to $60,000. Then you have all the fees associated with getting your license.”
And due to an old-school ethos of dues paying – as well as the freeze in building – today’s students often wade through round after round of low-paying internships before getting a full-time job, only to find that salaries have declined.
“It’s not good for me,” Touraine, who now teaches at USC, says of the field’s sour state. “But I’ve had my good time. I probably won’t be able to climb the way I wanted to. But I won’t be homeless; I can teach. I’m really concerned about a generation that won’t get a chance.” As for his peers, “We’re pissed off, we’re frustrated, we’re overstressed. But as an educator, I feel like an ayatollah sending kids running into the minefield.”
Horton thinks architects are deeply out of touch with economic reality and aren’t leveling with students and young designers. “How do you keep the KoolAid and the boosterism flowing when there are no or few prospects after graduation?” he asks, describing what he calls a lost generation. “But architecture just grinds on heroically, regardless.”
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People will always need houses, cities and nations will always need schools and libraries and civic buildings, and trendy restaurants will need redesigns. Architecture will never die completely: It’s existed as a calling, in various forms, at least since the medieval master builder.
Moss, who regrets having to lay off employees, says he still feels encouraged about the future. He expects to hire this year – at lower pay and with less stability than he’s used to offering. Periods of tension sometimes produce fresher thinking. “Maybe there’s an opening for new ideas.”
The Washington, D.C.-based American Institute of Architects, which represents the entire field but is considered by some a cheerleader for corporate firms, is cautiously optimistic, projecting “a 2.1 percent rise in spending this year for non-residential construction projects,” and better numbers for 2013. The group fights to make small increments sound victorious, like the two months of slight increases in architectural billing, following dozens of months of contraction, which the AIA celebrated in January.
But overall, the state of architecture reflects the larger story of the creative class in the 21stcentury: Security and artistic freedom exist only for those who are independently wealthy. There are heavy casualties at small independent companies from which corporations are somewhat shielded. The middle levels get hollowed out. Barriers to entry tighten. And there’s a lingering sense that even when the recession lifts, these industrywide problems will not abate. Record corporate profits, after all, have not led to a significant increase in design work or construction. They’re issues, of course, that increasingly face the broader middle class in the developed world as well.
Some smell trouble in architecture’s sense of itself, as the most visible architects work for high-fashion companies – Koolhaas’ Prada stores, for example — even as the profession suffers: It’s part of a process by which the field orients itself around the top 1 percent and contributes to what some call the skyboxing of America. “Most architects in the ‘50s were building private houses – like the Case Study House project,” Touraine says of the effort by Arts & Architecture magazine to design stylish, modest homes for the middle-class. “But the idolatry of the starchitects has made it seem like architecture is only for exceptional buildings. Architecture is perceived as a luxury good. It can be, but it’s not only that.”
A decline in public spending – belt-tightening by U.S. cities and states, full-on austerity in Europe – kills off the civic projects that allow architects to develop reputations and make payroll. “I don’t feel like this is temporary,” says Daly. “The immediate future will be more like now than it will be like it was five years ago. Until we make the decision as a society to invest in things – and I don’t really see that happening.”
After two full years of pain, Horton got a new job, this time at a firm that he calls a better fit. For him personally, the recession and the blow it dealt his field has had a reasonably happy ending. But he’s less sanguine about where things are headed: The downturn has shown the contradictions of a field built on wait-your-turn hierarchy, a sense of self-importance, and a culture of sacrifice. And it showed that the world had changed from the postwar age of professional loyalty.
“You had the economic bargain that Robert Reich talks about: You work, and you’re taken care of,” says Horton, who, at 43, is old enough to have seen the transition from the old model. “This bargain no longer exists; it’s not unique to architecture. Architecture is a creative industry, but it’s also reflective of shifting paradigms of the middle class. Architects are supposed to be serving society, but I think we’re struggling to maintain our position in society.”
He may not look much like Justin Timberlake, but Jeff Miller is something of a Hollywood player. Or, rather, he was — until he got a call on Labor Day from his employers, the owners of the best and most important movie rental store in the orbit of Hollywood. For a decade the bearded, teddy-bear-like Miller helped run Rocket Video, a place frequented by directors, actors and aspirants, and staffed by obsessive savants. But thanks to Netflix, streaming video and the damage done to the store’s rental revenue, it was all over for this onetime destination – in a hurry.
A few weeks later, the inevitable closing party arrived on its stretch of La Brea Boulevard. “There was shock,” recalls Miller, a native of steel-belt Pennsylvania originally drawn to movies by old horror films and Abbott & Costello. “There were women who came in crying. There were people who wanted to take photos of their family with me because they’d grown up with Rocket.”
Some of the store’s patrons were regular film-lovers in the neighborhood; others were better known. Miller recalls William H. Macy renting ’70s porn before his role in “Boogie Nights,” Courtney Love coming by until she got angry about the store stocking the unsympathetic documentary “Kurt and Courtney” and blew up at the staff, Frank Darabont renting zombie films while he was conceiving the TV series “The Walking Dead.”
The shop’s most loyal celebrity customer was Faye Dunaway, who regularly came in to ask him for advice about foreign directors. “She said, ‘I was gonna take a film course but I figured I could just come in here and talk to you guys.’ ” She paid back the debt by doing numerous events at the store.
Rocket’s story – a strong reputation and longstanding community love, followed by sudden collapse – is not unique: Thousands of bookstores, record stores and video shops have gone under in the last few years. And with them, people like Miller have lost their jobs during the worst job market since the Great Depression.
The years following the 2008 market crash have been hard on many people. But due to other transitions in the economy and culture – the continued trickling-up of wealth to the very top, the “storm of innovation” unleashed by the Internet, a growing faux-populist disregard for expertise — certain sectors have been hit harder than others. Shop clerks, however erudite, don’t fit into the most influential definition of “the creative class” – urban scholar Richard Florida considers these folks members of the service class, about which he is not optimistic. But they’ve been, over the decades, important conduits between consumers and culture — and a training ground and meeting spot for some of our best writers, filmmakers and bands.
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Science fiction novels often sketch future worlds in which computers have replaced – or tried to subvert — human beings. Frank Herbert’s “Dune” opens well after wars between “thinking machines” and mankind. (Humans won, forbidding the construction of computers or robots; super-intelligent “mentats” performs the more intricate mental functions.) In Philip K. Dick’s work, almost everything is uncannily automated – including pets. (Check out “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”, the novel “Blade Runner” is based on.)
Closer to home, the damage automation has done to blue-collar employment – assembly lines, bank tellers, customer-service types – is now a well-documented aspect of life in the developed world. When a Don DeLillo character encountered an ATM in 1985’s “White Noise,” he brooded on its eerie inhumanity; these days we take such things for granted.
And technology – which began by destroying unskilled labor – has begun working its way up to fields that require real expertise. For now, doctors, lawyers and hedge-fund managers are safe. But people whose connection to culture involves putting books, records and films in the hands of paying customers – are an endangered species. Employers don’t have to pay medical benefits to algorithms that offer glib, simplified, if-you-like-this recommendations.
OK, OK — we also know they’re figures of fun. Kevin Smith made them into foul-mouth suburban stoners in “Clerks,” and Nick Hornby and Stephen Frears made the “High Fidelity” gang into smug, retro-obsessed elitist losers. And some clerks, it’s fair to say, are just killing time.
But for decades, bright, hard-working creative types – sometimes, though not always, lacking college degrees or professional connections – have been drawn to working in shops that allow them to filter the flow of culture, one customer at a time. One of these self-made savants was Jonathan Lethem, who clerked at bookstores in New York and the Bay Area before, during and after an aborted college degree, long before he became an internationally respected novelist.
“I think of bookstore jobs as my university,” says Lethem. (His new nonfiction collection, “The Ecstasy of Influence,” emphasizes the catholic nature of his taste and his provocative way of discussing work he loves – both qualities embodied by the best store clerks.) “The physical trade of books was a hallowed way to become a writer in the pre-MFA era. It was the only work I wanted to do, and the only work I was qualified to do.”
Those years shaped his taste as a reader profoundly. “With bookstores, you go in and you find the things you weren’t looking for. The clerk is doing that 24/7 – my reading was shaped by what was left behind. And you develop a loathing for the false canon – the two books each year that everybody is supposed to read.”
It also shaped the writer he would become, known for a mongrel, genre-blending style. “You can’t hang onto those sacred quarantines,” he says, “when you see the mad diversity around you.”
Lethem, of course, is not alone: Writer Mary Gaitskill and Decemberists singer Colin Meloy – now an author himself — started out in bookstores; punk heroine Patti Smith worked at New York’s sprawling the Strand. My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and R.E.M.’s Peter Buck clerked at record stores in Louisville, Ky., and Athens, Ga., respectively. Quentin Tarantino – who could almost be a character from Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” – developed his distinctive blend of junk culture, Asian film and cinephile obsession while laboring at a video store in Manhattan Beach: Video Archives was his film school.
These places speak to people outside urban bohemians. Poet and critic Dana Gioia, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, grew up in the ’50s, in the rough Southern California town of Hawthorne, with parents who lacked college degrees. “When I was a little kid, there was a used bookstore every 10 blocks,” he recalls. “There would be some grumpy old man running it: If you came in a couple of times he’d comment on your books — not in a charming way that you’d put in a movie. But it showed you that other people read and had opinions; it was a socialization. So much of culture is chance encounters between human beings.”
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So why are these places closing and their staffs sent into unemployment or forced to transfer their expertise to unpaid blogging? Some of the cause is simply the hangover of the 2008 market crash, which has slowed retail sales and sent unemployment to 12 percent in some places, including the very culture-savvy cities that used to support many of these stores.
Each industry has its own story, but the common denominator seems to be the Internet.
Bookstores have had an especially hard time: Competing with Amazon and other online sources that discount books and don’t require bricks and mortar spaces in dense, urban areas has proven fatal. In the last few years, Boston has lost Wordsworth, Los Angeles has lost Dutton’s Brentwood Books, Metropolis Books and the Mystery Bookstore. Borders is history. Used bookstores continue to drop so quickly it’s hard to keep track.
Even Portland’s mighty Powell’s Books, which not only takes up an entire block in a city of readers and was ahead of the curve in selling books over the Internet, laid off some of its expert staff this year and may not be done making cuts.
The collapse of record stores is part of a larger implosion of the music industry, says Steve Knopper, a Rolling Stone correspondent and author of the industry chronicle “Appetite for Self-Destruction.” As his title implies, the labels should have seen the threat of Internet piracy coming, but it dealt them a fatal blow. The new, Internet-inspired business model — replacing the sale of $15 CDs by selling individual songs at 99 cents a pop and sharing that with Apple – shrunk things further.
“Apple had basically taken over the entire music business,” writes Knopper, who still misses the Denver Tower Records and a shop called Hegewisch in Indiana that made his first newspaper job a lot less lonely. You can love the convenience of iTunes and still recognize that it’s made it much harder for stores to compete.
Gary Calamar remembers moving to Los Angeles the late ’70s, fresh from New York. He dropped into a record store in the Licorice Pizza chain and a punk-rock girl helped turn him onto some new music. “She would recommend things and run back and play them for me over the in-store system,” he says now. “I remember walking out of the store with singles from the Police, B-52′s, Devo, the Knack. I was in love with L.A.”
Now indoctrinated, Calamar soon had a record store job of his own, moving a career that would lead him to become a KCRW deejay and music consultant for shows like “Six Feet Under” and “Dexter.” Calamar is also the author, with Phil Gallo, of “Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital and Back Again,” which looks at places like Waterloo Records in Austin, Texas, and Newbury Comics in Boston – as well as many shops that have since closed and taken their staffs with them. For his equivalent, moving to a big city in the 21st century, that ladder into the industry no longer exists.
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The loss of clerks – and the spaces in which they work – is a loss for the culture as a whole. It’s intangible, though. “So much of it is happenstance and chance,” says Doug Dutton, who ran Dutton’s Brentwood Books, arguably Los Angeles’ finest bookstore, until its 2008 closing. One of his most beloved clerks was a poet and crime-fiction junkie named Scott Wannberg. “All you had to do was say something about noir mysteries, and it would open a stream. Conversation can lead to all kinds of things – to mutual distaste, to romance, or profound meetings of the minds. These pathways of connections are very important, and disappearing.” (Wannberg’s death this year was mourned by the city’s literary world.)
There’s a bigger, more tangible dimension to all of this: The death of the clerk as cultural curator is part of a larger move by which computers are putting educated “knowledge workers” out of jobs. It’s not just the guy on the assembly line, now – it’s the autodidact at the bookstore. Next, they’re coming for librarians – many of whom are dreaded “public employees.” Other white-collar jobs could start to drop as computers become more ruthlessly efficient and human beings find it harder and harder to keep up.
The actual work of creativity – creating a short story or a film — is not yet something computers can replicate, says Andrew McAfee, author, with fellow MIT economist Erik Brynjolfsson, of “Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy.”
“But that doesn’t mean that automation and technology isn’t a threat to the creative class,” McAfee says. “Members of the creative class need day jobs, and some of those classic day jobs – Quentin Tarantino working in a video store – are endangered.” Same with writers, he says, as the Web puts a downward price on their labor.
Artificial intelligence that replicates human abilities – websites that recommend books or CDs, for instance — have surged just in the last few years. “I’m blown away by the power of some of these algorithms. We now have digital alternatives to store clerks. Amazon has all the money and all the will in the world to get it right.”
McAfee, a research scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management, says he breaks with peers who see today’s difficulties as similar to transitions like the Industrial Revolution that ultimately created more jobs than they destroyed. “We’re talking about a new reality,” he says.
“When you don’t need people for their muscle power, of for their communication abilities, or for their pattern recognition, an entrepreneur, someone wanting to start a company, looks around and says, ‘Remind me what I need human labor for?’ The pool of things that’s uniquely human is shrinking.”
In a world of rapid technological advance, where even some highly trained lawyers and medical pathologists are in trouble, the humble clerk doesn’t stand a chance. The out-of-work video store clerk, blogging in his bedroom for free, may be a kind of canary in the cultural coal mine. We don’t always get warnings before our livelihood – or our lives – suddenly change. But the signs today, of a new kind of creative destruction, are getting harder and harder to ignore.
“I have a feeling we better start reading that science fiction,” McAfee says. “That reality is coming to us, and coming to us sooner then we expect.”
Over the last few weeks, Salon has been looking at the destruction of the creative class by the Internet, the recession and a transforming economy. A new book, “Free Ride,” by the journalist Robert Levine, intersects with some of these concerns. Subtitled “How Digital Parasites Are Destroying the Culture Business and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back,” Levine’s book looks at how publishing, the music industry, newspapers and other industries drank the dot.com Kool-Aid, effectively killing themselves off. He’s particularly interested in copyright, the U.S. government’s role in unleashing the Internet and the impact of digital piracy.
Levine, a former Billboard executive editor who has also contributed to Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair and the New York Times, asks, effectively: Can the culture business survive the digital age? It’s a welcome reconsideration after the cheerleading that has greeted the Web and the structural changes in the U.S. economy. We spoke to the Berlin- and New York-based Levine about how we got here and where we go next.
The Internet has caused a revolution, and in any revolution there are winners and losers. How do you think that’s worked out here? Who’s won and who’s lost, so far?
I think the revolution is still ongoing. The short-term losers are media companies. The short-term winners are technology companies. The long-term loser is everyone. I don’t think anyone wins. The premise of my book is that most online companies rely for their content, and hence for their money, on traditional media companies. If they destroy that business model, it’s unclear what they’re going to have to distribute. If you look at YouTube, eight of the top 10 videos are major-label music videos. If the major labels shrank to the point where they can’t make videos, YouTube isn’t much of a business. It’s still a great social phenomenon, but it’s not much of a business.
Was this inevitable, or were there policy choices that led to this state of affairs?
Oh, I think it’s all policy choices. It’s inevitable that there would be a problem, but technology creates uncertainty and regulation solves uncertainty. When the car was [created], no one knew how fast you were allowed to drive. We came up with speed limits and that solved some of the uncertainty – didn’t solve it perfectly, but it made the roads safer. As copying technology evolved, we came up with other copyright laws to regulate it. Media companies thrived. Technology companies thrived. And despite not liking each other, they thrived together. A VCR isn’t very valuable if you can’t rent any good movies. Movies aren’t very valuable if you can’t watch them on a VCR. Then [Congress] came up with the DMCA, which I think was sort of the original sin. The idea was we have to say something before you want to take something that infringes on copyright down…
And DMCA is?
I’m sorry, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The important provision was notice and takedown. You have safe harbor from copyright liability if you follow this notice and takedown procedure. It turns 300 years of copyright law on its head by making it an opt-out system instead of an opt-in system. Dozens of sites will use this interview until you specifically tell them not to. That’s very different from “they can’t use it until they ask for permission.” What that does is it destroys the market.
One of the desirable things that copyright laws do is create some kind of market for intellectual property. We’ve had that for 300 years. That should change and it should evolve, but what we’re doing now is we’re dismantling that market. I think that’s really scary, because, first of all, you are going to see a lot of job loss. Secondly, I think you’re going to see the quality of things get affected. You see that happening with newspapers already. Third, I think the whole system suffers. Google News is not as useful if there’s not as much news to Google. I mean, Google is an information search tool, right? It’s not a moral issue. But the problem you’ve created, you create a very powerful incentive for somebody to create a better search engine. You eliminate [the] incentive to create better journalism. That is a problem.
Music was one of the first businesses to get hit hard. What happened there? Was it all piracy?
This is one of those questions that is hard to answer. It’s very hard to say exactly what caused what, and I would argue that separating those things out is impossible. Right now, the single biggest problem with CD sales is all the stores where you used to buy CDs are closed. Well, what caused that? Well, people started buying songs online. That became a problem because people were only buying singles instead of albums and they weren’t spending a lot. Well, why did that happen? Because piracy put so much downward pressure on prices that you have to take any deal, whether it’s a good deal or a bad deal. It’s very hard to separate these things. Any study where people say this has nothing to do with piracy is a bunch of bullshit.
When the Internet emerged, we thought we would be dropping the middleman out of this, that musicians and artists would connect directly with their fans.
The middleman hasn’t been eliminated. There’s a new middleman. YouTube is the new middleman. YouTube, just now, was giving professional content creators advances against future royalties. Is it a good middleman? I don’t know. YouTube has a lot of good technology. They obviously have other advantages. It could be a smart deal. It depends on the advance; it depends on what you want. But I would say that the idea that YouTube is fundamentally different from a record company is silly. YouTube probably has a higher percentage of the market for online video than all four major labels combined have of recorded music. Who’s stopping their market power? No one, and everyone is saying it’s a progressive thing.
Europe has responded a little differently to piracy and assaults on copyright. What effect has it had?
Well, I think it’s two things. One is, in continental European law, there’s a different tradition of copyright. One of my problems with the “copyleft” is that you don’t hear that. If you read Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu and all those sort of copyleft books, and there are 25 or 30 of them, you’ll see copyright is a limited monopoly and a balance between the author and the public interest, if you will. That is very true. It’s the roots of Anglo-American copyright law. What you rarely hear is that the French tradition – and this applies, to varying degrees, to a lot of other countries in Europe – copyright is a fundamental right. It is your work and you have a fundamental right to it. What’s interesting is you have a lot of people talking about the right to remix. In Europe, not only is there very little legal support for a right to remix, there’s a decent amount of support for a right not to be remixed. You have a right to the paternity and the integrity of your work. It’s a moral right. So someone says, “I want to remix Rob Levine’s book so that every 10 words it’s going to say: Rob Levine eats stinky poo” – by the way, I’m fairly certain that somebody would call this an art project – I can say, “No. I have a right to my work.” I think a lot of people would find that very reasonable.
The idea that the Internet is somehow immune from law or regulation or the protection of people’s rights has been seen as a progressive idea. It’s the “free and open Internet.” But if you really think about that for a second, that’s not a progressive argument. It’s a libertarian argument, because the same regulations that annoy you might be the regulations that protect me.
From the beginning, hasn’t the Internet been framed as the second coming of the Wild West?
I think it’s been framed as the second coming of Jesus H. Christ in full 3-D Cinerama Smell-O-Vision. Look, a lot of very smart people believe the Internet will change things that won’t change because they come out of human nature. Like people look at Wikipedia and they say, “See. People will all work together. We don’t need regulations.” I think that Wikipedia is a great thing but I wouldn’t want to change my system of government based on the 10-year track record of Wikipedia. Right? It gets a little wacky. People like to cooperate; people like to give things away. Yes, but people also like to violate the rights of other people. I want certain kinds of protections.
Your book is about several industries. You talk about the music industry, the movie industry, publishing, etc. I wonder if there is a common mistake that you saw most or all of these industries make along the way?
Yes. Listening to people who don’t have your interest in mind – they have their own interest in mind. When Google says newspapers should be free on the Internet, they may really believe that, but you also have to keep in mind that it’s a huge help to them. Right? I was on a panel a couple of weeks ago and this guy from Creative Commons said: “You should concentrate on art; you shouldn’t worry so much about these contracts.” That’s exactly what any artist should never do. The record company guy does not want to make you money; he wants to make him money. Same with your concert promoter. Same with Google. They are not on your side. They’re on their side. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because Google’s greed and self-interest has led to the creation of a valuable company, and many jobs, and some really remarkable technology, but it’s the government’s job to make sure they don’t trample the rights of other people.
How often is free speech used as a cudgel against copyright that claims free speech?
Several times a minute. Free speech is very important in the U.S. It’s a more important value than copyright. In most countries it is. But there’s an argument on the other side. There’s a great quote by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that says: “The Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression. By establishing the marketable right to the use of one’s expression, copyright supplies an economic incentive to create and disseminate.” That’s a pretty powerful argument on the other side.
Her argument, which I think is yours, is that copyright doesn’t inhibit free speech, but encourages free speech.
I think it does both to different degrees. It’s not that simple. Let me be clear, I hammer on that Justice O’Connor quote because it’s not something you’ll see in a lot of other books. But this is a complicated issue. Copyright often encourages free speech. It sometimes inhibits free speech. The idea that copyright is the be-all and end-all of free expression is simplistic. The idea that it inhibits free speech is simplistic. I think this is true of politics in general, but everyone argues about stuff like a 4-year-old.
Entertainment companies talk about digital theft. In my mind, that’s not a useful way to talk about a problem. The problem is copyright infringement. If you download my book illegally, I’m not angry. I hope you don’t. If a lot of people do it, I’ll be angry. The idea that someone is going to download my book illegally doesn’t bother me. The idea that someone is selling advertising against that transaction and profiting from it really does upset me. There’s just a lot more nuance there. You have one side calling it digital theft and saying that downloading things is a moral wrong. You’d have to ask a philosopher. Then you have another side saying you have the right to see movies. Well, that’s even dumber. I don’t think anyone is going to go to hell for downloading “Iron Man 2.” But saying you have the right to download it is also pretty silly.
We need to look at what copyright was meant to do. It was not meant to inhibit the copying you do at home. It was meant to give you monopoly that’s limited in scope and that’s limited in time to profit from your own work. That’s what I want. I want to have a monopoly on profiting from my own work. So, if you lend my book to a friend, God bless you. If you put it on the Internet and distribute it to 100 people, even if you are not benefiting from it directly, that goes against what we’re talking about on a very basic level. You can hire expensive lawyers to parse this in all sorts of ways, but let’s get real here. Mass distribution of stuff like this is really a problem. That’s what I’d like to see: a nuanced legal solution to solving and a nuanced discussion of what’s going on.
If you look at countries with functioning copyright systems and countries without functioning copyright systems, who creates more culture? That’s not a question. Cory Doctorow gave a speech at the New America Foundation about how copyright endangers democracy. That’s not a responsible comment. That’s just a bunch of bloviating. Democracies tend to have copyright. Countries with copyright tend to be democracies. I’m not suggesting a causal relationship, but to suggest that copyright endangers democracies – it doesn’t even meet the laugh test.
Let’s look to the future. You say in your last chapter: “Over the next decade, we will choose between two competing visions for the online world: media companies want the Internet to work more like cable television, while technology companies want cable to run more like the Internet.” Tell us what you mean by this.
If you think about the cable system, it’s closed. You can’t publish or broadcast without permission; you can’t receive or consume without paying. On the Internet it’s the opposite. Anyone can publish or broadcast; just about anyone can consume without paying. And again, sorry to keep hammering on this, I would say that those are two absolutes. There’s a lot of problems with the cable system. It leads to monopolization. The prices keep going up and there’s a lack of diversity of points of view. But there’s also good things about it. Television has never been better. We enjoy better TV. If you say, “Oh my God. Look how my cable bill rose in the last 10 years,” what you get is completely different. It’s a revolution of quality. Now let’s look at the Internet. It does a lot of things as well. You’ve got free expression. It’s a great thing. The Internet is very valuable. You get an incredible diversity of opinion. It’s very cheap. There’s a lot of good things about it. There’s also some bad things about it. It resists regulation in a very fundamental way. You have some people saying the Internet must be cable-ized; you have other people saying that cable must be Internet-ized. Is that really the best we can do? My argument is that we deserve better. I don’t want to choose between “Breaking Bad” and the skateboarding bulldog.
I would like to see the advantages of both. I would like to think the technology would allow that. And I’d like to think we can regulate smartly to encourage that.
What would you like to see happen? What’s the best-case scenario for the situation we’re in now? Because some things aren’t coming back totally. Newspapers, publishing, probably not coming back.
I’d like to see enough law applied in a smart way that we can bring back a market. U.S. publishing is never coming back, but I think we can enforce enough law to create a market, and that’s what we need. There’s obviously problems with the market. I’m not one of these “worshiping at the altar of the market” kind of dudes. But the market for intellectual property has served us very well both in terms of job creation and in terms of art. And I think that that is very important.
Listen to the optimists and the great recession sounds like a great opportunity. This is the time for the creative class to brand itself! A day job, they say, is so 20th century – as quaint and outdated as tail fins and manual sewing machines.
Thanks to laptops, cheap Internet connections and structural changes in the world economy, we’re living in a world of “free agents” – “soloists” who are “self-branding” and empowered to live flexible and self-determining lives full of meaning. We are all citizens of Freelance Nation — heirs not to the old-school stodgy, gray-flannel-suit Organization Man but to the coonskin-capped pioneers and rugged, self-made types who built this country.
But for those who must actually scrape together work in this new “gig economy” – architects, filmmakers, writers, musicians, bookstore managers, graphic designers and other downsized members of the creative class, folks made obsolete by the Internet and the current predatory style of corporations – Freelance Nation is a place where they fight to keep a home or medical insurance.
Some are losing their houses. Others are watching marriages go up in smoke or falling into heavy drinking. Still others are couch-jumping for months or years at a time. Or they’re veering close to bankruptcy because of the risk of living without medical insurance. Call it the new creative destruction.
Daniel Pink, a former Clinton White House hand, wrote the witty and engaging Bible of the freelance life, “Free Agent Nation.” “Today,” he wrote in 2002, in a book still cited approvingly by followers, “in good times and bad, at the peak of the boom or the trough of the bust – the dice are loaded in favor of the individual. That’s why I feel good about the future – a future in which more people can assert their independence and guide their economic and personal destiny.”
It might be rough at times, Pink concedes. But a wide range of people “will be able to throw off conformity, escape subservience, and live out their true potential.” (Much of the rhetoric of this movement resembles the books from the ’70s that told Americans that marriage or monogamy was for squares and that they should enter the free-spirited world of swinging.)
But life on the ground shows that the free agent life isn’t always so exhilarating – especially as incomes have fallen by roughly 10 percent since the recession began.
“Everyone I know who’s a graphic designer has had to take a pay cut of at least 40 percent over the last 10 years,” says Suzanne Rush, a former print designer for Warner Bros. who now freelances for movie studios and magazines around Los Angeles. “That’s true across the board — motion graphics people as well as print people,” staffers as well as freelancers.
In fact, many free agents see themselves not as freewheeling soloists but as permatemps and content serfs.
The free-agent reality
Matthew Wake had paid his dues. Post-college, he’d worked as short-order cook, waited tables, worked construction and clerked in record stores. While he was living in New Orleans, playing guitar in bands, a girlfriend suggested he might try something less financially risky than piling into a van to play small clubs across the South: music journalism.
Wake didn’t walk right into a staff job – he wrote copy for a bank, freelanced for papers for free, sold ads and sat through three-hour town-planning meetings, all ways to break in. But after a few years he became a writer, and later editor, at several Southern papers. For his latest job, he was a staff writer at a weekly in Greenville, S.C. The paper was owned by Gannett – a famously profit-driven company. “Every quarter was like a ‘Friday the 13th’ horror film,” he recalls. “’Am I gonna be the guy that Freddie gets?’”
One day in June, he and his colleagues were called into a room and told the paper was eliminating its arts and entertainment staff: The weekly would recycle copy from other papers in the chain. It was one of about 20,000 layoffs at Gannett under former CEO Craig Dubow, who retired last month due to medical issues and left the company with a $37.1 million golden parachute.
“First,” Wake says of his life post-job, “I went through my savings the way Jane’s Addiction goes through bass players. I hit up tons and tons of publications – local, regional, national. What I’ve observed is that as times get tough, freelance is the first thing they cut.” And publications are shrinking. “Spin just went bimonthly. The Rolling Stone I get in the mail is about as thin as a brochure. There will be more rats fighting for that same piece of cheese.”
Unpleasant as working for Gannett could be, Wake lived in a three-bedroom house, buying CDs or heading to bars when he wanted to. Now, he’s moved back to his hometown – Huntsville, Ala. — and has taken a room in the house he grew up in, now owned by his attorney brother. He writes for pay when he can, and lives off what he makes taking care of his 91-year-old grandmother. “It gives me something to do so I don’t have to go back to waiting tables,” he says. “I just turned 40.”
It’s hard not to feel like he’s going backward. When Wake had a job, he was able to make some forays into collecting art. “Now I have the same Stones poster I had in college… Do I go into PR? Marketing? I go from interviewing Slash to writing copy for a Denny’s menu? It’s gonna be a weird world for a while.”
“The collapse of culture”
Typically, the Internet-cheerleader books – as well as the websites of motivational branding coaches who urge creative types to stop working for the Man and seize their destiny – turn on rousing tales of the new economy. Pink’s “Free Agent Nation,” for instance, opened and closed with a inspiring sketch of Betty Fox, who ran a site called GrandmaBetty.com and ends up with the kind of big-money deal that most bloggers – the vast majority of whom are unpaid – dream of.
Internet skeptic Jaron Lanier, author of the razor-sharp book “You Are Not a Gadget,” sees the reporting on the new economy as driven by unlikely Horatio Alger stories. “There are a few success stories,” he says, “that create a false sense of hope.” Because Radiohead can offer its record for free, he points out, doesn’t mean that bands below the superstar level can. (Similarly, the death of Apple visionary Steve Jobs uncorked various rants about the value of mavericks and how you can get it if you try hard enough. Which makes everyone who struggles in a post-boom, post-bubble economy a loser. Or, as Herman Cain says, people who aren’t trying hard enough.)
Today’s gig economy is tough even for people accustomed to success. Dana Gioia is one of the leading – and for a while, most controversial – critics of American literature. He served as a vice president at General Foods, and later as director of the National Endowment for the Arts.
But between those two stints, he worked for more than a decade as a freelance writer, poet and critic. “When I quit my job in 1991, I had some tough years,” he says. “I reviewed books, I did gigs for the BBC, I gave lectures. When a big piece appeared, people would to invite me to give a speech. If you were willing to take a risk and float between gigs, you could make a living.”
Like Gioia or not — his criticism has made him enemies in academia and elsewhere — no one can say he’s lacking in drive or entrepreneurial energy. But in between the ’90s and now, a lot has changed. “Electronic entertainment has taken over people’s lives,” he says. “You see it with lower rates of reading, with people not going to performances — it’s all down. People not going means it’s harder for the artists to make a living; it’s very difficult for a jazz musician, for instance, to become well-known enough to get gigs. And political support for the arts is down.”
For Gioia himself, it’s made being a freelance man of letters – like his heroes from mid-century – much tougher. “I don’t think that’s possible anymore,” he says, as writing becomes unpaid volunteer work. “There are fewer gigs.” The number of papers with real book or ideas sections is down substantially; serious magazines are half the size they used to be. “If I’d quit my job this year, I don’t think I could have made it as a literary freelancer. The problem isn’t the decline of the economy, though that doesn’t help. The problem is the collapse of culture.”
Can the middle-class create?
Human beings, of course, have been making art at least since a Paleolithic man sketched a horse on the Lascaux caves 17,000 years ago. Stone sculpture of busty women and music, made originally on animal bones, are likely even older; the late scholar Denis Dutton argued in his book “The Art Instinct” that creativity was hard-wired into the human race during the process of evolution.
So, some of us will always do this. Modern life has allowed specialization that Stone Age man did not enjoy, but it’s never been easy to survive as an artist. Still, for generations to come, young people with trust funds will head to urban centers to make it as writers, visual artists, musicians and filmmakers. A few – especially those with copious subsidies from parents – will strike gold and inspire the next generation to take a chance.
What’s changing is the ability for people to make a middle-class living in creative fields. Many are forced to go freelance because they are losing their jobs: A new report shows that even well after the official end of the recession, slashed state budgets are making things tougher in the performing arts, with a 16 percent drop in performing-arts jobs since last year.
“For the performing arts,” writes economist and Progressive Policy Institute senior fellow Mike Mandel, “this is the moment where recession turns into depression.” For authors, book advances are reported to be about half of what they were before the crash. That’s easily the difference between a viable project and something you just can’t afford to do without an inheritance.
And as the New York Times recently observed, the freelance musician has gone the way of the Southern Democrat.
“It was a good living. But the New York freelance musician — a bright thread in the fabric of the city — is dying out,” wrote Daniel J. Wakin. “In an age of sampling, digitization and outsourcing, New York’s soundtrack and advertising-jingle recording industry has essentially collapsed. Broadway jobs are in decline. Dance companies rely increasingly on recorded music. And many freelance orchestras, among the last steady deals, are cutting back on their seasons, sometimes to nothingness.”
This is all coming very soon after a surging discussion about how casual, “no collar” creative class, laptop-toting “knowledge workers,” self-determining “free agents,” and so on, would be redefining and reviving American life. Richard Florida’s vaunted creative class was supposed to be pumping its mojo into American cities.
To Chris Ketcham, a freelance writer based in Brooklyn, it all comes down to living space. “Rent,” he says, “is the basis of everything. For any artist or creator who wants to live with that dynamism of dense urban spaces, he can be saddled with rents so high that they take up 50 percent or more of his income. It’s impossible to do things outside the marketplace because you’re constantly working to pay rent.”
Ketcham has recently penned a long, impassioned article for Orion magazine, “The Reign of the One Percenters: Income Inequality and the Death of Culture In New York City,” which coincides with some of the concerns of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
“It goes back to the rise of the financial class, that top 1.” says Ketcham. “That takeover of New York by the very rich, which drives up the cost of land, of rents.” His artist and filmmaker friends mostly have corporate jobs these days, he says. “They become servants to the corporate class.”
We are, admittedly, a long way from Lascaux here.
No benefit
Freelancers plying their trade in the gig economy range widely — from artists sleeping in their cars and tapping electricity from streetlights to, say, Gore Vidal, living in luxury in the Hollywood hills, and everything in between. One thing most freelancers — thriving or struggling — have in common is a complete lack of benefits. And that’s especially true in the case of medical coverage.
A longtime, hard-working freelance writer, Steve Mirkin has penned music and style stories for Rolling Stone and the New York Times. He’s a sharp-witted Queens native, with a fighter’s temperament. “Ten years ago, I was making a good living as a freelancer – I was writing a story a day.” With that work drying up, these days he’s mostly a freelance researcher and writer for reality TV and game shows, which are now slowing as well. Another thing these varied kinds of work have in common is the lack of health insurance.
Mirkin doesn’t like the risk of living without coverage. But money is tough as rates at both publications and in Hollywood fall – even the talent at “The Simpsons,” the longest-running show in television history, are seeing their pay being cut significantly — and he’s spent the last year borrowing guest rooms and couches from friends across Los Angeles. “You worry every time you cough,” he says, “that it could be very costly.”
A few years ago, those costs suddenly got real tangible. A sunny spring afternoon was interrupted by a kidney stone, and after a trip to the emergency room, he was hit with a bill for $30,000. “If you’re not insured and you don’t have the money,” he says, “they charge you more.” In Mirkin’s case, a strong-willed relative intervened and got the cost reduced, he’s still fighting to survive. “I worked very hard,” he says, “to avoid having to declare bankruptcy.”
His story is hardly unique. (Pink, to his credit, argues in “Free Agent Nation” that employer-based medical insurance makes no sense in a world increasingly populated by the self-employed.)
Radio producer Frances Anderton, an Englishwoman who moved to the States 20 years ago, sometimes wonders if she lives in the land of the free. “The myth of America is about being mobile – and being entrepreneurial: This was a country where people moved around, renewing their lives. But the so-called countries of Old Europe end up being far more conducive to mobility and risk-taking because of their safety nets.”
This bind inhibits creative types, says Anderton, who produces the public radio show DnA: Design and Architecture. “Architects might have an idea to start a firm, or to buy a piece of land to develop a project, but they feel compelled to find a job with healthcare. People stay in jobs they don’t like because they’re terrified to leave. I know from my own experience of being a freelancer, medical coverage is staggeringly expensive. Throw in a partner and a child, and it becomes extremely daunting. What should be an exciting way to pursue one’s career becomes fraught with peril.”
The last boat
For some people, the ever-changing alliances and environments of the gig economy add up to a better way to live and work.
“I’ve been a freelancer because that’s what I fell into, “says John Steinmetz, a composer, bassoon player and educator who combines stints – teaching at UCLA, playing with the Los Angeles Master Chorale – even as he’s watched music gigs dry up or move overseas. “I don’t envy being married to the same group of people all the time. I like the variety; I still do.”
But things have changed since he started out freelancing in the mid-’70s, and earlier this year, he and his violist wife saw unpleasant trends – falling pensions, rising medical costs, a tougher freelance market – and decided to downsize and sell their house. When he left his position with the Los Angeles Opera, and his income dropped, they were glad they had. Some musician friends lost their homes.
“I used to have a confidence that there was a path available for people who were willing to work at it,” he says. “But I’m not so sure about that any more. If everybody’s trying to crowd a deck of the last boat still afloat, there’s not much room there.”
Someday, there will be a snappy acronym for the period we’re living though, but right now — three years after the crash of 2008 — American life is a blurry, scratched-out page that’s hard to read. Some Americans have recovered, or at least stabilized, from the Great Recession. Corporate profits are at record levels, and it’s not just oil companies who are flush.
For many computer programmers, corporate executives who oversee social media, and some others who fit the definition of the “creative class” — a term that dates back to the mid-’90s but was given currency early last decade by urbanist/historian Richard Florida — things are good. The creativity of video games is subsidized by government research grants; high tech is booming. This creative class was supposed to be the new engine of the United States economy, post-industrial age, and as the educated, laptop-wielding cohort grew, the U.S. was going to grow with it.
But for those who deal with ideas, culture and creativity at street level — the working- or middle-classes within the creative class — things are less cheery. Book editors, journalists, video store clerks, musicians, novelists without tenure — they’re among the many groups struggling through the dreary combination of economic slump and Internet reset. The creative class is melting, and the story is largely untold.
It’s happening at all levels, small and large. Record shops and independent bookstores close at a steady clip; newspapers and magazines announce new waves of layoffs. Tower Records crashed in 2006, costing 3,000 jobs. This summer’s bankruptcy of Borders Books — almost 700 stores closed, putting roughly 11,000 people out of work — is the most tangible and recent example. One of the last video rental shops in Los Angeles — Rocket Video — just announced that it will close at the end of the month.
On a grand scale, some 260,000 jobs have been lost in traditional publishing since 2007, according to U.S. News and World Report. In newspapers alone, the website Newspaperlayoffs.com has tracked some 40,000 job cuts since 2008.
Some of these employees are young people killing time behind a counter; it’s hard for them, but they will live to fight again. But education, talent and experience — criteria that help define Florida’s creative class, making these supposedly valued workers the equivalent of testosterone injections for cities — does not guarantee that a “knowledge worker” can make a real living these days.
“It’s sort of like job growth in Texas,” says Joe Donnelly, a former deputy editor at L.A. Weekly, laid off in 2008 and now pouring savings and the money he made from a home sale into a literary magazine. “Gov. Perry created thousands of jobs, but they’re all at McDonald’s. Now everyone has a chance to make 15 cents. People are just pecking, hunting, scratching the dirt for freelance work. Living week to week, month to month.”
* * *
Past groups punctured by economic and technological change have been woven into myth. Charles Dickens wrote sympathetically about Londoners struggling through the Industrial Revolution of 19th-century Britain. John Steinbeck brought Dust Bowl refugees to life; Woody Guthrie wrote songs about these and others with no home in this world anymore. One of his inheritors, Bruce Springsteen, did the same for the declining industrial economy.
But the human cost of this latest economic/technological shift has been ignored. Many of us, says Northern California writer Jaime O’Neill, are living in a depression. “It’s hard to make the word stick, however, because we haven’t developed the iconography yet, he writes in a recent essay titled “Where’s today’s Dorothea Lange.”
A fading creative class — experiencing real pain but less likely to end up in homeless shelters, at least so far, than the very poor — may not offer sufficient drama for novelists, songwriters or photographers.
But journalists themselves have also ignored the human story all around them. In fact, the media — businesses that have been decimated by the Internet and corporate consolidation — have been reticent at telling the tale of this erosion. Good newspapers offer responsible coverage of the mortgage meltdown and the political wars over taxes and the deficit. But it’s easier to find a story about a plucky worker who’s risen from layoff to an inspiring Plan B than it is the more typical stories: People who lose their livelihood, their homes, their marriages, their children’s schooling because of the hollowing-out of the creative class and the shredded social safety net. Meanwhile, luxury coverage of homes, fashions, watches and wine continue to be a big part of magazines and newspapers.
Optimists like Florida are undoubtedly right about something: This country doesn’t make things anymore and never will. What the United States produces now is culture and ideas. Trouble is, making a living doing this has never been harder.
Wait a minute, says Allison Glock, a magazine journalist and writer who’s just returned to her native South because she and her novelist husband could no longer afford life in New York. “Wasn’t the Internet supposed to bring this class into being?”
* * *
Much of the writing about the new economy of the 21st century, and the Internet in particular, has had a tone somewhere between cheerleading and utopian. One of the Net’s consummate optimists is Chris Anderson, whose book “The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling More,” championed the Internet’s “unlimited and unfiltered access to culture and contents of all sort, from the mainstream to the farthest fringe of the underground.” With our cell phones, MP3s and TiVos, we’re not stuck watching “Gilligan’s Island” over and over again, he writes. Now we can groove to manga and “connect” through multiplayer video games.
Of course, it’s not all about the Internet: David Brooks’ influential “Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There” traced a multi-ethnic, meritocratic elite and a fantasia of latte shops, retro-hip consumers and artisanal cheese stores. The cheese stores are, in some cases, still there, but much of what Brooks predicted has fallen through. He wrote — in 2000 — that we were living “just after an age of transition,” with the culture wars dead, a “peaceful middle ground” politically and a nation improved by the efforts of a class that had reconciled the bourgeois ethos with bohemianism.
This was easier to understand when things seemed to be humming along. But even after the 2008 crash — with unemployment at 12 percent and above in California, which, thanks to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is also the state most driven by the creative class — blind optimism continues.
In 2009, Anderson came out with the intelligently argued “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” which suggested that new revenue streams and the low cost of computer bits meant that both businesses and consumers would benefit as the Internet drove down prices. It’s nice to contemplate, but the human cost of “Free” becomes clear every day a publisher lays off staff or a record store closes.
Richard Florida helped set much of the agenda with his 2002 book “The Rise of the Creative Class,” which argued that this class would make cities rich in “technology, talent and tolerance” and jolt them back to life. His latest book, “The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity,” wrestles with the difficulty of the last few years. But it continues to put faith in knowledge workers and the places they settle to bounce back stronger than ever.
The new economy “is good for whoever owns the computer server,” says Jaron Lanier, a virtual-reality pioneer and author of “You Are Not a Gadget,” which debunks a lot of Internet hype. “So there’s a new class of elites close to the master server. Sometimes they’re social network sites, other times they’re hedge funds, or insurance companies –other times they’re a store like the Apple Store.”
Andrew Keen is another Silicon Valley insider who’s seen the dangers of the Net. “Certainly it’s made a small group of technologists very wealthy,” he says. “Especially people who’ve learned how to manipulate data. Google, YouTube, a few of the bloggers connected to big brands. And the social media aristocracy –LinkedIn, Facebook.”
Keen’s book, “The Cult of the Amateur,” looks at the way the supposedly democratizing force of the Net and its unpaid enthusiasts has put actual professionals out of work. It’s not just the Web, he says, or its open-content phase, but a larger cultural and economic shift. “We live in an age where more and more people think they have a book in them,” he says. “Or a film in them, or a song in them. But it’s harder and harder to make a living at these things.”
And when Google is used as an excuse to fire the librarian, or “free” access to information causes circulation to drop and newspapers to lay off staff, the culture pays a very real price.
* * *
So as these people lose their jobs, where are they going? The book/record/video store clerk is not only a kind of low-paid curator, but these jobs have long served as an apprenticeship for artists such as Patti Smith, Quentin Tarantino, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck or Jonathan Lethem.
Donnelly, who co-edits the Los Angeles literary magazine Slake, has watched numerous friends leave writing, art and acting. “I’ve seen a lot of people go into marketing — or help companies who want to be ‘cool.’ What artists do now is help brands build an identity. They end up styling or set decorating. That’s where we’re at now.”
The hard times and frustration are not confined to writers: Eric Levin is a kind of creative class entrepreneur: He owns Aurora Coffee — two cafes in Atlanta that employ artists and musicians as baristas, and the Little Five Points record shop Criminal Records, which, after 20 years, has just announced that it will close. (There are local efforts underway to try to save it.) When asked if he knows anyone who’s hurting, he replies, “Everybody I know.” And he emphasizes that independent business people are in the same boat with writers and musicians.
“Main Street U.S.A. is suffering,” he says. “If you like big-box retailers –they’re winning. Corporations are winning.”
The arts — and indeed, narratives of all kind — can capture a time, a place and a culture, and the inner and outer lives of its people. “But the tale of our times,” O’Neill wrote in his piece on the silence of the new depression, “is mostly being told by our unwillingness to tell it.”
Over the next few months, Salon will look periodically at the hollowing out of the creative class — its origins, its erosion, the price of “free,” and offer possible solutions and reasons for hope.
Is it a recession, a transition, a reset, or all of the above? “I think we’re nowhere,” says Donnelly. “We’re in a no man’s land.”
(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock) 
An unfinished residential building (left) is seen on a mountain in Estepona, near Malaga, southern Spain, Jan. 31, 2012. (Credit: Jon Nazca / Reuters) 
(Credit: A still from "Clerks") 
(Credit: l i g h t p o e t via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: sheff via Shutterstock/iStockphoto) 
