Salon.com > Scott Timberg

No sympathy for the creative class

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 13:00:00 +0000

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.

The architecture meltdown

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 22:00:00 +0000

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.

The clerk, RIP

Sun, 18 Dec 2011 20:00:00 +0000

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.”

Does culture really want to be free?

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 15:00:00 +0000

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.

Why “branding” won’t save the creative class

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:05:00 +0000

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.

The creative class is a lie

Sat, 01 Oct 2011 13:01:00 +0000

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.