There’s some interesting stuff for arts and cultural mavens in Richard Florida’s latest salvo on the implications of the ‘creative class’ mindset. Sure, it’s a bit over the top and chicken-little-esque (that’s what polemics do, after all), but there are bits of wisdom along the way, as well.
Florida is alarmed at the efforts of other countries to build creatively engaging cities that attract the best and the brightest, while America is locking its borders and focusing on more rigid social values. As a result, he says, fewer creatives are coming to America, more creative Americans are moving overseas, and the hothouse of insight, diversity, and innovation that drove our exceptional economic success is cooling down.
Whether this relates to any community’s ‘SOB’ (symphony, opera, ballet) is a valid question. But it certainly relates to the cultural ecosystems of cities, counties, states, and regions. A vibrant mix of opportunities to express, engage, observe, and share the creative impulse — especially in a social setting — seems a no-brainer connection for encouraging highly creative workers — whether lured from somewhere else, or home grown.
More chilling in Florida’s article is not the mega-migrations of creatives from one city to another, or one country to another. It’s the micro-migrations we all seem to be making within our community sphere. Says he:
City by city, neighborhood to neighborhood…our politics are becoming more concentrated and polarized. We may live in a 50-50 country, but the actual places we live (inner-ring v. outer-ring suburbs, San Francisco v. Fresno) are much more likely to distribute their loyalties 60-40, and getting more lopsided rather than less. These divisions arise not from some master plan but from millions upon millions of individual choices. Individuals are sorting themselves into communities of like-minded people which validate their choices and identities.
It’s easy to see how the rigid and individualistic pursuit of professionalized cultural organizations can feed into that separation — the opera serves a different bunch than the jazz club, which is also niche-marketing to avoid the grunge crowd. More subtle is the sense that the whole idea of a functional purpose for creative expression only makes the matter worse.
A chilling case-in-point comes from the newly appointed, but already embattled, Heritage Minister of Canada, Hélène Chalifour Scherrer. She got an earful from the cultural community when she joked that one of her favorite cultural pursuits is sports. Later, she tried to clarify:
‘Heritage Canada isn’t necessarily about knowing a lot about culture, but rather taking care of its Canadian identity. Culture is a tool. And you need a vision to be the guardian of the Canadian identity. You don’t necessarily have to know what books were published last week.’
Both Scherrer and Florida are convinced that ‘culture is a tool.’ For Sherrer, it’s a tool to protect and preserve. For Florida, it’s an economic lure to draw smart people. To me, the very effort to wield cultural expression as a functional tool presents a danger greater than the utility. The power of art is in connection — in every sense of the word. And tools have a way of defining, reinforcing, and codifying the separation of space.
PROGRAM NOTE: I just noticed that fellow weblogger James Russell has a recent entry featuring the very same quote from Florida’s article. Take a peek at Russell’s perspective on the whole thing.
