• Home
  • About
    • CultureCrash: The Blog
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Scott Timberg
    • Contact
  • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Culture Crash: The Book
    • Book Events
  • Other AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

CultureCrash

Scott Timberg on Creative Destruction

Can Unions Save the Creative Class?

March 18, 2013 by Scott Timberg

SALON is running a series on labor unions in the 21st century. My contribution is a piece asking if struggling artists, musicians, authors, scribes, etc. can make use of a union or collective to negotiate these strange times.

I spoke to a number of folks — a laid-off journalist, a music historian, screenwriter who helped lead the Hollywood writers strike, cultural observer Thomas Frank — for this piece. And took the whole thing back to about the 12th century. Complicated issue.

Here it is.

Filed Under: art, classical music, creative class, newspapers

Comments

  1. Sam says

    March 18, 2013 at 3:07 pm

    Scott–

    Your article describes the Musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra as being on strike. We are not on strike, but locked out by our management.

    At no time did we ever threaten to strike this season, and we were entirely willing to continue “playing and talking” beyond the expiration of our contract on Oct. 1, 2012. We also offered to submit our entire contract to binding federal arbitration to avoid a work stoppage. Both of these offers were turned down flat, and we have been locked out since October 1, 2012.

    If you could make this correction to the Salon piece, it would be much appreciated. There is very little understanding in the general public as to the difference between a strike and a lockout, and it’s important that the press report this detail accurately. Thanks.

    Sam Bergman
    violist, Minnesota Orchestra

  2. Lakeside Camera Photography Class says

    March 18, 2013 at 8:02 pm

    Dear Scott- if you are interested in what I see as the decline in the professional photography industry please feel free to contact me.
    I am a professional photographer for over 35 years…in New Orleans
    Sincerely, Richard Vallon Jr.
    rvallon@me.com

  3. Destiny Allison says

    April 6, 2013 at 9:21 am

    Hi Scott,

    I’m interested in your articles on the demise of the creative class. I’m not sure unions or guilds is the answer, though I agree we are returning to a more local/regional focus that, if managed well, has the ability to stop the slide. I’m working on an article for THE magazine in Santa Fe, NM and wonder if you would be willing to talk. My email is destinyallison@aol.com. Regardless, I look forward to your book and hope it’s progressing smoothly. All the best,

    Destiny

  4. luodidigood says

    May 6, 2013 at 1:16 am

    I see as the decline in the professional photography industry please feel free to contact me. cheap jersey

  5. TCinLA says

    May 18, 2013 at 10:00 am

    A very interesting article. As someone who somehow managed to survive the Great Screenwriter’s Strike of 1988 (but not the way any of us thought we would), I would list that strike as being as harmful to writers as the musician’s strike of 1942-44 was to big-band music.

    That strike of 1988 killed a system in which screenwriters actually got to live a middle-class unionized life and one in which you did not have to be a son/daughter of the upper middle classes with a trust fund in order to survive and get to work as you do now; the loss of those voices has a lot to do with the decline in overall quality of Hollywood and the reason why the only thing writers seem to “know” anymore to write about is the crap they learned in Fillum School.

    Sadly, it was the union members themselves who did it to themselves (with the help of their “leadership”) just as happened in 1942-44.

Scott Timberg

I'm a longtime culture writer and editor based in Los Angeles; my book "CULTURE CRASH: The Killing of the Creative Class" came out in 2015. My stories have appeared in The New York Times, Salon and Los Angeles magazine, and I was an LA Times staff writer for six years. I'm also an enthusiastic if middling jazz and indie-rock guitarist. (Photo by Sara Scribner) Read More…

Culture Crash, the Book

My book came out in 2015, and won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award. The New Yorker called it "a quietly radical rethinking of the very nature of art in modern life"

I urge you to buy it at your favorite independent bookstore or order it from Portland's Powell's.

Culture Crash

Here is some information on my book, which Yale University Press published in 2015. (Buy it from Powell's, here.) Some advance praise: With coolness and equanimity, Scott Timberg tells what in less-skilled hands could have been an overwrought horror story: the end of culture as we have known … [Read More...]

Follow Me

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

Archives

@TheMisreadCity

Tweets by @TheMisreadCity
March 2013
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
25262728293031
« Feb   Apr »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Scott Timberg Has Passed Away
  • Ojai Music Festival and JACK Quartet
  • What’s in a Name?
  • Time Pauses For Valentin Silvestrov
  • The Perverse Imagination of Edward Carey

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in