From the cultural contradictions of capitalism to the creative economy

Abstract

The geography of contemporary bohemia is integral to Richard Florida’s thesis of the rise of a new creative class in the USA. The strong correlation between the presence of bohemians and innovative high-tech industries in a number of American cities stands in sharp contrast to the historical image of a bohemian subculture of artists and intellectuals, defined by their antagonistic relationship to bourgeois society. Rather than a sign of social marginality, bohemian life-styles have now become a marker of the ‘new economy’, variously labeled the creative, the cultural or the aesthetic economy. In my paper I want to compare and contrast these two opposed images of bohemia – the 19th-century idea of bohemia as the libertarian other of liberal-bourgeois society and the new, highly topical economic geography of bohemia – with the following questions in mind: How and why does the 19th-century artistic critique of capitalism mutate into an expression of the new spirit of capitalism? Does this change from an antagonistic to an affirmative relationship signal the emergence of a new spirit of art that can be related to the new spirit of capitalism?

Keywords

Daniel Bell boheme bohemian city Luc Boltanski spirit of capitalism Andy Warhol

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Allen

(1983) The Romance of Commerce and Culture: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bell

(1996) The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Boltanski

(2002) The Left after May 1968 and the longing for total revolution. Thesis Eleven 96: 1–20.

Boltanski

Chiapello

(2005) The New Spirit of Capitalism. London: Verso.

Buchloh

(2000) Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Buchloh

(2001) Andy Warhol’s one-dimensional art, 1956–1966. In: Michelson

(ed.), Andy Warhol. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1–48.

Calinescu

(1974) Avant-garde. In: Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, pp. 67–78.

Cowen

(1998) In Praise of Commercial Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Florida

(2002a) Bohemia and economic geography. Journal of Economic Geography 2: 55–71.

10.

Florida

(2002b) The Rise of the Creative Class. New York: Basic Books.

11.

Foster

(1996) The Return of the Real. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

12.

Furet

(1999) The Passing of an Illusion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

13.

Grau

(2004) Virtual Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

14.

Heilbroner

(2000) The Worldly Philosophers, rev. 7th edn. London: Penguin.

15.

Howkins

(2001) The Creative Economy. London: Allen Lane.

16.

Kreuzer

(1968) Die Boheme. Beiträge zu ihrer Beschreibung. Stuttgart: Metzler.

17.

Kolakowski

(2005) Main Currents of Marxism. London: Norton.

18.

Landry

(2000) The Creative City. London: Earthscan.

19.

Marcuse

(1969) An Essay on Liberation. London: Allen Lane.

20.

Peters

(2009) Education, creativity and the economy of passions. Thesis Eleven 96: 40–63.

21.

Polsky

(2005) I Bought Andy Warhol. New York: Bloomsbury.

22.

Ray

(2000) The Cultural Creatives. New York: Harmony Books.

23.

Rifkin

(2000) The Age of Access. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.

24.

Sassen

(2001) The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

25.

Seigel

(1986) Bohemian Paris. New York: Viking.

26.

Seltzer

(1999) The Creative Age: Knowledge and Skills for the New Economy. London: Demos.

27.

Sternhell

(1994) The Birth of Fascist Ideology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

28.

Valéry

(1964) Aesthetics. New York: Pantheon Books.

29.

Warhol

(1975) Philosophy of Andy Warhol. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

30.

Yack

(1986) The Longing for Total Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.