Like The Who, I Sell Out
In 2002 Richard Florida’s concept of a “creative class” resonated with many readers. In his book “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” he had identified that in the latter decades of the 20th Century many of the more lucrative occupations in America did not fit existing economic classes. (Florida, 2002). I didn’t read it, and one of the reasons was certainly due to an aversion I had at the time to anything that carried with it any whiff of the dotcom era. While I’d hardly had to be dragged kicking and screaming into five years working at Internet startups, I’d always resisted the inflated rhetoric that came with them. I wasn’t looking to be part of any “new economy” or “new paradigm.” I was looking to do good solid work that returned profit on investment.
I do recall the book circulating among my then-peer group of dotcom survivors, long-term contractors, and aspiring startup founders. Many were perhaps drawn to the book because it seems to provide a matrix within which they could position the recent experiences we held in common.
10 years earlier I’d had a different peer group. My peers at that time were performing artists and arts technicians. They included actors and musicians, directors, and lighting, costume, and set designers. I was a sound designer and engineer, occasional director of photography, would-be screenwriter, and willing to do all sorts of manual labor to help pay the bills between gigs. I was part of a class that certainly did creative work, but was otherwise closer to “working class” than Florida’s “creative class.” And this class certainly wasn’t rising – it was falling. Opportunity to make a living in these purely creative endeavors, was becoming harder and harder to find, even as opportunities to do similar work for commercial endeavors became more common. Increasingly, my peers gave up art for art’s sake and took jobs with a new breed of company, focused on media, publishing, and technology.
When I took the plunge and became an Internet writer and producer, my own self-perception wasn’t that I’d bought into the creative class. It was that I’d sold out the creative class and joined the corporate class. It was a tolerable form of servitude, sweetened with perks and trappings of creativity, but still I had a sense I’d gone from being a independent creative agent to a cog in someone else’s machine, performing creative acts on command daily. It might have given the Human Resource department hives to hear me say it out loud, but what I understood was that the criteria for evaluating my creative work had shifted from high-craft/low-output to high-output/low-craft.
Pondering the concept of a Creative Class in the way that Florida sees it – as a central driver of innovation and change in business and society –- I find myself revisiting my previous perceptions. A decade and a half after the fact I wonder what, if anything, I gave up when I “went corporate” by choosing a Floridian Creative Class path instead of a Creative Working Class path? Maybe it’s just a matter of semantics, but is the Creative Class really as creative as it thinks it? What are the implications to creativity as part of our societal fabric of creativity going corporate?
Man in the Sharkskin Suit
A primary question is whether the Creative Class even exists. Could it be that, in the same way sharkskin suits, cigarettes, and martinis at lunch were the faddish emblems of Madison Avenue movers during the “Mad Men” era, but weren’t actually essential to the definition or output of the work they did, the trappings of late 20th Century bohemian artists and youth subcultures are the faddish emblems of Florida’s Creative Class, unrelated to the core nature of the work being done?
While I may cringe at the term “Creative Class,” Florida’s description of a historic shift in the nature of work does ring true. The work exists, and its emblems are the emblems of creativity. But does the work justify itself? What is the real return on investment from Creative Class jobs? Does the worldwide economic instability of the past decade stem from a change in emphasis from output to creativity?
A Vocation or Avocation?
One of my undergraduate theatre teachers, Ed Trujillo, used to stress to his students that creative fulfillment doesn’t have to come from one’s job. “You can have a vocation and an avocation,” he said. This was sage advice to a group of idealistic young people in an acting class at a state-run liberal arts college.
What we see in fan fiction is an exercise in creative avocation. The authors of works derived from popular copyrighted material are cogs in nobody’s machine. They create on their own time and, at least for the most part, have not had any expectation of payment. Attempts to monetize fan fiction have been made, although to date none have succeeded to any notable extent (De Kosnik, 2009).
The avocational nature of fiction has created, as De Kosnik describes, a gift culture. She argues both that it is this essential nature that has prevented monetization, and that the culture is at risk of corruption if monetization is driven by companies that aren’t rooted in it. Commercial and amateur versions of art forms can, and do, coexist, and that this often leads to a meritocractic process in which talented amateurs move on to professional work.
De Kosnik’s concern is whether the culture of what Becker describes as an Art World can survive the appropriation of that Art World’s output for commercial gain. But a mirror image of this concern could be whether the output of an Art World can survive the appropriation of that Art World’s culture.
It could be argued what Florida describes as the emergence of the Creative Class is not the creation of new types of work, but the appropriation of longstanding norms of creative culture by outsiders looking to aggrandize the nature of the work they need done. Compared to the drudgery of assembly line work, or the buttoned-down environment of mid-20th century corporations, Creative Class jobs seem to offer more opportunities for creative thinking. But compared to the purely creative output of jobs in the arts, what Creative Class jobs seem to offer in creativity is actually reduced in scale.
Overthrow of the Meritocracy?
A potentially more disruptive effect of the appropriation of the Creative Working Class culture might be the end of the creative meritocracies that feed notable talents in various art worlds from the ranks of the amateurs to professional careers. The allure of a job that promises creativity in return for economic stability – something the Creative Working Class positions often lack – is a hard thing to pass up. Florida’s conception of Creative Class work as blurring the boundaries between being on the clock and off it also disrupts the vocation/avocation model.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, unions struggled to establish an eight-hour day/40-hour week as the norm. “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will” went one variation on a common slogan. Florida says these new Creative Class jobs lack such boundaries because creative work happens on its own timeframe. But is it actually that by focusing on “creative” jobs, he has missed the bigger picture in which working hours for all types of work have been steadily increasing again (Early & Gordon, 2007)?
Since these Creative Class jobs often stress output over craft, it may be that the truly talented never have a chance to nurture their talent. Of course, the definition of talent changes as circumstances change over time, but are we ready to accept a world in which the most creative writers are those who best perform to spec, within deadline and within budget?
In this doomsday scenario, the Creative Class turns out to be a way business can syphon away immature creative talent and lump it together in such a way that it produces a consistent product. Not only does this obscure the output of the real talents, it also tends to take away their off time when they might otherwise have been honing their skills as amateurs.
If Jenkins is right in his assessment that fan fiction serves the same role in our society that the retelling of Homeric epics did for the Ancient Greeks (Westcott, 2008), then is there a chance the creative impulse itself could become subsumed to the commercial impulse? What impact on society would that total appropriation have?
Hindsight Isn’t Always 20/20
I can’t answer my own question about what, if anything, I gave up when I left the Creative Working Class. Nor can I answer any of the other questions I left hanging, at least in a paper as short as this one.
All I know is that there’s always been something about Florida’s premise that seems both too facile and too derivative to take at face value. It’s certainly unfair of me to so harshly judge a book that I only know in excerpt, but every time I try to map the concept of an emerging Creative Class transforming the way we work onto any familiar territory, I start smelling the smoke of cognitive dissonance and it smells like dotcom hyperbole.
References
De Kosnik, A. (2009). Should Fan fiction be free?. Cinema Journal, 48(4), 118 – 124.
Early, S., & Gordon, S. (2007, October 23). Whatever happened to the eight-hour day? . The Nation, Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071105/early_gordon
Florida, R. (2002). The rise of the creative class: and how it’s transforming work, leisure, community and everyday life. 1 – 17. New York: Basic Books.
Westcott, G. (2008, July 1). Friction over fan fiction. Literary Review of Canada, Retrieved from http://reviewcanada.ca/essays/2008/07/01/friction-over-fan-fiction
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