Florida's theory is that the economic and social structure of the country has changed, and is now driven by what he calls the creative class; cities, he insists, that embrace the creative class are more prosperous than those that don't. The creative class is made up of anyone who is paid to think for a living--on the first page Florida calls out to this new army of professionals: "If you are a scientist or engineer, an architect or designer, a writer, artist, or musician, or if you use your creativity as a key factor in your work in business, education, health care, law, or some other profession, you are a member." These people, as distinct from the yuppies of the '80s or the bobos of the '90s, place a high premium on the working of the mind, and therefore on what Florida calls the "experiential lifestyle," so they cluster in cities distinguished by diversity, street-level culture, arts, parks, and even gays (Florida's "Gay Index" demonstrates that a healthy population of homosexuals is a good economic indicator). The more a city invests in these things, Florida asserts, the better it will do.
On the surface, it sounds good: an uncommonly progressive economic theory that could help promote civil rights for gays, the preservation of historic neighborhoods, investment in the arts. But when Florida says "art," he means something quite curious.
It's not just that Florida relies on words like "funky" and "eclectic" to describe art scenes--words that tend to signal a passive enjoyment of the scene rather than genuine interest in art itself. Or that someone devoted to creative thinking uses empty phrases like "thinking outside the box" and "pushing the envelope" instead of proposing real innovations. It's true that Creative Class is dedicated more to a dissection of the economic situation rather than solutions for creating what Florida calls "people climates"--that is, the kind of place that these creative-class types would like to live. But Florida tends to glide over the solutions (as well as some of the more outstanding problems) with vague recommendations such as "invest broadly in arts and culture," an idea he puts right up there with tax breaks for technology companies.
He likes to lump artists in along with engineers and computer programmers and R&D people, but the latter three are more prominently his concern. Anyone in the trenches of the art world, or the art-policy world, would be hard-pressed to recognize artists in the demographic he describes: people who (according to 1999 Department of Labor statistics) made an average annual salary of $48,752. I know very few artists who make such good money, largely because many of them work in what Florida identifies as the service class. But it is not artists as producers of art that he's talking about--it's artists' lifestyles. Setting one's own hours, wearing casual clothes to work, living in unusual spaces--these are the conditions of an artist's life, conditions that arise, as it happens, out of making little money and having to make art in whatever interstitial hours one can find. According to Florida, these are also the conditions that allow the creative class to perform their strenuous creative tasks. But computer programmers are not artists, no matter how industrial-chic their lofts are, no matter how much their "funky" and "eclectic" neighborhoods stimulate them and make them feel more involved. The creative-class theory fabricates validation for people formerly known as nerds. They're "creative" now, a word quickly becoming one of the most abused in our language. And so Florida deftly recontextualizes the social desires of the previously marginalized. Without irony, he writes that the creative-class members want to live in "a place where they can construct and validate their identities as creative people."
Florida's creative class bears a strong, unnerving resemblance to what art critic Dave Hickey calls looky-loos, or spectators. They're the parasites of the art scene, consuming it without being invested in it. The kinds of people that Florida says contribute to a lively street scene--street musicians, old people, even bag ladies--represent a kind of diversity, certainly, but should a musician play for quarters just so that creative types can feel part of something "funky"? (To say nothing of the bag ladies--if their presence is so vital, perhaps we should subsidize them.)
Presumably he would argue that economic prosperity bolsters the arts. But we saw in Seattle's boom years that this wasn't true, at least not on the street level Florida so admires. Lots of new building was initiated--the symphony, the new opera house--but very little of this money trickled down to artists, largely because the dot-commers who came to Seattle to make their fortunes weren't buying art. "Investment in the arts" tends to mean investment in institutions, not in the things artists really need to survive: affordable studios, for example, and health insurance. Bust times, when rents become cheap and commercial spaces come available, are in a way much better for artists, but because Florida has conveniently conflated art and lifestyle, he doesn't have to address this paradox.
Supporting the arts is an ethic; removing art from the fickle free market proves that something is more important to us than what capitalism allows to grow. But Florida's theory doesn't have much to do with art. Art, to him, is only useful as an economic cog, as a spur to the creativity of computer programmers, as background music and décor for people who need their creative identity validated.
Florida continually cites Seattle as a perfect creative-class magnet, which may be the greatest indicator of exactly who he's talking about. This is patently not a great city for artists--there is little to no artist housing, few districts are zoned for live/work use, and there's a poverty of public money for projects aside from public art--but it is a great city for sitting in a "quiet cozy spot listen[ing] to jazz while sipping brandy," served to you, most likely, by an artist.
