earlier visionaries prophesied a world in which increased leisure allowed all human beings the well-being and security to freely cultivate their creative instincts, the apostles of the creative class collapse labor into leisure and exploitation into self-expression, and they arrogate creativity to serve corporate ends.
“Capitalism has also expanded its reach to capture the talents of heretofore excluded groups of eccentrics and nonconformists,” Florida writes. “In doing so, it has pulled off yet another astonishing mutation: taking people who would once have been bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe and setting them at the very heart of the process of innovation and economic growth.” According to Florida’s theory, the more creative types colorfully dot an urban landscape, the greater a city’s “Bohemian Index” and the higher the likelihood of the city’s economic success.
It’s all part of what he calls the “Big Morph”—“the resolution of the centuries-old tension between two value systems: the Protestant work ethic and the Bohemian ethic” into a new “creative ethos.” The Protestant ethic treats work as a duty; the Bohemian ethic, he says, is hedonistic. Profit seeking and pleasure seeking have united, the industrialist and the bon vivant have become one. “Highbrow and lowbrow, alternative and mainstream, work and play, CEO and hipster are all morphing together today,” Florida enthuses.27
What kind of labor is it, exactly, that people will perform in this inspired Shangri-la? Florida’s popular essays point the way: he applauds a “teenage sales rep re-conceiving a Vonage display” as a stunning example of creative ingenuity harnessed for economic success; later he announces, anecdotally, that an “overwhelming” number of students would prefer to work “lower-paying temporary jobs in a hair salon” than “good, high-paying jobs in a machine tool factory.” Cosmetology is “more psychologically rewarding, creative work,” he explains.28
It’s tempting to dismiss such a broad definition of creativity as out of touch, but Florida’s declarations illuminate an important trend and one that helped set the terms for the ascension of amateurism. It is not that creative work has suddenly become abundant, as Florida would have us believe; we have not all become Mozarts on the floor of some big-box store, Frida Kahlos at the hair salon. Rather, the point is that the psychology of creativity has become increasingly useful to the economy. The disposition of the artist is ever more in demand. The ethos of the autonomous creator has been repurposed to serve as a seductive facade for a capricious system and adopted as an identity by those who are trying to make their way within it.
Thus the ideal worker matches the traditional profile of the enthusiastic virtuoso: an individual who is versatile and rootless, inventive and adaptable; who self-motivates and works long hours, tapping internal and external resources; who is open to reinvention, emphasizing potential and promise opposed to past achievements; one who loves the work so much, he or she would do it no matter what, and so expects little compensation or commitment in return—amateurs and interns, for example.
The “free” credo promoted by writers such as Chris Anderson and other new-media thinkers has helped lodge a now rung on an ever-lengthening educational and career ladder, the now obligatory internship. Like artists and culture makers of all stripes, interns are said to be “entrepreneurs” and “free agents” investing in their “personal brands.” “The position of interns is not unlike that of many young journalists, musicians, and filmmakers who are now expected to do online work for no pay as a way to boost their portfolios,” writes Ross Perlin, author of the excellent book Intern Nation. “If getting attention and building a reputation online are often seen as more valuable than immediate ‘monetization,’ the same theory is being propounded for internships in the analog world—with exposure, contacts, and references advanced as the prerequisite, or even plausible alternative, to making money.”29
As Perlin documents in vivid detail, capitalizing on desperate résumé-building college students and postgraduates exacerbates inequality. Who can afford to take a job that doesn’t pay but the relatively well off? Those who lack financial means are either shut out of opportunities or forced to support themselves with loans, going into debt for the privilege of working for free.
Creativity is invoked time and again to justify low wages and job insecurity. Across all sectors of the economy, responsibility for socially valuable work, from journalism to teaching and beyond, is being off-loaded onto individuals as institutions retreat from obligations to support efforts that aren’t immediately or immensely profitable. The Chronicle of Higher Education urges graduate students to imagine themselves as artists, to better prepare for the possibility of impoverishment when tenure-track jobs fail to materialize: “We must think of graduate school as more like choosing to go to New York to become a painter or deciding to travel to Hollywood to become an actor. Those arts-based careers have always married hope and desperation into a tense relationship.”30 In a similar vein, NPR reports that the “temp-worker lifestyle” is a kind of “performance art,” a statement that conjures a fearless entertainer mid-tightrope or an acrobat hurling toward the next trapeze without a safety net—a thrilling image, especially to employers who would prefer not to provide benefits.31
The romantic stereotype of the struggling artist is familiar to the musician Marc Ribot, a legendary figure on the New York jazz scene who has worked with Marianne Faithfull, Elvis Costello, John Zorn, Tom Waits, Alison Krauss, Robert Plant, and even Elton John. Ribot tells me he had an epiphany watching a “great but lousy” made-for-TV movie about Apple computers. As he tells it, two exhausted employees are complaining about working eighteen-hour days with no weekends when an actor playing Steve Jobs tells them to suck it up—they’re not regular workers at a stodgy company like IBM but artists.
“In other words art was the new model for this form of labor,” Ribot says, explaining his insight. “The model they chose is musicians, like Bruce Springsteen staying up all night to get that perfect track. Their life does not resemble their parents’ life working at IBM from nine to five, and certainly doesn’t resemble their parents’ pay structures—it’s all back end, no front end. All transfer of risk to the worker.” (In 2011 Apple Store workers upset over pay disparities were told, “Money shouldn’t be an issue when you’re employed at Apple. Working at Apple should be viewed as an experience.”)32
In Ribot’s field this means the more uncertain part of the business—the actual writing, recording, and promoting of music—is increasingly “outsourced” to individuals while big companies dominate arenas that are more likely to be profitable, like concert sales and distribution (Ticketmaster, Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play, none of which invests in music but reaps rewards from its release). “That technological change is upon us is undeniable and irreversible,” Ribot wrote about the challenges musicians face as a consequence of digitization. “It will probably not spell the end of music as a commodity, although it may change drastically who is profiting off whose music. Whether these changes will create a positive future for producers or consumers of music depends on whether musicians can organize the legal and collective struggle necessary to ensure that those who profit off music in any form pay the people who make it.”
Ribot quotes John Lennon: “You think you’re so clever and classless and free.” Americans in general like to think of themselves as having transcended economic categories and hierarchies, Ribot says, and artists are no exception. During the Great Depression artists briefly began to think of themselves as workers and to organize as such, amassing social and political power with some success, but today it’s more popular to speak of artists as entrepreneurs or brands, designations that further obscure the issue of labor and exploitation by comparing individual artists to corporate entities or sole proprietors of small businesses.
If artists are fortunate enough to earn money from their art, they tend to receive percentages, fees, or royalties rather than wages; they play “gigs” or do “projects” rather than hold steady jobs, which means they don’t recognize the standard breakdowns
