Toronto: Justice Denied

The Toronto-based critic Ryan Bigge noted that the idea of the artist or writer as an entrepreneur used to be a joke, an essential piece of the healthy overall opposition between bourgeois and bohemian. In his novel Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis uses the eponymous character, a witless champion of civic boosterism, to make the point. Speaking at the Annual Get-Together Fest of the Zenith Real Estate Board, quintessential zippy go-getter G. F. Babbitt notes one of the great prizes of America’s dedication to progress. “In other countries,” he says, “art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man.”

The natural but unfortunate reaction to the collapse of a value distinction is a rear-guard action. As fauxhemians move in to gentrify an area, generating Starbucks franchises and Pottery Barn outlets, driving property values up and grotty art galleries down, the “real” bohemians, about to lose their studios, lofts, and self-image, rise up in protest. Claims of authenticity are made, ever more emphatically and frantically, in an attempt to ward off the threat by force of magic. Justin Davidson, on the blog of the New Yorker’s Alex Ross, wrote with some dismay about the new concert hall planned for Hamburg, Germany, designed by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, which adds a complex billowing of glass sails to an existing harbourfront warehouse. This latest example of repurposing industrial buildings as cultural venues joins the Tate Modern reconstruction in London (also by Herzog & de Meuron) to the creepy extermination camp vibe of Toronto’s own Distillery District project.

Davidson summed up the central point this way: “I have to admit to some queasiness about the current enthusiasm for fitting out power plants, factories and warehouses as post-industrial pleasure domes. Isn’t there something inherently decadent about taking the means of production and transforming [it] into the means of consumption for the bourgeoisie?” These repurposed downtown workhorses, while clearly a good idea in an age of unbridled sprawl, rubbed the authenticity types the wrong way, stirring a vague unease.

This reaction is of course foredoomed to incoherence, a fact indicated not least by Davidson’s use of that telltale nostalgic adjective decadent. Decadent! In an age that celebrates decadence as its baseline assumption, in our always-already-sold-out culture, this is a charge without purchase, a holdover from a distant age of political belief. Consumption is what is produced by a post-industrial economy. In fact, we could go further. We no longer merely produce consumption; in an experiential economy — a post-post-industrial one — the main product is ourselves as consumers, under the sign of consumption. And we consume that spectral product even as we produce it, cannibalizing our shopaholic identities with every entertainment choice or shopping district purchase. The process may be given a name: endocolonization.

The simplest reason the boho reaction cannot succeed, however, is that bohemian authenticity, like coolness more generally, is part of a spectral economy. In Thorstein Veblen’s terms, it is a positional good; that is, it depends for its value on the ability to differentiate one person from another. Like all positional goods, absent the relevant other person — otherwise known as social context — a good loses value. In the case of boho authenticity, as with cool, a good itself is not even a thing, so when the context shifts you are left with nothing except a disgruntled memory. Music that, once cool, is rendered uncool by mainstream success — the ever-familiar cycle — is still music. You can still listen to it, maybe even enjoy it “ironically,” possibly phase it back into cool somewhere down the fashion line. But authenticity is nothing without the inauthentic comparator.

When aesthetically inclined people with money choose to look and act, live and talk just like poor artists, the poor artists cannot win, because the rules of the game have changed. Indeed, the game is over; there is no game. And authenticity, together with its identity-defining properties, disappears in a puff of self-referential smoke.

A respondent to Davidson, musicologist Phil Ford, noted that he used to think of the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis — a converted brick warehouse — as “a rec center for bobos.” He counselled a sort of uneasy, or maybe defeated, acceptance of the value collapse. “The unpalatable truth of the arts world in America is that you have to learn to love bobos,” Ford said. “Or at least not long to see them hanging from the lampposts of some post-revolutionary Artsylvania. Because, let’s face it, if you’re working in the arts, you’re not too different from the clientele. Hate on the bobos and you’re just hating on yourself. And middle-class self-loathing is so cliché.”

Well, who cares? What impact, if any, does all this have on a city’s life, let alone its level of justice?

For many people, none at all. This is a tempest in an artsy teapot. The rearguard actions will run their futile course, creating lots of unhappy bohemians, but the rest of the town has no stake, hence no interest, in the endgame. To them, this is indeed two kinds of privileged types having a pointless struggle over their narcissistic identities. But the Florida/Brooks idea — also, in fact, the more humane Jane Jacobs idea that precedes both — is that creative-class success has a trickle-down effect on a city’s prosperity, not just its appeal. Mixed-use neighbourhoods and human-scale buildings create street life, lower crime rates, and encourage civility. The more art galleries, restaurants, jazz clubs, theatre companies, and great architecture a city can boast, the thicker its tax base and the livelier its economic growth. Given the background presupposition that a rising tide floats all boats, or merely that tax wealth translates into redistributed benefits, the bottom-line claim is that we’re all better off living in a Big Fusion city. But are we?

This question is never easy to answer. Jacobs’ own optimism about neighbourhoods is predicated on a specific normative position, derived negatively as an objection to what she mocks as the Radiant Garden City Beautiful school of suburban growth. The inner-city alternative she proposes is just as top-down, however — a fact that makes her argument against “prescriptive” urban planning prima facie contradictory. For Jacobites, prescriptive planning is fine, as long as they get to do the prescribing: thou shalt not build tall; thou shalt not make condos available to shallow wealthy people.