Book Review: The Warhol Economy

In his influential book The Rise of the Creative Class, new Torontonian Richard Florida claims that urban bohemia serves to attract and magnify affluence. In The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art, and Music Drive New York City, Florida acolyte Elizabeth Currid takes this one step further: New York’s powerful economy is crucially driven by the artists, musicians, and fashion designers who continue to thrive there, every bit as much as by the throngs of suited bankers and lawyers on Wall Street.

Through scores of interviews with people ranging from Diane von Furstenberg to graffiti artist Futura 2000 to the members of the band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Currid seeks to understand how the cultural economy actually works. The worlds of art, music, and fashion in New York are closely interconnected, she points out, so cultural producers often frequent the same bars, clubs, and parties, and those contacts both inspire them creatively and establish enduring business connections. “The cultural economy is most efficient in the informal social realm and social dynamics underlie the economic system of cultural production,” Currid writes.

The creative vitality of New York has always depended upon easy access to these social networks. “Art and culture thrive in almost bifurcated economies,” Currid says. “They are most creative when rents are depressed, gallery space plentiful, and gatekeepers and fledgling artists are able to engage in the same spaces.” And as Currid points out, in cities like New York — the same could be said of Toronto — the stratospheric cost of living is in danger of destroying that delicate and generative balance. With that in mind, she recommends that city governments, arts agencies, and urban planners focus on facilitating the conditions under which a vibrant arts community can thrive. By not doing so, we risk turning our great urban centres into high-rise deserts, and in the long run undermining their role in the global economy in an era when creativity is increasingly valued.