Over the next four decades New York developed into a classic creative city–an enclave with a mix of artists, bohemians and thinkers so combustible its influence spread far outside the town itself. “It was a period of breaking away from the Victorian Age and from the stuffiness of prudish Puritanism. It was a discovery of an American culture,” says Polly Kline, who settled in Greenwich Village in the 1920s at the age of 19 and became an artist. Other metropolises have undergone similar transformations. Paris in the 1860s and 1870s gave us the literary giants Balzac and Flaubert, the poet Baudelaire and the artists Manet, Degas, Seurat and Monet, to name a few. Berlin in the 1920s produced Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht and hosted a young Vladimir Nabokov. Typically these creative communities have been confined to the sprawling capital cities of leading powers. Only they had the wealth–and the means of distribution–to attract such a broad cross section of artists from around the world.
Increasingly, that’s no longer the case. In recent years new kinds of creative laboratories have emerged–in small university towns like Austin, Texas, and Antwerp, Belgium, in the impoverished neighborhoods of Marseilles, France, and Gateshead, England. Driven out by the high rents of cities like Paris and London, and aided by technology and the growing ease of travel, more artists and thinkers are congregating in smaller, far-flung communities around the world. In Tijuana, Mexico, a new generation of artists is uploading its work onto the Internet for the world to see. In London, an advertising agency relies on copy that’s written in Cape Town–often by someone sitting at a sidewalk cafe, admiring the view of Table Mountain. “Culture today is globalized and decentralized,” says Vanessa Swartz, a history professor at the University of Southern California. “From the 1850s to the 1950s, New York, Paris, London, Berlin and St. Petersburg were the artistic centers. Now just as culture has become decentralized, so has creativity. We see avant-garde cultures in smaller places often with young, hip bases.”
These funky towns can be found in the most unlikely places. (A thriving film industry is emerging in war-torn Kabul–really.) Yet some things haven’t changed. The same vitality, the same youthful dreams, the same chaos that once filled the rollicking cafes of Montmartre is thriving in the honky-tonks of Austin. And importantly, the forces that draw artists to these unusual locales are also the same. “They come to live life to the fullest, to be a ‘player,’ to be where the action is, to walk the streets and feel what’s it’s like to be on the edge of what’s possible,” says Christine Stansell, a professor of cultural history at Princeton University.
One truism that still holds is that creativity emerges from chaos. Disorder has a way of shaking up old ideas, pushing people to take risks, making them see things in new ways. Paris in the years after the Franco-Prussian War was a hotbed of idealism, utopian radicalism and the kinds of experimentation and openness under which art thrives. The difference now is that the sites of greatest ferment are often far from the rich, comfortable cultural capitals: postwar Kabul, for instance, is alive with painters, filmmakers and musicians, all streaming back to the city after years in exile.
Another, more unfortunate spur to creativity is the yawning wealth disparities that are growing in many parts of the world today. Marshall Berman, professor of urban studies and history at CCNY-CUNY, says the stark contrasts of wealth and poverty in prerevolutionary St. Petersburg helped produce writers like Dostoevsky and Gogol. In 1960s Latin America, the discrepancy between bitter squalor and the ostentatious displays of the ruling class were so stark as to be surreal–that’s the reason, he contends, that Latin America gave us magical realism.
Historically, all these meccas have also had something more prosaic in common: cheap rents, at least in certain neighborhoods. Inflation in post-World War I Germany and Paris was so high, expatriate artists could live like kings. The slums of lower Manhattan at the turn of the century provided a haven for thousands of new arrivals. Now, artists are being priced out of New York and London and moving to places like Antwerp and Austin, which still have affordable loft spaces and cheap beer.
All this is kindling, though. What’s needed is a creative spark to fuel the rise of a genuine community. It could be the arrival of a great name or the development of a cafe culture or the founding of a new art school. The point is that these events are no longer exclusive to major cities. In Seattle, the formation of tiny SubPop Records in the late 1980s nurtured the rise of the grunge scene. In Antwerp, the sudden success of six graduates from its once obscure Royal Academy of Fine Arts in the 1980s spawned a world-renowned fashion scene.
Once word begins to spread, these cities tend to attract secondary and tertiary levels of creatives–first artists in other fields, then small businesses, tech start-ups and design firms, seeking to glom onto the cool. Then–finally, inevitably–gentrification arrives, forcing up prices and driving out the artists. That, it seems, is more true today than it’s ever been. Lauren Fogel, a guitarist and singer in Austin, caught the tail end of Seattle’s music boom and now lives in the midst of another one. “Everyone was moving out because the rent went up and you couldn’t afford a house to make noise in,” she says. “There was one last artist-loft building left, and they closed it down the month after I left. Seattle was ruined.”
In fact, a growing body of research suggests that the presence of artists and bohemians may be linked to economic productivity and the growth of jobs–ironically, the very factors that lead to gentrification. Richard Florida, a professor of economic development at Carnegie Mellon University, argues in his new book, “The Rise of the Creative Class,” that with the decline of the manufacturing base, what he calls a “creative class” now dominates many Westernized societies.
His theory is simple: creative people want to be around other creative people. Thus a city with artists, a nightlife, diversity, will also draw entrepreneurs, academics, tech geeks–those able to drive economic growth in the new age. “Now because so many of us are called upon to contribute to society with creative thinking instead of physical labor, more and more cities take on the characteristics long associated with creative centers known for the arts,” Florida says. To prove his theory, Florida compiled what he calls a “creativity index.” In the United States, Austin ranked second, behind San Francisco, and had the sixth largest high-tech sector in the nation. Florida argues that the cities that fail to meet the needs of the new creative class will lose out to those that do.
To some, it may seem a dubious proposition–that the same classes that thrive on the margins would be sought out and exploited by the mainstream. But a similar process has been happening within the culture industry for decades–witness the growth of hip-hop. In Newcastle today, city leaders have helped construct a new art gallery and music center in large part because they believe a thriving arts scene will help to lure high-tech businesses to town.
But the arts also provide ample proof of the dangers of mainstreaming the avant-garde. As the pace of development accelerates around the world and local scenes rise and fall faster and faster, artists–just like their art–may find it increasingly difficult to live on the fringes, outside the box. It’s heartening to see creativity spreading outward around the world. But to remain vital, these new communities will probably have to keep on moving.
