BY BEN WINTERS
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| Professor Richard Florida in his creative room. |
Any mayors of American cities out there, this one’s for you. It turns out that if you want high-tech growth in your city, you shouldn’t be fussing around building a sleek industrial corridor or offering attractive tax incentives to big business. What you need is a couple of decent punk clubs and a Boy’s Town. So suggests Professor Richard Florida of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University in the May issue of Washington Monthly.
In a lengthy excerpt from his upcoming book, "The Rise of the Creative Class," Florida explains that what makes cities grow is having a healthy population of the "creative class." And what is that, exactly? In his lead Florida introduces us to one member, a college senior with "spiked multi-colored hair, full-body tattoos, and multiple piercings in his ears," who strikes Florida as "an obvious slacker…probably in a band."
But it’s kids like this–whose advantage is in their creativity and ineffable artistic souls–who drive economic growth, Florida argues. "Places that succeed in attracting and retaining creative class people prosper; those that fail don’t," writes the professor. Keep in mind, "they do not consciously think of themselves as a class. Yet they share a common ethos that values creativity, individuality, difference, and merit."
And they’re gay! Or at least gay-friendly. "While I had been studying the location choices of high-tech industries and talented people, Gates [another researcher] had been exploring the location patterns of gay people. My list of the country’s high-tech hot spots looked an awful lot like his list of the places with highest concentrations of gay people."
The big winners include San Francisco, rated tops among large cities on Florida’s "Creativity Index," along with places like Austin and Seattle; low-creativity cities included Memphis, Norfolk, and Las Vegas (Siegfried and Roy notwithstanding). Chicago didn’t make it into the top 10, but Florida has special praise for the city: "Chicago, a bastion of working-class people that still ranks among the top 20 large creative centers, is interesting because it shows how the creative class and the traditional working class can coexist," writes Florida, citing the work of Terry Clark, a sociologist at the University of Chicago who suggests that "[u]nder the second Mayor Daley, the city integrated the members of the creative class into the city’s culture and politics by treating them essentially as just another 'ethnic group’ that needed sufficient space to express its identity."
THE CHAMPIONS OF THE WORLD
Readers of the United Kingdom’s The Guardian have voted Queen’s "Bohemian Rhapsody" the best song of all time. Not shockingly, most of the songs in the top 10 slots were Beatles numbers, and "ArtsLine" isn’t going to sit here and quibble with "Hey Jude" (although, well, the ending is a little repetitious). But "Bohemian Rhapsody"? It’s just that kind of weak reasoning that cost those guys an empire.
As the poll came out in The Guardian’s May 8th issue, the London theatre community was bracing itself for the debut of We Will Rock You, the Queen…gulp…musical. It opened May 14 at the Dominion Theatre, and among the producers is Tribeca Productions, co-owned by Jane Rosenthal and noted American film actor Robert DeNiro. A musical based around the music of Queen "seemed like a great idea to me," quoth the Raging Bull to the Associated Press (AP) back in April, and the decision to back it "was that simple." But what exactly was the "great idea"? A theatrical entertainment matching the songs of Queen with a tale set (per the Web site) "in the future, in a place that was once called Earth"? Or was it the giant piles of money, like those the producers of the ABBA-fest Mamma Mia! are now swimming in like so many Scrooge McDucks?
GOING ONCE…GOING TWICE…
Speaking of the Associated Press, they had a big day on May 9, covering not one but two impressive auctions–one in London, the other in New York. Shutterbugs, take note: "Photographs of the 1848 Paris riots, thought to be the world’s first examples of photo journalism, sold for $267,000 at an auction," AP reported. The two pix (OK, daguerreotypes) were taken by a Frenchmen known only as Thibault, the little AP story explains, and ran in a weekly paper called L’Illustration, or The Illustration ("ArtsLine" is taking an educated guess on the translation).
"The images," it seems, "were sold at Sotheby’s in London by an anonymous Frenchman to raise money for the World Animal Handicap Foundation." Hopefully old Thibault approves.
Meanwhile, in New York, the other cultural capital of the English-speaking world (the one not obsessed with Queen), another big sale. "Two guitars belonging to Grateful Dead frontman Jerry Garcia were sold at auction for about $1.74 million," the president of Guernsey’s auction house said.
Two anonymous buyers each own a piece of rock history, and Garcia proves himself, from beyond the grave, still really, really cool. The auction took place at Studio 54, and the guitars, custom made, were named "Tiger" and "Wolf."
FAREWELL, LIVINGSTON BIDDLE
Washington Post obituary chief Richard Pearson did the solemn duties on May 5 for Livingston Biddle, Jr., who chaired the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) from 1977-81. As Pearson’s piece explains, Biddle was on staff with Senator Claiborne Pell–and there he actually drafted the early 1960s legislation that created the agency. "As an endowment official, he told a budget staffer that some proposed action was never envisioned by the legislation establishing the endowment," writes Pearson of Biddle. "Asked by the staff member the basis of his theory, Mr. Biddle replied, 'Because I wrote the legislation.’"
And, on a more poignant note, Pearson quoted the following Biddle sentiment, which (rightly) appeared in every single other obituary of the man: "'The arts are so fragile, like flowers in your garden,’ [Biddle] said in 1985. 'If you don’t water them, they’ll wither and blow away.’"