Assignment 02 Taylor
Taylor (2014:50) argues that the fate of creative people, in the new economy, is to “exist in two incommensurable realms of value and be torn between them–on the one side, the purely economic activity associated with straightforward selling of goods or labor; on the other the fundamentally different, elevated forms of value we associate with art and culture.” Your hybrid writing assignment this week is to describe these two realms and the challenges they pose for artists, teachers, activists and others who view their work as serving “the public good.”
In the latter portion of the second chapter of The People’s Platform, Taylor elaborates on a concept raised perhaps most enthusiastically by Richard Florida in his descriptions of the “Creative Class.” In Florida’s vision, a natural consequence of the digitally networked economy and increasing automation is a reorientation of the bourgeoisie as a class of creatives who traffic in ideas, creativity and information rather than material goods or everyday services. There is a deterministic rationale behind Florida’s writing as he uses data to parse a descriptive rather than normative claim about the changes in society, but by discounting the near term pain of technological displacement and offering no solutions outside the framework of market capitalism, Florida’s writing does indeed take on a normative tone. The message seems to be “leave your hotel front desk job and take up a graphic design course or face obsolescence.”
Missing also from Florida’s analysis is how precisely creatives, notoriously inept at salesmanship, will collaborate and compete in the supposedly freer market. Taylor addresses this head on in the above quote where she is describing the transitional pains being experienced by creatives at present. In our economy that has been diluted of middlemen, artists nakedly face a public ill suited to parse through massive swaths of content. The effect on art has been commercial success for those who know how to navigate the byways of social media and marketing or ascend into the mass market from popular content sharing platforms (as in the case of EL James). Those who lack such skills, knowledge or time are marginalized from an artistic community that once held a strict firewall between sales and creation. This has the effect of turning artists into salespersons first and creators second, in effect culturally sanitizing the work as appeal and the bottom line have to be considered alongside artistic vision.
This tension, however, is not new and is the byproduct of living in a commercial society that attempts to extract value at the lowest possible margins. In my view, Taylor laments an era that was already cemented in privileges of cultural curation. The privilege now has shifted to those with a particular set of skills; namely creativity alongside marketability whereas previously it was networking and culturally insular notions of taste that led to artistic success. It is difficult to say if the “wisdom of crowds” that Lanier and others lament is worse than the prior system, but it is certainly different and the change comes at a cost. Taylor describes the bias against the longer produced more content rich forms of art as a consequence of the efficiency culture the new media milieu begets. Efficiency is touted as something to aspire towards, which discounts that some taste may not be divined algorithmically and that some excellent work may be woefully inefficient. The market, as ever, is reductive to culture as it is principally concerned with utilizing culture to enlarge the wealth of individuals rather than preserving it for its own sake.
Beyond art, other public good professionals (which Florida would also lump into his creative class) such as educators, activists, and scientists must also survive in our present system. As growing amateurization and automation dilute the value of labor across the board, professions such as these find themselves increasingly vulnerable to attack. It is not difficult to imagine funding in the sciences shifting to companies who own proprietary algorithms set to work in server farms to calculate complex proofs or genetic datasets. Likewise, it isn’t difficult to imagine virtual reality classrooms and wiki-homeschooling displacing public education while philanthropy and activism is reduced to crowdfunding campaigns. As long as the market economy continues to dominate, we will see either a brain drain in these sectors, should these scenarios come to pass, or we will see them become less accessible and thus contributory to inequality. The notion that art, activism, or education are or will be done “for the love” is missing the basic ingredients of quality control and a need to place a higher valuation on those who grant our society these critical services.
