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katebushwick · 7 years

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ARTISTS, AESTHETICISATION AND GENTRIFICATION

At the same time, within the cultural field there is an abiding struggle to shape legitimising principles between these autonomous criteria of an avant-garde and the compromising criteria of market-determined values. So there is a tendency towards an insidious subversion of the other-worldliness of an autonomous aesthetic disposition, which is predicated, reasons Bourdieu, upon “the suspension and removal of economic necessity and by objective and subjective distance from groups subjected to those determinisms” (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 54).3 Its locus within the dominant class defines the sociology of the aesthetic disposition and thus its availability to dominated members of that class. Provocatively, Bourdieu identifies bourgeois adolescents and women who are

typically excluded from the economic and political power held by men in their class as sometimes adopting responses of aesthetic appropriation or resistance

Bourgeois adolescents ... sometimes ex- press their distance from the bourgeois world which they cannot really appropriate by a refusal of complicity whose most refined expression is a propensity towards aesthetics and aestheticism (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 55).

Such a habitus is one example of a ‘stylisation of life’, most fully realised by artists, that informs and is formed by aesthetic views and practices—including, as will be seen, the occupation and valorisation of space.

There has been a long tradition in art history of extolling the creative individual, the artist, the anguished performative genius. There is, of course, immense personal creativity in art works, and here it seems as if, partly for his own disciplinary objective of establishing sociology over against philosophy in the French academic canon, Bourdieu (1993) tends towards an over-socialisation of the artistic project. But he is surely correct to state that a hagiographic celebration of individual artistic genius is a hugely incomplete analysis—for art is part of a much broader social terrain, reminiscent of Sharon Zukin’s narrower, but evocative term, the artistic mode of production (Zukin, 1982). The social contexts of art have be- come a significant emphasis in recent art criticism, extending earlier work such as Becker’s (1982) study of the art world, with its fellow artists, colleges and critics, its bars and hang-outs, buyers and patrons, galleries and museums, to a much tougher critique of the social consequences, for some even the social purposes, of art which have much to do it seems with the politics of displacement (Deutsche, 1996).

The artistic mode of production involves social relations between different players in the art world, but Bourdieu (1993) makes that analysis more formal as he considers in addition the conditions that permit an auton- omous artistic field, exemplified in the slogan

‘art for art’s sake’, to exist at all. In other words, art should be understood not only as a material product with a creator, not only as a symbolic product with an audience and set of facilitators who bring it to the attention of the audience, but also as a manifestation of positions within the artistic field as a whole, the positions of predecessors and contemporaries, of valued and devalued, of dominants and dominated. Bourdieu regards the art- work as a joint creation. It is not just the creation of the artist, other than in a crude material sense, for its value has to be received and confirmed in an intersubjective art world. But this art world is itself shaped by the whole field of cultural production.

The quasi-magical potency of the [artist’s] signature is nothing other than the power, bestowed on certain individuals, to mobilize the symbolic energy produced by the functioning of the whole field, ie. the faith in the game and its stakes that is produced by the game itself (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 81).

Value should be understood as socially produced in a ‘game’ involving the artist, the art-world and also the social conditions producing the art-world, including the position of the art-work in an historical space of genres, techniques and patterns of recognition. “In short it is a question of understand- ing works of art as a manifestation of the field as a whole” (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 37). Now what does this argument have to say to gentrification as an aestheticisation of urban space? What defines the field of gentrification?

The Field of Gentrification

Bourdieu’s development of the field of cultural production as the proper site for the creation of value is a powerful heuristic and the remainder of this paper will extend it to think of gentrification also as a field of relationships, practices and historical traces. This historical standpoint, so emphasised by Bourdieu, is critical, for there are fragments of precedent and memory that are part of the cultural codes of the gentrification ‘game’

and that shape the field into the present. A first step is to establish some of the key relationships in the field: first, the type of capital held by artists, and, secondly, their position within the dominant class, albeit as Bourdieu would have it, as the dominated segment of the dominant class.

In North America, the life of the artist is an invitation to voluntary poverty and here is the first manifestation of a calculus that is incomprehensible to economism. Surveys abound highlighting the minimal economic capital of the artist. A 1993 analysis of Canada’s cultural producers found artists in the lowest niches; painters and sculptors re- ported a mean annual net income from cultural activity of under $8000, dancers, musicians and writers, $15 000 or less (Statistics Canada, 1995). A few years ear- lier, a Toronto survey had discovered that half of a sample of visual and performing artists had registered a net loss in art-related income the previous year (Social Data Re- search, 1990), while in New York an ethnography of urban artists in SoHo estimated that only 1i n a100,at best 1 in 20,would achieve commercial success (Simpson, 1981). In art, as in statistics, the significance level seems to stop at 5 per cent. Or does it? For the deep deficit in economic capital is relieved by a surfeit of cultural capital. Re- member Carole Itter’s assessment of the density of graduate degrees on her block in Strathcona. The survey of Canada’s cultural producers revealed the same pattern. Al- though economically impoverished, artists had very high levels of education, with 51 per cent possessing university degrees— more than three times the national workforce average.

Not only the appropriation of high levels of cultural capital, but also the discipline and achievement of learning an aesthetic disposition, identify artists as members of the middle class. Correlations of the location of artists in Canadian cities in the 1970s identified them as overlapping with the residential areas of higher socioeconomic status, if sometimes on their margins in districts whose gentility has become frayed at the

edges (Ley, 1996). This interdigitation is evident, for example, in several of Margaret Atwood’s Toronto novels where characters move between the social worlds of artist or writer in Cabbagetown or the Toronto Is- lands and such middle-class bastions as the University of Toronto and the Royal Ontario Museum, showing joint membership of a larger professional middle class in the central city. So, too, the studios of art colleges are filled by the children of middle-class parents. At Vancouver’s art college

The students are protected and middle- class. They face 10 years of apprenticeship after 4–6 years of little to no income. They have wonderful ideas but not the means to follow them through. One hundred and fifty graduate each year. A lot of them are very quickly on welfare (interview with assemblage artist).

Here, succinctly, is Bourdieu’s concept of rich cultural capital, limited economic capital, but nonetheless membership of the dominant class.

Artists, however, are very special members of the middle class for they stretch its imagination, its desires, even its practices, beyond its norms and conventions. The artistic lifestyle, like the creative art-work, deliberately presses the borders of conventional middle-class life, while at the same time representing its advancing, colonising arm. In a more abstract discussion, Habermas (1983, p. 5) declared that “the avant-garde must find a direction in a landscape into which no one seems to have yet ventured”. But this venturing is part of a broader field of relationships where the dialectical ties be- tween artistic imagination and middle-class convention may lead to a synthesis in the aestheticised product. One such valorised product is space.

Artists’ Spaces

As modern art attempted to create a world for itself with greater independence from the patronage of the church, the court and the aristocracy, so artists congregated in large

modern cities such as Paris, New York, Lon- don and Berlin, close to the art world, their market and, perhaps, most important, close to each other. Various avant-garde movements have been synonymous with urban life (Mar- cus, 1989), and so it remains today. Artists remain disproportionately associated with large urban areas. In 1991, just over half of Canada’s artists were located in the three principal cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Further specificity exists within these three metropolitan areas, for, against a national standard (of 1.0), suburbs are under- represented as homes for artists, while cen- tral cities are overrepresented. Average location quotients of 0.97 in the suburbs contrasted with a quotient of 2.46 in the central city. The 1996 Census of Canada uses a new occupational classification that permits a more precise specification of artists’ occu- pations. Now against the standard of the metropolitan area as a whole ( 􏰃 1.0), a loca- tion quotient of 2.95 is identified for artists in the City of Toronto, compared with a figure of 0.62 in the remainder of the metropolitan area. Similar, if less polarised profiles existed in Montreal (1.87, 0.68) and Vancouver (1.65, 0.74). Moreover, adding the older oc- cupational classification shows a steady in- crease in centre-city concentration in each of the four censuses from 1981 to 1996 in each metropolitan area. Within the inner-city neighbourhoods, quotients are even higher (Figures 1 and 2). In Toronto, a semi-circle of tracts around the downtown area registers quotients in excess of 4.2; in Vancouver a broken circle of tracts around downtown has values of 2.5 or greater. This is a remarkable development considering that Toronto and Vancouver have consistently had the most expensive housing markets in the nation. Artists must be enduring considerable sacrifices of both housing quality and afford- ability to maintain this residential habit. Once again, their behaviour defies economic rationality, confirming that they are marching to a different drummer.

Repeating the evidence of the Census, a survey of artists in Toronto identified the importance of a central location as part-and-

parcel of the artistic habitus. Among import- ant locational requirements, 86 per cent specified a residence in downtown Toronto and (supporting Richard Florida) 85 per cent required a ‘socially tolerant’ district (Social Data Research, 1990). Interviews with artists in Vancouver add some flesh to this skeleton and revealed that not just any central-city neighbourhood will do. A sculptor showed the keen spatial differentiation that may take place

Artists need authentic locations. You know artists hate the suburbs. They’re too confining. Every artist is an anthropol- ogist, unveiling culture. It helps to get some distance on that culture in an en- vironment that does not share all of its presuppositions, an old area, socially di- verse, including poverty groups.

Poverty areas (like Carole Itter’s Strathcona) also offer cheaper rents, making a cultural virtue of economic necessity. In contrast, areas, including areas formerly occupied by artists, lose their allure with redevelopment even if heritage preservation or historical or cultural theming is part of the new landscape. A painter revealed the cultural as well as economic limitations of such redeveloped districts, including the festival market of Granville Island, very popular with Vancou- ver’s inner-city professionals

I used to work with Dundarave printmak- ers on Granville Island, a dreadful place, Disneyland. You can’t ever park there, it’s too planned, too sanitised. It’s better if the city keeps out, rents get too high, the place becomes too sanitised. The live-work spaces the City set up in Yaletown are too expensive and sterile. They’re alright, you know, if you like wall-to-wall clean.

The live-work spaces, frequently marketed as artists’ lofts, are rarely popular (or afford- able) with many artists. An artist interviewee confided that she “doesn’t know anyone who lives in these artists’ studios”. What she sees there and in other redeveloped central-city settings is something other than authenticity.

Commodification is what I see. Gastown looks pretty but there’s nothing for me there. Is it a romantic notion that brings people to places like Granville Island? There’s no place there for me.

Once again, the aesthetic disposition inverts the normal ranking of stimuli. Those com- modified sites that are popular, even popular with middle-class professionals, are subject to aesthetic rejection, while what Bourdieu (1984, p. 40) might class as ordinary and everyday, even plebeian, are subject not only to aestheticisation, but to aesthetic approval. “An old area, socially diverse, including pov- erty groups” can be valorised as authentic, symbolically rich and free from the com- modification that depreciates the meaning of place. For the aesthetic disposition, com-

modified locations, like commercialised art, are regarded as sterile, stripped of meaning: “there’s nothing for me there”. The suburbs and the shopping mall, emblems of a mass market and a failure of personal taste, are rejected. The related but opposing tendencies of cultural and economic imaginaries re- appear; spaces colonised by commerce or the state are spaces refused by the artist. But, as scholars know, this antipathy is not mutual; the surfeit of meaning in places frequented by artists becomes a valued resource for the entrepreneur.

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