BOOK REVIEW: The Warhol EconomyBy Elizabeth Currid Princeton University Press, £16.95 (€25).The author argues that the vibrant creative community in a city such as New York contributes more to the economy than many realise, writes Jim Carroll.
Great cities have always been magnetic hubs for people with bright ideas.
Artists, designers, musicians and creative producers of every stripe have historically flocked to cities and cultural capitals such as London, New York and Paris.
Once in residence, their work and career benefit from close proximity to a burgeoning support infrastructure, the all-important presence of their peers and, perhaps most crucially of all when you look at how the commodification of art and culture has driven the creative industries in recent years, a primed market for their wares.
Yet there is also a long-held belief that it is other sectors and industries that power a city's economy and that art and culture are really just eye-candy add-ons for the office workers who generate all the income.
After all, aren't the banking and financial institutions, with their huge staff, salaries and disposable income, more important to an urban balance sheet than what happens in nightclubs, studios and galleries?
Surely there is no way that the tax receipts derived from old-school businesses can be matched by those intangible feel-good factors which are part and parcel of a healthy, artistic community?
And wouldn't those city blocks currently occupied by run-down and uneconomic art studios and hang-outs be better monitised if they were turned into chic, modern apartments or offices for rising law firms and accountancy practices?
Yet, as Elizabeth Currid argues in The Warhol Economy, the creative network in a city like New York may well be responsible for contributing more to the economy than many realise.
Currid believes that it is the grand sweep of arts and culture - from ballet, opera and evenings at the Museum of Modern Art to hip-hop DJs cutting their teeth at hole-in-the-wall clubs and new rock bands taking baby steps - which gives the city its unique selling points and attracts non-arts companies to locate there.
However, Currid feels that there is a danger that such competitive advantages may be thrown away if city landlords and property-owners persist in replacing low-yielding cultural tenants with conventional businesses and offices. The city's municipal stakeholders, she says, need to take steps to prevent the development of such a homogenous and uncreative cityscape.
A lecturer in urban planning at the University of California, Currid delves into New York's fashion, art and music scenes to show how what happens at night, when artists network with each other at launches and in nightclubs, feeds into the Big Apple's standing as the brightest and most exciting metropolitan area in the world.
Like other pop-economics books of recent years, such as Chris Anderson's The Long Tailand Steven Levitt and Stephen J Dubner's Freakonomics, Currid knows exactly where to go to find colour for her arguments.
She flits from catwalk to dancefloor via boutiques and galleries to file the thoughts and notions of designers (Diane von Furstenberg, Zac Posen), musicians (Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Talking Heads) and artists (Futura, Lee Quinones). They are the ciphers who allow her to build her points about the vast, often untapped potential of the creative economy.
She is also a dab hand at showing how developments reported initially in the business pages, such as the sale of a building's lease in the city's meat-packing district for instance, affect the cultural machinations she is tracking.
However, Currid comes from academic stock. There are many times when her attempts to bolt on data derived from her number-crunching to sketches of essentially ephemeral happenings do not quite have the effect she is aiming for.
Some events are impervious to data-mining, but Currid's attempt to track absolutely everything that is going on and give it a place in her narrative sees her over-emphasising certain elements to the detriment of the book's main thread.
Her attempts to quantify the role of scenes, nodes and gatekeepers, or even simply the benefits to DJs and musicians of hanging out until the small hours at parties and clubs, and to turn this into tables and statistics does not always work. Some of the data she relies upon, such as employment figures, for example, serve to undo her own argument by pointing up increases in other sectors.
Perhaps Currid's most interesting and coherent argument (and one which has implications even in Ireland) is when she addresses how New York's once-thriving downtown artistic zones have been destroyed by property developers, forcing the artists to flee to Williamsburg or to Jersey City.
Currid feels that this is where the city fathers have to come into play and she puts forward a raft of policy suggestions, including a more enlightened approach to nightclub licensing, redirecting museum grants into rent subsidies and a more proactive approach to protecting artists from profiteering landlords.
While you could argue that this strikes a blow to her own argument (if New York is so driven by artists, why are they leaving?), it does highlight action which could be taken by a city's administration if they were sincere about protecting their creative patch.
How to spare artists from having to spend more time applying for such prescriptions than focusing on their own individual work is a discussion for another day.
