The Warhol Economy by Elizabeth Currid

I recently finished reading Elizabeth Currid's analysis of New York's cultural economy, The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art & Music Drive New York City. The book argues that creative industries drive the economy of New York as much as or more than conventionally recognized industries such as finance, real estate, etc.

Currid also points out that promoting social events, such as night life, is an effective way to promote the cultural economy. Though she plays up the networking aspect a lot, I think networking is helpful for most idea-based industries. A more important point is that night life is how cultural products get evaluated. Most people don't go to work and decide which band sounds good or whose painting you like, you go to a social event like a gallery opening or a concert and decide whether or not the artist has merit.

As the editor of a music magazine I can assert that I decide on what bands to cover by going out and seeing them, not sitting at my desk in my office. The workplace of most cultural employees is as much out at the events that promote the music, art, fashion, whatever as it is in offices. As such it is beneficial for the culture based economy for a city to encourage these sorts of events to happen.

Currid also points out that New York has such a successful cultural economy because it is such a dense grouping of creative types which encourages people in different mediums to cross-pollinate, expanding on the idea that artists do not create in a vacuum and arguing that the greatest come to their success through connections and collaborations with other people in the cultural world.

She backs up her arguments with a bundle of statistics and interviews with notable people such as Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Shepard Fairey, Aesop Rock and a tonne of other people. To be honest her ability use the statistics left a little to be desired as she seemed to misinterpret the very ones she used in her book from time to time, however, none of her misreadng of stats undercut her points much.

She gets into more detail and I'm not going to wax on about this too much, the book does have applications for thinking about Vancouver's creative scene though. If you're interested at this point you can either grab a copy of it, or if you know me and don't mind that I write in the margins of everything I read I'll loan it to you.

Book cover lifted from the Internetz. Thanks Google image search.