Tuesday 26th January 2016, 8:00pm

Session 154: “Culture Class” by Martha Rosler

For this second Theory Tuesdays session at the Reseda Lochergut furniture showroom, Philip Matesic presented the second essay “Creativity and Its Discontents” from the three-part essay “Culture Class: Art, Creativity, Urbanism” by Martha Rosler (e-flux, 2011).

“Culture Class reflects on the commodified status of creativity in the geopolitical power formations and bureaucratic management of cities. Writing in direct response to Richard Florida’s book The Rise of the Creative Class, Rosler problematizes Florida’s definition of creative workers as driving urban economic success, exploring the notion that artistic labor ‘cannot be conflated with neoliberal urban political regimes,’ as sociologist Ann Markusen has put it. Yet artists and urban cultural centers are irrevocably intertwined, and part of Rosler’s task in this series of essays is to tease out the complicity of artists in both the economic advancement and spatial reorganization of cities.” -Abbe Schriber

Participants: 5