The urban theorist Richard Florida often illustrates his data with anecdotes, and he has one about an art collector. In it, he asks the art dealer, someone “very well known,” how to tell which artists’ work will be worth something in the future. To what degree is it a factor of non-artistic skills, Florida asks the dealer. “That’s the one that’s going to make it,” the dealer says of the hypothetical artist who could draw attention to himself. “That’s the one who’s going somewhere.”
As we hit the tenth anniversary of his polarizing 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, that anecdote is only one of the many that Florida has to add to his oeuvre. An anniversary edition of the book, which will be released on June 26, includes several new chapters, with revised data (and anecdotes) throughout. Most of that information is about the topic for which Florida is best known—whether cities can be revitalized if their leaders work to attract creative types, which has gotten him his current gig at the helm of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto—and he takes the opportunity to rebut some of the many criticisms he’s faced over the last decade. (The criticism is still coming: the new book The New Geography of Jobs by economist Enrico Moretti contains a substantial list of cities that are counterexamples to Florida’s theories.) But the revised edition of the book also includes his prophecy about the future of the entertainment industry—and, between the lines, his prescription to keep artists from starving. That’s where the collector comes in: more than ever, entertainment-industry workers have to be creative; at the same time, art isn’t enough.
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