Neo-Bohemia: Art and Commerce in the Postindustrial City
How it’s changing, and what’s driving that change, preoccupied Lloyd on and off for a decade–from 1993, when he was a University of Chicago grad student hanging out in the neighborhood, to 2003, when he left town for Nashville and a job teaching sociology at Vanderbilt University. His 295-page book, derived from his dissertation, asks how the bohemias of today are different from their forebears. More specifically, it asks how historically antibourgeois, avant-garde districts, dating from 19th-century Paris, evolved into “bohemian-themed entertainment district[s] where patrons are not starving artists but rather affluent professionals.” He found his answer in what he calls the “aesthetic economy” of Wicker Park: the bars, restaurants, clubs, coffeehouses, galleries, and design firms that cater to the making and selling of “lifestyle experiences.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In his closing pages Lloyd calls the arts a MacGuffin, Hitchcock’s term for an otherwise meaningless plot device that motivates his characters. They’re the pretext that spurs the real economic action in contemporary bohemias like Wicker Park. “Indeed,” he writes, “if fields like theater, poetry, or the visual arts had a larger market and better-compensated participants, it would reduce the need and opportunity for artists to capitalize on their subcultural competence in the more commercially viable enterprises that have agglomerated in and around the neighborhood.” (And yes, that’s how a lot of the book reads, though Lloyd’s interviewees add some color to offset the academese.)
He also wasn’t trying to write the history of Wicker Park, or a Baffler essay about commodified dissent, or an analysis of gentrification, though he can’t avoid touching on these themes. At one point in the book he meets a musician at a loft party who, upon learning that he’s doing a study on Wicker Park, narrows her eyes and says, “Oh, gentrification. Are you for it or against it?”
“What was ironic,” adds Handley, “was that he was such a straitlaced intellectual nerdy type, and there’s all these drug-crazed artists in Wicker Park at the time. You wondered what the guy was all about. To certain people he got labeled a narc right away, and he never forgot. I think being thought of that way colored his engagement with the community. But he found a safe haven with some folks who would become central to the Urbus thing in later years.”
Lloyd’s approach isn’t entirely new. It builds on pioneering work by New York-based sociologist Sharon Zukin, who in books like Loft Living, a study of SoHo in the 1970s, charted the impact of artists on the urban economy. Lloyd goes further, though, with his often exhaustively detailed accounts of service work–tending bar at the Borderline, managing Mirai Sushi, or, in an example of “digital bohemia,” concocting marketing campaigns for Boom Cubed, a Wicker Park design firm that went from making flyers for local hip-hop acts to contracting with global corporations like Nike.
Such activities weren’t “visible to outsiders, or arguably to insiders,” insists Lloyd. “There’d been an artist presence going back decades . . . but there wasn’t a scene. For it to be a scene, it requires spaces that lend it coherence.” Urbus Orbis was the first space, he argues, that “allowed for interactions that fostered a sense of community and opportunities for mutual support and collaboration.” (Patrons of the Rainbo circa 1985 will no doubt take issue with that.)
