Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class - Scott Timberg.epub

Change is no stranger to us in the twenty-first century. We must constantly adjust to an evolving world, to transformation and innovation. But for many thousands of creative artists, a torrent of recent changes has made it all but impossible to earn a living. A persistent economic recession, social shifts, and technological change have combined to put our artists—from graphic designers to indie-rock musicians, from architects to booksellers—out of work. This important book looks deeply and broadly into the roots of the crisis of the creative class in America and tells us why it matters.

Scott Timberg considers the human cost as well as the unintended consequences of shuttered record stores, decimated newspapers, music piracy, and a general attitude of indifference. He identifies social tensions and contradictions—most concerning the artist’s place in society—that have plunged the creative class into a fight for survival. Timberg shows how America’s now-collapsing middlebrow culture—a culture once derided by intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald—appears, from today’s vantage point, to have been at least a Silver Age. Timberg’s reporting is essential reading for anyone who works in the world of culture, knows someone who does, or cares about the work creative artists produce.

Scott Timberg, a former arts reporter for the Los Angeles Times, writes on music and culture and contributes to Salon and the New York Times. Over the past six years he has been an award-winning freelance journalist, a blogger on West Coast culture, and an adjunct writing professor. He runs ArtsJournal’s Culture Crash blog and lives in Los Angeles.


“Scott Timberg has written an original and important study. He explores some of the most pressing cultural issues affecting the arts and intellectual life with remarkable clarity. This is the first analysis of our current culture from the bottom up—the precarious situation of the individual artists, writers, and musicians who are now struggling to survive.”
—Dana Gioia, poet and former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

“We’ve all had the feeling of these enormous changes—long in the making, not ‘at the last minute’—but Scott Timberg has the synthesis that makes them make sense. Culture Crash throws a clear, defining light on the squeeze that digitally-based economies have put on our artists. A hugely important book.”
—Sven Birkerts, author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age

“Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash is a valuable book because it describes the plight of American arts and culture as an ecological catastrophe, a disaster rooted in the conquest of a trickle-down mentality, intellectual as well as economic . . . This book should be read by anyone in the world of culture who wants to peer beyond the profitable illusions of middle class contentment touted by our various snake oil salesmen, from Richard Florida to universities, the mainstream media, and arts organizations. . . . A passionate look down at the future.”
—Bill Marx, ArtsFuse

“Mr. Timberg succeeds in assembling a large, coherent and troubling mosaic. He writes lucidly but with passion and a kind of bitter wit. And he is impressively well-read . . . . He shows himself to be a gifted synthesizer, weaving all manner of information and opinion into a fluent narrative of cultural decline.”
—Ben Downing, Wall Street Journal

‘His part-history, part-analysis provides absorbing detail of the demise of the mid list — the authors, painters, designers, architects and actors who did not become famous but whose contribution to greater good should be celebrated rather than relegated to average annual earnings of under £20,000.’
—John Kampfner, The Observer.