Why networking is different to collaboration: Andy Warhol and the peculiarities of the postmodern creative class | Eduardo De La Fuente

Summary: Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Eduardo De La Fuente In her recent study of the contemporary creative class in New York, The Warhol Economy, Elizabeth Currid suggests that Andy Warhol pioneered a new approach to creativity: ‘Andy Warhol exemplified... in both his work and his Factory, the collective nature of creativity: that fashion, art, film, music, and design did not reside in separate spheres – that instead they were constantly engaging each other and sharing ideas and resources across creative sectors’. However, the types of social interactions that Currid points to – the interactions of creative personnel at art gallery openings, dance clubs and bars – doesn’t exactly fit traditional understandings of artistic collaboration. As Currid admits, Warhol ‘saw the significance of the social spaces in which these industries and creative people interacted – his Factory merged cultural production with a social scene’. Similarly, Simon Frith and Howard Horne argue that, what figures such as Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren learnt at art school, was that their own social circles were the ‘art world’ and everyone who mattered was a member. The question I want to raise in this paper is: what understanding of social interconnectedness characterizes the ‘networks’ of sociability of postmodern creatives? And why do postmodern creatives blur the line between work and leisure, making art and socializing? My suggestion will be that if Currid's ethnographic account is accurate then collaboration has been largely replaced by networking; and involvement in an ‘other’s’ creativity is less like love or friendship, and more like the feeling of ‘being connected’. Eduardo De La Fuente is Lecturer in the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, at Monash University. He has recently published a book, entitled, Twentieth Century Music and the Question of Modernity (Routledge, 2010), and co-edited (with Peter Murphy) Philosophical and Cultural Theories of Music (Brill, 2010); as well as a number of essays on art, aesthetics and social theory, in journals such as Sociological Theory, Cultural Sociology, Journal of Sociology, Classical Sociology, Distinktion and Thesis Eleven.