The Death of Scenius

Urban Creativity Isn't What It Was

Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, and Franz Kline (all painters) at the Cedar Tavern, 1957 (photo: Fred McDarrah). We’ll just have to imagine John Cage and Morton Feldman chatting to Willem De Kooning in a nearby booth.

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In the course of a piece lamenting the decline of modern dance and dance criticism, the critic William Deresiewicz lists the amazing succession of avant-garde revolutions fostered in America during the second half of the twentieth century: “Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Conceptualism; bebop, folk rock, hip-hop, and punk; neoclassical ballet, postmodern dance, and performance art; Beat poetry and the New York School; the Jewish novel and the African-American novel; the Black Arts Movement; the New Hollywood; Off-Off-Broadway; and the New Journalism.”

That’s not even all of it. To Deresiewicz’s list we can add Minimalism (musical and artistic) and, at one remove, subcultures like Grunge, that weren’t explicitly avant-garde but were innovative and influential. That was one hell of a half-century (and the half-century before it was pretty lively too). It is unlikely we will see such an interconnected series of efflorescences ever again. We are living, by comparison, in an age of cultural stagnation. There are multiple reasons for this, but one of them is that artists no longer gather in cities.

Brian Eno coined the term “scenius” to refer to the collective genius that can emerge when a population of diverse and fertile talents living in geographical proximity form a loose community or ‘scene’. A scene consists of artists (from the same field and adjacent ones) and of collectors, entrepreneurs, curators, critics and theorists (akin to what the sociologist Howard Becker called an “art world”). Like a new brain being formed, these clustered nodes interact in wild and unpredictable ways, sparking new ideas and birthing movements.

Scenius is primarily an urban phenomenon. New York was the crucible for several of the avant-garde movements listed above. Deresiewicz writes eloquently about how the dance scene in Manhattan was highly social. It thrived on physical, serendipitous interactions, which added up to a kind of collective consciousness: “You saw each other in the theaters, the galleries, the music clubs, the independent bookstores, saw each other in each other and knew that you were all engaged in something bigger together.”

Throughout history, urban scenes have repeatedly proved fertile: Renaissance Florence, of course, and Elizabethan London; Vienna in the late nineteenth century; Montmartre in the early twentieth century; Harlem in the 1920s; London in the 1960s; Seattle in the 1990s, and many others (periods and cities). Much of what we now treasure, culturally speaking, was forged inside these metropolitan concatenations.

There’s something about living and working near other artists and art-adjacent people that multiplies individual potential. This is a measurable phenomenon: a study of classical composers during the period 1750-1899, in Paris, Vienna and London, discovered that they were significantly more productive when they lived in close proximity to other composers. Notably, it was the most talented composers who benefited the most.

You can guess at the reasons: the stimulation of seeing what others are up to, the headspinning conversations, the clashes of different perspectives - creative, theoretical, commercial. Ted Gioia identifies a deliciously darker reason too: rivalry. When your rival (or as Ted prefers, nemesis) is in your geographic and social domain, you are more likely to be annoyed, enraged, and stimulated by them. Above all, perhaps, creative clustering sharpens focus, forging a sense of shared purpose and passion. Density generates intensity.

There are also infrastructural reasons - not (just) the infrastructure of transport and electricity but social and institutional infrastructure. A city doesn’t have to be thriving economically for scenes to emerge (New York in the 1970s: highly creative but crime-ridden and shabby). It just has to be a place where creative people can afford to live and work, where they feel free, and where there are common spaces for them to gather (bars, restaurants, bookshops) and to see or hear each other’s work (galleries, venues, museums).

During his most formative artistic years Picasso lived in a ramshackle, warren-like building in Montmartre known as the Bateau Lavoir. Fellow residents included Juan Gris and Amedeo Modigliani. The building became a nerve centre for radical artists and their sponsors: visitors included Leo and Gertrude Stein, the poet Apollinaire, and Picasso’s nemesis, Matisse. It was here that Picasso, responding to the gauntlet thrown down by Matisse, painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, perhaps the most important painting of the twentieth century.

In post-war New York, artists colonised buildings that few others wanted to live in. John Cage took two rooms on the top floor of a dismal tenement block on Monroe St, near the Williamsburg Bridge. He painted it white and furnished it minimally. It had spectacular views and it was big enough for him to entertain artists and musicians in his circle: Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg, Pierre Boulez when he was over from Europe.

Cage’s friend and fellow composer Morton Feldman moved in downstairs. When Cage ventured into town he would go, with Feldman, to the Cedar Tavern, on the eastern edge of Greenwich Village. The Cedar was frequented by the painters who became known as Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Cage and Feldman would join them around six in the evening and talk and drink and talk until closing time. Feldman later said, “I can say without exaggeration that we did this every day for five years of our lives.”

Cafes and bars play a recurring role in artistic revolutions. In 1860s Paris, Café Guerbois was where Manet, Degas, Renoir, Baudelaire, Zola and others would meet to gossip, theorise and argue over wine and billiards. Monet, who also dropped in, later recalled, “Nothing could have been more interesting than these talks, with their perpetual clashes of opinion. You kept your mind on the alert, you felt encouraged to do disinterested, sincere research, you laid in supplies of enthusiasm that kept you going for weeks and weeks, until a project you had in in mind took definite form. You always left the cafe feeling hardened for the struggle, with a stronger will, a sharpened purpose, and a clearer head.” It’s a beautiful articulation of the benefits of camaraderie among innovators.

Scenius seemed to stop happening at some point early in this century. What was the last musical movement to be distinctively associated with a city in Britain? Trip-hop, from Bristol? Grime, from East London? Once you get beyond 2010 it’s hard to think of any. In the US, New York is a more liveable city than it was for much of the twentieth century, and a less creative one. Portland and Austin are not quite what they were. San Francisco and Silicon Valley are perhaps the last examples of scenius, but those scenes are driven by money, not art.

What killed scenius? Well, as on the Orient Express, there are multiple culprits, but they include the vast inflation of real estate prices in Western cities. Artists made SoHo and Shoreditch attractive places to live, which means that they, or their successors, can’t afford to live or work there. There are fewer and fewer affordable pockets of the city for artists to flee to; once Peckham and Williamsburg are out of reach, where do you go?

Another reason is that the modern internet has made young people more solitary and homebound, and less likely to meet up in shared spaces. In a new article for the Atlantic, Derek Thompson details how Americans of all ages are spending more time at home, and young people are less likely to socialise with friends, trends that were greatly accelerated by the pandemic. Young people are less likely to drink alcohol or do drugs than previous generations, which is good for their health but not necessarily for their artistic vitality.

Without urban scenes we’re more reliant on lone brilliant individuals to jolt us out of our cultural tramlines. They do exist, but there are fewer of them, and the ones we have are probably not being driven to realise their full potential in the way they would if they were closely surrounded, pressed in upon, by collaborators and competitors. How would music sound if Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Beyoncé all lived in the same tenement building in Williamsburg? What would art and literature look like if Sally Rooney, Robert Icke and James Marriott were meeting up for a drink in the same bar most nights of the week? I mean I dread to think - but it would be interesting. And if there’s one thing we’re running short on, it’s interesting new directions for artists to pursue.

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