Clasa Culturală (Romanian edition, 2016)
Translation: Alexandru Polgar
IDEA Design & Print Editură (Cluj, Romania)
ISBN: 978-606-8265-42-1
192 pages
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What ensures the success of a city these days? Over the past few decades, in cities around the world, artists – and, more broadly, creative workers – have become increasingly important to discourses of urban revitalization and civic development.

In many places, artists in search of cheap rents have become the symbol of gentrification. However, the so-called creative class includes entire categories of "cognitive" workers, who enjoy far less precarious conditions than artists, and whose wealth leads to the permanent dislocation of both working-class residents and those of the turn of the artists. In the creative city, the branding of subcultural movements, the translation of the new into the old, and the professionalization of art combine to produce a user-friendly "social" interface dressed in the harness of bohemian art environments.

How to respond to the deafening violence of an urban landscape that adapts to successive explosions by dissolving or intentionally suppressing, to the point of amnesia, class distinctions? Did a contradiction arise between the declared politics of the artists and their actual role in the flows of global capital, which pass through biennials and art fairs? Can we consider the commitment of so many artists to the Occupy movement as a sign of their desire to mobilize and redirect their energies towards social justice?