The Bourgeois Bohemian

I've been called a BoBo, that is, a Bourgeois Bohemian. Now I think one can easily asses what this entails, mainly a taste in expensive, cutting-edge stuff with a rejection of the ordinary. But I immediately recognized a possible contradiction here (or maybe someone told me, I can't remember): what has expense got to do with bohemia? Fortunately the New York Times Magazine this week attempted an answer to this very question!

Now in the usual Times style, the author, James Traub, first declares the state of the world in moral terms and then deduces the implications:

In New York City, Bohemia is determined by real estate: artists gather in raffish neighborhoods where studio space is cheap; the new outposts of culture and consumption they establish make the quarter desirable, thus raising the rents to prohibitive levels; the artists then decamp for the next shabby enclave.

That is, in New York, bohemia is replace by bourgeois: the two are mutually exclusive. But dig a little deeper here: artists, at least the young, fiscally insolvent ones, are forever doomed to cheap real estate. This seems natural enough, but they have the special power of revitalizing areas, even making them the coolest places in the whole city. Then are we to believe that the spoils belong only to them, that they wouldn't even want the more affluent to patronize them? It seems that the whole reason New York is the art capital of the world in the first place is the money and patronage.

Furthermore, just because the artists move out, does that mean the area is no longer bohemian? That is to say, are we to believe that embourgeoisement is always in bad taste? This leads me to believe that Bohemia must be where artists live, and have affected their surroundings. This article also says this area must be walkable:

But the middle-class householder geography of Queens offers too barren a soil for the rooting of a new Bohemia. Fortunately, there is lots more Brooklyn available.

I make a conjecture: walkable space is finite in America. Construction is not, and new urbanism is surely doing its part to provide more of it, but it's simply more expensive to individuals at this point to build it. (Of course the argument is that it is cheaper to society, and that the true cost is hidden in time spent driving, the lack of bohemia partout, and subtle subsidies virtually unrecognizable and inextinguishable.) But at this point the ring of suburbia surrounding New York has made the space finite, and so when the switch happens from cheap coffee to expensive latte, our moral philosophers are up in arms:

[Today's artists] are threatened not by penury but by gentrification.

But I don't agree with this philosophy, because it once again supports the view American cities must be dumps. More of the article goes to support this view:

In short, downtown, or the idea of downtown, has become thoroughly implicated in the cultural and economic forces that it once resisted with every ounce of its scruffy integrity. The misfits and longhairs and revolutionaries deemed unassimilable by mainstream culture ... are now considered "edgy".

This statement is even more loaded than just that: not only must American cities be dumps, but there's an integrity to it! Furthermore, "mainstream," typical, call them middle-class, Americans are rejected by the city. If artists don't reject them, they are no longer Bohemian, no longer edgy. This is an insult both to artists, who perhaps have good, eccentric taste not out of pure rejection of mainstream but out of creative introspection, and to the patrons of the arts, who brought artists to New York in the first place.

I've turned the argument on its head: Traub argues that Bohemia grows out of rejection by the mainstream, I say it grows out of rejection of the mainstream, which can be completely reduced to an argument of taste. Therefore the Bourgeois Bohemian can exist, and he will as the proud heir of great American cities.