Living, Writing, Imagining (at) the End of Creative Capitalism

Abstract

“Creative” and “artistic” capitalism have been with us for a while. Yet something is wrong with them. We seem to be too stressed, too extracted, too invested in the time and effort and monthly subscriptions necessary for curating our public personae in “social” platforms. Back in the early 2010s, neoliberalism seemingly entered a stage in which its “artistic features” were sufficiently appealing to smooth over contradictions. It was as though everything the early avant-garde had once promised was finally coming about. Art was merging with everyday life, including a never-ending demand for originality (or what looked like originality), the articulation of a system of economic and social value based on flexibility and regulated transgression (gig work has its upside for creative types), and the celebration of previously marginalized cultural types (diversity, inclusion, and equity—even in an art world fundamentally structured by novelty, exclusion, and unpaid apprenticeships). But with this transformation soon came another realization. The aestheticization of politics that Walter Benjamin gravely forewarned about as a hallmark of fascism deeply stained artistic capitalism, as the mobilization of creativity became a driving force for urban gentrification displacing those apparently lacking the imaginative flexibility to surf the peaks and troughs of the new normal society of risk. Artistic capitalism and its promises began to stink. Something is wrong, and we are its pitiable symptom.We are not talking about the simple replacement of a mode of capitalism by something else, about an irreversible disappearance. Things are subtler than that. The artistic imperative, the emphasis on participation and experience, the anxiety linked to “like” economies and profile capitalism, are still there. Yet there are new things, too. Technofascism, for that matter: the normalization of the murderous combination of bio/necro/geopower control and authoritarianism. This is not your average nightmare: while artistic capitalism relied on psychosocial isolation, the performance of narcissism, and the establishment of hierarchies through a simulacrum of personal-realization-as-differentiation, this new thing does not care about how curating has become part of the vocabulary of professional and personal self-realization or about the interiorization of extractive mode(l)s of self-exploitation.The farewell to artistic capitalism also implies a farewell to the “human face” of late capitalism. The good news is that in this deeper circle of hell in which we are now, I/you/we don’t need to feel creative anymore. (In truth, I/you/we are so exhausted, disoriented, subsumed into survival mode that I/you/we can’t afford it. It seems that only the algorithm can keep the pace of “not-particularly-creative creative imperatives.”) The bad news is that the new landscape that is just materializing in front of our eyes seems vaster and gloomier than anything we have seen before.Recent debates on technofascism suggest that capitalism died in front of our eyes without us noticing. That necropolitics has been enhanced through its transposition into the policed digital-social now. That subject formation is again under attack and that inhabiting the non-normative implies being at the frontline. That “politics” does not exist anymore, because it has been replaced with memes and algorithms (as if the effects of these were not political and material and tangible). In any event, the exercise of coming to terms with the nightmares of our recent past should not be done to feed apocalyptic thoughts, nor to say that we occupy a worse position than what we occupied ten years ago. Rather, the challenge remains one of imagining the historical coordinates of both subjugation and flight, of capture and fugitivity; understanding what creative capitalism did to us, but also resisting its self-fulfilling, totalizing allure.“Creative” capitalism relied on the collective fulfilment of the equation art = life; technofascism is creative in different, darker ways. In this context, looking forward seems an imperative for basic survival. On the contrary, looking back seems more like a luxury, as a nostalgic gesture without important consequences for our crisis-driven present. “Forward” and “back” should, however, be relativized, as things have already happened, keep happening, in front of our eyes. Coming to terms with “artistic” capitalism should be seen as a complex operation, one that implies adjusting our temporal perception and challenging simplistic, self-predicted, apocalyptic visions of the end of the world. Could we look at the end of “creative” capitalism with creative eyes, to see something other than the replacement of a bad nightmare by a worse one? What is at stake in such a task? How might we accomplish it? Does it make any sense?Until recently, “creative” and “artistic” capitalism was something almost taken for granted. The use of the concept implied its naturalization as a prevailing force, as the new normal. Creative capitalism was the gentle touch making possible the financialization of everything, the “creative force” giving an abstract system a humane face. As such, the concept was so indissolubly linked with late capitalism that its specificity could be easily dismissed as part of the ideological apparatus naturalizing neoliberal ideologies. The loss of relevance of creative capitalism has paradoxically made its contradictions more visible than ever, as in a last desperate attempt to keep traction, to stay in the game.Writing in 1999, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello explained that late capitalism has been taking lessons from countercultural movements since the 1960s and applying these to increasingly profitable endeavors.1 For both authors, a new state of things was taking shape at the end of the 1990s, one marked by the commodification of difference, the interiorization of artistic critique, the diversification of market options and the transformation of services and social relationships into a resource. The confluence of these elements sought to simplify and facilitate control and surveillance. For Boltanski and Chiapello, however, the new spirit of capitalism failed at suppressing a sense of collective anxiety that prevailed over the superficial variations implemented. The clearest symptom of the inefficiencies of the “new spirit of capitalism” could be felt in the flesh, as it is related to the impossibility of being predicated on the flexibility and originality that “creative” paradigms demand. In a connectionist world, the tension between the requirement of flexibility and the need to be someone—that is, to possess a self endowed with specificity (a “personality”) and a certain permanency in time—is a constant source of anxiety. The slogan that sums up the ideal of a successful life as becoming oneself—that is, changing in order to bring out and discover what one potentially was, so that one is no longer the same person while nevertheless evincing conformity to an original self—is the typical expression of this tension.2Reading Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism in 2025, feelings of pessimism and even nostalgia seem to be unavoidable, especially in relation to the idea that the main obstacle blocking change has to do with critical and epistemological limitations, as if not knowing how to call this “new spirit” made it more menacing. In a postscript added in 2007 to the original book, the authors mention that the specificity of recent developments consists in the development of a connectionist logic, which does not mean that it has invaded the totality of the social world or that, in particular, connectionist exploitation has replaced other forms of exploitation. In our view, however, it is precisely the shortage of descriptions tailored to the uniqueness of this world that has hitherto prevented critique from being more effective.3Looking back fifteen years later, it is clear that we have plenty of descriptions dealing with the “uniqueness of this world.” We know well how global globalization was; how much liberation the celebration of creative freedom turned into an imperative of self-development brought. We have the information, but this has not helped us in preventing the damaging effects resulting from an excessive trust of connectivity and newness. Importantly, we can feel an exhaustion in the ways in which creative capitalism is researched and theorized, as if its normalization implied that some of its edgier features could no longer be appreciated and critically apprehended.In 2013, Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy wrote a less radical book, L’esthétisation du monde. Vivre à l’âge du capitalisme artiste, in which the authors defined artistic capitalism as the driving force of an exhausted neoliberal logic in constant need of reinventing itself.4 The key issue for both authors is the appropriation of the project of aestheticizing the world for capitalist purposes. The point for Lipovetsky and Serroy is not just the expansion of aesthetics, but rather its confluence with the domains of economics and finance, its indistinguishability. The collapse of design and experience, the acceleration and automation of consumerism, the development of platforms for mass-tailored consumerism: all these elements play a role in the conceptualization of this new version of creative capitalism. And yet, the most confusing, the most outdated element found in Lipovetsky and Serroy’s book is the idea of perfection, as if the only thing we needed to do is give capitalism enough time to perfect the formula, to tune up the algorithm, so that mass-consumerism-as-aesthetics resembles more the echo of a lost aesthetic grandeur.Reading L’esthétisation du monde in 2025, more than a decade after its first publication, is an interesting exercise. On one hand, things have changed significantly. But there is something else. It is worth noting that Lipovetsky and Serroy’s book was written at a time when artistic capitalism was not hegemonic, when non-individualistic modes of being in common were being put into practice by assembly movements and activist platforms all around the world. Part of the appeal of artistic capitalism as an idea lies in its character of self-fulfilling prophecy. The idea, in order words, is not just an idea; the concept comes with its own advertisement, as the ultimate commodity. In its soft apocalyptic tone, it is simultaneously anticipatory, and already outdated.It is particularly useful to think about artistic and creative capitalism as a remarkably persistent fictional tale, as a way of presenting things that anticipates its own triumph and parries any critical blows against it by justifying its presence as the best possible way of organizing everything. Artistic capitalism takes the glitter of the creative genius and presents it as universally reachable. The emphasis on blockages and frustration only adds up to the climax of self-realization. The interiorization of this fictional account that reduces sociality to the configuration of successful individuals works, because it works its way into the psychosocial texture, projecting its malleability as a sort of do-it-yourself tool kit that can be adapted and transformed for each particular case.Discourses on creative and artistic capitalism present “the thing” as a relatively new phenomenon, as something emerging out of the disintegrated fluxes of Fordism and late capitalism. In fact, the equation “creative self-realization = subject formation” can be defined more accurately as the central piece of a long-term occupation. Of biopolitics attempting to transcend the physical realm of the body to invade also the oneiric, the aspirational, the not-yet. We may, for instance, dust off the genealogies of the artist novel or Künstlerroman, in which becoming (subject, citizen, individual) is associated with becoming an artist, with orienting yourself and finding your way in relation to creative imperatives.5The artist novel—the genre that establishes the novel form at the center of modern literature; the specific form of Bildungsroman in which personal development and subject formation is achieved through artistic means; the body of work that glues together the canon of Western literature, from Balzac to Goethe, Joyce, Mann, Woolf—is not just a literary genre. Rather, we should read this body of work concerned with the coming-of-age of the individual as an artist as a socializing pact, as a particular way of imagining the world in which creative self-definition is always in reach, a path always available. Importantly, the artist novel is not just a literary genre. We should see it as a malleable genealogy that permeates cultural imagination, as a formula for subject-formation-as-individuation that involves novels, but also social media profiles, curated avatars, and the myriad ways in which self-appreciation and self-definition in creative terms are mobilized as socializing tools.The artist novel is not a tale about artists. It does not tell anything about anyone in particular. Rather, this body of fiction works by projecting the fantasies of artistic capitalism (long before such a concept existed) onto the reader, by narrowing the distance between emissary and receptor, producer and consumer. These narratives arise from the hope that realization is around the corner, that “if I could, you also can,” that the alliance between material progress and self-investment represent the perfect formula of success.In the artist novel, the possibility of imagining a life worth being lived is projected upon the reader. Artist novels are aspirational in at least two ways: first, they are concerned with moving off the beaten track, of fulfilling desire as a way of countering a dull and normalized bourgeois reality. Second, the kind of becoming depicted in the novel remains available, transferable, and applicable as a sort of toolkit that the reader can import and put into practice within the sanitized environment of the reading room. The artist novel produces capitalism through the fiction of subject formation and identification, through the accumulation of property made possible by a supposedly inexhaustible and expansive creative imagination.To be sure, this goes much further than any dream of perfect, polished cities powered by the force of a young class of cosmopolitan creative practitioners. We are talking here about a centuries-long experiment that works beneath the skin and repurposes all sociality to make it fit the equation of creative individualism = subject formation. Importantly, this is no longer (it never was) just about literature. Under the late stage of artistic capitalism, scientific progress is replaced by the advancement of “creative” socialization. Apps and user-friendly profiles are the new chemical formulas. Patents and proofs of concept are no longer the predefined terrain of scientific advancement; rather, they have been translated into the realm of the subject-as-profile, curated personae relying on the mobilization of inventiveness to constantly demonstrate that they belong to the group, that they are “in” instead of “out.” Ranking anxieties and technofascistic democracies have combined personal development with computerization and AI sovereignty.The issue with the artist novel and the pact it relies upon is that it is never stable. The process of becoming (subject, individual, citizen) that is promised and propagated through the artist novel is not static, is not about assuming any position. Rather, it is concerned with displacement, with the politics of pattern(ed) lives that are embraced and discarded, that are made fashionable and conceived of as worth being lived. In fact, we should look at the genealogy (fictional and otherwise) of the artist novel and its late capitalist ramifications as lifelines, as patterns that produce their own orientation. Sara Ahmed conceived of queer orientation as a phenomenological task concerned with “the politics of lifelines.” She explains that “following lines…involves forms of social investment. Such investments ‘promise’ return (if we follow this line, then ‘this’ or ‘that’ will follow), which might sustain the very will to keep going. Through such investments in the promise of return, subjects reproduce the lines that they follow.”6 Crucially, Ahmed foresees the possibility of getting lost, of starting new lifelines, while following any path.What is interesting is that the artist novel was always, also, an escape route. 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