ABSTRACT
That said, part of the ambition here is to consider what is at stake in the creative act in the information age. With reference to Alan Liu’s (2004) gloomy assessment of the possibilities for creativity given its requisitioning by a voracious digital corporate culture, I distinguish between creativities that are complicit with this ethos and those that offer resistance. A cold creativity founded in the production and accumulation of capital and ‘good taste’ can be discerned in relation to particular types of gnome fun, acting in contradistinction to a warmer, expansively heterotopic (Foucault, 1986) set of actions, relations and energies. To make this case I contrast the designer gnome (exemplified by Philippe Starck’s gnome stools Attila and Napoleon) with a group of gnomes who live, against all odds, in a recycling plant in Birmingham, Uk. Attending to the cautious choreographies that accompany the gnome in the context of contemporary design reveals not only that taste hierarchies are very much alive and well – contradicting the growing conviction that kitsch and so-called bad taste are ‘dead’ (Street Porter, 2001; Londos, 2006; Attfield, 2006) – but also that a symbolic economy is at work at the heart of the apparent relaxation of taste. It should become clear that not all gnomes are cool and much squeamishness can still be detected in relation to the gnome’s presence. Meanwhile, in Birmingham those gnomes who find themselves remaindered – effectively sentenced to death by taste decisions – are brought back to life in the form of a gnome sanctuary.
