ABSTRACT
For approximately 150 years, modern bohemians built their identities and their lives on the foundation of unconventionality and self-marginalization from mainstream institutions. They questioned the imperatives and rewards of holding a steady job and forging a traditional career, preferring to live hand to mouth rather than to relinquish self-determination. The 1980s would mark a turning point in bohemia. In the early 1980s, New York, the United States, and the world were emerging from a decade fraught with economic crises. The increasing relaxation of trade barriers enabled major corporations to take advantage of globalized production; the stock market began to boom; and the abundance of capital buoyed the global art market, hungry for new investment opportunities. The young artists of the Lower East Side were tapped by influential dealers and gallerists to become the new art stars. The meteoric rise of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Julian Schnabel to celebrity and wealth epitomized the shift in the downtown scene and bohemia in general. Young people no longer sought out bohemian enclaves in search of acceptance of their unconventional ways or subversive politics, but rather as a means to fulfill their ambitions. The few who did not harbor mainstream aspirations were confronted by an increasingly unaffordable and materialistic environment. While the critique embodied in modern bohemians’ questioning of the workaday world remains significant, developments endemic to late capitalism, including the rising cost of living, commodification of bohemian culture, gentrification of bohemian neighborhoods, and industry’s co-optation of bohemian work patterns, have placed great limitations on modern bohemian life.
