Furthermore, this shift enables [Craig]Owens to tie art production to urban development—the (capitalist) production of space—to show how the emergence of an ever “new” art scene is always more complicit with processes of gentrification and marginalization than it is critical of such byproducts of urban renewal. In stark opposition to the alternative lifestyle and contestation of space they advertise, artists and “scenesters” are in fact essential to the post-Fordist turnover of obsolete industrial space from spaces of production to spaces of consumption. In Sharon Zukin’s influential Loft Living, a more thorough study contemporary with Owens’ text, she named this process, with a sly paraphrasing of Marx’s notion of an Asiatic mode of production, an “Artistic Mode of Production!” Exemplified by the East Village scene described by Owens, an AMP has less to do with the production of actual goods (or artworks, if you will) than it does with the related task of producing urban forms, lifestyles, and consumption. Indeed, an AMP is integral to the connections between accumulation and consumption in a post-Fordist economy.
Simon Sheikh, Positively East Village Revisited: The Problem with Puerilism
