Artist Ethic and Bohemianism

There is a scene in Marin Cotillard's La Vie en Rose in which Edith Piaf's mother, in a jealous rage tells her that she is an artist, not a prostitute, nor a thief, but an artist and therefore an honorable person.

Bohemianism was born around the time of the industrial revolution and it is a by-product of it.  The low brow Bohemian artists, condemned to the life in the factory or the life of the outlaw, lacked everything that the bourgeois high browed had. Artistic activity came as an alternative in the pursuit of a decent life, and if wealth was to be acquired it was only by those means that brought satisfaction in work: artistic and literary practices; together with the pursuit of pleasure as vengeance on the inequalities and hypocrisy of bourgeois culture and society.

Bohemianism ran its course after more than a century and reached its peak in the American and European 1960's communities.

Unfortunately, the former 1960's Bohemians have become old bourgeois and Bohemianism is impossible to practice any longer in the big cities where it used to exist, as a consequence of prohibiting rents.

Nevertheless, Bohemianism is practiced today by moneyed youths who consider themselves artists but without the toll of poverty on their backs. This new "bohemians" are the high hipsters that concentrates (in New York) in areas such as Williamsburg and Park Slope; as opposed to poor young creatives or low hipsters of the so-called Hipsturbia.

Cities who wants to thrive and prosper need a quota of Bohemians and of street cultural life: Our success may hinge on embracing a bohemian philosophy.