Video: America’s “Great Unwind”

One should always be skeptical when a guy who makes his living from selling people stuff they don’t need starts talking about “empowering” consumers and how great it is that people are shopping less.And there are some annoying, ad-guy aspects to the talk John Gerzema, chief insights officer of Young and Rubicam, gave at the TED conference.

That said, he’s not wrong. From the start of the downturn, we saw changes developing in society—people would think differently about money…

Recession Shows the Real Meaning of Luxury

I only started realizing how out-of-whack the luxury industry had gotten back in October, while chatting with the well-respected publisher of a now-dead magazine at a charity event.

“You don’t watch Gossip Girl?” he said, incredulous. “But you’re in luxury!”

(That, of course, was when I still was In Luxury).

The next Monday I settled in to learn about my industry from a CW television drama about New York private school kids. After five minutes, I flipped it off, rattled. How was it luxury to watch 16-year-olds sporting handbags that even I couldn’t justify spending $10,000 on? How were they supposed to have acquired said bags? Is that what luxury had come to? Glee in watching people with expensive purses, and hoping that one day we might be able to own something similar?

How did this happen?…

An Unemployed Girl’s Review of a Novel on Unemployment

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter makes a fine primer on unemployment for the uninitiated. But for the over-educated and under-employed (me, for example) that the protagonist Matt Prior is based on, it can be plain unsettling at times to discover your anxious likeness captured and distilled into eloquent, neatly packaged prose.

Matt is aptly named, as the recession has gone and rubbed its dirty feet all over him. But his hare-brained career choices are as much to blame for his situation as the forces of Wall Street.

Is the Age of Joy Upon Us?

Robbie Blinkoff, a consumer anthropologist and founder of Context-Based Research Group, a Baltimore firm that advises corporations on product strategies, believes that the recession is turning us into “grounded consumers.” He spoke to us about the rite of passage we’ve been through in the last year, how we’re all becoming happier, and why this will be the Best Holiday Ever.

So the “grounded consumer.” As opposed to what?

I’m a cultural anthropologist. What we’re looking at is people living within our culture—that culture defines our rules. Where our economy has taken us is to a point where we say we have a culture, but what we really have is a market. Market has supplanted culture and drives the way we live. Consumerism has supplanted cultural identity, like when there’s an eclipse the moon comes over the sun. People have been foregoing relationships in return for material goods—though nobody went out and said I’m buying an iPod because I don’t want to have relationship with someone.

Has this sort of thing happened before?

We did a study after 9/11, and people were realizing they’re more in control of their identities. Last fall—Sept. 29 actually—the market fell all of 129 points. This feels to me like Sept 11 without the terrorism. It was the same blue sky that day. This is going to transform us…

Lasting Lessons from the Recession

We’ve all gotten schooled in some way by the recession. Maybe it was a shock to learn that she loved your money more than she loved you. Perhaps the interest-only mortgage wasn’t as great a deal as it seemed. Or it might have been a good idea to have some money in the bank, in case your job evaporated.

It’s been a hard education for some of us. But once we have new homes or new jobs, and our financial situations are back on track, will we remember what welearned? Here are five lessons we hope will outlast the recession, the recovery and beyond:

1. Bad things can happen to good careers. A lot of talented, experienced, hard-working people lost jobs in this recession. (And some of them, we hope, are getting hired again.) The question is not why you, but what’s next?

2. You can live on less than you think…

Recession Lexicon: Putpockets

/n. From the Department of Strange but True: Aware of how people have been hit by the downturn, former pickpockets who are giving back by slipping cash into the pockets of unsuspecting pedestrians.

“It feels good to give something back for a change–and Britons certainly need it in the current economic climate,” Chris Fitch, a former pickpocket who is running the operation, told Reuters a couple of weeks ago…

Recession Lexicon: Fretworking

/v. This word popped up on the Recessionwire-inspired contest that vocabularist Ben Schott held at the New York Times website last weekend. The “official” definition, offered by a reader who goes by Hotfrostins: Extreme networking driven by the fear of potential job loss…

Retooling: Affordable Art Keeps Gallery Afloat

Provenance be damned. These days the most important thing for gallery owners to master is the art of survival.

The art market—like everything else—has been in contraction for more than a year. Galleries are closing, and many are struggling.

But Jessica L. Porter, owner of a small gallery in New York City, started her business in a recession-friendly fashion. And in the downturn, she has figured out a way to keep people buying art…

Boom’s Over, Boys: Art’s New Take on Money

What is art for? In the boom years, many people, if answering honestly, would have said art was status symbol, investment, an excuse for socializing (and social climbing) at art fairs and gallery openings from New York to Miami to Switzerland. During the boom, artists prospered instead of starving and even students got high prices for their work. Eight of the 10 most expensive paintings ever were sold between 2004 and 2008.

The art market has crashed along with everything else. We’re all thinking more about money–and we’re also thinking differently about it. Which may be shifting the spotlight to artists who have a more skeptical take on money, markets and capitalism than, say, Damien Hirst, the darling of the boom years who created a $100 million, diamond-encrusted skull. We’ve seen some impressive examples out there:

Hedge Fund is an eerie work by Gianni Monteleone, one of 12 artists that Robert Jain, head of Credit Suisse global proprietary trading, commissioned to create works inspired by Wall Street terminology…

Recession Lexicon: Lazylancing

n./ Just when we wondered whether we might be running out of new downturn words, we got a Tweet from adventurous polymath Christina Davidson: “They miss what all my laid off journo friends R doing now. We call ‘lazylancing’ a way to justify travel.”

Lazylancing is when you subsidize your travel with freelance work, as Davidson did last year after being laid off from her job. “I decided to take a couple of months and go backpacking through Turkey and Syria,” she says. A story she wrote for The Atlantic ended up covering a good part of her expenses for the three months. “You may be hard pressed to get anyone to admit to this,” she says—writers want you to think they’re working hard. At the same time, more people may be lazylancing; they might as well. “There are so few regular jobs out there, and it’s a lot cheaper in the third world…