Bohemia isn't lost. It has just gone underground The disappearance of bohemia, as announced by David Hockney on Radio 4, is a familiar song. "Bohemia is always yesterday," wrote the American writer Malcolm Cowley, a bohemian himself, as long ago as the 1920s. The word and the concept have lost traction; but in the 19th and 20th centuries, the bohemian was a well-known figure, locked in a love-hate relationship with the philistine bourgeoisie. Bohemians were artists against society, their art too far in advance of middle class taste to sell. As a result, these self-chosen outcasts were often penniless, yet they transformed their poverty into a costume of defiance, flaunting their rags and cast-offs. They were out to shock: the outrage of straight society was their lifeblood. Some lived spartan lives devoted to new experiments in art, but others developed themselves as outrageous or eccentric characters, an unconventional way of life their sole artistic creation. Dedicated to failure, the bohemians soon discovered to their horror that their way of life was a huge success, speedily taken up and turned into a "lifestyle" by the industrial capitalism most of them despised. By the 1890s the bohemian districts of Paris had become tourist attractions and the artists who had lived in Montmartre were forced to flee an area transformed into a cheery parody of their outlaw dissidence. Boulevard Montmartre in Paris by Camille Pissarro (1897). Time and again commercial imitations, from George du Maurier's bestseller, Trilby, to Puccini's La Bohème undercut the genuine bohemian way of life. The greedy mill of consumer capitalism devoured every new trend that came its way and sold it to the very people from whom the bohemians tried desperately to set themselves apart. So from very early on bohemia was swathed in nostalgia. The "real" bohemia was always in the past. Suburban consumers could steal the bohemian style. It may prove harder to steal the bohemian soul. Bohemia, after all, is not a geographical location, but a state of mind. To be a bohemian was to reject all conventional ways of looking at things, to explore the forbidden and to turn the world upside down, politically as well as artistically. Yet here too the majority stole the bohemians" clothes. The forms of shocking behaviour the early bohemians opted for, ranging from free love, homosexuality, illegitimate children, drugs and alcoholism to mere untidiness and unpunctuality, were copied by the mainstream (except the last two). Attitudes towards art have also changed. The traditional middle classes were not necessarily conservative. They loved the interior designs of William Morris, himself a communist and ardent critic of bourgeois society, but avant garde art was often viewed with suspicion and hostility. Works by Schoenberg and Diaghilev were booed off stage; canvases by the impressionists and later painters denounced as degenerate daubs. Today, by contrast, we live in a world so highly aestheticised that it is almost impossible for any art to truly shock. New artists and writers more easily find acceptance, if not cash. In a promiscuous democracy of taste, anything goes. On the other hand, the failures of revolutionary politics have led to disillusionment. Bohemia was an umbrella term that united art and politics. Feminists, sexual radicals, socialists and anarchists sheltered together with cultural innovators in its protective shade. These days, art and politics have to some extent uncoupled, and if there is a political avant garde it more likely consists of religious fundamentalists or extreme nationalists, some of whom condemn art altogether. The Fugs on the march in New York in 1966 against the Vietnam war. The flaunting personalities of bohemia have meanwhile been shoved aside by celebrities. In the 1960s the way of life spread into youth culture via the beats, then into rock music as the youth movement itself evolved out of a less differentiated bohemia. This launched a new celebrity culture that is about the glamour of bad behaviour and the bad behaviour of the glamorous. It is about instant fame and rapid extinction. Bohemianism was about ego; so is modern day celebrity. The great bohemians had the steely tunnel vision that can sometimes achieve genius. Celebrity is indiscriminate, embracing the inauthentic, kitsch and trivial. It is part of a web of mass distraction, designed to smash the diamond of an individual's will into a thousand smithereens of tweets and trivialities. Consumer culture, which took up bohemian style with such enthusiasm, demands conformity to every latest whim. Yet originality of vision has not died, rather it can no longer afford to advertise itself in the old way. Today there are still enclaves of bohemia, but Hockney will not find them in the expected places. Bohemians have become like the revolutionaries they once were close to; they have gone underground, nurturing their ideas until these are ready to bear fruit.