I'm not too terribly knowledgeable about that particular scene, just about several of the artists that were present, but was it well known while it was happening or was the veneration kind of in hindsight?

I think there have been places similar, especially in what I've heard about urban areas in the US from the 70s-90s: cheap areas with lots of young, gifted and poor artists trying to make sense or relay experiences.

There are still places like that nowadays, like some parts of brooklyn, but tastes/scope/aesthetics have changed drastically, plus there legitimately IS tons of cross-pollination outside of geographical areas because of the internet. A lot of digital art/music provide examples of this, they have this hella fast adoption of aesthetic memes that blow through the landscape really quickly and then disappear. Granted, there's always changing/evolving tastes and whatnot, but it seems like it is much more rapid than previous times. We have a completely different world we are trying to address that isn't the awe-struck aplomb of a bombed-out post-World War era, which was limited to locale and stimulated by direct experience, but now a lot of those experiences are much more universal. and ubiquitous and not limited to a particular locale.

Not to say there aren't influences that stem from particular social-spheres (sissy bounce rap from NOLA, gender-fucked performance art from SF, vaporwave-esque-gif-90s-tumblr art in brooklyn) but it doesn't really stay contained nor do these scenes have a focus on just a handful of innovative individuals doing their own thing, but rather copies on copies on copies, post-post modernism or whatever? Hyperreal shit? Fuck if I know, but I don't think our generation is gonna have heros and physical locales like there used to be.

As for literature, I'm not too terribly up-to-date, but I've heard good things about HTML Giant.