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The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Critical History - Coggle Diagram
The Cultural and Creative Industries: A Critical History
Talking about cultural and/or creative industries tend to take two forms.
One identifies a set of institutions and practices (a ‘sector’ or an ‘industry’) that demands our attention in some way, often against a background of their previously marginal position.
And the secondone takes a more ‘constructivist’ perspective, highlighting an active process whereby an object is created or assembled by or through policy discourse(s).
These two approaches are not mutually exclusive; they represent different narratives or rhetorical tropes that have been used in different situations.
Forty years ago puts us in the early 1970s, when ‘the cultural industries’ began to emerge as an object of academic and policy concern
Given the subsequent academic focus on frictions between culture and economics we need to emphasize that, at this time, it was the issue of culture and politics that was primary.
Economics was registered mostly in terms of social inequality or class which gave differential access to the media - a problem for liberal pluralist theories and for social democratic notions of the ‘public sphere´.
It was the political consequences of ‘the culture industry’ that had been most prominent since its inception in a post-war USA
For them the term represented the final reduction of the realm of culture to the logic of monopoly capitalism, resulting in the extension of the control of the worker to the sphere of everyday life.
And also, the worker was also programmed during the leisure hours by ‘conditioned response’ entertainment that simply relaxed them.
The consumption of commercial culture was growing at extraordinary rates across all social levels.
A positive charge was now attached to the notion of ‘industry’ as a collective project; individual artistic practice had to be set within a wide range of professional, managerial and commercial services.
The industry was also about markets and profits, which raised difficult issues for cultural policy makers.
The embrace of industry and technology was necessarily accompanied by a revalorization of the market. It was clearly not just ‘collective’ production and technological reproduction/ distribution that counted here but its organization outside state subsidy and control, that is, in the market.
Interventions within the cultural industries requires information on the structure and dynamics of the sector – such is now routinely collected by governments, international agencies, policy consultants and media/cultural economists.
The cultural industries operated very differently from the models of mainstream business theory and practice.
It has been common to present the rise of the cultural and/or creative industries within the policy field in terms of the increasing emphasis on economic arguments for culture. This is a serious oversimplification.
It overstates the continuities between any current economic emphases and the emergence of the cultural industries agenda in very different circumstances. And it ignores the transformative, oppositional and indeed utopian dimensions of some of its early aspirations.
The cultural industry's agenda gained its real traction. In the 1980s we can see how the marginal urban cultures of cultural production and consumption came to be recognized by city governments and real estate developers as sources of value.
The use of ‘creativity is a case in point. The change from ‘cultural’ to ‘creative’ has been widely discussed. For some it was a recognition of the centrality of culture, simply written under the sign of ‘creativity; the terminological change was pragmatic and not central to the real ‘out there which is designated. For others it was nonsensical: did it describe an input or an output; what was not creative; how was science, technology, or business creativity different from that of ‘culture’; was there a difference between creative and cultural industries.
Creativity’ takes a specific kind of aesthetic, autonomous art and turns it into a universal human attribute.
The GLC’s cultural industries strategy was based on a recognition that large corporations controlled distribution and thus access to market, hence their power over the independent local cultural producers.
In one part of the reading, it says that that the self-contained, separate ‘autonomous’ work of art is needed now to take its place in a wider social context, in ‘everyday life.
The move from ‘art’ to ‘culture’ might thus be seen as a widening of an elitist, autonomous art to embrace the messy, grounded realities of ‘ordinary culture’; but it should be clear that this widening was also a migration.
The new cultural economy involved new kinds and scales of commodification. But this was not the reduction of cultural use value to the universal equivalence of exchange. This new economy was built on recognition of cultural ‘use value’ and the skills and processes necessary to organize this.
. The creative industries moment which began in 1997 combined many different and contradictory cultural agendas around an urgent call to recognize a new ‘out there’ – one that represented the future, change, renewal.
In developed countries at least the ‘artistic critique of capitalism’ has now become domesticated, a resource for economists, developers and high minded idealists alike.
Globalization is no longer the sole province of the de-regulators and off-shore outsourcing but also belongs to the post-national ‘multitude’ .
New kinds of cultural practice across the globe, concerned to create new spaces of possibilities and collaboration, can be seen as part of work to invent new kinds of social collectivities. They suggest a movement beyond autonomous aesthetic culture to a recognition of the social and ethical bonds within which this culture is produced.
