About the Video
Weather Report is a recurring ScribeMedia.Org series that focuses on what’s happening in the here and now of various industries.
About the Article
“Creative Industries – What are They, And Do We Want Them?” was written by Maria Berek, Executive Director of the Institute for Cultural Enterprise.
The term “Creative Industries” was adopted in 1997 in UK by the new Labor government in an attempt to re-brand government departments responsible for arts and culture. This shift from Culture to Creativity was meant to link aesthetic or artistic creativity and entrepreneurial creativity as an important form of capital in the new knowledge economy. The term was designed to become an umbrella for arts, design, architecture, publishing, broadcasting, film and video, crafts, heritage, but in some definitions also includes advertisement, education, research, and information technology.
Particularly in advanced industrial countries, new development opportunities, such as wealth and employment creation and urban regeneration, are increasingly seen in harnessing creativity. In the past decade, various cultural policies centered on this fragmented but dynamic field were generated with mixed results including municipal-scale rebranding, Olympic size festivals, museum conglomerates, and biennial circuits. However, so far, neither a comprehensive definition of the field nor assessment of the lessons learned has been achieved. The interest in Creative Industries is rising worldwide. So are the controversies surrounding them.
The nucleus of critique of Creative Industries currently rests in Europe. In the atmosphere of diminishing public funding for art and its absorption into governments’ creative industries schemes, the theme of “instrumentalization of the arts” became an anti-neoliberal leitmotif. The outcomes of these discussions range from prophecies of the death of conceptual art to outcries to stop using the term “Creative Industries” and pretend they never existed. European discourse about arts, culture, and creative industries seems to be largely arrested by double fear of governments and markets.
In the US, where arts and culture depend on a voracious market and the philanthropic tradition supported by favorable tax regimes rather than on direct government funding and social welfare, such fears prove to be rather insubstantial, exposing a different set of problems. The US arts market has a track record of easily digesting artifact-less, process-oriented art. The death of conceptual art is unlikely in the near future. However, this very robustness of the art market masks a distressing reality cultural and artistic producers face, especially in the context where information flows within closed circuits of segregated and introvert artistic disciplines. Even in the United States, as many as 40% of people in the industry maintain an additional job and eight out of ten independent creative workers do not have health insurance (apparently, creativity has an irresistible symbolic pull not just for consumers but producers as well), a fact gaining more attention since cross-discipline analysis became available under the rubric of Creative Industries linking problems for artists with a much broader range of creative workers.
It is useful to recognize that most of Creative Industries-related anxiety plays out against a background of affluent social democracies, with institutions that are neither available nor replicable or relevant outside of the European or North American context. The withdrawal of state support is a problem only where there is a habit of relying on it. Risk-taking is a norm when it comes to creative producers, as the nature of cultural products is symbolic and fleeting. Predominantly small and micro organizations and independent individuals, which comprise this sector, have to constantly adapt to shifts in available resources and cross boundaries between commercial and public sectors. Creative industries are characterized by their unique capacity to make the most of ambiguity. The anxiety about placing artists into circumstances where they would need to take risks – including economic risks – turns out to be a luxury and a paradox.
In this context, the rubric of creative industries draws attention to a basic and unavoidable set of questions concerning artists’ livelihoods in poor countries. The world gradually starts to recognize the significance of Creative Industries and Creativity and joins in on efforts to cultivate this as a resource available to all. But support infrastructures for it such as social welfare systems, strong markets, stable non-profit support, education infrastructure, and easily accessible information, are largely lacking. What can be distilled from the controversial Creative Industries experience of value to our shared future?
In the context where Creative Industries are an undeniable policy and economy reality, for better or worse, did this umbrella term unearth anything of importance that lay latent before? Does the Creative Class, that carrier of creativity and its benefits and perils and a possible beacon of gentrification, exist? Or, rather does it have a reason to exist?
Although there is no single answer to this question, it seems clear that the term has erased some boundaries and illuminated some issues. It uncovered the true affinity between different artistic disciplines, art and design, traditional and contemporary cultural forms, and commercial and non-profit endeavors.
It has a potential to allow people engaged in them to become a part of larger social strata and not think of themselves as an isolated social luxury but a public good and a productive force, possessing social, political, and economic impact.
Just as the economic perspective highlighted not only the market share of the production sector but also the common problems and conditions its workers are facing such as precarious labor arrangements, temporary, project-based, and double employment, a strong self-identity/vision often disengaged from an actual employment, etc. These new forms of labor organization might and indeed are often conceived as flexible and therefore desirable, however, they also ensure decreased responsibility of employers for the employees’ well being. The impact Creative Industries have on our lives is hard to trace and pin down. In this motion blur, what alternative arrangements can we sustain?
