Upload
hortense-berry
View
217
Download
1
Tags:
Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
The 2014 Berlin Research Symposium on Culture and Creative Industries
23rd October 2014
Justin O’Connor, Monash University
Is the idea of creativity the most important concept of the 21st century? Are the jobs of the future to be found in the cultural and creative
sector?
DCMS 1998
“those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property”
Creative Industries
• Rebadging of ‘cultural industries’ by the UK Government for tactical purposes (more money for culture).
• Does not mention culture but parasitical on artistic and cultural sense of the word.
• Linked this to the new world of digital start-ups and information economy.
Creative Industries
Claims to establish links between ‘culture’ and ‘economy’
This done since 1970s in Europe/ North America:
(political economy of communications; urban and regional economic geography; local culture-led development coalitions).
Creative Industries
Also in developing world/ Global South by UNESCO’s ‘Culture and Development’ programme
Creative Industries
refuses to deal with any substantive issues around culture, reducing culture to an input – creativity – into an innovation system defined in exclusively economic terms.
What is distinctive about the ‘creative’ rather than ‘cultural’ industries?
• Intellectual property?
• Commercial?
• Application to ‘functional’ or ‘utilitarian’ products and services?
What distinguishes creative industries from the rest of industry?
• What is not creative?
• What does not generate IP?
• High level of cognitive skills?
Definition of the Creative industries
A statistical and conceptual mess
People only use it because everybody else does
Vicious circle
‘ those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property ’
(Department of Culture, Media and Sports, 1998)
ICT and Cultural Industries
• Are coders creative?
• Have ICT/ digital transformed the cultural industries?
• Does that mean ICT workers are part of the cultural industries?
ICT and Cultural Industries • CIs rely on technologies:
• Guttenberg, Edison etc. and ‘mechanical reproduction’
• Communications and convergence: Code, fibre- optic, satellites, telephony, internet…..
These also important manufacturing sectors which can be included in ‘depth’ models of CIs
ICT and Cultural Industries
• But they have transformed other sectors
• Medicine and health services, education, business organisations – finance!
ICT and Cultural Industries
• In 2008 the DCMS dropped ICT
• NESTA complained – precisely because it cut out 40% of employment.
• When you read of how big the creative sector is: Caveat Emptor!
Advertising, Marketing, PR
• Been linked to Arts and publishing since 18th century.
• Crucial as to how they survive• Crucial to our understanding of how they work• Increased in size and importance (rise of
consumer economies; erosion of public sector broadcasting;)
• Why are these ‘creative’ and not ‘cultural’?
Design
• Wide catch-all term: graphic, communication, fashion, interior, furnishing, crafts, architecture
• These all linked to cultural debates – how modern industrial systems create a new expressive and functional world for mass democratic society. (Bauhaus!)
Design as Planning • Now also ‘design-thinking’ – planning and re-
imagining of a whole range of systems
• Social services, information, transportation, educational services, smart cities, ecological management etc.
• These are huge issues and to which we hope the imaginative resources involved in ‘creativity’ will be applied in some way.
Design as Creative Industry
• What is served by calling this a ‘creative industry’?
• Does a ‘creative input’ define the kind of issues it addressed and the processes involved in their solution?
Design as a creative industry
• When part of the creative industry ‘design’ becomes narrowed to the kind of aesthetic appeal “designers” add to functional goods.
• This one aspect allows link to the wider world of advanced manufacture, user-interfaces, smart cities etc. – they are related but is it conceptual and practical confusion to lump them into one ‘creative’ sector.
Not industries but occupations!
• Creatives employed outside the ‘creative industries’.
• Adds 40% to employment
• Financial services?
Creativity as Innovation Machine
Precise mechanism whereby the creativity of the creative sector is transferred to the wider economy.
Presence of creatives proxy for levels of innovation.
Creative occupations the motor of the innovation machine
NESTA
But this does not tell us about creativity or innovation – it tells us how many marketers and graphic designers, ICT systems planners there are in manufacturing, or finance, or extraction etc.
NESTA: Creative Workers
“ a role within the creative process that brings cognitive skills to bear about differentiation to yield either novel or significantly enhanced products whose final form is not fully specified in advance”.
Creative Intensity
• Can define any situated skilled worker in education, finance, science, the legal professions etc.
• Industries not ‘creative’ because of input – could be the most regressive, unimaginative, destructive industries or practices.
• “Lipstick on the pig”
Creative Intensity
Reduction of creativity to the most basic idea of innovation as commercial growth
– only one part of rethinking where we are going in the 21st century – and how…
Creativity and Culture
Creativity does not exclusively define culture
ritual, identity, tradition, meaning, celebration, social bonding etc.
Creativity and Culture
• Creativity as innovation machine takes one aspect of Euro-American modernity’s ‘aesthetic’ art - avant-garde
• and ties it to Schumpeterian notions of creative destruction and ‘disruptive innovation’ - part of the knowledge economy discourse.
Culture as Service Sector
With Education and Health - Culture is a key public sector of last two centuries.
Culture as Service Sector
• Provides Jobs• Commercial• Big corporate players• Multiple kinds of state investment• New Technologies• Globalisation• Huge manufacturing links
Cultural as a Service Sector
• Economies set within wider goals
• These wider goals a basis of policy judgements
• What is it we require of the cultural sector?
• Discourse of ‘creative industries’ prevents these kind of judgements being made. Only economic performativity is allowed.
Two Challenges
How do how do we get back to a discussion of the cultural sector or cultural economy:
one that allows the full play of cultural values – of why we need and value culture – within the cultural economic system and its links to other sectors.
Culture and Economy
• Culture traditionally opposed to economy.
• Few would hold to this strictly now.
• But: what grounds for their mutual accommodation?
- or is it “reconciliation under duress” (Adorno)
What kind of economy?
Second problem:
How do we want to organise the cultural economy (and indeed the rest of it)?
Cultural EconomiesBenign economies:
High level of skills and education;Network, trust and communication intensive;Strong role for SMEs;Low barriers to entry;Beneficial externalities for places; Resources of the human renewable;
- All favour more equal forms of growth.
Cultural EconomiesBut it can also be the opposite:
•Exploitation and precarious labour;•monopolies and concentration:•Exclusionary labour practices (class, gender, race)•High levels of geographical concentration (London)•Globally unequal•Narrow focus on high value consumption groups•Narrow policy focus on high-growth, high value companies.