Konstnären och kulturnäringarna Artists and the Arts Industries

Ingrid Elam | An industry like no other Ingrid Elam | An industry like no other
is high time to formulate a policy for this new area of enterprise
that takes into account the mutual dependency which exists between
the artistic and creative industries and other economic
and social sectors.
Within the research community, and also at the regional policy
level, interest in cultural and creative industries has grown dramatically
in recent years. A steady stream of anthologies and
reports are being published, individual cultural industries such
as art halls and concert halls are being studied by economists and
sociologists, and action plans are being drawn up at regional and
municipal level. 8
The place and role of the artist in cultural industries, however,
is virtually unknown, as noted for instance by Raj Isar when
we asked him to provide an international perspective on the subject.
It is the industry itself, not the artist, that has interested
researchers, and the industry ignores the complexity inherent in
artistic creativity; it has adopted an increasingly economic perspective
and has focused on digitally mediated art. Isar perceives
a growing value conflict between the artist’s vision and market
demand, and he questions whether technological advance in fact
benefits artistic creativity.
Who is an artist? There are many definitions, the simplest
among them, perhaps, being whoever calls him/herself an artist.
Another is those who have acquired the requisite training,
while a third is someone who mainly operates in the arts sector.
When the Arts Grants Committee published a survey of artists’
8 The list of research about the cultural industries is extensive. The most important
names include David Throsby (2010) and Justin O´ Connor (2009).
income a year or two ago, 9 anyone who belonged to an artists’
organisation or who had applied for a grant from the Arts Grants
Committee at some time or other was counted as an artist. The
number of artists in Sweden is hard to pinpoint, but various
studies have arrived at roughly the same figure, 30 000. This
may be compared to the estimated number of people working
in the cultural and creative industries 10 – 120 000 – according
to a study by the Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis.
This would mean that three out of four people in the cultural
industries are not artists.
More important than counting heads is to examine how artists
actually support themselves. Concern has been voiced in the
culture policy debate that there may be too few artists capable
of exploiting the work opportunities offered by the market. The
latest study from the Arts Grants Committee, 11 however, shows
that artists are self-employed to a far greater extent than the
population as a whole. They also support themselves to a greater
extent than might be expected on their own artistic work,
rather than on bread-and-butter jobs outside the artistic sector.
In other words, they are already entrepreneurs, but they prefer
not to call themselves businesspeople. They produce meaning
and artistic value, not primarily economic added value.
So artists are better placed than others to survive in an
uncertain, changing world, but they may need to learn what
mindsets prevail out there. Today, there are more arts training
9 Konstnärsnämnden (The Swedish Arts Grants Committee) 2009: 11.
10 The Swedish Agency for Growth Policy Analysis 2009:06, p 7 ff.
11 Konstnärsnämnden 2011.
programmes than ever before, and those who enrol need to know
something about the labour market that awaits them – seldom
with open arms. The market has definitions and value concepts
that differ from those of the artist, but the boundaries are now
more fluid. The gap between the artist and the business world
used to be a very substantial one in Kockums’ day; young artists
now have to find their way around a landscape in which some
advertisements could be mistaken for art and in which storytelling
has become an important tool in many types of business
activity. But while the idioms may be new, the phenomenon is
old, as we have noted – the dividing line between art and nonart
has always been open to challenge and has to be re-drawn by
each new generation.
It is equally important to ask what the business community
needs to know about artistic activity and what other industries
can learn from a cultural entrepreneurship that values content
above money, i.e. one that produces goods regardless of their exchange
value, as the European Commission Green Paper on the
cultural sector puts it. Ylva Gislén goes a step further in her
contribution by spotlighting the distinction between different
types of work already noted by the thinkers of Antiquity. They
had different words for subsistence work and work that involved
acting and participating in the world. Artists’ work specifically
involves participating in the world and creating meaning, but
today the perception of work as a means of support has become
established in the artistic sphere as well, giving rise to the requirement
that art should provide the artist with a living. This
requirement, Gislén argues, is deeply implicit in today’s arts
training programmes.
Nor is innovation necessarily a positive concept in artistic
contexts; it must be filled with content and subjected to critical
scrutiny. How, for instance, has the social innovation Facebook
enriched the public discourse, if at all? Kate Oakley questions
our present tendency to uncritically acclaim all innovation, as
if there were no such thing as bad news. Artists are far more
likely to talk about change than innovation, and Oakley believes
we have too much faith in the ability of art to drive innovation.
Meanwhile, we are sometimes blind to innovation’s actual need
of art, to how much it needs art’s creativity and familiarity with
unpredictable markets.
The researchers who have contributed to this anthology are
mostly pessimistic about the place and prospects of the artist in
today’s cultural and creative industries. This pessimism is probably
a result of acquired knowledge and proven experience. Quite
simply, the researchers know a great deal about developments
in recent years and can adopt an historical perspective. Europe
is further down the line than Sweden, and much has happened
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