Konstnären och kulturnäringarna Artists and the Arts Industries

Yudhishthir Raj Isar
Artists and the Creative Industries:
Problems with the Paradigm
Introduction
When any paradigm becomes as dominant in cultural discourse
as the notion of ‘cultural and creative industries’, it needs to be
unpacked, questioned and challenged. This one could be critiqued
from many different perspectives. From that of the individual
artist, for example, one might ask exactly how she might benefit
from having her work framed in ‘creative industries’ terms. 13
Does such a framing represent progress for the artist? And if so,
how should he/she respond in order to benefit as richly as possible
from this progress? Such questions become even more relevant
in the context of the reflection process set in motion by the Swedish
Arts Grants Committee on topics raised in the the Swedish
government’s action plan for the cultural and creative industries.
The questions posed by the Committee are ones that artists and
13 I shall henceforth use the more capacious term – ‘ creative industries’ –
simply because it has become the more greatly favoured catchword of the two.
I myself prefer the earlier term ‘cultural industries’, which is more closely
related to the remit of artistic practice.
their well-wishers are asking in many settings across the world.
In the context of this ambitious undertaking, my brief was to
provide a global perspective on how the artist figures in this economistic
framing. On a worldwide canvas, what is the mutual
benefit? Is it a win-win situation? How does the work of individual
artists contribute to the way the creative industries are
developing? Does the flourishing of the latter improve the lot of
the artist?
Now, before I even set to work on this brief, I could not avoid
challenging the assumption that it is right and proper to accord
such uncontested primacy to the economic calculus as the central
policy issue. Is the discursive hegemony acceptable? As the
discourse has evolved from the ‘cultural industries’ to the ‘creative
industries’ and subsequently to an even broader category,
the ‘creative economy’, all these terms have become the banner
heads of a bandwagon that many ride for fear of being left behind,
without realizing that as cultural actors they are increasingly be-
coming both instrumentalizing and instrumentalized. We know
that the language of business has formatted ways of thinking and
seeing in many different arenas, and that both ‘enterprise’ and
‘entrepreneurship’ have become positively charged keywords. But
should market and ‘management’ criteria be allowed to lead unchallenged?
Who would quarrel with the notion that artists and
their organizations ought to operate efficiently and effectively?
Yet, are the nature, extent and efficiency of their contributions to
the economy the only values that the policy maker should choose
to value? Is this the only arena in which they can deliver ‘value
for money’? Aren’t there other issues that are just as central to
the condition and contribution of the artist? Their place and role
in a healthy democratic polity, for example. So the argument I
am making here, even as I address the brief I was given, is that
we ought to if not change then at least broaden and diversify the
brief itself. There is a real need to shift the terms of the debate
away from the economic alone, and for this reason it behoves us
to determine other terms of engagement.
I shall return to this point of view briefly later, but before doing
so I should like to comment also on the way in which the very
notion of ‘creativity’ has been commandeered by the creative
industries discourse. In the process, creativity has ceased to be
the privileged capacity of art and artists. Instead, the creative
industries discourse has pushed artistic practice to the sidelines
Yudhishthir Raj Isar | Problems with the Paradigm
– despite the continuing veneration of the artist as demiurge
and the mystique attached to singular, individual artistic genius.
Also, the creative industries logic misses out on some of the most
important features of the contemporary dynamics of creativity
and innovation in arts practice as marked by globalization. The
anthropologist Maruška Svašek, for example, foregrounds four
key notions: ‘transit’, ‘transition’, ‘transformation’ and ‘improvisation’
(Svašek, 2010). Transit refers to the trans-local and
trans-national movements of people, objects and images across
space and time that mark our epoch; transition to transit-related
changes of meaning, value, and emotional efficacy of objects and
images; transformation to the dynamic ways in which artists and
other cultural producers relate to the changing social and material
environments they find themselves in. Finally, improvisation
relates to how such actors react to new challenges and demands
by taking on contextually specific roles and identities and by
gaining various degrees of ownership over creative processes and
their outcomes. I would contend that these processes and the
issues they generate are more germane to the condition of the
artist today than the creative industries discourse can ever be.
This was precisely why the third volume in the book series
I co-edit was devoted to the topic Cultural Expression, Creativity
and Innovation and included the reflections of Svašek and
others who think along such lines. The goal was to explore the
interactions between globalization and individual artistic practice,
not just between globalization and the mass-scale, increasingly
digitalized, production, distribution and consumption of
cultural goods and services. In the same volume, we asked the
Indian theatre scholar and arts commentator Rustom Bharucha,
28 29