Konstnären och kulturnäringarna Artists and the Arts Industries

Yudhishthir Raj Isar | Problems with the Paradigm Yudhishthir Raj Isar | Problems with the Paradigm
From ‘cultural’ to ‘creative’… 15
The term ‘cultural industries’ began to be used in France and
at UNESCO in the late 1970s and then spread to Britain in the
1980s. It concerned the arts and heritage (including cultural
tourism) and the crafts seen within an agenda of economic and
social welfare: the subsidized arts as public goods, with an additional
emphasis on applied arts practices in fields such as urban
regeneration, audience development, community development
and the like. Indeed, it was with such regenerative goals in mind
that the notion began to be used by and for the Greater London
Council in the early 1980s. This early usage was cognizant
of the far earlier and highly critical Frankfurt School’s ‘culture
industries’ theorizing and therefore contained a degree of apprehension,
even disdain, with regard to cultural goods and services
targeting mass society, through forms of industry that could trivialize
art and popular culture alike. This made it necessary for
the public cultural institutions and agencies to defend art from
the negative effects of both the market and the masses, while
at the same time harnessing the former and providing greater
access to the latter.
The ‘creative industries’, a broader category, crystallized
15 See the excellent historical overview in Justin O’Connor’s The Creative
Industries: A Review of the Literature (2007).
later, around the new technologies as well as the ‘knowledge
economy’, yet focused more than its predecessor on the forprofit
or commercial sector – thus embracing advertising, interactive
leisure software and so forth. In the late 1990s, the
British Government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport
foregrounded the notion in its vision and rhetoric, giving it
considerable purchase in the English-speaking world. 16 A great
boost to the ‘creative’ in the term was then provided, and projected
internationally, via Richard Florida’s 2002 bestseller The
Rise of the Creative Class and how it’s transforming work, leisure,
community, & everyday life. Florida’s theses were taken
up enthusiastically by many government officials, politicians
and cultural activists the world over – and despite the obvious
vastness and imprecision of the ‘creative class’ notion he was
using, which stretches across a very broad range of rather different
professions and occupations indeed, including scientists,
engineers, architects, educators, writers, artists, and entertainers.
In other words, all those whose economic function is to
create new ideas, new technology, and new creative content are
now part of the ‘creative class’, even though the actual economic
16 It defined the creative industries as comprising ‘those industries that
have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have the
potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation
of intellectual property.’
and social circumstances of the various professions and groups
so subsumed vary widely. Florida’s argument found such wide
and enthusiastic acceptance because of the positive, proactive
policy stance implied and the way it presented the creative class
as a panacea for urban regeneration and attractivity. Thus city
and regional authorities began to turn as a matter of routine to
place-marketing strategies that rely increasingly on cultural offer,
in other words on the presence of artists, creative people and
the cultural industries as forms of symbolic capital that exert a
strong attraction on international companies and their mobile
workforces. Thus urban ‘quality of life’ has come to be seen as a
key ingredient for ‘city branding’, including international strategies
to attract capital and skills, and cities and regions now take
it increasingly for granted that they must build international
competitive advantage in the cultural products sectors.
Such processes have led to the replacement of public sector
provision and management by a variety of private, voluntary and
semi-public agencies and initiatives – as is clearly the purpose
of the Swedish action plan. New strategies to mobilize local potential
for economic growth now include actors other than those
associated with traditional municipal policies. In these new partnership
processes, bargaining systems have emerged which require
more co-operative structures and styles of policy making.
A clash of values
Returning now to a point referred to earlier, it cannot be taken for
granted that economic value is coterminous with cultural value.
Whether he is a composer, a painter or a playwright, the artist
always has to consider the alternative between producing a work
in his artistic medium that emerges out of the pure pursuit of
his artistic vision and one that meets the demands of the market
more closely which therefore makes it more commercially saleable.
Tensions can arise between the imperatives of the marketplace
and the values inherent in the artistic act – and today these
tensions are exacerbated by globalization. Some of these tensions
were addressed in the form of questions posed in the Introduction
to my edited volume entitled Cultural Expression, Creativity
and Innovation (Anheier and Isar, 2010) and some answers were
provided by the contributors to the volume. What does creativity
mean in a globalizing economic, cultural and artistic landscape?
How does creativity manifest itself empirically, and what are the
economic, sociological and cultural factors that help account for
variations in creativity across genres, fields, regions, and societies
over time? Are transnational milieus and clusters of creativity
emerging? What institutions, organizations and professions as
well as artistic, political or economic interests are behind such
milieus, and how are they interlinked? Is the changing ‘map’ of
creativity related to the various drivers and patterns of globalization?
How does cultural/artistic creativity differ from creativity in
other fields, in particular the sciences, the business world and in
politics? Questions of agency and dominance also arise. How do
certain actors seek to encourage, control or discourage creativity
as a matter of policy? How do such effects occur unintentionally?
Is cultural expression becoming homogenized across the world
as a result of globalization? What countervailing forces, if any,
challenge the hegemonies? Who are the cultural-political entrepreneurs,
institutions and organizations in this respect, and how
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