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December 26, 2008
The Arts Council of England runs a Creative Partnerships program which includes literature reviews on a variety of issues. It is a creative learning programme, designed to develop the skills of young people across England, raising their aspirations and equipping them for their futures. Long-term relationships between creative professionals and schools lie at the heart of the Creative Partnerships process.
One of these literature reviews is by Justin O'Connor on the Creative and Cultural Industries. He says that in 1997 when New Labour were elected in the UK the cultural industries were renamed as ‘creative industries’ and a ‘creative industries task force’ was set up involving many big names from the film, music, fashion and games sectors. After long neglect the creative industries were now also linked to national cultural and economic policy.
The cultural industries, previously ignored or lumped with ‘the Arts’, were to become central to a new contemporary image for Britain and high profile exemplars of the creativity and innovation that were to remake Britain for the 21st century...This was not simply a re-assertion of social justice against the hard headed economics of Thatcherism, something popular culture articulated throughout the 1980s to little political effect...New Labour built on currents of oppositional popular culture articulated in the form of the emergent discourse around cultural industries, creativity and socially responsible entrepreneurialism.
This new discourse was about a picture of a new economic order; a postmodern
one centred on more fluid patterns of work and a life course demanding more individual responsibility in exchange for autonomy, an economy based not on cut throat competition but on the more open collaborations of projects and networks, rewards for individual creativity and innovation away from the fixed hierarchies of class and corporation.
The sort of economic and cultural conjunction made in the 1980s in France happened – if in different ways and through different paths – in Britain in the 1990s The identification of the creative industries with a ‘new economy’ driven by ‘digital’ technologies and closely related to the ‘information’ or ‘knowledge’ economy.
This conjunction hasn't really happened in Australia, where the policy emphasis has been on manufacturing and resources.The creative industries/information economy bit is a small business strategy by state governments. What we do have in Australia is research at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) which gives the ‘creative
industries’ a theoretical legitimacy.The central tradition is a cultural policy of using art to civilise the working classes. That was certainly one rational for the ABC.
According to O'Connor, the QUT group (eg., Cunningham, Hartley) argued that:
the deregulation of state controlled media, the proliferating platforms and distribution channels (mobile phones, internet, satellite etc.), the extension of creative content application to education, health and information services, and the provision of ‘experiences’ generally – all this meant that cultural policy could no longer even dream of control...these new applications and outlets indicated a market-driven responsiveness to the new citizen consumer of the affluent society. The rise of User Generated Content (UGC), the ‘long tail’ providing extensive consumer choice, and the more active organisation of consumers through the internet has further altered the cultural landscape. The market has brought the exact opposite of cultural catastrophe, and they are much more sanguine than Garnham about the ability of consumers to circumvent the control of distribution by the big companies; as evidenced by the
impact of digital downloads on the business models of the biggest global corporations.
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