International Journal of Cultural Policy
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The disappearing arts: creativity and innovation after the creative industries Kate Oakley To cite this article: Kate Oakley (2009) The disappearing arts: creativity and innovation after the creative industries, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15:4, 403-413, DOI: 10.1080/10286630902856721 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10286630902856721
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International Journal of Cultural Policy Vol. 15, No. 4, November 2009, 403–413
The disappearing arts: creativity and innovation after the creative industries Kate Oakley* City University, London, UK International 10.1080/10286630902856721 GCUL_A_385844.sgm 1028-6632 Original Taylor 402009 15 Professor
[email protected] 000002009 and & Article Francis KateOakley (print)/1477-2833 Francis JournalLtd of Cultural (online) Policy
Since the birth of the ‘creative industries’ a decade ago, there has been a series of attempts to link the cultural sectors with innovation policy and to downplay the connection between them and traditional arts or cultural policy. The theory appears to be that innovation is where the big money is, and that the cultural sectors can only benefit by being rescued from the ‘ghetto’ of arts funding. This paper seeks to query this notion and to draw attention to some of the problems that have resulted and may result from it. Keywords: creativity; innovation; creative industries
1. Introduction Since the birth of creative industries as a discourse and a policy construct in the late 1990s, there has been a series of increasingly enthusiastic attempts to link the cultural sectors with innovation policy (Cox 2005, Cunningham 2006, NESTA 2006), and to downplay the connection between them and traditional arts or cultural policy. The theory appears to be that innovation is where the big money is, and that the cultural sectors can only benefit by being rescued from the ‘ghetto’ of arts funding. As Stuart Cunningham argues, The price to be paid for a creative economy is that the case for arts and culture will become less about their special or exceptional difference, and become diffused into the need for creativity across the economy and society. (2006, p. 4)
In this formulation, the development of the creative industries discourse (as opposed to the arts, or cultural industries) was the first to ‘break free’ (Hartley 2005) from traditional cultural policy concerns, ranging from market failure to issues of identity politics (Potts et al. 2008). Thus liberated, the new ‘non-political’ creative industries cease to be industrial sectors producing cultural products or services, let alone the refuge of the uncommodifiable, and become ‘markets for novelty’ conveying and organising the production and dissemination of new ideas across the economy. This paper seeks to interrogate and query this notion and to draw attention to some of the problems that have resulted, and may result from it in the future. The shift in terminology from ‘cultural’ to ‘creative’ and from ‘creativity’ to ‘innovation’ captures the drift of this discourse and, I would argue, reflects a changing set of priorities. The paper considers, somewhat unusually for a paper on the ‘cultural and creative industries’ these days, the effects of this shift on arts policy, and in particular the renewed debate about excellence and *Email:
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innovation in the arts that followed the publication of the McMaster Review (McMaster 2008). The context of the paper is the UK, and while other places have embraced the notion of creative industries, it does not attempt to speculate on whether similar trajectories are being followed elsewhere in terms of innovation or arts policy. 2. Culture to creative industries In order to speculate on the future of cultural policy under an innovation regime, we have to, of necessity, have some history. The DCMS’ delineation of 13 ‘creative industry’ sectors back in the late 1990s (DCMS 1998) has been globally exported (Cunningham 2002) with a rapidity and effectiveness that many UK-based creative industry firms would envy. The shift from cultural industries to creative industries has been well examined elsewhere, not least in the last special issue of IJCP (Garnham 2005) so I do not intend to dwell on it too much here, other than to make the point that while the ‘creative industries’ moment undoubtedly represented a shift in the role that culture was expected to play, and a ramping up of the focus on their potential for economic growth; there were also continuities between cultural industries policy and creative industries policy, continuities that have been broken with the birth of the creativity and innovation discourse. The rebranded creative industries extended the definition of the cultural sectors beyond the traditional arts and media and into the creative services (NESTA 2006), where the UK was perceived to have some competitive advantages, namely, design, architecture and advertising. But actual public interventions did not diverge as far from the cultural industries paradigm as a simple analysis of the rhetoric would suggest. Policy retained a concern with local economic development, not least because most of the policy development and support was done by local authorities and regional development agencies (RDAs), and with job creation (Evans and Shaw 2004, Oakley 2009). In particular, public funding for dedicated workspaces, for specialised advice networks and for skills training and education initiatives, supported interventions that were not so different from those which could have been pursued under a cultural industries framework. And the concern of many cultural industries advocates with access for marginalised groups – ethnic minorities and women in particular – still found itself reflected in specific interventions, though the ability of those interventions to counter wider market and social forces was limited, to say the least (Oakley 2006). Most importantly, for the argument of this paper, the concern of creative industries policy was, initially at least, to support the development of particular industrial sectors (Garnham 2005), primarily concerned with producing cultural products and services. 3. The discourse of creativity The impact of the work of Richard Florida (2002) on local economic development more generally and policies around the creative industries specifically, has been analysed extensively elsewhere (Markusen 2005, Nathan 2005, Peck 2005, Lloyd 2006, Oakley 2009) and there is no need to rehearse all the arguments here. But it does represent an important step in the decoupling of the use of the term ‘creativity’ from specifically cultural activities. Florida’s adoption of the term ‘creative’, for his class of knowledge workers, and professionals, which as Garnham (2005) points out, derives from Daniel Bell (1973), enabled his work to become entangled with existing debates about ‘creative industries’, ‘creative cities’ and the ‘creative economy’, and thus to gain wider currency, despite the fact that his focus is largely on high technology growth, rather than the cultural or creative industries (Pratt 2008).
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Although artists, writers, musicians and so on are included in Florida’s ‘core’ creative class, the primary function of cultural activities is as amenities, part of the urban infrastructure that serves to attract a mobile, professional labour force and provides an outlet for their, highly focused and purposeful, leisure time (Banks 2008). Creativity in Florida’s construct is the production of new ideas, a force which is ‘powering the great ongoing changes of our time’ (2002, p. 21), and comes suitably loaded with expectations; economic, moral and political. As Pope has pointed out (Pope 2005), in its form as an abstract noun, the term ‘creativity’ did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1933 and was not in widespread use until the 1940s and 1950s. Having emerged in educational and psychological circles, in the 1920s, Pope argues that it is a specifically modern response to rapid social and technological change. He quotes one of the pioneers of creativity research, J.P. Guilford, as claiming that the upsurge in interest in creativity, was the result of specifically modern dilemmas, including space travel, global communications and the population explosion. As Pope comments, it is not clear whether, in this conception, creativity is the force driving these changes, or what is needed to help people readjust to them, and certainly this dual role has continued in more contemporary discourse, including Florida’s work. In the UK, the influential UK National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) report, ‘All Our Futures’ (Robinson 1999), argued that the reasons for fostering a ‘creative’ curriculum in schools, were that it enabled young people to be able to participate in global markets, feed the fast-growing creative industries and adapt to technological and social change. It is clear from this description that we are a long way from creativity as a synonym for culture, or even from the idea that creativity is a particular quality associated with the arts or with those of us with artistic talent. If, as Craft (2001) has argued, there have been two waves of conceptualising creativity: firstly a Romantic notion of personal creativity, and secondly a strong emphasis on social systems, we are by now firmly in the latter camp. The NACCCE notion of creativity, one that has become widespread internationally, since its publication (Schlesinger 2007), is that creativity is essentially ‘democratic’, in that everyone can learn it; is a co-operative activity and best learned via collective activity; and it is essentially pro-social, in that it encourages communication and feelings of empathy. Such a notion of creativity clearly has widespread appeal to those in the community arts and education worlds who see more ‘elitist’ notions of creativity, which focus on individual talent, as setting up barriers to personal development. But as Banaji et al. (2006) argue, there are dangers in this broad but bland definition of creativity. Most obviously there is a danger that by ‘mainstreaming’ creativity in this way, and stressing its pro-social elements, we risk excluding creative expression that is marginal, radical, counter-cultural or in some way deemed to be anti-social. Creativity no longer undermines or challenges social norms, now it is the key to social cohesion; dynamic enough to bring us lots of new products in the marketplace, but not so dynamic that it has much to say about the operation of markets themselves. Indeed, we now have a term that is designed not only to cover both economic growth and social good; but to suggest that there is never any conflict between them. Secondly, the ‘problem solving’ idea of creativity, the notion that it is ‘the application of knowledge and skills in new ways to achieve a valued goal’ (Seltzer and Bentley 1999, p. 10), stresses the instrumental utility of creativity, while diminishing notions of fantasy, play or uselessness, which have a long history in discussions of artistic creativity, and which are often stubbornly clung to by cultural practitioners themselves (Oakley et al. 2008).
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Crucially, it also fails to highlight what might be the distinctive features of creativity as practised in the arts. However, in practice, particularly for policy-makers in economic development and education, this decoupling of creativity from culture, is partial rather than total, with resulting confusion about the relationship between culture, creativity and innovation (Garnham 2005, Pratt and Jeffcut, 2009). 4. Creativity becomes innovation An example of this confusion can be seen in the Cox Review of Creativity in British Business (Cox 2005). As Schlesinger argues, Cox is ‘unusually clear’ in its attempt to define the terminology, defining creativity as the generation of new ideas, and innovation as the successful exploitation of those ideas (2007). But in arguing that design is what links these two and in concentrating its recommendations on improving the take up of design, particularly in manufacturing industry, the Cox Review does not depart as far from aesthetic considerations as it seems to want to. Nor is Cox’s desire to use a broad notion of creativity to argue for an increase in design training and education, a new approach. As Garnham points out, it was a feature of 1980s policy to see manufacturing failures as essentially design failures (2005) and the intervening years have seen at best mixed results in addressing this, despite the rather over-heated claims for the importance of design as an input into the wider economy (Design Council 2004). What was less clear was what, if any, was the relationship envisaged by Cox between creativity as the generation of new ideas in general, and the particular performance of the UK’s ‘creative industries’. While a number of research projects are underway to try and capture spillovers or model the relationship between culture and creativity (Andari et al. 2007, Stoneman 2007, Bakhshi et al. 2008, Higgs et al. 2008), policy-makers are keen to assert this relationship, even where no clear idea of what it is, exists. A Department of Trade report (DTI 2005) accompanying the Cox Review, claimed that the creative industries can serve as ‘proxy’ for creativity in the economy in general; but it is unclear within this argument, how the economic performance of advertising or the television industry, can act as a proxy for the ‘generation of new ideas’ in the pharmaceutical industry, or in financial services. Another attempt to model the relationship of the creative and cultural sectors to the rest of the economy (Andari et al. 2007) formed part of the UK Department of Culture’s ‘Creative Economy’ review. It was based on Throsby’s ‘concentric circle’ model of the cultural sectors (Throsby 2001), which sees the creative arts as the source and generator of ideas that are later picked up by other cultural industries such as the media industries (film, TV and radio). But importantly, and somewhat stretching Throsby’s argument, it extends this influence of ‘expressive value’ beyond the cultural and creative industries and firmly into those areas which produce non-cultural outputs, such as the Dyson vacuum cleaner, or, the ‘retailainment’ of Virgin Atlantic flights (Andari et al. 2007) This is a variant of the ‘culturisation’ thesis, that cultural objects themselves proliferate in a variety of forms, ‘as information, as communications, as branded products, as media products, as transport and leisure services, cultural entities are no longer the exception: they are the rule’ (Lash and Lury 2007, p. 4), and are therefore no longer primarily symbolic. But if Lash and Lury are keen to take, in part at least, a critical look at how culture, as they argue, has moved from symbol to brand, and how cultural value has become enmeshed with use and exchange value; innovation enthusiasts see the process as somewhat less problematic. If culture can be ‘thingified’, as Lash and Lury argue that it can (p. 4); innovation enthusiasts are simply keen to thingify it as speedily and efficiently as possible.
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However, in its enthusiasm to demonstrate that this process is happening, much of this literature tends to assert rather than provide evidence for the link between culture, creativity and innovation. Andari et al. (2007) argue that, The creative industries can be conceived as a pioneer sector of the economy, trailblazing approaches, and fostering an attitude towards creativity and innovation from which the rest of the economy and society can benefit. This critically depends on whether ‘effective’ transmission mechanisms are in place. (p. 14)
This is a little clearer than simply suggesting that the creative industries are a proxy for wider ‘creativity’, but the nature of the transmission mechanisms, let alone whether they are effective or not, is not made apparent. It seems entirely plausible that the creative arts are a source of ideas, stories and images that are reproduced in other forms in other parts of the economy; but the mechanisms by which this happens remain frustratingly elusive. Recent attempts to look at input-output tables (Bakhshi et al. 2008) find weak evidence that firms with supply chain links to firms in the creative industries are more innovative than those without them, but there is no evidence about what takes place in these engagements, and hence no clues as to causality. It may simply be that more innovative firms buy more creative industry inputs, namely design, branding or advertising. Other work (Howkins 2001, Florida 2002) claims that ‘human capital’ is the mechanism of transmission, in essence that there are more people working in creative occupations in the wider economy than in the cultural sectors (Higgs et al. 2008). But this calculation depends on accepting the notion that town planners, software professionals and library assistants are ‘creative workers’, which stretches the definition way beyond any reasonably cultural occupation and therefore turns into a slightly circular argument. On what basis are these ‘creative occupations’, creative? Is it because many of them are cultural occupations such as dancers, actors or photographers? In which case why include town planning, which is not a cultural activity? And if creative simply means ‘works with new ideas’ or some such, why include musicians, but not research chemists? In other words, why sometimes use cultural notions of creativity and at other times not? This confusion poses a problem for those who would argue that the primary importance of cultural activities is their effect on the wider economy (Cunningham 2006, Potts et al. 2008) and therefore now need to provide evidence for these wider economic effects of cultural activities; but it poses a greater problem for cultural policy-makers and advocates, who, having appropriated the term ‘creativity’, must now show how cultural creativity is different from other kinds of creativity, and the basis for any claims of prominence in the debate. 5. The price of a creative economy One price to be paid for a creative economy, therefore, is the downgrading of efforts to develop the cultural and creative industry sectors themselves, however half-hearted this attempt has sometimes appeared (Hesmondhalgh and Pratt 2005), in favour of seeing them primarily as an input into other economic activities. As Pratt and Jeffcut argue (2009) For many policy makers it is this innovation or creativity ‘spill-over’, and not the intrinsic or substantive economic and cultural value, that is the prize to be gained from the promotion of the cultural economy. Such a view rests on the assumption that culture and entertainment are necessarily inferior and dependent upon the ‘real economy’.
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The current recession may demonstrate how far and in what ways, culture and entertainment depend on the ‘real’ economy, and one could hypothesise that business-to-business creative sectors such as advertising or design, much favoured by innovation enthusiasts, may actually suffer more than business-to-consumer cultural products and services, such as films or music. If so, we may see a switch back to arguments about the viability of cultural products and services as themselves, not as inputs. But in some cases, it will have come too late. Perhaps the best example of an organisation that has moved in concert with the times is NESTA, set up with lottery money in the wake of the 1997 election and initially committed to funding individuals in the sciences, arts and technology, who have traditionally struggled in the UK, where funding tends to go to firms and institutions. Poets such as Carol Ann Duffy and Tom Paulin, theatre directors Katie Mitchell and James MacDonald and the novelist W.G. Sebald were among recipients of NESTA awards in the early years. More recently the organisation has switched focus entirely and under the strapline, ‘making innovation flourish’, now ‘informs and shapes innovation policy’, with its arts stand of work, other than in connection to innovation, generally regarded as moribund. Economic development agencies that previously backed creative industry interventions are now reducing this support. The London Development Agency has closed its ‘Creative Industry’ team, in favour of generalised ‘Business Development’, and ‘Skills’ teams, and ended the funding for many of the interventions it supported as part of its ‘Creative London’ initiative (see http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/creativeindustries.jsp), a practice that may be repeated across the UK, especially as EU structural funding diminishes. And at the same time, the UK’s creative industries seem to have been undergoing something of a decline. From measuring 8% of Gross Value Added (GVA) in 2003 (DCMS 2005), the latest estimates put the figure at 6.4% (DCMS 2009). While allowing for changes in methodology in what is notoriously unreliable statistical area, this still suggests diminished competitiveness on the part of these industries, an issue which one might have thought would be of concern to policy-makers. But the creativity bandwagon appears to have moved from a focus on the creative industries, to one on ‘creativity’, leaving the culture and creative industries, somewhat sidelined. 6. The policy echo chamber – excellence, risk and innovation in the arts As Pratt and Jeffcut (2009) argue one of the problems associated with the creative industries label, let alone the creative economy, was that it glossed over real differences between the constituent parts of the creative industries, with their different business models, markets and relationship to public funding. Even if we accept that an innovation discourse offers something to design or advertising, the effect on the arts, far from rescuing them from the ghetto of shrinking public funds, is to consign them to a residual role as heritage, social amelioration or enablement (Cunningham et al. 2008). If the cultural industries and even the creative industries, offered an enhanced role for the arts within a growing economic sector, innovation discourse puts them firmly back in their place. In an attempt to combat this extreme instrumentalism, either of a social or an economic bent, the Arts Council of England (ACE) has been engaged in recasting a new set of arguments and justifications, based around notions like ‘public value’, public consultation and the re-birth of peer review (Keaney et al. 2007, McMaster 2008). In an example of the way the policy echo chamber works, innovation has also been adopted as a buzzword by the Arts Council, albeit in reference to artistic innovation, rather than economic innovation in general. In the same way that associating the cultural sectors with creativity was seen as bringing them new ‘friends’, but ended up reducing them to an
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input, innovation looks set to be even more problematic (Cunningham 2006, Pratt and Jeffcut, 2009). In an almost perfect piece of public policy prose, Brian McMaster in his review of ACE funding and decision-making states, It has been argued that culture does not always need to innovate to be excellent, but if it is to be truly relevant to our society, it absolutely must. Innovation is understood to be the introduction of something new, where old methods and systems are insufficient. Innovation is therefore an integral part of the search for excellence, and should be encouraged if we are to encourage excellence. (2008, p. 10)
Innovation is thus related to excellence, which is related to relevance, all of which are vital in ways that are continually stated, but never entirely made clear (McMaster 2008). However, although McMaster’s concern is with artistic innovation, his echoes of innovation enthusiast language runs the risk of over-stating the importance of novelty in discussion of what is valuable about the arts; not to mention getting into rather deep waters about what counts as artistic innovation. 7. Are artists innovators? Artists may seem like natural innovators: they work in highly uncertain, inherently risky markets where originality is prized and ‘imitation’ often disparaged. But discussions of cultural production are rarely that simple. As Becker (1982) argued, Every art work creates a world in some respects unique, a combination of vast amounts of conventional materials with some that are innovative. Without the first, it becomes unintelligible; without the second it becomes boring and featureless … (p. 63)
This ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ is hardly unique to the arts (Edgerton 2006), but the degree to which contemporary production does not substitute for historical works in the arts is pronounced. A living painter or poet does not supplant his or her predecessors; old plays and dramatic styles are regularly performed and rediscovered, forming the majority of the repertoire for some theatre companies. At a more fundamental level, while you are unlikely to treat yourself with seventeenth century medicine if you fall ill; if you fall in love, you may find that John Donne has as much to say to you as Simon Armitage or the Arctic Monkeys. Both the need for innovation, and what constitutes innovation in the arts therefore, is somewhat contested. Castañer and Campos (2002) define artistic innovation as something that is ‘new to the field’. Thus, they argue that a new piece of music by John Cage is not an innovation in the musical world, as minimalism is already a well-known musical form. This rather strict definition however suggests that one cannot innovate within a genre or form, something that most people would find puzzling. The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper may have been innovative in musical arrangement, use of recording technology and even cover art work; but it was still recognisably within the genre of popular music; it did not create an entirely new field. At the same time, few would be comfortable with the notion that every ‘new’ cultural product; each book, film, song or videogame produced, is an innovation (Stoneman 2007). Michael Palin’s New Europe is one of a series of books he has written to accompany his BBC TV programmes. The book may not have been written before, but it uses a well-known format and very few would regard it as an ‘innovation’ in travel writing.
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Crucially, nor should innovation be seen as a cultural product’s only desirable quality (Bunting 2007): tradition, heritage, memory and ritual influence the value that consumers get from cultural products, even in popular culture. Few fans at a Rolling Stones concert want to see the Stones take an entirely new musical direction; most come to hear old favourites and relive youthful memories. They are taking part in a communal ritual, not seeking novelty. Closeness to the consumer may be part of the way in which the cultural sectors innovate, but it is far from being an uncomplicated relationship (MacDonald 2003). While it seems reasonable to argue that public funding for the arts should support the risky, rather than the tried and tested, leaving the development of successful formats to the market, a strict interpretation of the innovation mantra would ignore much craft production, however high a level; would leave very little room for non-Western arts forms, which are often less enamoured of the ‘shock of the new’; and would marginalise genre works which depend on their collective, historical development, for much of their meaning. To argue that all great art is an innovation is to argue for Picasso but not Lucian Freud; Orson Welles but not Howard Hawks; Dashiell Hammett but not John Le Carre. It’s an exciting cultural world; but not necessarily one you would want to inhabit all the time. Nor does applying an ‘innovation framework’ to cultural funding get you off the hook of having to make judgements. As Hesmondhalgh and Pratt argue, the question of aesthetics never really goes away in cultural policy (2005) and the Arts Council is now beginning a lengthy process of ‘operationalising’ its commitment to innovation1 with a public consultation on the best methods of self-assessment and peer review for its regularly funded organisations. It is unlikely that echoing the language of innovation will make those judgements any less problematic or contested. For arts organisations, used to negotiating the twists and turns of policy language, it may simply be a case of re-stating their value in another context. Like the discourse of ‘public value’, some may embrace it, others may use it opportunistically to re-brand their current activities (Oakley et al. 2006). It is probably too early to say, and tracing the effect of innovation discourse on funding practice is outside the scope of this paper, but the danger is less to individual arts organisations and more to the ecology as whole. A desire to fund only the new and innovation-friendly risks producing a sort of perpetual present; a culture without memory. 8. Conclusion: arts policy after the creative industries In contrast to Garnham’s arguments that the arts lobby welcomed the notion of creative industries, because it signalled a return to an artist-centred, supply-side type of cultural policy (Garnham 2005) and away from a focus on distribution and consumption; it has always seemed to me that the arts lobby has had a rather ambivalent relationship to the idea of creative industries. Although, to adapt Markusen’s argument about Florida’s work (Markusen 2005), the discourse of creative industries temporarily made the arts seem visible to policy-makers who had never thought to notice them before, and at the regional level, it secured funding for regeneration projects that often involved the arts (Evans and Shaw 2004); it did so at the cost of collapsing several, carefully constructed arguments for public cultural funding into essentially one: it’s good for the economy. The way that the arts were understood to be good for the economy changed between creative industries, creativity and innovation – from a focus on the growth of the arts and media sectors as growing providers of employment – to the disappearance of the arts themselves into a host of knowledge-based activities. This is sometimes presented teleologically, in the shape of four models of culture (Cunningham et al. 2008), which move us from a
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welfarist or subsidy model of arts funding, via the cultural/creative industries, to an innovation model, ‘where creative industries’ value lies in the development and adoption of new knowledge, and so is focused on experimentation and difference, rather than conservation and equality’ (2008, p. 9). In this account, past cultural forms no longer inform new the development of new ones in a fruitful dialogue across time, but instead fracture into ‘old’ and ‘new’ cultures (Potts et al. 2008), where the historical built environment, museums (and their collections), and the ‘classic’ performing arts, require only ‘maintenance and continuity’ (2008, p. 11); something that might come as a shock to anyone who works in these worlds and is continually engaged in a process of reinterpretation and re-creation. Not to mention the odd property developer who has realised the value of ‘heritage’ buildings as contemporary cultural spaces. Culture as innovation goes much further than creative industries discourse, not only in stating cultural value solely in terms of economic impact, but in breaking up cultural activities themselves into the novel and innovative (videogames, good) and the heritage and educational (opera, almost certainly bad). The complex symbiosis that informs the cultural ecology of any town or city – with its mix of funding models, cultural forms and working practices – that links a performance of the Tempest, with a TV cop show and voiceovers for advertisements (the staple working life of a successful actor, for example) is too messy, too wasteful and simply too hard to understand. In the face of this, traditional arts advocates seem ready to beat a hasty retreat into more comfortable terrain. They rage at ‘meddling philistines’ (Tusa 2007), and worry that illinformed ‘cultural diversity officers’ are now in charge of what hangs in our galleries, rather than say, curators (Appleton 2004), though it must be said that there is scant evidence for this one. Social instrumentalism seems to raise more concern than economic instrumentalism, at least on the political Right; but even a former Secretary of Stare for Culture worries that, between the two, we have ceased to value culture in its own terms (Jowell 2004). The gains made in decades of cultural and media studies-informed policy work in collapsing distinctions between high and low culture, market and non-market, dominant and ‘other’ are real, if fragile. The difficulty for an innovation framework is that they need defending in terms of meaning, not of impact. When the recently elected Mayor of London, Boris Johnson addresses the Royal Society of Arts, one hears some arts advocates in full retreat from much the argument of cultural policy over the last 40 years. I get pretty steamed up about the general mushy-minded cultural relativism of our age, and I assert the total superiority of Homer over the epic of Gilgamesh, and I think the artistic output of 15th century Italy was much better than the artistic output of 15th century mesoAmerica, and I congratulate Neil McGregor on getting the Terracotta army to London, but when you compare those universal imperial henchmen with the Panathenaic frieze you can see why democracy and individualism got going in western Europe, rather than in East Asia. (Johnson 2008)
This is not to suggest that the arts lobby, assuming we think it a coherent force, would line up behind any such crude assertion of the superiority of European high culture. And indeed the Mayor’s proposed cultural strategy for London, while displaying a somewhat naive faith in the transformative power of unused musical instruments, steers well clear of such emotive language or content (London 2008). But it is to make the point that discussions of cultural policy ultimately become entwined with question of aesthetics, politics, identity and meaning.
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Stuart Cunningham (2006) doubts that we have enough agreement about cultural values to make a ‘robust and enduring’ case for public funding. But surely that is the point. Debates about culture take place in a contested space and so they should, as they are essentially political debates. Alan Finlayson’s (2003) critique of New Labour, as wanting, ‘a permanent consensus under its permanent management,’ (p. 11) seems to be apt here, and as he goes on to say, It sometimes seems to be dreaming of a world of pure individuals, permanently innovating new products, and managing social relations through the terms and practices of trade. (Finlayson 2003, p. 11)
The collapse of culture into an innovation discourse fits this aspiration entirely, and as such it may simply be part of the waning political moment of New Labour. But the price to be paid for it is a thin notion of cultural value, declining cultural sectors and a crude version of innovation, which conflates it with novelty. As such, it seems a fairly high price. Note 1. The Arts Council is consulting on the best method of doing this, the consultation ended 23
January 2009 (http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/consultation).
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