Re: <nettime> The Creative Question--Nine Theses

["d.garcia" <d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk>]

In the interest of avoiding the conflict free zone that worries the authors the following  
> 
> 1. Goodbye to Creative Industries
> 
> A creepy discourse on creativity has captured cultural and economic policy. Creativity invokes a certain pharmacological numbness among its spruikers ??? a special sub-species entirely unaware of how far removed their version of creativity is from radical invention and social transformation. Their claims around the science of economy are little more than a shoddy con..

This kind of now familiar rant sounds increasingly elitist, as though creativity can only be sourced on the wild frontiers of radical invention and social transformation. This romantic rhetoric falls straight into the reductavist trap of depicting creativity  (the near universal capacity for invention and making of meaning through expression) to a kind of bohemian rhapsody. In which artists/makers and designers are required to be wild and untamed, patrolling the boarders of consciousness and returning with their -blue chip investments for level headed fetishists-. 

Many of the masterpieces of the 20th century were generated (to take just one example) in the white heat of the Hollywood dream factory- e.g. Some LIke it Hot, Casablanca, Vertigo etc etc. It was definitely creative and it was definitely an industry, operating in factory conditions of exploitation. It was far from being an outpost of bohemia. Today's culture of continuous innovation is also highly exploitative so instead of parodying the attempts of the state to recognise its existence of an industrial creative sector and its economic contribution, why shouldn't the established political class not seek to celebrate that contribution. And, in a better world, be inventing policy to address the insecurity, decrease the exploitation and increase the life chances of the precarious creative workforce.  


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d a v i d  g a r c i a
new-tactical-research.co.uk


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