The Industrialization of Creativity and Its Limits

Work in Croatia’s independent cultural sector demands a specific type of individual. A typical worker is female, lives and works in the capital, Zagreb, and is mostly paid by honoraria. She is well educated and has well-educated parents that provide her with the safety net. She is burned out, but overall, she is satisfied with her position and life. She is also middle aged, single, and in most cases childless with only a few younger collaborators who are working with her. As an independent cultural worker, she is in a state of permanent crisis created by broader structural socioeconomic conditions in Croatia. These conditions do not encourage viable and sustainable cultural production, especially independent cultural production and especially in communities outside the capital. In order to work in such an unstable environment, independent cultural workers must be persistent, resourceful, multitalented, loyal to their profession, well embedded in the community, and privileged with a family that can function as a safety net. In short, to work precariously in this sector, one must belong to the elite, as only the elite can afford to work precariously.

This chapter focuses on the hybrid creative labor of managers in Moscow-based contemporary art institutions. The Russian context is of interest because its young contemporary art market is still transitioning from the Soviet cultural monopoly to an open-market economy, and it, therefore, lacks established standards of cultural production, especially in the case of institutional organizations. The research examines Moscow’s new private centers and contemporary art museums, which were founded in the late 2000s. Conceived as Russian versions of the Tate or Guggenheim, these institutions offer workers and their visitors the unique experience of belonging to the international art world in the center of Moscow. In this context, creative work organization is filled with negotiations and experiments, forming an ideological battlefield where both neoliberal creative entrepreneurialism and the Soviet heroization of work, such as praise for the new Stakhanovites, can be encountered. This chapter is based on a 2016 ethnographic study composed of 25 in-depth interviews with full-time cultural workers and 20 observation visits by the researcher to the art centers’ offices and exhibition areas.

Creative writing schools and programs are weird creatures. They have been around for decades and have become increasingly popular despite their relatively recent addition to the curricula of higher education. This chapter investigates the public discourse around creative writing programs: it looks at how creative writing degrees are received both in the English-speaking world (the United States and the United Kingdom) and in Italy, and it investigates the reasons behind this reception. In the Anglo-American case, creative writing is part of university education, but this is not the case in Italy, where universities do not offer degrees in creative writing. The teaching of creative writing thus is entirely entrusted to private enterprises such as schools, associations, charities, cooperatives, and bookshops. This chapter looks at how, in Italy’s case, the reception of creative writing has been shaped by the country’s historic understanding of high and popular culture and by the position of the Alessandro Baricco, best-selling author and founder of the Holden School, the most famous Italian creative writing school. These themes are relevant to the scholarship on creative and cultural industries because they offer insights into the role of creative writing programs as mechanisms for the inclusion and exclusion of cultural workers. They also reveal the programs’ growing influence over literary production and cultural production more generally.

In recent decades, the biennial has become the most widespread mode of showcasing contemporary art. Rather than acting as mere aesthetic containers, these shows aspire to be socially relevant by raising questions about capitalism, colonialism, inequality, environmental devastation, and gender imbalances. In this chapter, we draw from ethnographic observation of the 7th Berlin Biennale (2012) that took place in the context of a rising anti-capitalist discourse reflected in the Occupy movement and the movement of the squares. We explore the outcome of curators’ attempts to disrupt existing practices by introducing the logic of activism. Drawing from empirical vignettes, we identify three institutional rationales that coexisted, clashed, and mutually displaced this logic, reaffirming rather than disrupting the idea that art has to preserve some distance from social reality, that neo-anarchist activism should prefigure social reality in the here and now, and that the configuration of the above through the organization’s politics of visibility that promotes the spectacle of the Berlin Biennale and itself as a brand. These three rationales concomitantly and decisively structured the event’s public performance and turned the idea of linking art to activism into the spectacle of a human zoo. We discuss our findings and link the micro-institutional logics to broader macro-level logics of aesthetic capitalism and spectacle.

This chapter focuses on discursive constructions of creativity in the Greek public sphere in connection to the Greek government debt crisis. Instrumentalized by policy makers and pundits pursuing neoliberal reforms in Greece, creativity is understood to serve a mode of biopolitical governmentality. This is connected to the production of a national consensus over the necessity for neoliberal reforms and to the individualization of the risks and insecurity that such reforms entail. This chapter looks at specific public discursive constructions of creativity in Greece from 2010 onward. Specifically, the creativity discourse is approached in both its progressive and conservative articulations as articulated by the social democrat Giorgos A. Papandreou, Greece’s prime minister during the first years of the crisis (2009–2011), and the conservative Kyriakos K. Mitsotakis, Greece’s prime minister in 2019 and at the time of writing. Simultaneously, this chapter foregrounds the examples of success stories of creative ventures that received publicity in Greece so as to unfold other examples of a hegemonic discourse meant to motivate society on a post-political, entrepreneurial, and nationalistic basis. Such success stories develop through the didactic narratives that proliferate in Greece’s mainstream news and lifestyle media, which are meant to establish a creative paradigm as a way out of unemployment and recession. Here, creativity forms a public repertoire that fabricates the crisis into a so-called opportunity for development that is borne through entrepreneurship.

The chapter discusses different frameworks of knowledge production within the discourses and practices of Russian cultural policy. Russian cultural policy as an administrative sector has been developed in line with two distinctive governmental regimes, more precisely during the period of liberal decentralisation of the 1990s and the conservative centralisation from 2011 up until today. The study focuses on the main changes that have occurred in the framework of policy design and participation in policymaking.

An attempt is made to combine Foucauldian analytical frameworks of power and discourse with a Gramscian hegemonic approach to political studies that was mainly advocated by the Essex scholars—Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and David Howarth. Such a perspective opens up a possibility of considering the institutional rearrangements of intellectual leadership through which the post-2012 establishment has endeavoured to advance its sovereignty and planning capacities in both the symbolic and the normative dimensions of culture. Thus examined, Russian state cultural policy turns out to be intrinsically subordinated to the sovereignty of the presidential apparatus that privileges the conservative stance of the ‘Russian World’ project and neglects human rights and cultural diversity.

The research is based on a wide selection of national strategies and drafts of federal law on culture.

This chapter considers three manifestos by UK-based music promoters and record labels that had influenced the ideas and practices of my interlocutors in Glasgow at the time of my ethnographic fieldwork on Do-it-Yourself (DiY) music practices (2010–2011). In exploring these statements, I highlight their function: what do these manifestos do, and how? I focus on the content of the statements, their formal qualities and the rhetorical techniques used by the authors. In doing so, I underscore the ways in which these texts project a matrix of ethical values pertinent to work in creative economies and convey an underlying quest for authentic conduct in the cultural industries. In an era when creativity has come to signify an economic asset framing market-oriented discourses, the three statements demonstrate that DiY stands as a useful example of an ethical and authentic mode of self-expression. They further show that contemporary manifestos may still retain the passionate rhetoric and revolutionary sensibilities of avant-garde manifestos, but in many instances they seek to reconcile the tension between creativity and commerce in the cultural industries.

Though first developed in the mid-1990s, creative industries are still in their grand project stage. This chapter’s central hypothesis is that lumping the creative and cultural industries into the same category cannot be regarded as more real or effective than the emergence of a single category, i.e., creative industries, as advertised by professionals, experts, and policy makers. While the constituent elements of the cultural industries are by now relatively well known, this is not yet the case for the creative industries, which remain highly heterogeneous. It is therefore possible to list the similarities and dissimilarities between these two industries and even to identify numerous structural differences between them, even as they still appear in 11 market segments drawn from the 27 member states of the European Union, the data of which were available in 2014. If we accept this, the quantitative pre-eminence of cultural industries is not about to end.

For a long time, the basic underlying principle of cultural industries was the idea that the process of reproduction could be industrialized but not the creation itself. Over the course of a few dozers years, this idea determined the nonindustrial character of particular domains of culture, such as theater and performing arts, and some fields of education, maintaining them on the margins of the industrialization process. This chapter examines the complexity of the ongoing mediatization process, which brings such marginal domains into industrial logics, making them reproducible or partly reproducible. We can now see new schemes of the division of labor appearing in performing arts and other fields in which craft-based activity mainly consists of conceptualizing products, while the performances themselves become increasingly industrialized.

Very early on, the heralds of the “creative industries” emphasised on the imperative of a legal framework based on strong intellectual property to ensure their growth. In a context of intense international competition, intellectual property rights appeared to allow guaranteeing the “singularity” of local products and thus extricate them from untenable price-based competition. However, the excessive bolstering of those rights is likely to modify how they operate and, therefore, make them an obstacle to the development of a “creative economy”.

In many countries, media are facing severe crises. This chapter examines how media companies have undertaken a process of innovation that has nevertheless been accompanied by limited creativity. First, a literature review will recall the fundamental definitions of innovation and present various works on media innovation. Second, we will show that the ongoing innovation process is mainly based on a new media model, which we have called “the media Googlization model.” Media Googlization focuses on a new digital management process that aims to take advantage of digital data, traffic, and advertising. This process represents a strong shift for media companies. Third, we will show that this innovation is a process of creative destruction with limited creativity. Indeed, media Googlization induces a destruction of media’s traditional economic model, with, of course, new features. However, this innovation is accompanied by limited creativity because the priority has not been to fuel creativity in the production of quality informational and cultural media products. We will show that digital development tends to lead less to new forms of quality creative content than to a new form of industrial system driven by Internet platforms and media Googlization. We will draw on the Swiss press to illustrate our analysis.