The exemplary economy: a Hunterian reading of the creative industries as educative project (original) (raw)
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What creative industries? Instrumentalism, autonomy and the education of artists
International Journal of Education Through Art, 2013
As the narrative of the Creative Industries becomes commonplace, arts institutions are increasingly expected to interface arts practice with business and enterprise. This article opens with a critique of the CBI's document 'First Steps' (2012), arguing how this minimizes the arts' role in schools. It then provides an analysis of two pedagogies: productivism and autonomism. Following the implications that emerge from the tension between productivism and autonomism in arts pedagogy, and reading these implications from within the contexts of the divergent and increasingly hybrid forms of contemporary art practices, this article then moves on to state that to argue for the legitimation of the arts by gathering what they do under the designation of the Creative Industries would amount to reifying art into an object of mere use, thus distorting both its productive and autonomist possibilities. A society is a number of people held together because they are working along common lines, in a common spirit and with reference to common aims. The common needs and aims demand a growing interchange of thought and growing unity of sympathetic feeling. The radical reason
Contributing to the creative economy imaginary: universities and the creative sector
Cultural Trends, 2018
This paper explores the relationship between the creative economy and universities. As funders, educators and research bodies, universities have a complicated relationship with the creative economy. They propagate its practice, 'buying-in' to the rhetoric and models of creative value, particularly in teaching, research and knowledge exchange. Third mission activities also play a role, seeking to affect change in the world 'outside' academia through collaboration, partnerships, commercialisation and social action. For arts and humanities disciplines, these practices have focused almost exclusively on the creative sector in recent years. This paper asks how the third mission has been a site where universities have modified their function in relation to the creative economy. It considers the mechanisms by which universities have been complicit in propagating the notion of the creative economy, strengthening particular constructions of the idea at the level of policy and everyday practice. It also briefly asks how a focus on alternative academic practice and institutional forms might offer possibilities for developing a more critical creative economy. The argument made is that the university sector is an important agent in the shaping and performance of the creative economy, and that we should take action if we wish to produce a more diverse, equitable space for learning, researching, and being under the auspices of 'creativity'.
Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 2019
This article examines the nature and role of courses designed to train creative workers, policy-makers and related actors, in the skills necessary for cultural management, enterprise or intermediation and their relationship in apprehending the sector. The article takes a case study approach, engaging with university policy, student research, reflections from graduates and staff who have participated in a suite of integrated MA awards at a UK university. We find that the programme created environments in which practitioners and intermediaries were positioned in reflexive relation to their experiences and roles. We outline the insights and understandings that have emerged as students explored their own orbits in relation to both critical and instrumental research on the cultural sector, and in relation to perceptions of the transformations in sector and how it is conceived. The case study sets out an agenda for exploring the relationship of research, pedagogy and practice after the cr...
Higher Education and the Creative Economy. Beyond the Campus (2017, Book Review)
Abigail Gilmore offer a well-coordinated collection of theoretically-rich, methodologically solid, and data-driven essays that address the patchy and under-investigated ground of collaborations and partnerships between Higher Education institutions (HEIs) and the creative economy, mainly but not exclusively in the UK. In the last few years, an increasing number of scholars, as well as consultants and agencies, have examined the relationships between HEIs, on the one hand, and the arts and culture sector or the commercial creative industries, on the other. This has come as a result of recent and substantial reshaping in higher education and cultural policy. Although a 'drive to partner' has been emerging progressively over the course of the last 70 years (Doeser 2015: 33), the 1990s have been a turning point for partnerships between universities and parts of the creative economy. Universities have boomed since 1992 and have been evidenced more prominently as knowledge sharing hubs with the power to inform and spark the activity of businesses, museums and arts and cultural institutions (Oakley and Selwood 2010). Since the period of the Coalition government (2010-2015), the university sector has continued to experience a massive restructuring (Speight et al. 2013), and pressure to demonstrate the social and economic impact of university spending has grown even higher (Dawson and Gilmore 2009: 11). On the whole, as effectively summarised by the editors in their introduction, the HE policy and funding framework has become more informed by the move towards a more neoliberal HE system. In this context, it is thus not surprising that greater attention has been dedicated to understanding the dynamics of collaborations and partnerships between HEIs and the creative economy. However, the state of the art on this topic remains full of lacunae, and not devoid of literature driven by advocacy purposes, which, in certain cases, have also led to misleading portrayals of the 'art' of partnering as intrinsically beneficial. This edited volume should be praised for its successful attempt to enrich existing knowledge about the manifold links that tie Higher Education and the Creative Economy with proposed definitions, critical perspectives, and analyses applied to a range of countries. The book is structured in four sections preceded by an introduction, which usefully frames the scope of the discussion and the main concepts at the core of it: 'universities', particularly publicly-funded institutions; and the creative economy, understood as an " umbrella term that aims to capture a set of interrelated activities based around the production, distribution and consumption of creative and cultural goods (and ideas) which generate cultural, social and economic impact " (Comunian and Gilmore 2016: 6). The first section focuses on partnerships, examining the construction of industry identities in creative places, the process of exchanging knowledge between higher education and the creative sector, and issues of sustainability in relation to university-creative industries collaboration. The second section concentrates instead on the generation of " creative human capital " in and by higher education institutions. The third section of the book deals with the dynamics between arts school and local art scenes, also with a view to assess where and when these compete more (or rather) than supporting each other. The fourth and final section contains essays on aspects of higher education policy, and how these impact universities' interactions with the creative economy as well as the effects of such interactions on communities. The volume well conveys the breadth of a field 'in-the-making' and its highly interdisciplinary nature. The latter is reflected by the range of theories that are used to understand the relationships between HEIs and the creative economy and the value they generate. These include, for example, the convincing unpacking of the notion of 'creative human capital' by the essays in section two, or
Some research and popular conceptions of artists call into question the value of an arts degree. These include notions of the self-taught artistic genius, stereotypes about the arts-educated barista, and a recent report claiming most professional artists do not attend art school. Yet, what is the value of higher education for workers in creative fields? Do arts graduates contribute to the creative capital of cities and economies? This chapter draws on data from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), a survey of more than 92,000 arts alumni from over 140 institutions across North America, in order to assess the effects of arts-based training on career pathways. We present findings on how arts graduates assess the benefits of their education, how they deploy creative skills in various areas of life, and an analysis of challenges for higher education institutions and graduates (inequality, debt, and skill gaps). The chapter concludes by expanding current understandings of creative human capital to incorporate how competencies developed during arts education are deployed in various sectors.
A hidden history: defining and specifying the role of the creative industries
2015
In this article I craft a definition of the role of the creative industries through time and in their contemporary specificity. I consider some of the possible approaches to the situation of the creative industries vis-a-vis the rest of the economy. I steer a middle course through contemporary debates around whether, on the one hand, the economy is cultural or, on the other, whether culture is economic. I suggest that the two bear influence upon each other. The argument presented is as follows. Standard definitions of the creative industries typically struggle to account for the diverse manifestations of creative employment and creative practices in other areas of the economy. In some ways, all industries can be considered as ‘creative’. In other ways, and by extension, no industries may be considered specifically ‘creative’. In this context, we might conceive of the contemporary specificity of the creative industries and creative employment in terms of the way in which they bring together, institutionalise and standardise the plethora of creative functions that are necessary for the reproduction of a capitalist system of commodity exchange.
While new methods of marketing and rapidly evolving technologies appear to be creating unique opportunities for the creative artist, the idea of pure research and the Arnoldian concept of disinterestedness of the creative mind from political or civil responsibility seems to be in conflict with these current entrepreneurial pressures. This paper examines academia’s role as arbiter of art in relation to the larger picture of the student’s Transcendental ‘self’ that needs to juggle the pursuit of a degree and the realities of the marketplace. Research is presented from a collection of critical voices from a cultural studies and literary studies perspective, and also cultural economics is examined to debate what has come to be termed the cultural economy of creative industries. Following a critical tradition in literary education, the research examines the effect of this thinking on the education of the modern artist and looks at some new approaches being taken by a variety of universities to accommodate a new paradigm that balances marketing with the Socratic maxim ‘know thyself’.