User:ThomasW/Notes The Fiction of the Creative Industries

http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/32487

"The German artist Gerhard Merz said in 1991 that "creativity is for hairdressers".[^1] Professional artists and designers never had a high opinion of the word "creative" and the people bearing it on their business cards, from creative directors to creative consultants and creativity trainers. "

"Secretary of culture Halbe Zijlstra has factually made it a government agenda and will follow its advice to move all previous public funding for design and fashion, new media arts and architecture into a new sector institute for the creative industries."

"Does a political journalist from NRC Handelsblad or BNR Nieuwsradio know that he or she works in the "creative industries"? "

"On the remaining sixty pages of "Creatieve industrie in topvorm", we do not even read anything anymore on the publishing industries, television or radio, never mind the fact that economically, they amount to a large part if not the bulk of the "creative industries" as defined there. "

"Industries are normally defined by their products: the food industry produces food, the computer industry produces computers, the construction industry buildings, the healthcare industry health. But with the exception of the creativity trainers mentioned earlier, the so-called creative industries do not produce creativity. An architect, for example, does not work for the creative industries but as the creative-artistic part of the construction industry. A fashion designer is the artistic part of the textile industry, a graphic designer the visual artist for the publishing and media industry, and so on."

"Often, "creative industries" have been an illusion created by globalization: Nike and Apple, for example, were able to be seen as "creative companies" because manufacturing of their products had been outsourced to China."

"In Tony Blair's Britain, the coinage of "creative industries" coincided with the boom of Britpop and the British music industry. The Independent wrote in 2003 that "New Labour ill-advisedly prolonged its Britpop period. Alan McGee [owner of the Britpop music label Creation], along with Paul Smith, Richard Branson [owner of Virgin Records] and [television producer] Waheed Ali were appointed to a short-lived and long-forgotten body called the Creative Industries Task Force".[^6]"

"For media, communication design and performing arts professions, the "industries" model is one of the past, not the future."

"The suggested policies harm non-profit arts; but they don't even do the commercial design and media world a favor. The "creative industries" vision of the "Topteam" and, by adoption, the Dutch government reads like a retro trip into "Madmen". "

"If one looks at the "creative industries" meme globally, then one encounters the same story again and again: the fiction of an industry based on arbitrary definition criteria and blown-up business figures, made to persuade governments into funneling public money (and increasing public debt) into large-scale infrastructures; infrastructures that more often than not end up failing to meet the real needs of an "industry" that, right because of new technologies and globalization, really is a post-industrial patchwork of Tattoo Bobs."

The definition "creative industry" is a way for old government to make a group industry into one a old way of defeining thing. like the construction industry