Critique of Creativity: Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the ‘Creative Industries’

234 p. : il., Tablas.Libro ElectrónicoLa creatividad siempre está en movimiento: surge, se establece en el ente colectivo, palidece y desaparece a veces en el olvido; renace, vuelve con innovaciones, se reformula y resurge iniciando de nuevo el ciclo. Los viejos mitos de la creación y los creadores, los trabajos consagrados y los organismos privilegiados de los demiurgos están de nuevo en marcha, produciendo nuevos cambios. Los ensayos recogidos en este libro analizan ese resurgimiento complejo del mito de la creación y proponen una crítica contemporánea de la creatividad.Creativity is astir: reborn, re-conjured, re-branded, resurgent. The old myths of creation and creators – the hallowed labors and privileged agencies of demiurges and prime movers, of Biblical world-makers and self-fashioning artist-geniuses – are back underway, producing effects, circulating appeals. Much as the Catholic Church dresses the old creationism in the new gowns of ‘intelligent design’, the Creative Industries sound the clarion call to the Cultural Entrepreneurs. In the hype of the ‘creative class’ and the high flights of the digital bohemians, the renaissance of ‘the creatives’ is visibly enacted. The essays collected in this book analyze this complex resurgence of creation myths and formulate a contemporary critique of creativity.Contents vii Contributors ix Acknowledgements xv Introduction: On the Strange Case of ‘Creativity’ and its Troubled Resurrection 1 PART ONE: CREATIVITY 7 1 Immanent Effects: Notes on Cre-activity 9 2 The Geopolitics of Pimping 23 3 The Misfortunes of the ‘Artistic Critique’ and of Cultural Employment 41 4 ‘Creativity and Innovation’ in the Nineteenth Century: Harrison C. White and the Impressionist Revolution Reconsidered 57 PART TWO: PRECARIZATION 77 5 Virtuosos of Freedom: On the Implosion of Political Virtuosity and Productive Labour 79 6 Experiences Without Me, or, the Uncanny Grin of Precarity 91 7 Wit and Innovation 101 PART THREE: CREATIVITY INDUSTRIES 107 8 GovernCreativity, or, Creative Industries Austrian Style 109 9 The Los Angelesation of London: Three Short Waves of Young People’s Micro-Economies of Culture and Creativity in the UK 119 10 Unpredictable Outcomes / Unpredictable Outcasts: On Recent Debates over Creativity and the Creative Industries 133 11 Chanting the Creative Mantra: The Accelerating Economization of EU Cultural Policy 147 PART FOUR: CULTURE INDUSTRY 165 12 Culture Industry and the Administration of Terror 167 13 Add Value to Contents: The Valorization of Culture Today 183 14 Creative Industries as Mass Deception 191 Bibliography 20

The Journey of the Luxury Automotive Customer in the EU: the Porsche Brand

This Master Thesis analyses the shifting needs of the Luxury Automotive Consumer during its Journey, as well as the changes imposed by the last two years, strongly permeated by the pandemic. Generally speaking, the Luxury Consumer is a person who has always differentiated itself for the requirements and the qualities expected by the products he buys. The Luxury Automotive Customer in the EU goes on a Journey that needs a high level of personalisation and care to work correctly. Even though Covid has affected all Luxury Automotive Brands in a different way – unlike mass-market brands – the criteria that have allowed Porsche to withstand and prosper are based on well-established and essential company principles for a long time. The obtained financial results do not depend only on the Brand's worth – which definitely is ranked at the top – but are also the consequence of a careful and cutting-edge strategy able to recognise newborn customer needs and always place them at the centre of the planning strategy. Porsche perfectly incorporates the fundamental activities and trends, such as digitalisation, sustainability, electrification, Customer Centricity, and omnichannel. As a result, Porsche's Customer Journey maintains coherence and aims to sell and to let future Customers deeply breathe the Brand – as they will become the buyers of tomorrow. It goes without saying that if competitors want to stay competitive they need to follow its steps soon.This Master Thesis analyses the shifting needs of the Luxury Automotive Consumer during its Journey, as well as the changes imposed by the last two years, strongly permeated by the pandemic. Generally speaking, the Luxury Consumer is a person who has always differentiated itself for the requirements and the qualities expected by the products he buys. The Luxury Automotive Customer in the EU goes on a Journey that needs a high level of personalisation and care to work correctly. Even though Covid has affected all Luxury Automotive Brands in a different way – unlike mass-market brands – the criteria that have allowed Porsche to withstand and prosper are based on well-established and essential company principles for a long time. The obtained financial results do not depend only on the Brand's worth – which definitely is ranked at the top – but are also the consequence of a careful and cutting-edge strategy able to recognise newborn customer needs and always place them at the centre of the planning strategy. Porsche perfectly incorporates the fundamental activities and trends, such as digitalisation, sustainability, electrification, Customer Centricity, and omnichannel. As a result, Porsche's Customer Journey maintains coherence and aims to sell and to let future Customers deeply breathe the Brand – as they will become the buyers of tomorrow. It goes without saying that if competitors want to stay competitive they need to follow its steps soon

A Manifesto for the Book

What will be the canon for the artist’s book in the 21st Century? In an arena that now includes both digital and traditionally produced artists’ books, what will constitute the concepts of artists’ publishing in the future?This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council from March 2008 - February 2010. This project investigated and discussed issues concerning the context and future of the artist’s book, in an attempt to extend and sustain critical debate of what constitutes an artist’s book in the 21st Century.One of the key points of this project was to try and include all the book related activity that artists engage with. To include work that was being produced on, and exclusively for, digital technologies within the book arts field, and not leave it floundering uncomfortably on the edge, or subjected to a different terminology altogether, if the artist considered what they were producing to be a book, then we felt it should be included. We also looked at the continued practice of traditional production processes for artists’ books such as letterpress, etching, lithography, screenprint and woodcut, and have interviewed a range of artists and publishers who work with these, as well as those producing livres d’artistes, fine press books, design bindings, multiples, installation and audio books.Bodman will give a conference paper on this book at the IMPACT 7 International Multi-Disciplinary Printmaking Conference at University of Melbourne 27-30 September 2011. Topic 14: Printmedia and the Artists' Book - paper title ‘A Manifesto for the Book - artist's book - artist's publication - book art?’. http://impact7.org.au/program_wednesday.htm

Putting animals on display: geographies of taxidermy practice

Taxidermy specimens and displays have become increasingly liminal features in contemporary society. Viewed variously as historical curios, obsolete relics or more malignantly as ‘monstrosities’, they can be a source of discomfort for many. Taxidermy objects have become uncomfortable reminders of past scientific and colonial practices which have sought to capture, order and control animated life and as such have become increasingly problematic items for their owners. As a result many taxidermy displays have been dismantled and mounts relegated to ‘backstores’ to gather dust. The paradox is that taxidermy as a practice is a quest for ‘liveness’, to impute life back into the dead. Much like the taxidermist, my goal in this thesis is to revive and restore: to renew interest in and reassert the value of taxidermy collections by recovering what I shall term as the ‘biogeographies’ of their making and continued maintenance. Considerable academic attention has been paid to the ‘finished’ form and display of taxidermy specimens inside cabinets, behind glass – in other words, to their representation. By way of contrast, this thesis recovers the relationships, practices and geographies that brought specimens to their state of enclosure, inertness and seeming fixity. These efforts are aligned with work in cultural geography seeking to counteract ‘deadening effects’ in an active world through a prioritisation of practice (Dewsbury and Thrift 2000), and elsewhere draw on research arguments and approaches originating in historical geography, and the history of science. The thesis firstly investigates historical developments in the scientific and craft practice of taxidermy through the close study of period manuals, combined with ethnographic observations of a practicing taxidermist. Critical attention to practice then facilitates the recovery of the lifeworlds of past taxidermy workshops and the globally sited biogeographies behind the making of individual specimens and collections. The thesis required the purposeful assemblage and rehabilitation of diffuse zoological and historical remains to form unconventional archives, enabling a series of critical reflections on the scientific, creative and political potentials of taxidermy

British Collecting of Ceramics for Tea Gatherings from Meiji Japan: British Museum and Maidstone Museum Collections

Museum collections of Japanese ceramics in Britain include numerous utensils for whipped tea (matcha) and steeped tea (sencha) gatherings along with diverse vessels for daily and special occasions collected from Meiji Japan. Who collected them and why, and how did these objects obtain value in Britain around the turn of the twentieth century and through the process of collecting? Tracing the international network of collecting this material through the Sir Augustus W. Franks (1826–1897) collection at the British Museum, London and the Hon. Henry Marsham (1845–1908) collection at the Maidstone Museum, Kent, this thesis explores the value making process for objects used for two types of tea in the 1860s–80s and the 1880s–1900s, respectively. Based on archival and collection surveys in Britain, Japan, and Europe, the values assigned to these teawares are identified as a collaborative product of negotiations of multiple contributors—objects, collectors, learned societies, mediators, institutions and audiences. Adopting Actor-Network theory, this research gives voice to objects and mediators who have been subordinated and ignored in the history of collecting. At the intersection of the development of museums in the U.K., and academic disciplines of the nineteenth century, modern tourism in Japan, and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the objects for tea collected by Franks and Marsham can now be recognized as the products of (inter)national, local, and personal heritage

A linguistic analysis of three genres associated with the ship RMS Queen Elizabeth

This thesis is designed to explore three selected genres which are associated with a Scottish-built ship, RMS Queen Elizabeth, and her launch event in 1938. The main focus of this research is an exploration of how writers construct their texts by creating an interpersonal relationship with their readership in order to fulfil their communicative purposes. Specifically, it examines the generic structures and the lexico-grammar of the texts representing these genres from various theoretical perspectives. The present study analyses a set of business letters, newspaper articles and a promotional brochure which revolve around the launch event of the historic liner. The texts representing these genres are examined in terms of their generic structures using Swales’ move analysis model (1990; 2004) and Hasan’s generic structure potential framework (1985). In addition, a lexico-grammatical analysis of these texts focuses on the use of modal verbs as modality markers, analysed using three distinctive frameworks i.e. Brown and Levinson’s (1987) Politeness Theory, Martin and White’s (1998) Appraisal Framework, and Halliday’s (1994) modality system as markers of authorial commitment and/or obligation in propositions. The differing foci on the use of the modal verbs in the study are motivated by the aim of showing how these lexical items function in different genres. As a final analysis, these modal verbs in the respective genres are examined for their lexical properties using Sinclair’s (1996) and Stubbs’ (2002) Models of Extended Lexical Units. The analysis of the lexical properties of the modal verbs suggests that these lexical items possess certain patterns particularly in terms of colligation, semantic preference, and discourse prosody. The generic structures of the texts in the study are also found to serve the communicative purposes of the texts. It is also found that modal verbs are deployed by the writers to serve various functions in the three genres. In conclusion, all these findings indicate that despite being bound by a single event, these genres were clearly produced to address the communicative purposes as agreed upon by members of the individual communities of practice during that period

The oscillating subject in Don DeLillo’s White Noise

The dossier of work associated with my doctoral research comprises a creative component in the form of a novel, 1984 Did Not Take Place, and this thesis. Both projects address debates about the subject under the influence of postmodern theory, which arose during what Douglas Kellner calls the 1980s “theory wars” (1995, p 23). In this thesis I conduct an investigation into how the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jack Gladney, is depicted as reacting to the pressures of these ‘wars’ and how his “maneuvering for advantage” leads to his oscillation between subject positions associated with cultural canonical modernism and postmodernism. In order to determine Gladney’s characterisation in relation to modernist and postmodernist notions of the subject, I draw on key properties established by a range of fictional authors and theorists who have written on what typifies artistic modernism and postmodernism. I argue that White Noise depicts 1980s theoretical preoccupation with mass conformist consciousness, Baudrillard’s “precession of simulacra” (1983a), the dominance of mainstream media, consumerism and the decline of the transcendent subject, and that these themes play out within Gladney’s characterisation in challenging the hegemony of modernist preoccupations with authenticity, originality and individual agency in relation to the subject. I coin the term epiphomerical to demonstrate that Gladney represents the subject caught in between these conflicting cultural paradigms. This thesis compares Gladney’s characterisation with the modernist artist-hero Stephen Dedalus from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1992) and with postmodern hedonist-pragmatist Bruno Clément in Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (1998) to identify a continuum within the cannon of the literary subject in relation to the postmodern challenge to ideas of transcendence. This thesis shows that Gladney occupies a transitional place in this continuum, oscillating between canonical modernist and postmodernist positions. In a final study, I compare Gladney with Jack Blight, the protagonist in my novel 1984 Did Not Take Place, whose role as emerging postmodern artist is represented as a strategic game of survival played in collusion with his peers. Both White Noise and my novel draw thematically on the strong influence of Jean Baudrillard in the period and explore his concerns with the impact on the subject of an increasingly media-saturated consumer culture. While there are significant similarities in the treatment of the themes explored in this thesis, it is demonstrated that the key differences between DeLillo’s work and my own are, firstly, that DeLillo does not treat these themes explicitly, and secondly that my own work was penned in what is arguably the aftermath of postmodernism, rather than contemporaneously with the height of the theory wars. Some implications of these differences for the representation of subjectivity are considered

Exploring street art in the digital era: how the value of street art is co-created

How do street artists, and their artwork(s), become well-known and acclaimed in the digital era? Of course, not all street artists aim to become famous, but those who do seek to become renowned often struggle to identify the steps needed to reach a level of renown-ness that will allow them to secure profitable commissions, recognition within the street art community, and wider reputation and fame. This study aims to improve the understanding of how street artworks achieve renown/ness in the digital era by exploring some of the different perspectives of the actors involved in the street artworld; and looks to reveal and analyse the different types of interactions that happen both on and offline - and that influence the value of street art. A multi-method qualitative approach is used to access the different points of view of street artists, street art curators, and street art connoisseurs who make use of digital platforms. The study reveals the multi-dimensional nature of a complex social process characterised by value co-creation amongst both professional and amateur participants in the world of street art. The research findings provide a valuable new understanding and explanation of the social dynamics underpinning the value co-creation of street art across a wide set of key actors. Indeed, it seems that the value of street art develops via the interactions happening amongst street art crews, between street artists and curators, during discussions on digital platforms, and importantly from interactions that happen both on and offline. The research also identifies some of the practical vocational implications for street artists and contributes with some new insights and knowledge in regard to how creative renown and acclaim is achieved in the street artworld in the digital era

Reading Cruft: A Cognitive Approach to the Mega-Novel

Reading Cruft offers a new critical model in which to examine a genre vital to modern literature, the mega-novel. Building on theoretical work in both cognitive narratology and cognitive poetics, it argues that the mega-novel is primarily characterized by its inclusion of a substantial amount of pointless text ( cruft ), which it uses to challenge its readers\u27 abilities to modulate their attention and rapidly shift their modes of text processing. Structured into five chapters respectively devoted to subgenres in which mega-novels have been grouped--the dictionary novel, the encyclopedic novel, the Menippean satire, the picaresque and frame-tale, and the epic and allegory--it demonstrates how these books make substantial use of their generic elements but also include text that fails to either fulfill or subvert their most crucial elements, rendering much of their text into excess that cannot be deeply processed. However, mega-novels also contain text that, though appearing to be cruft, is actually quite important, forcing readers to subtly distinguish between the text that does require deep attention and that which does not. This requires readers to develop more sophisticated procedures of attentional modulation in text processing. Reading Cruft argues that the education of attention this process prompts can aid readers in learning to manage the information overload that increasingly characterizes every aspect of contemporary life