Scary Monsters: Hybrids, Mashups, and Other Illegitimate Children

Human creativity, like human reproduction, always makes new out of old in ways that copyright law has not fully recognized. The genre of vidding, a type of remix made mostly by women, demonstrates how creativity can be disruptive, and how that disruptiveness is often tied to ideas about sex and gender. The most frightening of our modern creations—the Frankenstein’s monsters that seem most appropriative and uncanny in light of old copyright doctrine—are good indicators of what our next generation of creativity may look like, especially if creators’ diversity in gender, race, and economic background is taken into account

Beyond Prometheus: Creativity, discourse, ideology and the Anthropocene

This article considers the strange confluence of the rhetoric of creativity and commerce at key points across the “Great Acceleration”. It argues that although the idea of creativity has its most common contemporary expression in art, it does not in fact emerge from the discourse of art. Rather, the idea of creativity as a specifically human possession emerges from the discourse of nature at the end of the eighteenth century, and particularly in the proliferation of natural scientific ideas about “natural creation”. It argues that if a global response to climate change necessitates a more enlightened remaking of ideas, industries and communities, then one of the ideas that must be “remade” is the Promethean aspect of the idea of creativity, and the relationship it articulates between human beings and the planetary environment we inhabit

The Effects of Workforce Creativity on Earnings in U.S. Counties

This paper examines the effects of local workforce creativity on county-level earnings. Descriptive analysis of the data shows that most of the high-creativity counties in the United States are part of metropolitan areas, and that employee earnings are high in these places. Regression results indicate that, other things being equal, workforce creativity enhances county-level labor earnings. However, the returns to creativity that we found can be confirmed only in the urban context. An extension of the analysis suggests that the creative workforce wage premium may be capturing the effects of "technical workforce creativity" on earnings.creative economy, wages, economic development, Labor and Human Capital,

Human capital and artists’ labour markets

It is argued that human capital theory applies only weakly to artists’ decisions about investment in schooling and training and about occupational choice. However, the same can be said about the sorting model. What is lacking in cultural economics is an understanding of talent and creativity, what economic factors motivate artists and how creativity can be encouraged as part of government cultural policy. Bringing social and cultural capital into the equation do not seem to add much in the way of understanding artists’ labour markets. A novel argument is made that the reproducibility of works of art in combination with copyright law alters the established view that human capital cannot be separated from labour, in this case that of the artist