Industry that pays, and art that doesn’t
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 23: Essentially Creative
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robyn Archer
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Robyn Archer's biography and other articles by this writer
The critical attitude
Strikes many people as unfruitful.
That is because they find the state
Impervious to their criticism.
But what in this case is an unfruitful attitude
Is merely a feeble attitude. Give criticism arms
And states can be demolished by it.
Canalising a river
Grafting a fruit tree
Educating a person
Transforming a state
These are instances of fruitful criticism
And at the same time
Instances of art.
– Bertolt Brecht, On the Critical Attitude
I take this opportunity to adopt a critical attitude to what I see as something of a hoodwink in current language about the arts. And it's not just semantics. It is an overarching brand that casually (and largely without protest) engulfs the arts and threatens to diminish their importance and wash over their points of difference. The consequence of this is that it will then be easy to starve them. I am talking, of course, about ‘creative industries'. They are perfectly good and productive industries, often highly creative and certainly deserving of investment because they have the potential to make a return on that investment and be financially sustainable. But what do they have to do with art?
There are certain articles that take pride of place in our museums. They might include a rare bowl from ancient Egypt, a fragment of tiled wall from Syria, a chair from the French palace of the Sun King or a vase from Han Dynasty China. These things now so glorified, and so electronically guarded, in our state treasure troves were in their own time simply artisan products – often made en masse. They were valued for their usefulness, not their art, and those who made them were either employed or enslaved to do so. If we now praise them for their beauty and speak of them as rare and valuable treasures, it is because either they were produced with a certain lasting but almost coincidental aesthetic accomplishment or because of their historical value in that there are few such pieces surviving.
While these artefacts are closer to what we may think of as creative industry, they are scarcely even that since the term ‘industry' implies work for profit of some kind: the word ‘industry' implies not just a one off, but enterprise that sustains over a prolonged period. In these examples, there may have been no profit (in the sense that the sale of goods would benefit the maker or producer with a wider margin of profitability than his competitor); they were professions into which the artisan was born and in which they had no choice but to stay and reap no more reward than mere subsistence.
In the case of certain objects from, say, Japan's past, many are tempted to surpass even ‘creative industry' classification and start using the word ‘art' in relation to such beautiful works. They are exquisitely crafted or painted, and we – wrongly – think of such beauty as proceeding from the kind of individual and original inspiration associated with art. Beautiful as they undoubtedly are, what we see are almost exclusively the products of artisan schools. The works are rarely attributed to an individual artist and the skill was learned through years and years of slavishly copying the master until perfection was achieved. These beautiful, very valuable, also highly guarded and cherished works that the public, when pressed, would be inclined to put in the arts basket are in fact also products of the creative industry of old Japan. And as it happens, prior to European contact the Japanese had no tradition of valuing art in museological terms. Now they share, and excel in, the global practice of museology, but that's a borrowed concept.
It is perhaps easier to see the Prue Acton collection, which has pride of place at the Melbourne Museum, in creative industry terms. And why is it easier? For a start, we know the frocks are valuable, but not as valuable as a pair of sixteenth century Japanese six-fold screens. Product appears in the public mind to edge closer to ‘art' the more expensive it becomes. Product certainly makes claims to art when it is one of a kind – and as such, the claims go, the product of individual genius and imagination with the maker then elevated beyond mass product status. But the clearest difference is that the frocks were originally made for profit. Yes, they were fun and original, and in retrospect the collection as a whole turned out to be a great historical record of fashion design and trends in 1960s Australia. But we all recognise that fashion designers do not make frocks in order to hang them on walls. They are made for a market.
This is a useful clue to the way we might think about the difference between creative industry and art. Of course, there are always going to be fine and blurred lines in any attempt to classify – and frankly, I would prefer not to have to think about a dividing line. My own tastes tend to be extremely wide-ranging – in music from rock and pop to the most angular contemporary classical, in visual art from strewn lumps of fat at Documenta to a slow cruise of the Flemish galleries at the Louvre – and to tell you the truth I am probably more inclined just now to gasp with pleasure at the ingenuity and aesthetics of Ikea's packaging than at any piece of furniture denoted as Louis Quinze.
CLARIFYING A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CREATIVE INDUSTRIES AND ART has only become a necessity in my mind because the term ‘creative industries' is appearing everywhere, and in particular in places where policies are starting to flow. Once policies flow, then funding and educational directives follow the stream, and then our daily lives and practice are all involved. So we need to know what we are talking about. Currently, the term ‘creative industries' is being used almost as a super-classification, under which the arts are supposed to sit. I think that's problematic, yet there seem to be very few voices challenging the trend.
Recently, Professor Richard Maltby from Flinders University proved to be one of the few. He wrote: ‘In the 1940s, emigré German intellectuals Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote a famously scathing critique of the commercialised popular culture they found in America. Believing that industrial mass production destroyed culture and produced only banal artistic monstrosities, they deliberately gave the Frankenstein creature they described a name that was a contradiction in terms: the "Culture Industry".'
Fifty years later, Tony Blair's ‘Cool Britannia' dug up this monster and renamed it ‘creative industries'. The idea began as a way to regenerate the discarded inner cities of post-industrial hulks or the working-class enclaves: subsidise a few craft co-operatives in an old warehouse, open a gallery or two and the odd smart café-wine bar, and next thing you know you have your own creative precinct, full of the aspirational classes on a Friday night, imagining themselves to be on the Left Bank in Paris.
Maltby has said that, like Britpop, the ‘creative industries' represented an exercise in national branding, a marketing proposition for repositioning Britain. Over the last ten years, everyone has bought the idea. It has come to operate as shorthand for a collection of commercial activities decorated or disguised by the notion that some form of ‘creativity' sits at their core. I would add that creativity sits at the core of every profession, and that the most effective incubator for creativity is art, whether it produces artists or not. A child effectively exposed to art may equally become a scientist, sociologist, engineer or homemaker. But art is the invaluable tool whereby we evolve a creative nation.
Creative industry products are far-ranging and many are exciting. They include design from virtual on-screen web applications to graphic two– to three-dimensional furniture, tools and entertainment machinery; fashion sits there, as does screen gaming, interactive display tools and projects, film and television aspects of screen culture and some music – and this is just the start. But all of them are made for a market. In the back of the minds of those who invest in them is always the desire to please an existing market or open a new one. The motive is profit. I do not use this in a pejorative sense. This can be fun, it can be stimulating, and its profits may well be returned to the industry for the sake of a healthy ongoing sector. But implicit in the system is the understanding that what is being created has value, that there are buyers for it and that the industry is financially sustainable – that is, the cost of training, creating and producing will be balanced by sales.
It is entirely sensible for governments to invest in this arena, and indeed there may be arguments to suggest that investing in this activity is more sensible than investing in traditional industries that have not been profitable for a long time – activities that require increasing subsidies to stay alive and activities that produce for markets already supplied by countries with more efficient means of production. It is also eminently sensible to start thinking about the kind of educational and training packages that will prepare an emerging workforce for careers in these industries.
It is every bit as important to consider new packages and incentives in these so-called creative industries areas, as it is to reinvigorate the education and training that will stimulate careers in, for instance, mining and resources-heavy industries. As Australia experiences a boom in mining, it is obvious that demand for all sorts of skilled workers is high and that we should train young people to supply that demand. So too in the creative industries. Why not?
However ... these subsidies, incentives and packages surely belong in the policy and funding area of industry rather than the arts. They involve industries, job skills and systems that, in combination, can offer services and make products – and make a profit. Why have they ended up in the area of arts and culture?
The first thing to be clear about is that in general, if a society wants to have art in it – thinks that having artists amongst its varied peoples is a good thing and enjoying what they produce is a good thing – this comes at a cost. Art, in general, is not something initially aimed at a market, nor is its prime motive to make a profit. I would almost venture that the most creative end of art, by definition, has no market at all, no value, because it is so new and perhaps so shocking. The fact that it is not yet understood and has no substantial following in its infancy is precisely why it cannot be part of a commercial market, and therefore requires subsidy.
Some argue that this is in fact the only level of art that requires subsidy, that once it has found its market it enters into commercial transaction with devotees who want it – governments shouldn't interfere in that commercial transaction. But art that is new, experimental and at the heart of research and development of new ideas and new ways of expression (the things that eventually do get nicked and fetch up a few years later in commercial applications) represents the very things that require ongoing subsidy. That originality and daring feeds creativity in all professions and sectors; those artists provide a way of seeing the world which is new. I will refer to resilience theory later, but this core and raw creative feed is essential for our survival.
It is obvious to all of us that, as in all endeavours, a handful of artists make an enormous amount of money (in teacher-speak, this is the mistaken justification for career-paths and skills training) and this is often about choices to enter early into avenues and systems that are market-directed. They make the break into industry: commercial theatre or musicals, mainstream cinema, pop and rock, advertising, the commercial visual art market. In all these and more, one finds stars and celebrity.
There is a second, larger rung of workers in the arts who manage to make a good living through their practice – actors and musicians of long standing, some dancers or singers (though their careers are often curbed by ageing), visual artists, writers, directors and administrators. And after that comes a horde in its hundreds of thousands over the years whose income over a lifetime never got much above the poverty line (like many great jazz musicians living and making some of the best music in Australia today) or those who abandoned their art to teach or take up entirely unrelated jobs in order to stay alive and to keep families fed.
All this is obvious. What is less obvious – though shouldn't be – is that none of them, from the pinnacle of celebrity to the artist who just couldn't starve any longer, would have been able to consider a life in the arts were it not for successive societies that believed in the presence of art and artists, and governments that chose to subsidise them. There has always been a framework whose very existence shouts loud and clear that art's primary motive is not profit. It requires subsidy. That is why successive governments have not only provided money for the arts and other attendant resources and infrastructure, but also constructed schemes to grant a tax deduction for wealthy individuals and corporations who donate money and resources to the arts. They understand that, even if there is no profit, most civilised societies value the arts. In addition, that investment also provides a vast number of attendant jobs – tech crews, caterers, administrators, manufacturers, builders, electricians, ushers, box office staff, exhibition crews, transport, and the like. The network of job creation through the arts is massive. There is an industry employment aspect to those arts that are not in themselves profitable. And there is also a business side because it is expected that, in return for their government grants, they will at very best keep their books in order and conduct their business within the financial parameters to which they have committed. It means that going broke and being bailed out time after time is no longer acceptable. Better governance and business practice have been part of the long defence of an arts industry. But these are basics and, apart from tipping the balance too far in that direction over the last few years (too much emphasis on business as opposed to passion, too many levels of bureaucracy), it's fair enough.
The main thing to note here stays the same – and I want to tease this out further a little later: what I call art does not in the first instance seek a market and is rarely profitable. This is what sets it apart from the creative industries. We all have the benefit of seeing what happened in Singapore in our lifetimes. In the 1970s and '80s, the pursuit of commercial success, a new modernism and the elevation of that island's status as stopover and duty free shopping capital of the world saw a great part of Singapore's heritage architecture torn down and very little investment in the arts. It didn't take long for that government to realise that it had created a city that was super shiny and commercially successful, but lacked a soul. Even the stopover shoppers started to trail off and the newly defined segment of cultural tourists was not attracted at all. Then the government began to invest on a large scale in the contemporary arts. It started renovating Singapore's main gallery and museum, gave grants and spaces to smaller contemporary companies and to individual artists, and began an International Festival of Arts. These days, the contemporary arts are thriving in Singapore, the new Esplanade Theatres on the Bay provide an intense focus of international, local and community arts activity, and Singapore is an interesting place to stay for a few days. For the extremely commercially minded and profit-aware Singapore, the non-profit sector of the arts became vitally important to its future and the state went out of its way to support it accordingly.