Two collections of texts, most of which were presented at the MyCreativity conference in Amsterdam this fall, take up and critically examine the present hype about creativity, the creative industries and the reality of creative work. A couple of texts stand out as particularly illuminating: Angela McRobbie on ‘The LosAngelization of London’ , she described how a logic of the ‘one big hit’ comes to dominate creative work and Maurizio Lazzarato on the ‘Construction of a Cultural Labour Market’ analysis how changes in french labour market regulation aim at regulating a value producing population that can no longer easily be confined to the categories of ’employment’ or ‘unemployment’, but must be understod as ‘a multiplicity in movement that has to be controlled in an open space’.
Their own blurb:
Creativity is attractive again. The Catholic church is promoting old creationism in the new guise of intelligent design; cultural entrepreneurs are invoked with the creative industries; the hypes of the creative class and the high-flying rise of the digital Boheme are consolidating into a renaissance of the creative. Yet at the same time, very different functions are attributed to the concept of creativity. In the tradition of the aesthetics of genius it continues to serve the distinction of truly “creative†actors, who are capable of generating and asserting innovations. In cognitive capitalism, however, there are also powerful populist impulses at work, in which the revolutionary cultural-political demands for “culture from all†or the Beuysian dictum of “everyone is an artist†are perverted in a logic of the total creative imperative.
find the links here: