There was a bit of Dave Harte’s Birmingham’s Creative Industries – the ‘business case’ post that really caught my eye – something that I hadn’t noticed/thought about before.
First the set-up:
I think this position [that creative industries need handouts] comes from the confusion of thinking that the subsidised Arts sector has much to do with the Creative Industries sector. There’s overlap of course but in Birmingham the two most significant contributors to Creative Industries value have been Architecture (32% of GVA in 2004) and Software (35% of GVA in 2004). Music and Performing Arts are low-value sectors in economic terms (1.1% of GVA in 2004).
And, keeping in mind that 1.1%, here’s the bit that hadn’t occurred before:
Writing in 2006, Calvin Taylor noted that it was:
“significant that the arts lobby mostly uses the creative industry tag. Very few other sector bodies, representing other components of what are taken to be the creative industries, use the tag in their sectors promotion work.”
I pointed this out to Pete Ashton who happened to be sat a couple of desks away at the time and he’s run with it on his own blog:
it’s no surprise to me that the “subsidised Arts sector” are the major cheerleaders for the Creative Industries in the West Midlands given they operate on a financial knife-edge and will grab at every opportunity to raise funds from wherever possible. Meanwhile those who make their income from international deals and multi-million dollar sales don’t feel the need to lobby the local chamber of commerce
Although I wouldn’t go along with that entirely – the arts sector is often chastised for not having a particularly strong/coherent lobbying voice around these parts (that’s partly what Creative Republic was set up to solve) and the games industry have been doing some quite high-profile and temporarily successful lobbying recently, especially around tax breaks. However, I agree with the general thrust and would pick out this bit too:
The other fantastically vague label that everyone’s keen to attach to them at the moment is “digital”
Which ties in with a bugbear of mine – that in some conversations the words ‘creative’ and ‘digital’ seem to have become oddly interchangeable, when they’re really not. It’s just there’s perceived to be funding available for ‘digital stuff’ (often quite useless ‘digital stuff’ at that) so that’s what dominates the phrasing of the conversation.
Oh, and I’ve just seen that D’log has chipped in with some analysis of Dave Harte’s stats. Cor, it’s like the good old days of blogging with comments, discussion and all sorts going on (it’s the same voices speaking up too).
Anyway, this is all a bit heavy and texty. In the next post there will be pictures.
Dave Harte has opened up an important discussion, as what he alludes to is the way that the term ‘creative industries’, which was originally – via Nick Garnham/ the Livingstone led GLC and in other cities like Birmingham and Sheffield – an importantly politicised term to argue for greater cultural democracy, a recognition of the economic and symbolic value of culture and a spur to see, if a parallel cultural and alternative economy to the monopolistic mainstream could be established was later hijacked and used as a term to describe the wider totality of the creative economy.
Now that the period of growth has stopped and the economy and the public sector are in reverse, the fault lines will appear again more starkly between the brazenly commercial and the breezily cultural.