Konstnarerna och de kreativa naringarna : problem med paradigmet

The questions posed by the Committee are ones that artists and their well-wishers are asking in many settings across the world. In the context of this ambitious undertaking, my brief was to provide a global perspective on how the artist figures in this economistic framing. On a worldwide canvas, what is the mutual benefit? Is it a win-win situation? How does the work of individual artists contribute to the way the creative industries are developing? Does the flourishing of the latter improve the lot of the artist? Now, before I even set to work on this brief, I could not avoid challenging the assumption that it is right and proper to accord such uncontested primacy to the economic calculus as the central policy issue. Is the discursive hegemony acceptable? As the discourse has evolved from the ‘cultural industries’ to the ‘creative industries’ and subsequently to an even broader category, the ‘creative economy’, all these terms have become the banner heads of a bandwagon that many ride for fear of being left behind, without realizing that as cultural actors they are increasingly becoming both instrumentalizing and instrumentalized. We know that the language of business has formatted ways of thinking and seeing in many different arenas, and that both ‘enterprise’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ have become positively charged keywords. But should market and ‘management’ criteria be allowed to lead unchallenged? Who would quarrel with the notion that artists and their organizations ought to operate efficiently and effectively? Yet, are the nature, extent and efficiency of their contributions to the economy the only values that the policy maker should choose to value? Is this the only arena in which they can deliver ‘value for money’? Aren’t there other issues that are just as central to the condition and contribution of the artist? Their place and role in a healthy democratic polity, for example. So the argument I am making here, even as I address the brief I was given, is that we ought to if not change then at least broaden and diversify the brief itself. There is a real need to shift the terms of the debate away from the economic alone, and for this reason it behoves us to determine other terms of engagement.