From Leigh French, continued
We believe that Creative Scotland will look to generate income streams through the exploitation of 'creatives'. Increasingly, they will be treated as the consumer base for a new financialised system of commercial 'creative' exploitation — indebting artists and exploiting retention of Intellectual Property Rights.
" [T]he cultural industries are seen as complex value chains where profit is extracted at key nodes in the chain through control of production investment and distribution and the key “creative” labour is exploited not, as in the classic Marxist analysis of surplus value, through the wage bargain, but through contracts determining the distribution of profits to various rights holders negotiated between parties with highly unequal power (Caves 2000). [For example, through the exploitation of Intellectual Property Right, as NESTA advocates & promotes] … [T]he political economy approach placed its major emphasis on the technologies of distribution, on the ways in which key economic and regulatory debates were to be seen as struggles over access to distribution under shifting technological conditions without any necessary effect on either the nature of the product being distributed or the relation with the audience. In particular, this analysis stressed the ways in which the profits of the whole process were returned to controllers of technological distribution systems rather than to the original producers of the cultural products or services."
('From Cultural to Creative Industries: An analysis of the implications of the “creative industries” approach to arts and media policy making in the United Kingdom', Nicholas Garnham, International Journal of Cultural Policy Vol 11, No. 1 2005)
Liberal MSP Jeremy Purvis challenged Fabiani over the "provision to provide loans for business enterprise, although we still do not know how that will be delivered, or, indeed, what priority the new organisation will give to business support — as opposed to acting as a grant-making organisation for arts bodies — as there must be some form of financial assistance and there will be a cost in creative Scotland providing such services." Indeed, a significant aspect of the financial crisis has been "financial institutions that aren't banks from a regulatory point of view but nonetheless perform banking functions." (Guardian Weekend, Dec 6 2008) It is doubtful a coincidence that an ex-banker, complicit in 'greed is good' demutualisation and deregulation of financial services, has been placed in charge of overseeing the creation of Creative Scotland Ltd and its transition. No doubt banks would like a little liquidity from the Scottish government via Creative Scotland… and the SNP is desperate to show an independent economy is viable at a time when it has effectively lost two significant financial institutions.
