From Leigh French, continued
Given what will be a shortfall, if not initially then quite quickly, Fabiani has stated: “If formed, Creative Scotland will add to the range of funding sources available to artists and creative practitioners. As well as grants, it will develop a wider portfolio of funding methods including loans and investments." According to the same Sunday Herald article, "A spokeswoman from the Creative Scotland transition team said: 'Creative Scotland will be looking at a range of alternative investment models, with the aim of finding and increasing sources of funding.' Tax incentives, venture capital, loans and corporate investment are all potential models previously mentioned by the transition team."
This is a fundamental ideological shift.
Before the credit crunch and the property bubble bursting, there was a received notion (via Richard Florida) that there is such a thing as a 'creative class' intensely interested in cultural goods of many kinds, which in turn gave rise to the idea that cities must 'invest' in and through culture; supposedly-benign terms such as 'creative cities' and 'creative clusters' have become increasingly prevalent as a way of describing culture-led regeneration strategies that appropriate the 'moral prestige' of the creative artist.
An abstract rhetoric of creativity has also become increasingly important to the fueling of labour markets marked by irregular, insecure and unprotected work; this argument in turn has had much wider implications in that it has pushed education policy much more strongly in the direction of a discourse of skills, on the basis that future national prosperity depends upon making-up for a supposed lack of creative, innovative workers. But Creative Industries policy, while seeming to offer a certain freedom of creative autonomy and self-realisation for workers, is in fact explicitly bound up in finding new articulations of existing power relations – the way in which notions of passion for, and pleasure in, work serve as disciplinary devices, enabling very high levels of (self-) exploitation, noting the extremely low levels of union organisation in most cultural industries.
This unqualified policy and theory using the term Creative Industries tends to be based on arguments which all too often come close to accommodating, if not explicitly endorsing, rising inequality and a considerable degree of exploitation associated with contemporary neoliberalism — and now its failure. With 'Creative Industries' policy there is a lack of attention to the way capitalist markets repeatedly work with other processes to produce inequalities of access and outcome in the domain of culture, as in many other aspects of society. Ultimately, the limits of the discourse appear to serve policies that reinforce both economic and cultural inequalities in our societies and diminish real social freedoms which remain enshrined in UNESCO universal declarations. Something the formation of Creative Scotland has no choice but to address, at some level.
