Reviewed by Megan Yarrow

My favourite piece in My Creativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries—a collection of essays edited by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter—is Annelys De Vet's Creativity is not About Industry:

I have nothing smart to say about the creative industry. This might be because I'm in the middle of it myself, not being able to see it clearly anymore. But most of all creativity can't be compared with industrial principals.
It's not about production, it's about reflection.
It's not about security, but about experiments.
It's not about output, but about input.
It's not about graphs, but about people.
It's not about similarities, but about differences.
It's not about majorities, but about minorities.
It's not about the private domain, but about the public domain.
It's not about financial space, but about cultural space.
Creativity has nothing to do with the economy, or with bureaucracy. It's about cultural value, trust, autonomous positions and undefined spaces. (151)

The weaselly worded, neo-liberal concept of Creative Industries was initiated in the United Kingdom by the Blair government and introduced in Australia in the 1990s. Since then, it appears to have been enthusiastically embraced as creative and/or cultural precincts have popped up around the country. A few years ago, a creative industries precinct was grafted onto the Queensland University of Technology's (QUT) Kelvin Grove campus, and entire study areas such as journalism, creative writing, visual arts, dance, drama, music and the humanities were absorbed into the Creative Industries Faculty.

Creative Industries usually involves obliterating unproductive spaces or communities, and developing them into revitalised and funky places for groovy, middle-class folks to live, learn, work, and possibly meet their life partners and breed. It's a label that signifies the supremacy of the economy, and the subsequent transformation of creative practitioners into creative entrepreneurs and art into product. Many see this as a good thing: "there's nothing sinister in promoting opportunities for artists to develop synergies with business and engage in some Orwellian doublespeak you stupid lefty". Others view it as a bad thing, in that it restricts the free association and evolution of ideas, and is nothing more than a hothouse for industry, and a real estate opportunity.

Interestingly, the concept of Creative Industries appears to flourish in colonial outposts and authoritarian countries where free market ideology reigns supreme. So it's not surprising that in Australia, Creative Industries has been adopted without much criticism or analysis. And as Michael Keane (the sole Antipodean contributor) points out in his essay, Re-Imagining Chinese Creativity: The Rise of A Super Sign: "The idea of creative industries is currently riding the crest of a wave, especially in China's large cities" (97).

The works of Richard Florida form a reference point for these essays, which cover an array of progressive ruminations on creativity and the problematic concept of Creative Industries. Some take a sociological standpoint (the argument for an artist's allowance is a continuing theme), while others are delightfully mind-bending. In The Murder of Creativity in Rotterdam: From Total Creative Environments to Gentripunctural Injections, Bavo (Gideon Boie and Matthias Pauwels) make a plea: "...for creative agents to tactically act uncreatively in the face of the aggressive usurpation of creativity by government and market forces" (153). But I wasn't convinced by Danny Butt's example of indigenous language education movements in his contention that, "We have the capability to effect change in existing organisations and institutions, precisely because we have the capacity to critique them" (208) in his essay Craft, Content and Method: The Creative Industries and Alternative Models.

Themes prominently articulated in this book are: observations pertaining to intellectual property and calls for reforms; the multinational stranglehold of copyright (is there an alternative?); and the creative commons.

In Out-cooperating the Empire? Exchange between Geert Lovink and Christoph Spehr on Creative Labour and the Hybrid Work of Cooperation, Christoph Spehr says:

Creative Commons does not transcend the legal system and is not pointing in any new direction how we can develop sustainable structure. It's a mere defensive license in that it explicitly refuses to tell how professionals and amateurs that attempt to make a living out of new work can start to earn money. It's dogmatic in this one message: abandon all hope and give it all away for free, put that funky CC license on your content and shut your mouth (89).

It's fascinating to read about the application of Creative Industries policies in other countries such as Ireland, Denmark and Austria. In fact, I couldn't help but draw spooky parallels with Queensland in Elisabeth Mayerofer and Monika Mokre's The Creative Industries in Austria: The Glories of the Past vs the Uncertainties of the Present:

National representation has been the main aim of Austrian cultural policies since the post-war period, however, this function is over-complemented by the significance of commercial interests. Thus the cultural field is comprised of big flagship institutions (museums, theatres, opera houses and concert halls) offering globalised programs of conservative cultural mass consumption: Picasso shows, philharmonic orchestras and their celebrity conductors as well as a handful of international directors. This sector is supplemented by the creative industries that embellish the surfaces of a globalised middle-class consumer culture (146).

Brian Holmes's eye-opening exploration of the connection between the multinational R & D laboratories of the 1950s and Creative Industries—Disconnecting the Dots of the Research Triangle: Corporatisation, Flexibilisation and Militarisation in the Creative Industries—puts forward some future possibilities:

It seems that the final frontier of knowledge-based capitalism—or the last natural reserve of energy to be exploited by the state and its corporations—is 'you': your body, your intelligence, your imagination (186).

MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries offers a wide and varied analysis of Creative Industries. This is a stimulating read for those who caught a whiff of the opportunism and exploitation, and didn't buy the fanfare associated with bulldozing part of a suburb and plonking a bunch of expensive and ugly buildings to house a bunch of uptight bounders and grumpy academics. Others will studiously ignore this book, achieve tenure, and appreciate that they can swing by Woolworths (nee IGA) after a hard day indoctrinating the young-uns that Rupert Murdoch holds no influence over the editorial content of his publications.

As Matteo Pasquinelli says in his essay Immaterial Civil War Prototypes of Conflict Within Cognitive Capitalism: "Tony Blair is still stealing your ideas. Let's try to do another back story" (69).

MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries
(2007)

edited by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter
Institute of Network Cultures
ISBN: 9789078146049
272pp