Art and creative industries

Should every artist, dancer, musician, festival manager, poet and writer become entrepreneurs? What is the position of art? Will subsidies to art be taken away? Goodbye to fine arts and the artistic work that can’t survive on the market.  Many cultural organisations and institutions, journalists and artists in Sweden discuss the issue these days, among them the Swedish Union for Theatre, Artists and Media, who recently published a book on their views on cultural policy. Igniting the discussion is the work of The Committee of Inquiry on Cultural Policy that has the assignment to overlook and change the Swedish Cultural Policy, a work that during this year has been followed by problems and is being questioned for different reasons; one is for having an unclear distinction in what is art policy and what is cultural policy.

The Department of Culture, Media and Sports in UK, presented in 2007 a model that might be helpful in these discussions. The model explains the economic relation between art, creative industries and the rest of the economy. It’s a fairly simple model, but useful in understanding why subsidies to art is necessary and effects the rest of the economy. The base, the core creative fields, is the poets, musicians, artists, dancers and choreographers; the producers of art that need public funding to get paid time to do their artistic work. Without them there will be no cultural industry. It’s only if you have the core, that publishers have anything to publish, or museums has anything to show. And without a cultural industry, there will be no creative industries. A publisher needs a bookstore to sell her books. This has a value for the rest of the economy, since for instance manufacturing and service sector benefit from the expressive outputs done by artists.

If values like ”Art for Art’s sake” feels a bit dusty and not enough as argument these days, perhaps this model can be of help.

To see the model above in bigger size, double-click on it. Download the UK’s ”Staying ahead:  the economic performance of the UK’s creative industries”. The study and report was done by the Work Foundation in UK.

The Staying ahead paper is also commented on the Swedish website www.kulturekonomi.se, they comment on the circle model here.