International Symposium on Jochen Gerz

Last weekend I was speaking at this symposium in Dublin, organised by the Goethe Institut at the Irish Museum of Modern Art. All the speakers were invited, being those whom in the last twenty years have published major pieces of research on Gerz’s work: Söke Dinkla, Marion Hohlfeldt, Guido Meincke, Renate Petzinger, Philippe Mesnard, and myself. It also featured those central to Dublin’s cultural scene, Declan McGonagle, Jenny Haughton, Pat Cooke, Lisa Moran, and Ray Yeates, among others. Jochen himself gave the opening address the night before, to a small but packed audience including the German ambassador. My paper was called ‘Countermonument and the materiality of memory: Jochen Gerz and Coventry’s Future Monument and Public Bench’. I was asked to concentrate on Coventry given my involvement with Jochen during his four years working on the city regeneration, branded by the city as the ‘Phoenix Initiative’.

Jochen Gerz’s now famous concept of ‘Public Authorship’ was engineered in Coventry around the millennium year 2000 – which we all remember as the year of the huge wave of public commissions by the UK government as part of the Millennium celebrations. The central component of the regeneration was a new ‘Place’, or plaza, which was to act as the missing public gathering place for the city. The masterplan was actually well-thought out by a prestigious and well-meaning design team, intent on creating new space for ‘the public’. The entire area was structured as a metaphorical journey (the physical trajectory being an actual pedestrian route) through Coventry’s historic centre, animated by the theme of reconciliation between the past, its industry and national self-assertion, and the present and its aspirations for renewed productivity and for international peace. Physically this would run from the old bombed-out cathedral from World War Two and earlier archaeological ruins, through a new boulevard into the new plaza (onto which a new frontage of the famous transportation museum opened), around a new spiral ramp and up to a parkland area: The Garden of International Friendship. This would, ostensibly, provide an ethically charged journey from past to future – and a prelude to the re-branding and marketing of Coventry city centre as a place for public culture. The reality, of course, is that (particularly after September 11^th 2001) the idea of a Garden of International Friendship was not so compelling, and today the area seems odd and somehow has not fulfilled its purpose.

The Future Monument is a 4.6m high obelisk made of a glass compound – around which, to the north, are names of associations or groups of citizens; on the south side are plaques engraved with the names of former enemies who are now, or will be, friends. The surface of The Monument appears shattered (is shattered glass sealed with a thick compound surface – a premiditated response to expected vandalism), and is lit up internally at night. Its apearance has been inflected by plantlife growing within it – quite hilarious, but something that has inadvertendly maintained its interest. The Public Bench features over 2000 plaques bearing the names of Coventry residents, and the names of anyone, anywhere in the world who remain significant in the memory of a Coventry resident. The Bench runs along the north rim of the square, made of concrete and wood, 45m long. Physically the two works are close but not contiguous.

‘Public Authorship’ as a title for a project – was open-ended and indeterminate in meaning; Jochen’s emphasis was on dialogue and city-wide deliberation on the meaning of ‘public’ and the role of monuments in the city (the being a countermonument, or what he called ‘antimonument’, project). The ‘Public’ in Public Authorship’ was not synonymous with the social…. It was not a form of art populism: It demanded participation, through writing, literacy, cooperation, and individual acts of self-representation. What does it mean for the public to ‘author’ – in the city? And what did it mean, to ‘author’ a monument? However, the genius of the term was that it seemed quite transparent, direct and beckoned a lot of public and media attention as it first appeared in various opening events and meetings in Coventry. When Jochen arrived in Coventry in 1999 there was no site for an art work, and he had no detailed plans, only two line-drawings and two questions -- ‘Who are the enemies of the past?’ And, ‘Who are your modern friends?’ The questions he asked the Coventry ‘public’ for three years before inscribing names of some of his interlocutors on plaques. The dialogue over that time hit at the heart of issues to do with the socio-political conditions of Europe, nationalism, multiculturalism – and during and after September 11 all talk of ‘our enemies’ was regarded by some city councillors are inflammatory. Yet it continued and Jochen successfully engaged with (and uncovered) a lot of the complexity of Coventry’s population, to some degree deflating the myth of a ‘general’ public. Go see it.

Jonathan Vickery : 25 Nov 2014 10:40 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

(You) Governing Tastes

I’ve wasted a bit too much time this week playing with the newly released You Gov profiler app. This is a powerful market research tool which provides its subscribers with detailed demographic information about existing and potential audiences for products and brands, drawing upon data provided by its panellists. It has generated considerable attention and comment in press and social media, with stories emerging about the tastes and inclinations of fans of Cliff Richard and Dr. Who, reflections on what tastes for Japanese manga may say about your preferences for pets and some surprising revelations about the fans of certain football clubs. Some of this comment has been, perhaps in the interests of a good story, strategically blind to the detail (the second of YouGov’s FAQ’s on the tool specifically explains why its information does not give a picture of typical consumers of the various brands, products or artists it asks about). This volume of media commentary, though, also reveals an on-going fascination with tastes, and the persistent assumption that they provide a route to know people in deep – and in this instance commercially exploitable - ways. This resonated with some issues I’m reflecting on in my current writing project on ‘dimensions’ of cultural taste.

Part of the fascination with tastes, for me, comes from a broader tension in consumer-oriented societies. One of the abiding myths we live with in that kind of society is that consumerism entails liberation from the social constraints of an imagined pre-consumerist past. Consumers are ‘free’ - although the quality of that freedom is contested - from being placed into the ‘boxes’ of social identity, and are instead encouraged to craft themselves as individuals through their consuming practices. This creates an assumption that what we like can define or express the kind of person we are. Much of the social media reaction to the You Gov tool that I’ve seen has, in a similar tone to the response to last year’s Great British Class Survey, been concerned with critiquing the labels and categories in which people find themselves as part of a general disquiet with being placed in any kind of category (‘I read the Guardian but hate braised endive!’) and, by extension, to dismiss the value of trying to categorise at all. The energy of these kinds of response might reflect an awareness that tools like this reveal the uncomfortable truth that we are not, in reality, as liberated as we think and that our tastes are ‘map-able’ and patterned in ways which reveal that who we are (our social class, our gender, or age or ethnicity our educational experiences, our professional networks) still shapes what we like even though we might feel little emotional affinity with, or might even resent, the categories in which we are placed.

The tool also raises interesting questions about how we come to know about taste methodologically. Back in 2007 Mike Savage and Roger Burrows wrote a prescient article about ‘the coming crisis of empirical sociology’, arguing that the established technologies of social research (the survey, the interview) and the glacial mode of academic production were being usurped by commercial techniques and more nimble, creative forms of method, including those enabled by digital technology, which are increasingly influential in defining the social. This profiler perhaps exemplifies this shift. Its cost would trouble a funding council, but its scale and complexity (200,000 panellists providing responses to over 120,000 data points) has the potential to offer a rich resource for sociological analysis – as much as fodder for strategic brand development. It is certainly a mode of investigating and displaying the social which has echoes with the visualising of tastes evident in Bourdieu’s Distinction, but its findings are presented with a clarity and accessibility which might make it a perfect tool through which to teach that notoriously difficult book. The question of who gets to make this kind of tool and for what purpose, though, raises a slightly different question about what is gained and lost in our understanding of the relations between taste and social life in this kind of activity.

Knowing other people’s tastes and judging ourselves against them is part of a well-established social game and, in some areas – newspaper readership for example - tastes are a well-established synonym for types of people in social and political discourse. Talking about tastes, in this sense can be a relatively safe way of talking about difference in contexts in which explicit forms of prejudicial judgment have, for good reason, become frowned upon. Moreover talking about taste can be a basis for social interactions, and for the establishment of friendships or relationships. Placing people and things into categories is an act of power, but it also has its pleasures – as anyone who has spent time answering and sharing BuzzFeed quizzes about which Star Wars/Harry Potter/Breaking Bad character one is on Facebook will know. This kind of technology, which effectively categorizes on the basis of probabilistic statistical relationships between inputs is increasingly present in a number of aspects of daily life – and increasingly powerful too, given that the categories in which we are placed might have consequences – in relation to the self-assessment of our health or of our ‘personality type’ in the workplace. These everyday forms of categorising might be understood as a more general strategy of contemporary governance. The impulse and imperative to classify and the impulse to avoid classification are in clear tension in tools such as this and the debates they generate. Whilst debates about taste might be a benign expression of this tension, they also flag up the limits of these technologies in separating data from people, and tastes from the bodies doing the tasting.

Whilst there might well be an affinity between the kinds of patterns revealed by this tool and inclination to buy related products, goods or services one of the things I’m exploring in my book is whether this is the whole story of taste. I’d also argue that taste is a more complex phenomenon bound up with sensory and affective aspects of experiencing the world and of moral judgments of ourselves and others living together in it. These latter questions remain important to understanding the consequences of classification – but they remain difficult to capture through measures of ‘liking’, however sophisticated they may be.

You can follow my research at academia.edu

David Wright : 21 Nov 2014 11:28 |  Tags: Cultural Policy Studies; Cultural Studies; Popular Culture; Sociology Of Culture Taste; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Centre PhD Day 2014

Friday 26th September 2014 was our PhD Day, which lasted from 10am to 4pm and found most of the Centre's PhD students and staff in deep discussion about a range of significant issues. The day was organised and convened by Dr David Wright, and during the course of the day we were joined by a Senior Advisor from Warwick Career and Skills Service and also Zara Hooley, the administrator of the new Faculty of Arts Centre for Arts Doctoral Research Excellence. The first half of the day featured an in-depth discussion on 'methods', with Centre staff each accounting for the role of methods in their research, and their views on methodology in general. This was regularly puctuated by questions, reflections and issues from the students, many of whom whose research projects are in full flow. After an agreeable lunch, the second half of the day featured a protracted discussion of the challenges of starting an academic career -- from attending conferences to research blogging, from networking to publications. Our PhD students are working on a wide range of topics -- from culture and religion in North Korea, to digital media in Africa, the creative city movement and its impact in East Asia, the Caribbean creative industries, arts practice in Brazil, Cultural entrepreneurship in the UK, the art world in Latvia, and many more !

Jonathan Vickery : 27 Sep 2014 13:20 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

All Roads Lead to Coventry

All Roads Lead to Coventry was a joint venture organised by Warwick Creative Exchange, Coventry Artspace and Warwick Arts Centre – the aim was to invite universities, arts organisations and council officers to share ideas about the longer term future for the city and the role that arts and culture could play in reimagining that future. Rather than spending day in meetings, we decided to invite participants to spend a morning walking and talking through Coventry, discovering and rediscovering some of the ‘hidden gems’ which are tucked away across the city (museums, theatres, statues and historic buildings) as well as encountering the everyday experience of a richly varied (but still compact) contemporary city. And so, on a sunny September morning in Coventry, our journey began.

The walks were designed by Simon Bedford, an associate producer at Warwick Arts Centre who greeted us at our starting point – appropriately enough, a car park midway between the city centre and the university. Here we were divided into ten small groups, each comprising cultural producers, academics from Coventry and Warwick universities and some of the senior officers at Coventry City Council. There was a buzz of anticipation – we knew our final destination (the EGO performance space close to the Transport Museum), and we knew that there would be some stops and talking points along the way, but the rest was up to us. Each group was given a map, a few notes on things to look out for and some questions to start the conversation, some chocolate – and away we went.

Our walks started from ten locations across the city, converging in the city centre. My own journey took in the village atmosphere of Earlsdon, the statue of Frank Whittle (inventor of the jet engine and a reminder of the city’s heritage as a centre of engineering, innovation and manufacturing) and the Albany Theatre, a beautiful 600-seat theatre run entirely by volunteers with big plans to relaunch itself as a centre for community arts. Like many of the places we visited, the Albany is hidden in plain sight, tucked away in an impressive former college which it shares, rather bizarrely, with a Premier Inn (see picture below right).

Other groups walked along the canal, visited Coventry’s music museum (home of The Specials and a back catalogue of ska and reggae), looked at the new Fargo development or took in the Hillfields neighbourhood.

Coventry is often identified with its history of motor manufacturing and today it is still dominated by the ringroad – an impressive feat of engineering and a vital artery for people who live and work in the area – but also a symbolic barrier which seems to cut off the city centre from the diverse neighbourhoods beyond. So it was refreshing to be able to walk the city, meandering through its many histories, guided by people who knew its hidden corners and byways.

All walks led to EGO performance space – here we were served a wholesome lunch, shared stories from the day and tried to connect our experiences of the city into a bigger picture.

It became clear in the conversations during and after the walks that people who know Coventry well enjoy sharing its secret histories and hidden pockets of culture and community. But for outsiders, like many of the academics and students at the city’s two universities (including myself), the city is hard to ‘read’ (and hard to navigate!). One of the challenges we confronted was how to connect the city’s diverse histories and communities into a coherent narrative – how can we sell this complicated, fragmented, reticent city in a world dominated by brash city ‘brands’ and honeypot tourist destinations? Coventry is a city which wears its history lightly – ancient cottages house kebab shops, the old city walls skirt brutal modernist buildings. How can we connect the city’s many pasts and presents into a new future? What part can the arts and culture play in drawing the city together and opening it out to visitors? What are the barriers in the way of what we want the city to become?

These questions will be part of a series of ongoing conversations between artists, academics and council officers and members over the coming months. If you would like to get involved, please visit the Warwick Creative Exchange website – we will be posting some pictures and blog posts from the day, and posting details of future activities and projects designed to reimagine the city and its culture. You can also continue the journey we started with All Roads Lead to Coventry by visiting Coventry Artspace’s City Arcadia Project, a series of art installations which reimagine a city in transition, beginning with Kathryn Hawkins’ sculptural installation, (river). Or use your smartphone to follow the Trails of the Unexpected walk, designed by Janet Vaughan of Talking Birds and built by digital artist and developer Ashley James Brown. Or just let us know what you think of the city in the comments section below.

Christopher Bilton : 17 Sep 2014 14:25 |  Tags: City Coventry Heritage Warwick Creative Exchange |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The ICCPR 2014

This last week, cultural policy colleagues from around the world joined us in Hildesheim, Germany, for the International Conference on Cultural Policy Research: the ‘ICCPR2014’. Six of us Centre colleagues were there. I was speaking three times and chairing twice – not an itinerary I recommend. However, it is a great opportunity for making research contacts and seeing what is happening around Europe.



I thought the conference was successful, not just because we found ourselves in a charming place having cycled from the hotel along a beautiful river pathway to the out-of-town campus (see picture above). I thought it was successful because the scope of cultural research was expanded in unexpected ways…. specifically with a critical mass of colleagues from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. The presence of these colleagues was a result of the commitment of Hildesheim Institut fur Kulturpolitik to advancing cultural relations and intercultural dialogue in these parts of the world – where cultural rights, diversity, and sustainable development are not just policy cliches but real areas of ethical conflict and political contestation. For me (at least in the sessions I attended) Hildesheim colleagues threw up a challenge – how do we to advance the cause of justice and solidarity through the world through research? Are we just all playing the Western career game of personal advancement, or are we sharing our academic resources with the parts of the world under pressure or conflict?

Of course – this raises some difficult issues about the limitations of research, as much as the limitations of our institutional contexts. In my Thematic Panel (and it also came up in two other sessions I attended) the question of agency emerged. What is a cultural policy researcher – what mechanisms of legitimacy or representation do we use, particularly ‘in the field’? And, who are the real agents of cultural change in a given place – and do they include cultural policy researchers? The Hildesheim ICCPR seems to be saying that the cultural policy researcher should be a change agent through using the opportunities of the research process as the means of advancing cultural relations and intercultural dialogue (through collaborations, symposia, research trips, exchanges and so on). The processes of research thereby become part of the dynamics of change; or at least, this is the idea, and advanced somewhat by Hildesheim’s work with the Arab Cultural Policy Group and various projects in Africa.

In the conference itself, we had the usual diversity and wide range of topics, from colleagues from around 60 countries of the world. Altogether I listened at various times to research that engaged with important political contexts of UN and EU, national governments, public administration and city councils, NGOs, consultancies, and a range of other civil society organizations. There are few academic fields able to broach this breadth of application. Generally, there seemed to be an increasing attention in cultural policy to ‘place-based’, particularly urban, research. The theme of the conference was ‘cultural policy’ and so one would expect less papers on creative industries issues, and there were indeed few. Our Arab and African friends emphasises the problems of cultural policy in times of serious conflict or the fragmentation of the state. There were also some attention paid to religion – which was good (and something pioneered by Bennett and Ahearne just a few years ago).

It was not that long ago that people could be heard saying that cultural policy as a category of knowledge and public management is becoming redundant – supplanted by a diversity of interests in creative industries, entrepreneurship and enterprise, new civil society and third sector developments, and so on and on. And of course cultural policy tends to be nation-state-based and Euro-centric in its values and ideals. Speaking as an unashamed Europhile, I found this conference's re-assertion of cultural policy very necessary – and a return to the old questions on the nature of the state, civil society and basic democratic norms, necessary and timely. As our host, Professor Wollfgang Schneider emphasized on several occasions -- cultural policy is principally about the the political contexts of culture…and cultural policy research should not just be a force for the construction of knowledge, but a force for social change. But it wasn't all serious -- we also had a drink with some old friends, and past PhD students -- do you recognise them?

Jonathan Vickery : 16 Sep 2014 16:20 |  Tags: Iccpr |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Why Past Television Matters

Hyperlocal memories of Dennis Potter: Why remembering past television matters

This year has marked the 20^th anniversary since the death of an important British television screenwriter, Dennis Potter. As the Potter Matters blog states:

One of a handful of British writers, producers and directors who from the early 1960's onwards pushed at the boundaries of what television drama could do, he remains an influence on many of today's most significant television writers. Dennis Potter most certainly still matters!

In our research for our most recent publication Remembering Dennis Potter through Fans, Extras and Archives (2014), we took the view that Potter matters to a different set of stakeholders in the cultural memory of television. Not directors, producers, the BBC, ITV, or the BFI, all of whom, to varying degrees have been interviewed, made commemorative programmes on TV and Radio, written editorials in The Guardian, produced exhibitions in London or screenings in selected regions, and have paid homage to Potter. Rather, the audience, the fan and the materiality of the evidence of paper and tape archives that accumulate in private and public collections, has been rather neglected. The desire to move Dennis Potter’s work into the schemata of high culture finds his television work publicly viewed in a cinematic theatre in London. This bears no resemblance whatsoever to the material living room conditions of the 1970s and 1980s where millions of people viewed Pennies from Heaven (1978) or The Singing Detective (1986) as not so much appointment television (there was much less competition for attention) but as a media event. What has Potter made for us now? How much will we be shocked? Viewed in a theatrical setting, Potter’s television is re-cast, not as popular culture (as it was), but as a form of quality television from the past, and as an origin of or precursor for more recent HBO experimentation in drama.

Memories and archives tell a different story and in their re-telling they keep those differences alive. As Carolyn Steedman eloquently puts it in Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, the archivist is in a ‘grubby trade’ for: ‘You know perfectly well that the infinite heaps of things they recorded, the notes and traces that these people left behind, constitute practically nothing at all’ (2001, 18). Only some of these traces and evidence end up in archives, such as BBC Written Archives at Caversham. Television has suffered this ‘nothing at all’ more than most. Early tape so expensive it had to be re-used alongside a perceived lack of cultural value has meant that only from the late 1970s was a secure policy and governance over retaining television broadcasts really practiced. Memories, on the other hand, of working in and with television provide alternative accounts, and the AHRC Spaces of Television: Production, Site and Style project at the University of Reading is a really excellent example of this kind of work.

In our research, we have been interested in the communities that have supported, assisted in producing, watched and collected television, and a case study of the community of the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire, described as Potterland, is an important example of what we would call hyperlocal memory. A very specific kind of cultural remembering through reference to the production of Potter’s works in the Forest that uses those works to shore up and ‘sure up’ certainties about regional identity and continua of cultural practices. We were not the only ones to spot this unique connection between Dennis Potter’s television production in the Forest and the continued legacy he has played out through the communicative memories of local residents. Not only is the Dennis Potter written archive now held at the Dean Heritage Centre, Soudley but one of our research team was production consultant for the recent BBC Radio 4 Open Country programme Dennis Potter and the Forest of Dean (Tx 11th Sept 2014). It is deeply heartening to hear the participants being interviewed having the opportunity to express their memories of Potter’s works being produced in the Forest. To hear them incorporate past television production not into a high culture aesthetic of cinematic value but into a hyperlocal community memory to be explored in the homes, gardens and trees of this ancient woodland with all its ancient Rights, demonstrates that television exists outside the flow (as many television scholars have argued).

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 12 Sep 2014 10:42 |  Tags: Dennis Potter Television |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Art of Management and Organization

I have just come back from a conference at the Copenhagen Business School – called ‘Creativity and Design’ and run by the research organisation The Art of Management and Organization (of which I am the Chair). Apart from being involved in the conference planning, I was also running a stream (with Ian King, professor of aesthetics and management at the London College of Fashion) called ‘Fashioning the organisation in the creative city’. Awful title, I know, but it emerged from a stream we participated in at EGOS 2012 in Helsinki and organised by our friends at CBS.

The photo above is one of the art inteventions at the conference – the German art collective ENQuETE Art [Experimental Nonpartisan Questioning of Enduring Technologies in the Economy – it sounds better in German, believe me!]. These are four robotic creatures that are replete with sensors and able to interact with the conference audience, all the while performing a role in a drama (the loud speaker component bleats out rhetoric).

Our stream attempted to explore ‘fashion’ and the fashioning of the body (as style, expression, identity, medium of knowledge) in organizational life, with particular reference to the new cultural identity, policy and urbanisation of cities. The backround for this urban cultural dimension was discussions around the ‘new model worker’ (and ‘creative class’, etc.: Florida, 2002; 2005), new mobile ‘cultural creatives’ (Ray and Anderson, 2000), ‘bourgeois bohemians’ (Brooks, 2000), all situated within the new urbane ‘economy of the inner city’ (Hutton, 2002). Fashion is not just about clothes; it is the deep structure of the consumer economy, and an economy whose multiple foci are the world’s largest cities (now routinely referred to as fashion city, media city, creative city, ‘smart’ city, so on). The term ‘fashion’ is intriguing – so associated with the global circulation of ‘catwalk’ imagery and celebrity designers, and yet in reality is much more. It is a form of implicit cultural policy (a global cultural order for the world’s largest trades -- the garment trade, along with ‘accessories’). Yet the models, templates, patterns, visual and symbolic communication that determines the actual shape and aesthetics of fashion items (from clothes to bags) often emerge from the intimate creativity of the designers studio and his company. Fashion is both art and commerce, supply and demand, retailer and consumer; it is ‘a mystery’ (Esposito, 2011: Czarniawska, 2011). Last year Ian and me published a paper in the Scandinavian Journal of Management on this subject, pondering why fashion is still derided within mainstream cultural research.

Apart from organising the stream, we also contributed a paper – which attempted to be multi-media insofar as I screened an edited version of a film as I talked my way through it. The paper was called 'An urban phenomenology of fabric: on Wim Wenders' 'Notebooks on Cities and Clothes'. The film was Wenders 1989 documentary, which, I must admit, some find very tedious. To me (when I first saw it in 1989!), was a revelation. I have since wanted to revisit the film and say something about it – about how Wenders, who at the time had little interest in fashion, through the process of making the documentary uncovered something quite profound about its social and aesthetic meaning. In the paper we attempted to explore the relation between fashion and what we called organisational urbanisation (why fashion is associated with cities, and emerges from the experience of urban modernisation), and what the implications of this are for thinking about the study of organisations. Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou, Wenders explores fashion through an intimate encounter with Yohji Yamamoto, the Japanese fashion designer. The documentary flips between Tokyo and Paris, exploring questions on the changing experience of the city and human identity. We took ‘phenomenology’ as the subject of the paper’s method – I say subject as the paper doesn’t ‘do’ phenomenology, it just uses it as a framework to think deeper on the relation between the body, perception/experience and environment (in this case, the city). The ‘fabric’ aspect relates to Yamamoto’s method of design, which begins with his experience of touch and feeling the material, as well as his reflections on the material conditions of human identity. The paper will be published in October by CBS in the conference proceedings.

Jonathan Vickery : 01 Sep 2014 17:38 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

'Cultural Intermediaries' in context

Very pleased this week to receive a copy of a new edited collection to which I have contributed. The Cultural Intermediaries Reader, edited by Jennifer Smith Maguire and Julian Matthews provides a comprehensive and critical overview of an influential concept in theoretical and empirical research on the creative industries. Identified by Pierre Bourdieu as strategically significant figures in in the field of culture in the France of the 1960s, ‘cultural intermediaries’ were members of those then ‘new’ occupations – advertising, marketing, public relations etc. which were concerned with the supply of ‘symbolic goods and services’ and engaged in the processes of identifying, shaping and circulating tastes for new products and lifestlyes. In the fifty years since, such industries have become even more significant, both in their relative scale and in their apparent sophistication. Workers in them have also, through such assumed characteristics as their creativity, dynamism, and their blurring of distictions between work and leisure become models for workers in other industries. An accompanying valorisation of youth subcultures, new technologies and emerging forms of urban living has appeared to place these kinds of workers in the vanguard of social and cultural life – although some well-placed satire has also helped to prick the more grandiose claims made for their significance.

The essays in this collection provide a timely critique of the original concept and also point to some developments of the theoretical language, drawing from the now far more established field of cultural economy which has complicated the distance between cultural production and consumption which the figure of an intermediary depends on. Contributions from the editors, and from influential voices in the field including Liz Mcfall, Sean Nixon and Toby Miller unpick and critique the claims made for cultural intermediaries and for labour in the ‘creative economy’ more generally. These essays are complemented by case studies of empirical work in specific fields of mediation including from Liz Moor on Branding, Victoria Durrer and Dave O'Brien on Arts Promotion and from Warwick’s own Lynne Pettinger on fashion retail.

My own contribution is also in this latter camp and provided a welcome opportunity to revisit research originally undertaken as part of my PhD into workers in the retail book industry in the early noughties in the light of the developments in this field since. Most significant here is the increasing dominance of online forms of retail and the accompanying digital means of mediation. The rise of online retailing was arguably a continuation of a story that had begun much earlier in this particular field. In the UK and US large retail chains had, since the early 90s dominated the book retail landscape, taking advantage of the rational and logistical technologies of modern retailing to reconstruct a field with a long history of shaping literary tastes. Such chains placed smaller stores who were unable to benefit from economies of scale in their negotiations with publishers under particular pressure, and shifted the power relations in the book industry away from publishers and towards powerful retailers and supermarkets able to pile ‘em high and, following the end of price maintenance policies protecting books from the market in the early 90s, sell ‘em cheap. The rise of Amazon effectively beat these firms at their own game, combining the logistical power of computing technology with a mail order - and then through Kindle and e-books, a digital- mode of delivery which physical stores can't compete with in terms of either space or price.

One consequence of this story is the change in the role of the book shop worker. Once imagined as a ‘profession’ amongst service work, and even as a means of entry into the publishing industry, the re-organisation of book retail over the last thirty years has also arguably involved processes of deskilling of its workers. The booksellers of the past might have been intermediaries in the classic sense, taste- makers whose expertise and enthusiasm enabled them to provide guidance to their customers. Processes of rationalisation have undermined the power of that expertise - for better or worse - such that the bulk of the day-to-day work becomes passing a barcoded product, linked to a electronically organised centrally managed stock-database through a till on behalf of a consumer who knows what s/he wants. Workers and firms in my study were often able to negotiate the tensions in this process. Workers were able to insulate themselves from the low pay and insecurity of service work through the pleasures of working with things they loved. Firms were able to use worker enthusiasm as a resource in shaping the semiotic meaning of the shop space – so crucial, so the story goes, to the ‘experience economy’. This accommodation is threatened by the digital context in which the apparently rational calculative consumer meets the algorithmic means of recommendation of the digital retailer, rendering any form of face-to-face mediation at best marginal and at worse an expensive indulgence.

The on-going consequences for these changes for cultural workers and for processes of cultural consumption – in this and equivalent fields - are yet to be worked out. The essays in this book should give students and researchers some useful context to understand the processes at play and provide the theoretical and methodological tools to help think them through in the future.

You can follow my research, including links to the original articles about bookshop work via academia.edu and see other publications via my author page on Warwick's WRAP repository.

David Wright : 28 Aug 2014 12:59 |  Tags: Cultural Intermediaries; Cultural Work; Media Research Taste; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The second meeting of the Cultural Economy Network

During the last week of July, the Cultural Economy Network [CEN] held their second meeting – in Monash’s Prato facility in Tuscany, Central Italy. The inaugeral meeting was in Shanghai in November 2013 (see my blog of 2013). The week of the 28^th of July began with a symposium called ‘Prato Creative City’, and while not directly connected to CEN, it was co-organised by CEN director Justin O’Connor and featured presentations from a number of CEN members.

The members present at this meeting (which we will hold twice a year) were Helene George (Australia), Anna Carla Fonseca (Brazil), Haili Ma (China/UK), Eric Poettschacher (Germany), Kate Oakley (UK), Tom Fleming (UK), Andy Pratt (UK), Carlos J. Villaseñor Anaya (Mexico), Cornelia Dümcke (Germany), Hans Mommaas (Netherlands), Antoine Guibert (Canada/ Québec), Jordi Pascaul (Spain/Catalonia), Montse Galí (Spain/Catalonia), Christine Merkel (Germany), Avril Joffe (South Africa), Mike Van Graan (South Africa), and with apologies from CEN members not able to be present, Danielle Cliché (UNESCO) and professors Wang Jie and Yin Qinghong (Shanghai).

Our tasks at this meeting were (i) to define ‘cultural economy’ as a field of 'cultural' (not economics) policy critique and find a consensus in the group on our intellectual mission; and (ii) outline a strategy. The meeting is a unique gathering of UNESCO experts, cultural consultants, policy researchers and academics. The breadth of experience in the group is huge, and at times made me feel half my age! And yet, through the extraordinary diversity emerged a palpable sense of community, and as we all aired our various viewpoints, we all agreed that a new voice is needed for a critical approach to global issues in cultural policy and creative industries. We will soon be publishing a website, through which a lot of both individual and collective activities will be posted, along with emerging research and publication plans.

The research questions that will be driving our debates and projects will probably revolve around issues like (i) the construction of the concept of 'economy' and its appropriation in cultural discourse; (ii) the discourse of creative economy and its appropriation by agencies and governments around the world; (iii) the ways in which 'creativity' policy discourse has mis-identified and suppressed 'culture' and its social potential; (iv) the stalled advocacy of 'culture' in global policy frameworks, such as the UN's post-2015 Agenda; (v) the significance of the particular cultural projects, artistic interventions, development NGO and city-based urban innovations (the CEN members are involved in) for generating intellectual content for a recharged critical cultural policy discourse. Can we 'shape' the political imaginary around culture, and how? Where?

Jonathan Vickery : 01 Aug 2014 13:47 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

My visit to Shanghai International Studies University [SISU], 17th July 2014

This is a clip of a page of the SISU website. SISU is a small yet elite institution specifically charged by central Government for (among other things) international academic relations and comparative research on foreign countries. In the past it has supplied the Chinese government with civil and diplomatic service staff, along with many of its graduates who are sent to work in embassies and agencies around the world. I have visited SISU before – the last time organising a seminar with my generous host and counterpart Professor Jian Gao and Assistant Professor (and CAL Warwick graduate) Dr Zhou Xiaozhou. Our last seminar served to scope out some research collaboration – and in my talk I put to them a number of questions (speaking, I hasten to add, as a neophyte on China studies): how is culture changing in China, or ‘evolving’ alongside an enduring communist party system? How are each of the arts or literature developing – and according to what (aesthetics, style, audiences, ideas and subjects, etc.)? Does China have a ‘public sphere’, and what role does culture play in that? How are ideas or debates transmitted, and how do citizens participate in ongoing changes in Chinese cultural life? We also discussed the growing ‘cultural economy’ in China – where ‘economy’ is becoming a huge component of political rhetoric. In China it is curious how, given the enduring strength of the communist social system, how the Government seems to assume that capitalism and its consumer markets can be completely managed and tamed for the good of the People’s Republic.

I have been fascinated by the recent history of China – and the question of the fate and meaning of ‘culture’ in China. The Cultural Revolution (c.1965-76) devastated China’s intellectual culture as it did China’s cultural and religious heritage; post-Mao industrialization wiped out a considerable amount of rural, local and traditional craft-based industry; in the 1990s, rapid urbanization and the rise of the Chinese megacity virtually reconstructed the social order and the vernacular culture of everyday Chinese life; and now in the new millennium, Chinese markets are flooded with global brands, the internet is threatening political as well as cultural 'security', billions of yuan are being invested in the creative industries and heritage parks...consumer culture and economic globalization is presenting Chinese scholars with a dilemma: what does ‘culture’ signify in China? By implication, what is the object of cultural policy? It is this question SISU scholars and me are now exploring for a journal special issue. I will report more when tangible returns appear.

Jonathan Vickery : 25 Jul 2014 15:11 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem