Novelty and the politicization of the creative field: Creative labour and the ‘open work’

Panos Kompatsiaris, Ph.D. candidate in Visual Culture

University of Edinburgh

Abstract

This article examines the ways that novelty can operate as an emancipatory thrust within the creative field today. ­­­­For this purpose, it first discusses how novelty is understood by creative economy rhetoric and demonstrates the ways that this understanding is incorporated in the actual production of works associated with the field. Whereas creative economy increasingly embraces the ‘poetics of the open work’ and recognizes the creative capacities of the audiences, it regards innovation as a quality that principally advances forms of competitive advantage. This emphasis on ‘openness’ often comes to mask the twofold exploitation of the audience- based labour and the (self-) exploitation of the creative worker. It will be argued that within the creative field today, novelty can operate as a force of emancipation only when it is articulated within emancipatory frameworks of respective value systems.

Keywords: creativity, creative industries, creative economy, novelty, exploitation, neo-liberalism, open work, emancipation

Introduction

Novelty, the quality of being new and original in respect to the past, is perhaps one of the most crucial aspects of today’s cultural and economic life. New models of economic development, such as that of creative economy, hold agendas awash with exalting remarks on the transformative capacities of novelty. No mode of ‘creative development’ can take place without the prime power of innovation, which tends to replace the obsolete and superannuated with the fresh and new (UN, 2008; 2010; Landry, 2000).

Novelty though, is not a neutral, self-validating concept. Something is called ‘novel’ only in reference to the value systems that are able to legitimize it as such. In the case of creative economy, novelty tends to be generally understood as a practice that has the capacity to generate forms of competitive advantage for products, cities or organizations (Florida, 2004; Hartley, 2006). At odds with earlier forms of cultural economies that had little trust in receiver’s participation though, creative economy – in a postmodern twist- tends to legitimize novelty by taking into consideration the transformative skills of the audiences. While novelty and creativity are still conceived as unique acts of gifted individuals, they also come to be regarded as social processes, amenable to the respective audiences, communities, consumers and so on (Harney, 2010; Flew, 2006).

This epistemological appropriation of ‘creativity’ and ‘novelty’ as ‘social processes’ brings about a considerable degree of ‘openness’ in the actual production of  creative works (Hatley, 2006). The work has necessarily to stay ‘open’ in its reception, so as to be left to be ‘completed’ by the receiver in “other circuits…beyond the workplace” (Harney, 2010: 439). However, as it will be argued the poetics of the ‘open work’ in creative economy rhetoric, tend to oversee questions relating to the political economy of creative production and often function as a masking of exploitation that involves the (self-) exploitation of the creative worker, as well as the exploitation of audience-based labour. The aim of this article is to highlight these issues, as well as to examine the ways that novelty can be critically reassessed as a force of emancipation within the current cultural and economic context.

For the purpose of this paper, an analytical distinction should be made between the cultural field, which usually refers to higher forms of art, and today’s creative field, which appears much closer to a postmodern-neoliberal conception of culture[i].  The field of creative production can be defined –at odds with the field of cultural production, which according to Bourdieu (1993) in its fully autonomous form was the economic world reversed- as a reconciliatory synthesis of the economic and the cultural field, where economic profit does not exclude the generation of symbolic capital for the producers (sometimes it is even taken as a measure for its reinforcement, e.g. in the case of Young British Artists). Despite the obvious risk of missing the critical impetus that the term ‘cultural’ implies, the term ‘creative’ is only preferred here so as to engage more explicitly with the current use of the term ‘creativity’ and attempt to reassert its possible critical nature.

Novelty and creative economy

Novelty refers to the quality of being new and original, and is often used to denote authentic and unusual qualities of certain cultural or scientific creations that come to replace or complement the already existing ones. The advancement of bourgeois society in particular, always relied upon a certain ‘creative destruction’, to use Schumpeter’s famous term, that is to say on the power of novelty to replace old hierarchies, institutions and structures with new and more effective ones. Yet, novelty cannot be objectively articulated; its attribution always depends upon the framing of the term and is confined by different, and in many cases, conflicting value systems. Almost any practice in any context can be attributed as a novel and creative one, depending on how these concepts are theoretically framed and by whom.

Within the creative economy rhetoric, the idea of novelty assumes a very prominent role. This model of development that is emerging since the late 1990’s, links in many respects economy and culture, embracing a wide degree of economic, cultural, technological and social aspects of development. Central to the understanding of this new paradigm is the fact that immaterial assets like knowledge, creativity and access to information are increasingly recognized by world economic institutions as potent engines driving economic growth and promoting development in a globalizing world (UNCTD, 2008). These immaterial assets, made widely available by new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and by the ongoing processes of economic and cultural globalization, supposedly replace the traditional hierarchical “top-down” architectures with horizontal ones that involve participation, peer recognition, self-management and empowerment of the marginalized (Hatley, 2006).

The main objective of creative economy is to “raise the question of the precise relationship between human expression and social and economic instrumentalism” (UNCTD, 2008:6). The ‘human expression’ here is applied not only in the arts but in a wider area of disciplines like software development, design, fashion and advertising, which together form the so called ‘creative industries’. According to European Commission:

“…at European level, the framework for cultural statistics set up in 2000 identified eight domains (artistic and monumental heritage, archives, libraries, books and press, visual arts, architecture, performing arts, audio and audiovisual media/multimedia) and six functions (preservation, creation, production, dissemination, trade/sales and education) that constitute the “cultural sector” from a statistical point of view” (2010:6).

According to data provided by European official sources, the creative sector represents one of the fastest growing sectors in Europe today, contributing around 2.6 % to the EU GDP, even more than the food industry (1.9%) and the chemical industry (2.3%). The European Commission asserts that creative economy provides quality jobs to around 5 million people across EU-27 and has a future potential for high amounts of growth (European commission, 2010; Office for Cultural Policy and Economy, 2010)[ii]. For countries that seek for a plethora of reasons to deindustrialize their economies, the creative economy represents not only an opportunity for job creation and new market formation, but also a way to regenerate, add value, and even gentrify previously industrialized metropolitan areas.

‘Creativity’ within this model, refers to “the formulation of new ideas and to the application of these ideas to produce original works of art and cultural products, functional creations, scientific inventions and technological innovations” (UNCTD, 2008:3). For Charles Laundry, author of the influential “The Creative City: Toolkit for Urban innovators” (2000) ‘genuine’ creativity in the context of creative economy involves among others, “the capacity to think problems afresh or from fresh principles; to experiment; to dare to be original; the capacity to rewrite rules” (2006: 233). The idea of being new and original, the idea of perpetually revolting against previous establishments, is perhaps one of the most fundamental aspects on the very core of creative economy.

Creativity as a social process

In contrast to earlier forms of cultural economies that had little trust in receiver’s participation, ‘creative economy’ tends to legitimize novelty as such through a feedback loop that connects the original creator to the ‘empowered’ receiver; that is to say, the original work becomes amenable to receiver’s ‘participation’ so as to obtain its economic or symbolic valorisation. In this sense, creative economy recognizes that creativity and innovation are not monopolies of individual creators, but are rather faculties that all human beings posses, as it is an “inner characteristic of individuals to be imaginative and express ideas” (UNCTD, 2008:3). As everyone is creative by nature then as the UN Creative Economy Report asserts, everyone can participate in one way or another in the creative economy. The audiences are no longer seen as passive dupes, as they were in the 1940’s when Adorno and Horkheimer were launching their overwhelming critique on the cultural industry in their “Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception“(1997); they have the inner capacity to communicate the work in their own innovative ways or, even better, to ‘complete the artwork’, to use Duchamp’s well known formula, and thus to participate in the general formulation of cultural and other landscapes. As Terry Flew remarks in his article “Creative Economy” (2006):

“The attribution of creativity to unique individual personalities loses sight of the extend to which creativity is best understood as being the outcome of a process rather than a persona, and how moments of creative discovery are characteristically the outcome of incremental processes undertaken as part of a team of people that posses diverse skills (2006: 349)”.

While this reliance on audiences’ creative capacities was mostly thought in art discourse as a means of empowering the receiver in respect to the artwork (Eco, 2006), in creative economy policy often means empowering marginalized communities in respect to the mainstream social order or empowering the consumer in respect to the product, depending on the purpose of the project. In this sense the notion of ‘empowerment’ mostly comes to mean participation and integration in given economic, political and social orders, agendas and ideologies, which in turn get even more ‘empowered’.

These conceptions of ‘empowerment’ share a similar ground-but different ends- with epistemologies that conceive creativity as a socially conditioned faculty of human beings, instead of the work of a single individual genius (Weisberg, 1993; Bourdieu, 1993; 2002; Hallam & Ingold, 2007; Biggs & Leach, 2004). Social anthropologists and sociologists have argued that creativity is a social process (Bourdieu, 1993; 2002; Harstup, 2007) and that the creative producers can never completely transgress the “iron cage” of social constraint (Friedman, 2001), as in the opposite case their creative act would be deemed incomprehensible or even insane.   The creative producer has necessarily to draw from “the total matrix of relations in which it is embedded and into which it extends” (Hallam & Ingold, 2007:9). Within specific fields in particular, as the cultural field for instance, each producer is amenable not only to the history, but also to what Bourdieu calls the space of possibles that a field offers for recognizing various creations as ‘creative’  (1993: 176). This has been very neatly demonstrated, as Bourdieu puts it, by the art objects of Duchamp, who showed that “the production of the producer as artist is the precondition for the production of these objects as works of art” (1993: 61). Along this line of thought then, creativity, and therefore novelty, can not be seen as the work of a single individual genius, but rather as the work of a collective, social and cooperative process.

The epistemological backdrop of these observations was never captured by and appeared rather marginal to mainstream economics and the cultural industries. Over the last two decades or so however, there has been as part of the ‘cultural turn’ in social sciences, a fresh and more general understanding and treatment of economic processes as “cultural phenomena”(du Gay,1997 :287) that meant to be analyzed with a particular emphasis on cultural standards like values, beliefs, ethical considerations and so on.  The idea of value as a collective process[iii] has entered the official lexicon of creative economy e.g. through knowledge management (Harney, 2010). Knowledge management is concerned more with the intangible flows that the product generates and is entangled in than with the product itself. That means that it seriously takes into account the creative capacities of the audiences, that is to say the ways that the audiences communicate the product and the ways they are able to redefine its qualities.

In similar lines, Terry Flew asserts that in the context of creative economy, “innovation should not be seen as a ‘manna from heaven’, but rather as arising from a cultural and institutional milieu that promotes innovation and experimentation” (2006: 348)[iv]. However, while creativity and innovation within the creative economy agenda seem to be recognized as social processes, they have in turn to be linked with economic rationales e.g. management, calculability, accountancy in order to produce some sort of wealth creation.  These economic imperatives seek to rationalize creative inputs and ultimately discover “the economic aspect” that resides within creativity (UNCTD, 2008:3). They seek, in Arvidsson’s words, “to appropriate and mobilize ‘meaningful new forms’ that are produced elsewhere” (2007:22).

The ‘open work’

Umberto Eco in 1967 called the creative producer, to consider ‘openness’ as a “positive aspect of his production, recasting the work so as to expose the maximum possible opening” (2006: 178). According to Eco, the creator should positively articulate the ontological condition of openness that resides anyway in any cultural artefact instead of trying to suppress it. This openness refers to the multiplicity of interpretations that arise out of the differentiated meaning-making capacities of the audiences, as “every reception of a work of art is both an interpretation and performance of it, because in every reception the work takes on a fresh perspective for itself” (Eco, 2006 :180). In Eco’s terms, a creator should positively incorporate these differentiated meaning-making capacities in the work itself, so as to be able to articulate the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the modern world in effective ways.

Currently, creative works increasingly tend to incorporate similar ideas about ‘openness’, and accordingly they have been called dynamic, de-industrialized, unhomogenized, in short ‘unfinished’ projects (Haseman, 2006; Harney, 2010). As Haseman (2006) argues, Eco’s poetics of openness are ubiquitous in creativity discourse and have already become an “important aspect of creative industries practice” (:164). As ‘open works’ they incorporate novelties both from the creative producers, who have to be engaging in respect to their audiences, and the audiences which in turn are invited to communicate and enhance the value of the product in the extended market.

The main difference with Eco’s ‘poetics of the open work’, is that ‘openness’ here is employed, not in order to examine questions on the nature of artistic production, but mostly as a means to enhance the symbolic value of the creative outputs in a globally competitive environment. This happens, as Lazzarato (1996) suggests, precisely because the value of the creative outputs or creative ‘things’ is not exhausted in the act of consumption, but continues to be enhancing the informational and cultural environment of the consumer. The product is not anymore a closed entity sealed in the cycle of production, but is essentially conceived as a product “open to interpretation and aesthetic judgement, a product in dialogue with other products, a product that is not used up in use but instead produces new versions of itself, a product that will be coded differently by different users, a product that will in a sense have both audiences and critics” (Harney, 2010: 436).[v]

In this sense, creative works such as a dance performance, a cyberdrama or a video game need to be ‘unfinished’ projects (Harney, 2010), if they are to survive and adapt into the new situation of informational capitalism (Haseman, 2006).  Despite their diverse nature, they share – in various extends- a common dependence on forms of social collaboration and innovation for acquiring some sort of symbolic, economic or other valorisation, as “any creative idea that is not imitated is not socially existent and has no value” (Pasquinelli, 2007:74)[vi]. For the creative economy discourse, it is a matter of mobilizing the creative play that exists in society at large, in a manner that will enhance the potential symbolic value of the creative work.  In this sense, as Sarah Brouillette notes, “capital is busily orchestrating the incorporation of creativity into itself”…. by “treating all social experience as a factory, in which the universal inclination toward creative play becomes the laboratory from which new products emerge” (2009: 143).

Therefore the nature of the various creative works that are supported and produced by creative economy, might then well be seen as less industrialized and predictable than the more standardized cultural commodities of Adorno’s cultural industry.  They appear, in line with all the ‘flexible’ post-Fordist production, reflexive, participatory and relatively open to modification. Novelty within the creative field might be separated into two distinct forms that in turn tend to become interwoven during the ‘life-process’ of the creative thing:

i) the novelty of the producer who has to creatively grasp the attention of their audiences, and

ii) the novelty of the audience, which in turn has to produce meaningful ways to communicate the product, enhancing its informational and symbolic capital in the extended market.

The ‘open work’ as masking of exploitation

Despite this ostensible rhetoric of openness, novelty within the creative economy rhetoric and practice is legitimized as such only when it succeeds in being communicative within the parameters set by the logic of cultural policy makers, usually aligned with the rhetoric of the market. Novel ideas, have to be able to produce useful social outcomes i.e. bring back financial gains, promote social inclusion, contribute to regeneration projects, produce competitive advantages and so on. As John Hartley mentions, “the consumer is “sovereign” to the extend that the value of creativity can’t be gauged until it is used” (2006: 29). Thus, whereas the “iron cage” of the creative industries appears to be looser in relation to the monolithic cultural industry, in reality it still preserves the  bars/boundaries (?)  which rather roughly delimit what is allowed to be deemed creative and novel and what is not.  In the context of creative economy, as Ned Rossiter points out “‘quality” culture is defined…as that which has the capacity to generate and exploit intellectual property” (2006: 108).

According to the classic neoliberal creed, proper justification can only derive from the ‘democratic’ institution of the market, which supposedly chooses in a natural way what is socially necessary and what is not. According to this line of thinking, cultural activity has to discipline its production with the forces of supply and demand in order to justify its raison d’être. The all-encompassing approach of creative economy puts under the same umbrella qualitatively different sectors, like video games and fine art, making them subjects to the same type of deregulation policy. In this sense, the complicity of creative industries with a neoliberal rhetoric which tends to regard “all areas of public policy including culture and media, in terms of a return on public investment” (Hesmondhalgh, 2007:556) has been repeatedly noted (Garnham, 2005; McGuigan, 2009; McChesney 2008; Hesmodlagh, 2007). Novel creations produced within the field are framed by the neoliberal conceptual apparatus that tends to reduce culture in its exchange value. As McGuigan eloquently puts it, within the field of cultural policy today “the emphasis is not longer on cultural experience but rather on ‘wealth creation”, and therefore “a discourse once recognizable about culture is now about economics” (2009: 156).

The working conditions of creative producers, in line with post-Fordist labour conditions, involve less unionized, outsourced, seasonal, temporary and self-employed labour, as well as a mass of disposable cultural workers often willing to work under conditions of self-exploitation (Hesmondhalgh & Sarah, 2010; McRobbie, 2002). The exploitation of the creative worker does not simply refer to the classic Marxian notion of exploitation that derives from the wage relation, since the value extraction for the capitalist becomes a much more complicated process than the one prevailed in industrial capitalism. For Nicholas Garnham:

“….. the 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 (2005: 20).”

These key nodes, as it has been argued by Variant Magazine (2008), might also include apart from the frantic obsession with intellectual property rights protection, the increase of the burden of debt for cultural institutions and cultural workers by replacing grants with a “system of credit or loans” (Variant, 2008). In such a way, the cultural practitioners “will be treated as the consumer base for a new financialised system of commercial ‘creative’ exploitation” (Variant, 2008). The stress on the ‘openness’ of the creative things discussed above, is also justifiably regarded as suspicious of masking the real conditions of exploitation, that involve the (self-) exploitation of the creative worker, as well as the exploitation of the audience based labour, which by supplying its creativity contributes not only to the much celebrated ‘completion of the work’ but also to the generation of economic or symbolic profit for capitalist minded enterprises (this disposition to ‘empower’ the audience is exemplified in internet marketing categories like ‘viral marketing’ and ‘crowdsourcing’ which quite literally abstract audience’s labour). In other words, while everyone is creative and thus everyone can potentially contribute to the creative economy, not everyone should expect to get remunerated for their contribution. The stress on the political economy aspect of creative economy can neatly demonstrate how the creative field through these various ‘outsourcing’ techniques appears very close to a neo-liberal cultural policy agenda, although it appears to be ‘participatory’ and ‘democratic’.

Img.1 “Windows 7 UK ads” (2009)

The empowerment of the audience as it appears in postmodern commercial discourse

Source : http://www.codenamewindows.com/?p=895 [visited 04/07/11]

Novelty beyond capital

The crucial point to ask therefore is: how the concept of novelty can be re-articulated as a force of emancipation against the instrumentality of the creative economy and the market, especially now that the notion of the underground seems to have become so problematic anyway? [vii] Put differently, are there any spaces within the creative field to articulate the novel in relation to other values, not economically instrumental, and if yes what are the qualities of these spaces? What kinds of autonomy do the poetics of openness grant to the creative producers?

Any satisfactory attempt for answering these questions needs to be contextually and empirically based. What follows here, after the brief bibliographical discussion, will necessarily be a schematic and somewhat speculative account for the questions posed above[viii].

First, given the contingency, diversity and heterogeneity of the cultural and economic fields, it is very possible to trace and advance within them counter-representations and roots of resistance. These fields are not fixed ideological patterns with unsurpassed ideological barriers, but emerge and re-emerge by feeding off each other during the development process of societies. Particularly within today’s ‘culture-friendly’ capitalism, many aspects of the ‘economic’ depend vitally on the qualities of the ‘cultural’ in order to generate surplus value or come up with forms of moral justifications[ix] (Harvey, 2001; Virno, 2009; Pasquinelli, 2010; McGuigan, 2009).

Speaking of the latter, Boltanski and Chiapello essentially argue in their New Spirit of Capitalism (2005) that capitalism cannot rely on the economic values that it advances for its moral justification, as it is a deeply unjust system. It is necessary that it draws its justificatory apparatus from elsewhere. According to them, capitalism, time and again, does so by appropriating “resources external to it” that come to embody cultural values and beliefs that are “inscribed in the cultural context that it is developing” (Boltanski & Chiapello; 2005: 20). In the New Spirit of Capitalism (2005) they advance this thesis by claiming that:

…justification of capitalism thus assumes reference to constructions of a different order, whence derive requirements that are quite distinct from those imposed by the pursuit of profit. (Boltanski; Chiapello 2005: 20)

While in post war Europe this ethic was to be found in the discourse of ‘social welfare’, in the last thirty years the ‘economic’, in order to adapt and survive, has incorporated the language of the social movements of the 1960’s, which is related to individual liberation, nomadic existences, anti-bureaucracy, etc. (Bohm, 2009). In this sense, the ‘economic’ today depends on inventions of ethical norms based on constructions different from and sometimes radically opposed to its economo-centric nature.

Similarly, much of the ‘Autonomist’[x] thought (Lazzarato, 1996; Hardt & Negri, 2004; Virno, 2004; 2009) poses questions on the productivity of capitalism today, albeit with a particular emphasis on the role of the linguistic relation as emblematic of the new era of relations of production. According to them, value for capitalism is increasingly produced today inside society- the so called ‘social production of value’- and not merely within the industrial units where principally the wage relation was exploitative. As technology automates much of the production process, value becomes more and more the result of societal relations and it is thus subjective and cultural, instead of objective and measurable e.g. in units of labour time. As the objective standards through which value is measured and produced in today’s capitalism are undermined, value becomes highly intersected with the communicative capacities of cultural and creative producers. As Paulo Virno puts it, the capitalist “wants to seize autonomously and freely produced intelligence and forms in order to realize a surplus value” (2009:30). The dependence on these ‘freely produced intelligence and forms’ make the creative field in its wider conception, a field where sorts of struggles can be advanced.  As these forms are principally conditioned by the very element of human intersubjectivity, they nurture ambivalence and thus posses an inherent possibility for resistance. As it would be argued below, the qualities of this ‘resistance’ and their effectivities need be contextually examined so as to be assessed.

In terms of actual creative and cultural production, David Harvey demonstrates in Art for Rent (2001) how urban developers and planners appropriate the cultural meanings produced by city dwellers or cultural producers, so as to establish ‘marks of distinction’ that will position cities within the map of cultural tourism. These ‘marks of distinction’ that make claims to uniqueness and authenticity, have the capacity to generate monopoly rents that enhance the land value and make cities more attractive to future investors. Capital is weak in establishing such authenticities by itself, as the extensive commercialization tends usually to destruct the social fabric with its homogenizing and superficial qualities. Capitalism requires these special artistic qualities in order become more competitive and keep on reproducing itself.  The ‘economic’ therefore within the current mode of production fundamentally depends on with the ‘cultural’ for its valorization, whether the cultural is translated as artistic production, as everyday culture or as simple linguistic communication.

If then, creative producers potentially possess a relative degree of autonomy, and if the respective fields in which they operate can potentially advance roots of resistance, the question that arises is what kinds of novelties can be emancipatory and what their respective qualities in this case are. More importantly, questions should be posed regarding the qualities of the institutional and non-institutional spaces within which these novelties can potentially operate, as well as about the degrees in which these contexts determine the qualities of innovation.

As noted above, novelty is threatened to become another buzzword if detached from particular value systems that also advance normative assumptions. What then should be reinvented on behalf of the creative producers is not the novel as an end in itself, but the value systems upon which respective novelties can operate. In other words, the novel should be articulated in relation to ethical and normative assumptions based on counter-hegemonic discourses that interrogate creative production in its entirety, progressing values related to social equality and justice. Upon these discourses, kinds of formal experimentation and innovation can be advanced at the level of the work, project or organizational platform.

Back in time, practices that advanced elements of formal experimentation and innovation within counter-hegemonic theoretically informed value systems, might well include groups like the Russian OBERIU[xi] and the Situationist International[xii], the work of filmmakers like Jean Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Harun Farocki, and instances of the ‘institutional critique’[xiii] of the 60’s and 70’s. At present, given the importance of creative production in the current economic system together with the all embracing neoliberal cataclysm that sweeps Europe and the world, the reinvention of value systems principally requires an understanding of the nature of creative production, and in our case of creative labour. In what ways does creative labour valorise the current predatory economic system, why does its precarious and flexible work model apply so well in today’s capitalism and in under what conditions does the aesthetic coexist with the economic today? To address these kinds of questions, creative producers can on the one hand engage in forms of self-organization that critically asses their practices outside the rigidity of institutionalized spaces, and on the other, permeate institutionalized spaces with practices that advance a contextual understanding of the creative mode of production.

In the first case, networked, non-representative, reflexive, peer-reviewed forms of self-organization, as the ones the Ned Rossiter advocates in his Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions (2006), can be invented so as to systematically reflect and understand the nature of creative practices. Within these kinds of networks and groupings the ‘poetics of the open work’ could be conceived and articulated according to ethics related to participatory peer-to-peer development models and not according to neo-liberalism’s looting participation model described above. In this sense, novelty as a force of politicization can exist not only at the level of the artwork, but also at the level of an organization. Examples of this kind of networked critical cultural practice in UK can be found among others in groups like the Carrotworkers Collective and Critical Practice, devoted respectively to the precarious condition of creative workers and the instrumentalization of the artistic field by a neoliberal agenda. The significance of these kinds of collectives for the emergence of new value systems is crucial, insofar as they manage to reflect upon their own practice and connect it to larger fields of social relations. In addressing this type of ‘holistic’ critique in its creative practice, the group Critical Practice states that “legitimate subjects” of critical enquiry are also “our research, projects, exhibitions, publications and funding, our very constitution and administration”(Critical Practice, 2011). This type of self-organized practice refers to the self-emancipation of the creative producers, in the sense of constituting themselves as political subjects and collectives.

Within more institutionalized spaces that usually carry their own ideological burdens, questions on the nature of current cultural production and its relations to economic flows can be contextually addressed, again ‘in the making’ of works or projects. An example of this kind, is for instance the curatorial project of the 11^th Istanbul Biennial (2009), organized by the Zagreb-based curatorial collective What, How and for Whom? (Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović). In an effort to achieve transparency, the curatorial team displayed in the catalogue the ways that the economic and the cultural intersect in the process of setting up a show, by comparing the GDP’s of artists’ countries of origins, by providing details about the legal status of the artworks (whether they were coming from a commercial gallery or not) and by breaking down the incomes and expenses included in the budget. This will to be transparent ‘in the making’ of the project reflects a desire to examine the institutional setting of the biennial not as a neutral site for art display, but as a space entangled in the contradictions that the art market, capital flows and national politics generate. In similar lines, the recent installation ‘The Marx Lounge’ by Alfredo Jaar in Liverpool Biennial and the talks connected to it provided an ‘open’ platform for social exchange that wished to negotiate aspects of the ‘economic’ and ‘cultural’ within a Biennial setting, which in turn is fundamentally relying on both in order to take place.[xiv]

Img.2 “The Marx Lounge” at Liverpool Biennial(2010)

Source: http://www.criticismism.com/2010/09/19/alfredo-jaar-the-marx-lounge-2010/ [visited 04/07/11]

Whether practices like these can potentially provide to capitalism a justificatory apparatus for itself (as Boltanski and Chiapello seem to suggest) is a matter of more empirically grounded research. If we follow Chantal Mouffe’s Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’ (2007; 2008), every hegemonic order, such as that of the current version of capitalism, does not constitute a totality, but a “temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices” (Mouffe, 2007: 2). Given this contingency of the social order, the advancement of cultural practices with contextual counter-hegemonic discourses is crucial so as to rearticulate the possibility of alternative social realities and architectures (Marchant, 2010).

Concluding thoughts

To sum up, novelty, the quality of being new and original in respect to the past is a context-depended notion that acquires its value within particular value systems. As it has been argued, the creative economy agenda also recognizes the creative capacities of the audiences as innovative, but most usually regards novelty as a vehicle for producing forms of economic productivity and for legitimizing dominant orders. The rearticulation of the qualities of the ‘openness’ in the form of work, platform or organizational setting principally require an understanding of the role of creative labour today and the ways that it manages to valorise current forms of economic development. Following that, openness can be articulated within emancipatory value systems upon which forms of innovation can emerge. The invention of these systems can take place either through the creative producers’ self-organization or through their contextual critical engagement with cultural institutionalized establishments.

Commenting on Godard’s call for “making films politically” instead of making “political films” (Lesage, 2006), Joanne Richardson states that there is a “need to move beyond the content of political engagement and consider how modes of production, forms of organization, methods of articulating meaning and the ownership of culture all form part of an interconnected whole that must be interrogated in its entirety” (2010: 3). In the same sense, the political dimension of creativity or the emancipatory dimension of novelty should not be regarded as self-legitimizing practices. These dimensions ought to be rearticulated all across the ‘making’ of artistic works, cultural platforms or networked critical organizations by exposing their own faults and inherent contradictions and by providing frameworks for thinking politically, reflecting upon their own practices and innovating within these parameters.