Dragan Klaic Creatvbity Another Crowded Bandwagon Elia Brighton 2007

7/28/2019 Dragan Klaic Creatvbity Another Crowded Bandwagon Elia Brighton 2007

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DRAGAN KLAIC

Creativity: Another Crowded Bandwagon?From Divine Creation to Creative Industry

ELIA Teachers Academy, Brighton, July 2007

Abstract: The author seeks to dispel some of the accumulated conceptual fogaround the notion of creativity and to probe it in relation to the transformation ofthe economies in Europe, prevailing artistic ideologies and shifting modes ofcultural production. He offers a critical look at the existing cultural infrastructureand its capacity to absorb and nurture creativity and positions creativity primarilyas an ability to initiate, develop and enrich a range of productive relationshipswith partners and teams, institutions, funders, media, communities and culturalindustry.

Dr Dragan Klaic, a Permanent Fellow of Felix Meritis in Amsterdam, teaches artsand cultural policies at Leiden University. Educated in Belgrade and at Yale, heheld professorships at the universities in Belgrade and Amsterdam and was aVisiting Professor at the Univ. of N. Mexico, Univ. of Pennsylvania, CEUBudapest and Univ. of Bologna, led Theater Instituut Nederland, co-founded theEuropean Theater Quarterly Euromaske, and presided over the Europeancultural networks ENICPA and EFAH. He is the initiator and Chair of theEuropean Festival Research Project and active across Europe as writer, lecturer,researcher and advisor. Author of several books, among which most recently anexile memoir, Exercises in Exile, in Dutch and Croatian (2004 and 2006), Europe

as a Cultural Project(2005), Mobility of Imagination, a companion guide tointernational cultural cooperation (2007)and of many articles and contributions to50 edited works. Contributing Editor of the Theatermagazine (USA). E mail:[email protected]

I am spending this month in Collegium Budapest, the HungarianInstitute for Advanced Studies as a Research Fellow. The placestrives to provide ideal conditions for academic creativity. I am part ofa team of scholars who work on a book about the literary exile fromEast Europe in the 20th century. Exile meant for those authorsmobility under durress and continuation of creativity under verydemanding circumstances. We reside in Buda, in the HouseWallenberg, built by Swedish foundations in memory of RaoulWallenberg, a scion of a Swedish industrialist family; he used hiscreativity to stop or at least to slow down the killing and deportation ofthe Hungarian Jews in 1944 deploying various strategies, tactics,

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schemes, even tricks and bribes to outsmart Eichmann andHungarian fascists. Over 420.000 Jews were deported and mostlykilled since March 1944 but some 75.000 survived to greet theliberation in January-February 1945. Here you have it: creativity as aa life saving capacity. Ironically, Wallenberg himself was arrested bythe Soviet liberators and never came back from the prison. Swedishdiplomacy was not creative enough to get him out of the Lubiankaprison.

Diffusion of meaning

Creativityis so commonly being invoked nowadays that its meaninghas been cheapened and diffused. Once it meant first of all theDivine Creation, the deistic enterprise to make the whole world from

scratch.

At the other end of the spectrum we encounter fashionable egalitarianpopulism: everyone is creative, everyone could be creative, it is notmore than an act of strong will.

There is also the neoliberal appropriation of creativity as a factor toboost employability and corporate growth and jack up the profits.

Creative industryis a nasty oxymoron, muddling boundaries betweenartistic creation and industrial production, between non-profit and for-profit culture and twisting the original notion of culture industry that

Adorno and Horheimer used in a critical sense to point out thealienation of the artist from its work, its commodification under thecircumstances of industrial reproduction and the ensuingmanipulation of the audience.

Another current obsession is with leadership, especially artisticleadership. I am myself guilty of this sin: in the summer of 2006 I

circulated a preliminary proposal for an an European artisticleadership program but I am having now some second thoughtsabout the feasibility and effectiveness of such an effort. The notion ofleadership comes from politics and the corporate world but in ourcontext it reasserts the individualist, exceptional notion of the artist,overloaded with romantic myths. Do artists make leaders and still

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remain productive artists? Do artists accept leaders? I am not sosure.

How artists workLet us look at the circumstances of creative activity: artists workalone, with other artists, with artistic collaborators and non-artisticcollaborators. This happens in the privacy of own working space or ina a community setting, within a cultural institution or in a corporatesphere. In any case, the relational dimension of the creative processis recognizable. Often, artists are being perceived or imagined asloners, as lonely producers but in fact they require a dense web ofrelations and dependencies to perform. At the Leiden UniversityFaculty of Creative and Performing Arts we run a course in which we

bring in guests from the filed of culture to introduce their specificcompetences, those on which artists regularly rely, such as taxassessor, copyright lawyer, curator, critic, restaurer... and then wehave students trace and map professional relationships of artistswhom they shadow for a while. We hope they will comprehend thefunctioning of an individual artist within a system, even in multipliedoverlapping systems with stapled up dependencies.

Cooperative capacities are commonly assumed to be deployed withinan artistic team but a recent Leiden University research found thatmore powerful teams are less effective than less powerful teams, atleast in business. More impact and decision making power brings, itseems, less trust and less information sharing, reducing theeffectiveness of the team's performance. In contrast, less empoweredteams try harder and work in more harmony, thus achieve more. Thisconclusion needs to be tested in cultural production, in an artisticcontext. But the question that needs to be posed is: how much is theteam dimension integrated in the professional artist education? Notmuch, I would dare to say.

Anti-institutional bias

Institutional set ups seems to be crucial today for the artistic careersdespite the noticeable restraints and limitations of culturalinstitutions, all practically derived from a very narrow 18-19th century

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typology, driven by specialization and hierarchy. Those institutionsare today stripped of some of their traditional and automatic authority,disoriented by globalization, by the explosion of the cultural industry,the ICT revolution, rapid demontage of the welfare state, and thesurrounding demography radically altered by migration.

If so many artists are frustrated with the dominant types of culturalinstitutions is it because they feel being crowded out by managers,experts, technicians, intermediaries? By communication andmarketing staff? Deeply ingrained suspicion of artists towardsinstitutions comes from a common belief that they are wastefulbureaucratic, overregulated, abusive, exploitative. Well, there is sometruth in those charges. The institutional innovation in culture has beenstalled. The last big wave of settting up new sort of cultural

institutions occurred after 1968, thus almost 40 years ago! Not manynew types of cultural organisations appeared since then. In the last20 years cultural institutions have been forced to behave asbusinesses and to treat their public and artists as clients. Theybecome larger in a hope to draw advantages from the economy ofscale not necessarily applicable in the cultural production andconsequently they are having an alienating impact on artists.

Artists as empowered techno-pioneers

ICT innovations are reflected in new business models and economy,including cultural economy, but not that much in the public and non-profit cultural organizations, while at the same time so many artistsprofited from this innovative developments and mastered new digitaltools of cultural production, distribution and documentation.

If artists feel shut out from the arrogant cultural organizations and notas their stakeholders, they tend to become more nomadic and to actinside and outside institutions, in a for profit and non-profit context,

alone and working with the others, at home and abroad, developingamorphous and discontinuous career paths. Their adaptability toglobalization is to be read in their creativity of patching up a continuitythrough many discontinuities and syncopated engagements atvarious places and in divergent frameworks.

A small entreprenuer agaist corporate giants

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A much touted model of artist as a cultural entrepreneur seeks toapply creativity to recognize and exploit economic opportunity but infact enforces internalization of neoliberal ethos and ignores the twistsand challenges of artistic development, issues of artistic integrity andlooks only to the bottom of the line of economic success that onlyvery few artists can claim. An one-sided concept at least, especiallyas artists as entrepreneurs embody a fragile SMB against the virtualmonopolies of increasingly big cultural industry corporations. This isan inequality of opportunity, power, legal and business competencethat opens a prospect of systematic exploitation and abuse.

The current copyright regime is benefiting corporations that utilizecultural products and industrially replicate them for global distribution

more than they benefit artists who are the initial creators. At the end,artists are forced into part-time collaboration with the globalizedcultural capitalism in exchange of opportunity to assert part-time theirautonomy, be occasionally let alone, to produce on own terms and atown risk, for own pleasure and for an uncertain market.

Autonomy, not independence

Independence is a dangerous delusion while autonomy is arelationship, dynamic, negotiable, renegotiable, to be tested and

asserted again anew, on multiple axes of engagement; withindividuals and with institutions, non-profit organizations and for-profitcorporations, with public and private parties. So, it is not a status buta changeable condition, requesting flexibility, negotiation, repeatedrealignment of interest, values and purposes, resting on a creativetalent to engage peers, collaborators, audience, media, funders,cultural organizations, communities and cultural industry.

Shaping a context for own work

While artist seek optimal conditions to do their own work they areincreasingly required to shape a receptive context for it, esp. in acrowded, oversaturated cultural market. They too have to apply theircreativity to the development of programming formats and templateswhich intermediaries are often not able to innovate and launch. Muchcreation without proper context gets lost, wasted.

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Key capacity the artists need in the development of context isintercultural competence, applied to identify possible partners anddevelop satisfying partnerships, nurture alliances and master thedialectic of local and global. This means that artists need to think andact strategically and not piecemeal, seking to liberate themselvesfrom the internalized values of neoliberal globalization and rely on anemerging global civil society.

Climate change and its consequences: an opportunity

In this global context, a major challenge is to understand theprocesses initiated by the climate change and the debate about itsconsequences. As we, baby boomers, turn gradually into senior

citizens -- a huge potential public with much education, culturalcuriosity, available time and some cultural budget at its disposal --this shift also coincides with the exit from the period of doubts anddenial into acceptance that the climate is indeed changing because ofrekless human behavior. In the coming years new coalitions ofconcern will slowly emerge, in parallel with the new economicmodels, envisaged in the recent Stern Report to the Blairgovernment. New forms of political organization will also replace thediscredited and exhausted political parties, leading perhaps to aglobal civic movement that will bring changes in life styles andbroadly shared values but only if cultural production invents andspreads new metaphors and images of alternative modes ofexistence.

Creativity deployed in the cultural production in opposition of thefossil-fuel dependency seek to imagine a sustainable society, basedon energy conservation rather than waste and on alternative energysupplies that is an opportunity for many artists to get in synch withthe civil society and assert the critical capacity of arts instead of the

celebratory energy that the cultural industry depends on to market thefeeling-good sentiment. Not the creativity invested in the identityenforcing, prompted by politics, and not creativity measured byeconomic yardstick only, but creativity turned towards the utopianhorizons. Utopia has been for centuries an eminent artistic domain.

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Who else, if not the artists will be providers of utopias as alterativeversions of the future? Who else, if not the artists will be thecriticaster of the quick-fix consumerist pseudo-utopias?Dragan Klaic

This article is derived from a speech given at the ELIA TeachersAcademy in Brighton, UK in July 2007.

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Dragan Klaic Creatvbity Another Crowded Bandwagon Elia Brighton 2007