::fibreculture:: Is Culture an Industry?

[Tom Worthington]

At 12:26 PM 2/08/2007, Andrew Murphie wrote:
>...  creative industries - the rhetoric that demands compliance, the 
>tie-in to performance-based economies, to capital etc - demands a 
>different kind of creative work. ...

Seems to me, that creative people should be free to create what they 
want, provided they do not expect someone else to pay for it. If 
creative workers want to be paid for their work, then they have to 
accept being part of an industry and have to produce what the 
customers want. This applies to those trying to sell a book, artwork, 
or performance and to university employees researching and teaching.

As an example, Paul Kirwan talked about his special effects work on 
Lord of the Rings movies at the National Museum of Australia in July 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/07/visual-effects-in-lord-of-rings.html>. 
Clearly Paul is a very skilled creative worker and he had some 
misgivings about some of the creative choices made for the movies. 
But if he wanted to get paid, he had to do what the director wanted.

There are moves underway to kick start a film and video industry in 
Canberra. One of Canberra's major industries is education. So I 
suggested it would make sense for Canberra to produce training films 
(or their online digital equivalent). However, my creative colleagues 
are resistant to this idea, as they do not find training films 
artistically interesting. But the choice seems clear to me: produce 
films people will pay for, or not.

The China new media conference had a few ideas on combining 
creativity, industry and a little politics 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2007/07/making-money-from-culture-online-in.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml