ARC | A+D Working Group: The Arts and Economics

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ARC | A+D Working Group: The Arts and Economics
September 16, 11am to 1pm (recurring Wednesdays throughout the semester)

Conceived as a forum to advance graduate study and to explore some of the institutional goals of UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative, this bi-weekly working group will focus on productive and fraught intersections between the arts and economics. What is the relation between the art market and the greater cultural economy? How do cultural producers understand and articulate their position in the arts economy and in the age of cultural entrepreneurship? What are the historical debates around this intersection? What contemporary scholarly and artistic experiments are providing new models for conceiving this relation? First meetings will focus on The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A feminist critique of political economy by J.K. Gibson-Graham and Southern Atlantic Quarterly’s recent special issue, “On Entrepreneurship.”

Guided by Shannon Jackson with lead coordination from Randi Marie Evans, Christian Nagler, and Jess Dorrance.

What is Creative Economy?

  1. Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception”
  2. Gerald Raunig, “Creative Industries as Mass Deception,” in Critique of Creativity, Precarity, Subjectivity and Resistance in the “Creative Industries,” 191-203
  3. Markusen et al., “Defining the Creative Economy: Industry and Occupational Approaches” Economic Development Quarterly 22 (1), February 2008: 24-45.
  4. Howkins, J. The Creative Economy: How People Make Money from Ideas
  5. Gibson-Graham J.K. The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) 1996
  6. “On Entrepreneurship: Immaterial Labor and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century,” South Atlantic Quarterly,  Volume 114, Number 3, July 2015, Imre Szeman and Dan Harvey, Special Issue Editors

Notions of Creativity 

  1. Shannon Steen, “The Creativity Complex,” from forthcoming book
  2. The Commonwealth, Hardt and Negri

Art Worlds and Creative Economy

  1. Howard S. Becker, “Art Worlds and Collective Activity,” Art Worlds, 2008, p. 1-39.
  2. Possible selections from: Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (University of Chicago: 2009)
    1. “Introduction: Contemporary Art Inside Out,” 1-10,
    2. “Going Global: Selling Contemporary Art,” 117-132
    3. “The Postcolonial Turn,” 151-171
    4. “From the Desert to the Fair,” 133-147;and “What is Contemporary Art?,” 241-71
  3. Saloni Mathur, “Museums and Globalization,” Anthropological Quarterly 78.3 (2005), 697-708

Questions of precarity and labor

  1. Maurizio Lazzarato, “The misfortunes of the ‘artistic critique’ and of cultural employment,”  in G. Raunig, G. Ray, & U. Wuggenig (eds.), Critique of creativity: precarity, subjectivity and resistance in the ‘creative industries, (41-56)
  2. Andrew Ross, “Nice work if you can get it: The mercurial career of creative industries policy,” in My Creativity Reader, ed. Greert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007): 19-41.
  3. Excerpts from Richard Florida’s Creative Class?

Creative placemaking in the city

  1. Ruth Ann Stewart, “The Arts and Artist in Urban Revitalization,” in Understanding the Arts and the Creative Sector in the United States, eds. John Maya Cherbo, Margaret Jane Wyszomirski, Ruth Ann Stewart (Rutgers University Press, 2008), 105-126.
  2. Jamie Peck, “Struggling with the Creative Class,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29, no. 4 (2005): 740-770.