Reclaiming culture: challenging the 'experience economy'

This presentation explores the contradictions in the use of 'creativity' as a tool of economic development. The past two decades have seen the rise of concepts such as the "experience economy" and the "creative oriented urban development". Culture has been re-configured in the political sense from a sector that draws on surplus production into a sector that creates economic value. The paper notes that the mass commercialisation of culture and the co-optation of the rebellious aspects of creativity for profitable gain can be traced at least as far back as the 1960s CE. What is evident more recently, as the examples given demonstrate, is an ever more accelerated and economically diverging phenomenon in which creative workers continue to be unable, or unwilling, to seek out and capture the full economic value that their labour produce