The bigger picture

The creative industries as a category did not exist as such until the late twentieth century. What is now called the creative industries was, in earlier political settlements, distributed across patronage systems, craft guilds, religious institutions, court production, and bohemian outsider communities. Each of these political settlements had different answers to three central questions: who is permitted to make, who pays, and what counts.

The German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, writing in the 1930s, documented how the political conditions of cultural production change when the means of mechanical reproduction make culture available at industrial scale. The political authority that came from the original work, what he called its aura, was changed by mass reproduction. The political consequences were significant, and the political contest over who controlled mass cultural production has been moving ever since. Australian creative work, distributed through mass-reproduction systems from the early twentieth century onward, has been inside this political analysis throughout.

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu spent his career documenting how the political fact of who is permitted to make serious creative work is shaped by class, education, family resources, and access to cultural institutions. His analysis of cultural capital, of how aesthetic preferences map onto class positions, and of how creative careers are sustained by inheritance as much as talent, is still useful for reading the political conditions of contemporary Australian creative work.

The colonial transfer 

The creative industries in Australia inherited British and European political settlements about cultural production. The patronage system, the gallery and museum tradition, the conservatorium and art school tradition, and the political assumption that high culture was a settler-European inheritance to be preserved and transmitted in the colonies, were all transmitted into Australia from the nineteenth century onward.

What that political vision excluded is part of the history. First Nations creative practice, developed over millennia, was not recognised as art by the colonial cultural establishment for most of the twentieth century. Multicultural creative practice, brought into Australia by successive waves of migration, was politically marginal in mainstream cultural institutions for decades. The political achievement of creating space for First Nations and multicultural creative practice in mainstream Australian cultural institutions was won through decades of advocacy, contest, and slow institutional change.

The political legacy of the colonial cultural settlement continues to do political work in contemporary creative industries. The hierarchies of which creative work counts as serious, which is decorative, and which is craft, are inherited political distinctions, not natural facts.

The post-war state arts settlement

The post-war Australian political settlement included a significant role for the state in arts and creative production. The Australia Council for the Arts, established in different forms from the 1960s onward, was a political artefact of the political idea that culture was a public matter requiring public investment. State arts agencies followed similar patterns. Public film funding, subsidised opera and ballet, and the state-broadcasting arts commitments of the ABC were all elements of this political settlement.

The post-war state arts settlement was a political achievement, contested at the time and contested again now. The political idea that the state had a role in supporting cultural production was held more strongly by some political traditions than others, and the political contest over arts funding has been a recurring feature of Australian federal politics for decades.

The post-war settlement also reshaped who counted as a creative worker. The political project of professionalising creative practice, of establishing arts unions, and of building the institutional infrastructure for sustained creative careers was a significant achievement of the second half of the twentieth century.

The neoliberal turn and the creative industries concept

From the 1990s onward, a different political settlement began to assert itself. The concept of the creative industries, developed in British policy thinking under the Blair government and adopted in Australia and elsewhere, was a political reframing of cultural production as economic production.

The shift from arts policy to creative industries policy carried political assumptions about who creative work was for, who measured its value, and how it was justified to public funders. The political consequence was a partial absorption of cultural production into economic policy thinking, with significant operational consequences for artists, designers, and creative workers.

The political legacy of the creative industries reframing continues to shape contemporary funding decisions, training programmes, and public conversations about creative work. The political questions about who has access to creative careers have intensified rather than resolved.

The present moment

Generative AI, the political conversation about cultural sovereignty, and the political conversation about creative labour conditions are reshaping the creative industries now.

Generative AI has reopened the political question of whether AI-generated work competes with human creative work, whether creators have rights against AI training on their work, and whether AI is a tool for or a replacement of creative practice. The political settlement is being negotiated globally with significant implications for Australian creatives.

The political conversation about cultural sovereignty, particularly First Nations cultural sovereignty, has intensified since the 2010s. The political pressure for genuine partnership rather than appropriation, for Indigenous-led work rather than non-Indigenous-presented work, continues to reshape creative practice.

The political conversation about creative labour conditions, including casualisation, freelance precarity, unpaid pitching, and the political invisibility of creative labour as labour, is being challenged through union organising, freelancer collectives, and political advocacy.