sociology of the arts Persistent Creativity Making the Case for Art, Culture and the Creative Industries PETER CAMPBELL Sociology of the Arts Series Editors Katherine Appleford Kingston University London, UK Anna Goulding University of Newcastle, UK Dave O’Brien University of Edinburgh, UK Mark Taylor University of Sheffield, UK This series brings together academic work which considers the pro- duction and consumption of the arts, the social value of the arts, and analyses and critiques the impact and role of cultural policy and arts management. By exploring the ways in which the arts are produced and consumed, the series offers further understandings of social inequalities, power relationships and opportunities for social resistance and agency. It highlights the important relationship between individual, social and political attitudes, and offers significant insights into the ways in which the arts are developing and changing. Moreover, in a globalised soci- ety, the nature of arts production, consumption and policy making is increasingly cosmopolitan, and arts are an important means for building social networks, challenging political regimes, and reaffirming and sub- verting social values across the globe. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15469 Peter Campbell Persistent Creativity Making the Case for Art, Culture and the Creative Industries Peter Campbell University of Liverpool Liverpool, UK ISSN 2569-1414 ISSN 2569-1406 (electronic) Sociology of the Arts ISBN 978-3-030-03118-3 ISBN 978-3-030-03119-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03119-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2018960252 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © Mint Images Limited/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. (Ecclesiastes 1:9–11)1 1 “Extracts from the Authorized Version of the Bible (The King James Bible), the rights in which are vested in the Crown, are reproduced by permission of the Crown’s Patentee, Cambridge University Press.” To my first reader Preface This book mirrors my academic career thus far. I first encountered the recently established UK government ‘Department for Culture, Media and Sport’, and its stated concern of developing ‘creative industries’, whilst studying a module on ‘Leisure in Modern Britain’ as an under- graduate in the late 1990s. A decade later as a PhD student, I found myself researching cultural policy and the development of these creative industries in more detail. Another decade on, as a full-time academic continuing to research this field, I now lead an undergraduate module of my own on ‘Culture, Economy and Cities’, attempting to explain such matters to students mostly unborn when I began my own stud- ies. This book considers how over the course of this twenty year period the concept of ‘creativity’, and attempts to leverage its apparent power, became increasingly prominent. Whilst a range of critiques have been made of this concept, and whilst at points it seemed vulnerable to crisis, creativity has shown a remarkable persistence. This book therefore attempts to understand and explain this persis- tence. It considers the development of an ‘agenda’ around creativity and looks into how this agenda is validated and applied. It demonstrates that although this ‘Creativity Agenda’ became particularly prominent ix x Preface during the 1990s, it is not an entirely new phenomenon, but rather represents the intensification of a range of historical precursors. Once established, this agenda deploys the idea of creativity in myriad ways, which are examined here in terms of their mutual coherence. Given that this era also saw an increased concern with the notion of ‘evi- dence-based policy’, this book considers how the case is made for art, culture and the creative industries, the challenges this evidence-making task presents, and the role of specific actors in establishing forms of evi- dence which substantiate and shape the Creativity Agenda, enabling its persistence. In addition to considering the persistence of certain conceptions of creativity, and the role of evidence in this, the book also considers the application of the Creativity Agenda in the specific site of Liverpool, England, demonstrating how the city draws on this agenda, and in so doing has helped to further its development. Despite a dominant ‘suc- cess story’ around creativity, however, it is argued that there is a need to consider this story more precisely, and to continue to question the nature of policies and methods in this field, lest the more problematic aspects of the Creativity Agenda also persist, as they have to date. ~ The completion of this book has relied on a range of support. Firstly, the support of the UK Research Councils has been vital. My doctoral research, during which I first explored some of these issues, was funded as part of an AHRC/ESRC Impact Fellowship in Cultural Policy and Regeneration, and I was able to develop these ideas—particularly those considered in Chapter 4 on the nature of the methods used to make the case for arts and culture—due to funding from the AHRC Cultural Value Project. Some material in this chapter has previously been pub- lished as: Campbell, P. Cox, T. & O’Brien, D. (2017) The social life of measure- ment: how methods have shaped the idea of culture in urban regeneration. Journal of Cultural Economy, 10(1), 49–62. The material from this article has been revised and is reused here under the terms of the Creative Commons 4.0 License. This book would also not exist without a period of research leave generously Preface xi provided by my academic home, the Department of Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology at the University of Liverpool. I would not wish to set myself the mammoth task of listing all my colleagues, both within the University and elsewhere, who have been of support in the completion of this book, so I will restrict myself to singling out for spe- cial acknowledgement those with whom I have been fortunate enough to collaborate with directly in publishing work on these subjects so far: Tamsin Cox, Stephen Crone, Dave O’Brien, Mark Taylor and Stuart Wilks-Heeg. I cannot fling enough appreciative adjectives in your direc- tion, but these names represent simply the tip of an iceberg of academic support: if you are reading this, you know who you are. Finally, my par- ents indicated that they deserved some acknowledgement for helping me to cart my belongings into the house in which this book was mostly written, but I owe them thanks for much more than that, as they surely know. Liverpool, UK Peter Campbell