Features of Culture Industries - Coursework Example

Culture Industries Introduction The definition of the cultural industries have been the of intense debate over the last few years, and the term ‘culture industries’ was first used in England by the Greater London Council by 1980s. The cultural industries are those activities which deal primarily in symbolic goods whose primary economic value is derived from their cultural value. This definition then includes what have been called the ‘classical’ cultural industries like broadcast media, film, publishing, recorded music, design, architecture, new media, and the ‘traditional arts’ like visual art, crafts, theatre, music theatre, concerts and performance, literature, museums and galleries. These are also sometimes known as creative industries. Generally it includes textual, music, television, and film production and publishing, as well as crafts and design. They are knowledge based and labour-intensive industries, and created employment and wealth. By nurturing creativity and fostering innovation, they help the societies to maintain cultural diversity and enhance economic performance. For some countries, architecture, the visual and performing arts, sport, advertising, and cultural tourism may be included as adding value to the content and generating values for individuals and societies (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). All activities which have been eligible for public funding is consider as ‘art’. The division between ‘art’ and ‘commerce’ is ideological and not analytical. The classical music world, though in receipt of enormous public subsidy, cannot be considered deeply commercial. Similarly, though aiming to ‘make it’ at some point, calling struggling pop musicians ‘commercial’ is to misunderstand a lot of what they do. The distributions of funds in these two areas are different. One relies on ‘the market’, and the other on a bureaucratic system of attributing value, and thus money. According to Hesmondhalgh (2007), the last few years have seen a boom in interest in the idea of ‘the cultural industries’ in academic and policy-making circles. In government cultural policy, this boom has been apparent at the international, national and local level. These are concerned fundamentally with the management and selling of a particular kind of work. Since the Romantic movement of the 19th century, there has been a widespread tendency to think of art as the highest form of human creativity. Both Sociologists and Marxists have argued that artistic work is not so different from other kinds of labour, as they say both are oriented towards the production of objects or experiences. Beginning of commercialisation The commercialisation of cultural production began in the 19th century in those societies which had made the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The trend intensified in advanced industrial societies from the early 20th century. The rise of the cultural industries was very much bound up with the rise of ‘mass culture’, and this phenomenon troubled so many 20th century intellectuals, and raised the question of ethics. In the second half of the 20th century, the growth of the cultural industries accelerated. Rising prosperity in the global north, increasing leisure time, rising levels of literacy, links between the new medium of television and new discourses of consumerism, the increasing importance of cultural hardware for the consumer goods industry are some of the factors contributed for the growth. And by the early 1980s, it was becoming increasingly difficult for cultural policy makers to ignore the growing cultural industries. At the same time, the cultural industries began to emerge as an issue in local policy-making (Hesmondhalgh, 2007). During this period, the cultural industries were beginning to make an impact on national policy making. The French ministry of culture under the socialists had devoted special attention to cultural industries, especially film and cinema. A number of rationales which had sustained a previous era of policy in the communications and media sectors came under increasing challenge in the 1980s. The successful challenge to these rationales on the part of corporate lobbyists, pro-competition academics and liberalising policy makers unleashed a series of waves of marketisation on the media and communication sectors. This began in the United States in the early 1980s, and later spread to other advanced industrial states. It has also been taken up in international bodies like European Union and World Trade Organisation, though such marketisation has not gone uncontested. All these changes have fuelled the growth of the cultural industries. And at the same time this has added legitimacy to the idea that national and local economies can be regenerated through the cultural industries (Garnham, 1990). The British press, along with many other areas of cultural life, was increasingly marked by the influence of American popular culture such as picture magazines, movies, comics and pulp fiction. Since the 19th century, British journalism had taken on board US tabloid initiatives such as populist campaigning journalism, exposes and the growing coverage of celebrity issues, human interest and scandal. In the early part of the 20th century, American journalists also pioneered moves into photojournalism and the heavy deployment of illustration in news reporting which is the emphasis on the visual over the written word (Thompson, 1995). In England the tightening bond between the entertainment industries, consumerism and the tabloid press became increasingly apparent during the 1970s with the rise to prominence of the Sun newspaper, to take one clear example. The Sun, acquired in 1969 by a market-wise media conglomerate headed by Rupert Murdoch, made its mark in terms of its reciprocal relationship with the commercial television industry, which is maintained to this day. It also devoted substantial amounts of space to advertising, competitions, TV promotions and tie-ins, sports and lifestyle. Its success leads to the three key components of the tabloid profile – sexual vulgarity, the use of popular vernacular and a radical iconoclastic conservatism that captured the attention of its non-elite audience. An increasingly commercialised media, allied with consumerism has transformed the public sphere of open citizenship into a privatised sphere in which citizens are primarily defined as consumers. It also draws on and intersects with a range of other popular media including TV talk shows, popular factual programming and reality television (Engel, 1996). Along with boom in cultural industries policy, a number of problems and tensions surround the role of the cultural industries which include definitional, statistical, ethical and conceptual problems. The most significant tension exists with respect to free trade policies. The dilemma is that if the cultural industries are characterised as economic then they are subject to WTO regulations, thus the development of the uneasy notion of the cultural exception. These industries have not traditionally found much of a place in mainstream economics, where they have generally been considered to be of peripheral importance. The cultural industries were an important concept in the area of media and communication studies, and were usually labeled the political economy of culture (McRobbie, 1999). There was a substantial case for believing that the cultural industries were riskier than most. Cultural goods had relatively high production costs. Because each recording, film, book is a kind of prototype involving considerable amount of investment of time and resources. However, reproduction costs are usually very low. Culture industries have a tendency of public goods where the act of consumption by one individual does not reduce the possibility of consumption by others. This creates some ethical challenges for cultural producers concerning how to control the circulation of their goods. The recent furore over digitalisation of content, heard most loudly in the debates over the sharing of music files over the internet is a manifestation of this feature of the cultural industries. After the Second World War, governments cultural subsidy in advanced industrial countries tended to go mainly to the classical, legitimated arts, the principal exceptions being public broadcasting and film. There were struggles to include more groups in the ambit of funding, in the interests of democratisation. For example in UK, funding for the fine arts was gradually expanded to the arts, and then to include traditional crafts such as pottery and folk arts. Due to such battles, the content of subsidised legitimated culture has shifted over time: for example, arts cinemas came to be subsidised alongside the opera and regional theatre houses. Cartoons were once exponents of fantasy as opposed to rationalism. They ensured that justice was done to the creatures by giving the maimed specimens a second life. All they do today is to confirm the victory of technological reason over truth (McRobbie, 1999). Modernism and Postmodernism Modernism is a set of ideas or the movement in visual arts, music, literature, and drama which rejected the old standards of how art should be made, consumed, and what it should mean. It has only emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism is a set of ideas or the movement that appears in a wide variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture, music, film, and literature. Up course, its not clear exactly when postmodernism begins. Over the period the major figures of modernism literature helped radically to redefine what poetry and fiction could be and do: figures like Woolf, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Mallarme, Kafka, and Rilke are considered the founders of 20th century modernism. In the forms of recording, performance and video, music has played an increasingly essential role in culture, and has gradually become a part of the postmodern condition. Even though postmodernism seems very much like modernism, it differs from modernism in its attitude towards a lot of trends. Many modernist works try to uphold the idea that works of art can provide the unity, coherence, and meaning which has been lost in most of modern life; art will do what other human institutions fail to do. Postmodernism, in contrast, doesnt lament the idea of fragmentation, provisionality, or incoherence, but rather celebrates that. Postmodern art favours reflexivity and self-consciousness, fragmentation and discontinuity, ambiguity, simultaneity, and an emphasis on the destructured, decentered, dehumanised subject. Postmodernism seems to be the rise of religious fundamentalism which is in the form of resistance to the questioning of the grand narratives of religious truth (Thompson, 1995). Period seems to be offering alternatives to joining the global culture of consumption in which commodities and forms of knowledge are offered by forces far beyond any individuals control. In United States, modernism, in a form identified as secular humanism, has been attacked by the so-called religious right whose conservative ideology has seriously undermined the very constitutional foundations of the whole American modernist experiment. Fundamentalism in nearly all of the worlds major organised religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism has risen sharply in recent years in direct opposition to modernism. Comparison between postmodernism (Fig.1) and modernism (Fig.2) Art. Fig.1 (Source: Postmodernart.com) Fig.2 (Source: artplaza.blogspot.som) Conclusion Nevertheless the culture industry remains the entertainment business, and its influence over the consumers is established by entertainment. Since all the trends of the industry are profoundly embedded in the public by the whole social process, they are encouraged by the survival of the market in this area. Even today, the industry dresses works of art like political slogans and forces them upon a resistant public at reduced prices, and they are as accessible for public enjoyment as a park. As one could live without the culture industry, it necessarily creates too much satiation and apathy. As like in any other field, culture industry is also not left out by the influence of advertising. The triumph of advertising is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them. Reference Engel, M. (1996) ‘Tickle the public: 100 years of the popular press’, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Garnham, N. (1990) ‘Capitalism and Communication’, London: Sage Publications Ltd. Hesmondhalgh, David. (2007) ‘The Cultural Industries’, London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2(1), pp. 3-30 McRobbie, A. (1999) ‘In The Culture Society: art, fashion and popular music’, London: Routledge. Snoddy, R. (1992) ‘The Good, the Bad and the Unacceptable: the hard news about the British Press’ London: Faber & Faber Inc Thompson, J. (1995) ‘The Media and Modernity’, Cambridge: Polity press. . Read More