Crafts as Creative Industry

Abstract

Since the 1980s a huge shift in the commercial landscape has seen creative entrepreneurial cultural production shoot to centre stage of government and corporate planning, research and development. This shift has included (as we have seen) a growth in the aestheticisation of everyday life, the rise of recreational and lifestyle sectors of the economy, and the emergence of copyright industries as drivers of global market share. Alongside this economic mainstreaming of culture has come the marketing of ‘cool’ individuality as a commodity to be purchased, often alongside a self-realising career as a creative professional. While prima facie craft’s place in economic growth, even within the creative industries, may seem unclear, as Banks has observed: the recent rapid growth in the number of individual, self-employed artists and craft producers (Arts Council of England 2003; DCMS 2005), and the expansion of artistic occupations more generally would not just appear to reflect the apparent coming together of art and commerce in the corporatized cultural industries, but more positively support Lash and Urry’s claims for the revival of ‘aesthetically reflexive’ and autonomous forms of independent production in reflexive modernity. (Banks 2007, p. 102)