Neil Mulholland

Bio: Neil Mulholland is an academic researcher from Edinburgh College of Art. The author has contributed to research in topics: Contemporary art & Ideology. The author has an hindex of 4, co-authored 18 publications receiving 72 citations.

The cultural economy

Abstract: Shortly after taking up his new position of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Andy Burnham launched the government’s latest ‘strategy for the creative economy’. Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy promises to continue the shift from an economic to a cultural understanding of economies, to ‘build a dynamic and vibrant society, providing entertainment alongside opportunity’ (DCMS, 2008). While it offers a clear definition of which industries are the ‘creative’ ones (1), Creative Britain is far from transparent regarding what it means by ‘culture’. Throughout the document ‘culture’ is equated with an unproblematised national identity and with an Arnoldian exploitation of community and customs as a centripetal unifying force (see Arnold, 1869 and Gordon Brown, below). On the other hand ‘culture’ is repeatedly described as ‘entertainment’, a sector of the economy, a type of entrepreneurialism. In both senses, ‘culture’ is a phantom, an entirely empty self-validating buzz word. No external validating contexts are intimated, its meaning and the values it invokes are taken as a given. New Labour has been playing this game of hide and seek with loaded terms such as ‘culture’, ‘new’, ‘modern’ and the ‘social’, for a long time now. This culturalisation of politics is nothing new; nor is the service economy to which it is shackled particularly ‘new’. What then does Creative Britain signify? Is it synonymous with the ideological triumph of the ‘cultural economy’ – the thesis that the economy has become encultured, less use-centred. Is the Laddie really for cultural turn-ing? The cultural turn has had an enormous impact in all fields of knowledge and labour (see Jameson, 1998; Ray and Sayer, 1999). It raises the importance of an expanded definition of what we call ‘creativity’ by encouraging meaning-centred research methodologies to be adopted in all walks of life. We thus live in a highly pragmatic era wherein all forms of knowledge are held to be contingent upon specific cultural assumptions. This means that all phenomena demand to be viewed from multiple perspectives in order to ensure parity and appropriateness. Dialectical materialism and monetarism are, in this light, absurdly reductionist in equal measure. While the cultural turn is often taken to involve a reversal of the base-superstructure model favoured by vulgar Marxists and the New Right alike, it actually involves a much more explicit rejection of such dialectical thought – a desire to destroy the old culture/economy dualism. As die-hard economists, most politicians are ill-equipped to engage with this paradigm shift (see Bonnell, Hunt and Biernacki, 1999). While New Labour pride themselves in their cosmopolitan cultural credentials, they are, in practice, not often so different from their peers in this respect. As a blueprint for a post-cultural turn nation, Creative Britain often reads as a dinosaur, fixated with the role that culture can play in developing the economy

The Cultural Devolution: Art in Britain in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract: The British art crisis Radical academicism Dynamic perversity The shock of the old Who am I? Where am I going? How much will it cost? Will I need any luggage? Art after Britain?

Meinü Jingji/China's beauty economy: Buying looks, shifting value, and changing place

Abstract: Along with the new products, modes of behavior, and economic relations that followed China's 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) came the introduction of new words to everyday language. The term meinu jingji, “beauty economy,” is increasingly ubiquitous, describing everything from beauty pageants, modeling competitions, advertisement, cosmetics, and cosmetic surgery to tourism, TV, and cinema, and even extending to China's success in the Athens Olympics. One of the unexpected by-products of this new cultural focus on beauty as a significant source of individual economic success is the full bloom of beauty pageants endorsed by the state. This article focuses on these pageants: their history in China, their promotion of Anglo-European beauty norms, and their relationship with Chinese national identity and economic reform. The paper argues that the beauty pageants are a prerequisite of China's neoliberal policies as they promote consumerism, reinforce and symbolize commodification, ...

Dreaming in the Middle Ages

Abstract: Acknowledgments List of abbreviations Introduction: modern and medieval dreams 1. Dreambooks and their audiences 2. The doubleness and middleness of dreams 3. The patristic dream 4. From the fourth to the twelfth century 5. Aristotle and the late-medieval dream 6. Dreams and fiction 7. Dreams and life Notes Bibliography Index.

The financialization of large law firms: Situated discourses and practices of reorganization

Abstract: This article uses the case of the financialization of large law firms to develop debates about the process of the ‘capitalisation of everything’ whereby financial logics spread both geographically between countries and sectorally from one industry to another. Drawing on work that analyses how discourses of shareholder value have led to the re-organization of firms, the article argues that large law firms have undergone ‘surgery’ as part of attempts to make them appear more and more profitable when assessed using the metric profits per equity partner. The influence of geographical context—English regulation and institutions relating to the legal profession—on ‘surgery’ in the period 1993–2008 are also outlined as part of a situated analysis of the way regulations and institutions together prevent or enable the reproduction of financialized practices in different industries and places through the creation of conjunctural moments that help financial logics gain legitimacy.

Creative economy policy in developing countries: the case of Indonesia

Abstract: This paper elaborates on how the global discourse on creative economy is interpreted in developing countries. We accomplish this by examining how the discourse has been institutionalized in several Indonesian cities. As an effect of decentralization, localities attempt to become a winner among other regions. The creative economy policy is thus pragmatically adopted to boost economic growth. Often these localities do not consider their local contexts before applying this policy. The creative economy in Indonesia is different in nature as interpreted in a different way. Traditional cultural industries are imposed to be included as creative industries, but they hardly perform new knowledge learning and innovation. This policy is implemented also to preserve traditional culture values, while efforts in improving knowledge and innovative capacity are taken for granted. The strong attachment to traditions could be the barrier to developing recent design and innovative products.