Creative Spirit and Economy

An essay written for the Arts Policy and Advocacy course (Colorado State University, Masters of Art Leadership and Cultural Management) examining and comparing various global creative economies.

"When learning is purposeful, creativity blossoms. When creativity blossoms, thinking emanates. When thinking emanates, knowledge is fully lit. When knowledge is lit, economy flourishes” –A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Indomitable Spirit

The creative and cultural industries have steadily become a focus and a global initiative of policymakers for the sake of national identity, quality of life, and economic development. These cultural policy creations are also a by-product of cultural values, history, and politics. Harry Chartrand and Claire McCaughey identified four roles that support the arts which are facilitator, patron, architect, and engineer that will be examined in this essay through the countries of the U.S., U.K., France, China, the former Soviet Union, Sweden, and Ghana.

Like the U.S., the U.K. leverages an arm’s length approach in their policy involvement with arts and culture through an Arts Council developed from the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) to increase access to the arts during WWII. Yet, unlike the U.S., the U.K. leverages subsidies more whereas the U.S. leverages tax expenditures more for funding arts and culture, making them less involved politically in its development. For example, quangos—quasi-autonomous non-government institutions—in the U.K. receive their budgets from the government to disperse for arts and culture but are governed by an independent board. This makes the U.S. a facilitator—funding through forgone taxes—and the U.K. a patron—funding through arm’s length arts councils. Comparatively, France is highly planned in nature making them an architect by funding the arts through a ministry or department of culture which began with Louis the XIV and culture being the “culture of the court.” Yet, in 1959, France has since shifted to seek to decentralize culture and bring the arts to greater France by dispersing it out of Paris making it accessible to everyone.

When we examine the former Soviet Union (U.S.S.R.) and China we see similarities in their communist and socialist ideologies that trickle down into their cultural policymaking initiatives. Both are engineers that own every mean of artistic production and a way to support their “political standards of excellence” while demeaning the creative process. Contrary to the U.S.S.R., China did experience a cultural policy reform in the 1970s and by 1992 the 14th Congress of the Communist Party developed a model for the market that defined culture as an element that serves an economic purpose. This reform assisted in relaxing policies while maintaining a level of restriction on them. Ultimately, China’s shift toward culture as an economic development strategy lends itself to forging increased access to arts and culture for the public. This is like the NEA policy agenda under Rocco Landesman that created the Our Town program that funded arts-based community development and creative placemaking throughout the U.S.

In Ghana, we see another story of the creative economy where the music industry is threatened by the piracy of music through the illicit sales of bootlegged cassette tapes, CDs, and MP3 files. The Ghana Music Rights Organization responded to this dilemma by sending youths to jail for these illegal sales despite them being the “strongest distribution network for music sales.” There are typically two sides to every story, and this is no different than the stories of Ghana’s government and the African pirates. It’s argued that neither UNESCO nor the African pirates are right or wrong. Yet, creating an effective cultural policy requires—not implementing an immediately western style—but examining the cultural patterns within the region and how pirates distribute music while allowing artists and producers to economically flourish.

Meanwhile, Sweden’s holistic approach to creative and cultural industry development is deeply rooted in cluster building to stimulate economic growth via The Swedish Business Development Agency and Regional Growth Programs. This is like the U.S. approach to film cluster development in regions such as New Mexico. An example of cluster building in Sweden is Rock City Hultsfred music industry that leveraged a rural region’s existing branding of a popular music festival, going back to 1986, that attracts an average of 26,000 visitors each year. By leveraging this music festival, Sweden successfully cultivated a cluster for popular music education and production. Sweden offers us some key takeaways regarding cluster building that are valuable and involve identifying a region’s competitive advantage, creating a clear branding strategy, approaching it more widely than narrow, and implementing continuous monitoring.

At the global scale, we can’t distinctly pinpoint one right way for cultural policymaking as it hedges on a people’s belief about what culture is which is essential is the formation of cultural policies. Despite the differences in beliefs about what culture is in various countries, we can delineate a global pattern of similarities that hybridizes policy and unites us on some key principles. These five areas are cultural rights, heritage, diversity, cultural statistics, and the one percent standard. It’s about the moral rights of artists with copyright law which became the first international cultural policy, preventing the destruction of cultural heritage, seeing culture not as a commodity but an element requiring protections, finding a standard definition of culture, and giving back to support public artworks. The creative spirit is there and at the economic forefront for policymakers around the globe making arts and culture an ineffably important part of deeper conversations and a voice that won’t be silenced.

Sources:

Rosenstein, C. (2024). Understanding cultural policy: Government and the Arts and Culture in the United States. Routledge.

De Beukelaer, C. (2017). Toward an ‘African’ take on the cultural and creative industries? Media, Culture & Society, 39(4), 582-591

Power, D. and Hallencreutz, D. (2005). Cultural industry cluster building in Sweden. In Oinas, P. and Lagendijk, A. (Eds.), Proximity, Distance and Diversity: Issues on Economic Interaction and Local Development. Ashgate: London, England.

Shan, S. (2014). Chinese cultural policy and the cultural industries. City, Culture and Society, 5, 115-121.