Creative industries and cultural value.

Abstract

The Creative Industries are essentially pluralist and transformative in the manner in which they conceive of knowledge creation and the attribution of value. Situated in the apex of the knowledge economy they have a capacity to both educate and inform. If the Cultural Industries are concerned with encapsulating kinds of value in society which encompass educational, cultural wealth or social wealth (including intellectual property) how do the Creative Industries resist instantiating Horkheimer and Adorno�s vision of a culture as �a commodity disseminated as information without permeating the individuals who acquired it�? Given the need to describe cultural capacity for creativity how do we account for values of potentiality and transformation within specific instantiations of cultural learning? How might we devise a descriptive assessment of qualities and conception which differentiate the Creative Industries from a process of reification and which attempts to reconcile the inherent disjuncture of the term?