Abstract
This chapter explores the resonance between contemporary cultural policy discourses—particularly those based on creative industries models for urban regeneration—and the manner in which literary festivals are promoted. Combining cultural, social, and economic goals, and demanding creative producers’ constant mediation between these often divergent priorities, creative industries discourse parallels literary festivals’ negotiation of a field structured by cultural and commercial tensions. Moreover, the creative industries approach remains a modish ‘catch-all’ policy framework applied in promoting literary festivals and local literary cultures. This chapter interrogates the extent to which this representation and this comparison are justified, and introduces a number of ethical and practical issues in the wholesale adoption of creative industries discourse. Ethical issues considered include the reliance of creative-industries-focused urban development projects on creative workers’ continued self-exploitation; these projects’ prioritisation of the needs of young professionals over those of demographics which are not part of the creative elite; and their tendency to mask, rather than address, issues of marginalisation and social inequality. This chapter also presents a survey of UNESCO’s Cities of Literature network, the International Organisation of Book Towns, and the Word Alliance, and traces the ways in which these networks circulate values similar to those promoted by proponents of creative industries approaches to cultural and social development.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See the article ‘The Lessons of the Eisteddfod’, published in 1887, for an example of the kind of idealistic rhetoric that was used to promote the civic virtues of such events.
- 3.
Mark Rubbo was the founding director of the Melbourne Writers Festival; in this interview, available on the Wheeler Centre website, he provides a detailed narrative about his involvement in the conception of the festival. See website: https://www.wheelercentre.com/notes/mark-rubbo-on-the-history-of-the-melbourne-writers-festival.
- 4.
See also Belfiore and Bennett (2008) for further discussion of the reasons why literature receives comparatively little public funding.
- 5.
See also Carter and Ferres (2001: 143) for further articulation, in an Australian context, of similar reasons for the lack of governmental attention paid to the funding of print culture.
- 6.
This amendment was proposed by the Republican Senator for North Carolina Jesse Helms as part of a response to federal funding of the artwork Piss Christ by Andres Serrano and subsequent funding of Robert Mapplethorpe’s homoerotic photography. The ‘Mapplethorpe Censorship Controversy’ , as it would later become known, is particularly interesting, as both sides invoked the First Amendment, protesting on the one hand that restricting the content of artists’ works was a violation of freedom of speech, and on the other that supporting artists such as Serrano and Mapplethorpe impinged on citizens’ rights to freedom of religious participation and that funding these artworks constituted state-sanctioned criticism of Christianity and Christian morality. A range of views on this issue, including those of Jesse Helms, were published in the Spring 1990 issue of Nova Law Review, entitled ‘Symposium on Law and the Visual Arts’. Courtney Randolph Nea’s 1993 article further explores the implications of these interventions for artistic practice. Loudon Wainwright III’s satirical song ‘Jesse Don’t Like It’ (1999) offers a more succinct summary of the art world’s opinion of Helms’s intervention: ‘Don’t photograph a penis, don’t paint a breast/Don’t write about the truth because it might offend Jesse/And don’t tell it like it is, and don’t show where it’s at/’Cause Jesse don’t like it and that is that.’
- 7.
- 8.
Recently there has been significant media coverage of the backlash to a number of big-name festivals’ unwillingness to pay authors for their festival appearances. Perhaps the highest-profile example is the resignation of the author Philip Pullman from his position as patron of the Oxford Literary Festival in the United Kingdom, and the subsequent call for authors to boycott festivals that do not pay speakers (Craig 2016; Flood 2016). In response, other festivals (such as the Ilkley Literature Festival 2016) have made public statements outlining their approaches to speakers’ fees. The censure of the Oxford Literary Festival and the promotional tone that the Ilkley Literature Festival uses to outline its commitment to these financial matters offer a clear example of the way in which literary festivals are seen—and are, perhaps not unreasonably, expected to be seen—to offer some kind of tangible commercial benefits to attending writers.
- 9.
Note the deliberate distancing from the Frankfurt School’s polemic moaning.
- 10.
Creative Nation was the first comprehensive national cultural policy in Australia, and was formulated and released by the Keating Labor government in 1994. Although the policy was largely shelved following Keating’s loss to the conservative Howard government in 1996 (Johnson 2016: 206), several of the policy’s key points, including its couching of cultural value in economic terms, its emphasis on democratic formulations of culture and cultural engagement that defied elitist definitions of ‘the arts’, and its framing of culture as crucial to identity-formation, have arguably had a lasting impact on the way in which cultural engagement and cultural policy are understood in Australia (see, for example, Hawkings 2014).
- 11.
VFW here refers to the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States, an organisation akin to the Returned and Services League, Australia (RSL), or the Royal British Legion (RBL). The VFW has seen a consistent decline in membership numbers since the 1990s (see, for example, Davey 2014; Druzin 2015; or Montgomery 2014).
- 12.
- 13.
The idea is encapsulated by the term ‘Bourgeois-Bohemian’ , or ‘BoBo’, which comes from the work of the journalist David Brooks (2000).
- 14.
Indeed, in many circumstances universities provide support and sponsorship for literary festivals, and are even involved in their programming. This is evident in the prevalence of local universities among, for example, the sponsor lists for the Edinburgh International Book Festival (Edinburgh International Book Festival 2016) or the Sydney Writers’ Festival (Sydney Writers’ Festival n.d.-b) and the development of awards like the Monash Undergraduate Prize for Creative Writing , which is administered and promoted as a partnership between the Emerging Writers’ Festival and Monash University (see Emerging Writers’ Festival 2016).
- 15.
See O’Connor (2011: 35) for a further discussion of the ‘use-value’ of culture and the fact that even commercialised culture is marketable only through its projection of older ‘autonomous’ values of aesthetic arts.
- 16.
There are seven different categories of Creative City: Crafts and Folk Art, Design, Film, Gastronomy, Literature, Music, and Media Arts (Creative Cities Network n.d.).
- 17.
Paju Bookcity, a custom-built industrial estate for South Korean publishing, is described by this interviewee as ‘more like a university campus of a specially designed, architecturally playful building [than a city] […] it houses the entire publishing industry for Korea, in this one place, and almost nobody lives in it’. Paju was initially conceived by a cooperative of publishers, who lobbied the South Korean government in the late 1980s and early 1990s to create an industrial complex for publishing and other cultural and informational work (Mattern 2013). The Bookcity’s first phase of development was completed in 2007, and—like other creative industries projects—it is variously described as a cultural, industrial, educative, or heritage project (Paju Bookcity 2008). It is also home to Paju Booksori , an annual literary festival promoted as the largest in Asia and featuring a programme of 500 Korean and international writers (see Ahn 2014; Kim 2014; or Paju Booksori 2015 (in Korean) for details of the festival).
- 18.
As of 2016, these member festivals are: the Edinburgh International Book Festival ; the International Literature Festival, Berlin ; the International Festival of Authors (IFOA), Toronto; the Melbourne Writers Festival; the Bookworm International Literary Festival , Beijing-Chengdu-Suzhou; the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature , New York; the Jaipur Literature Festival ; and Étonnants-Voyageurs , Saint-Malo.
- 19.
It is also noteworthy that the Melbourne Writers Festival, rather than the larger Sydney Writers’ Festival (or, indeed, the longer-running Adelaide Writers’ Week ), is the Australian node of this network. Similarly, Sydney pursued designation as a UNESCO City of Film (Screen NSW 2016) rather than Literature. Perhaps this contrast between the creative-industries-style branding decisions of the cities is indicative of the century-old competitive tension between them.
- 20.
See, for example, Mark Jaynes’s (2004) discussion of the unsuccessful attempts to implement creative industries policy in the largely working-class town of Stoke-on-Trent.
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Weber, M. (2018). Festival as Policy Vehicle: Creative Industries, Creative Cities, and the Creative Class. In: Literary Festivals and Contemporary Book Culture. New Directions in Book History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71510-0_5
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