Creative Space is an investigation into current issues at stake in culture, creativity, technology, urban development, and policy.

Through case studies of local and independent cultural development and international urban development projects, DOXA aims to question the role of culture and creativity in cities and its global practice.

Introduction: Creative Space

The history of cultural production last century entails a struggle in between criticality and its appropriation by capitalism. As in the work of Theodor Adorno (1), the standardization of creativity, or in other name the commodification of arts propheted the rising of culture industry as one of the main driving force of contemporary capitalism. The prophecy is more or less realized since 1997 (2), marked by Britain's effort in the insitutionalization, formalization and diplomatic promotion of culture industry by its Creative Industry Task Force under the lead of Chris Smith, the Cultural Minister at that time, and triumphed in 2008 when the United Nations published its first report on "Creative Economy" (3). Yet, the culture industry presents to us something totally different as what Adorno advocated, instead, it has evolved into another nature, which sociologists Scott Lash and Celia Lury call the play of difference, imagination or even the Kantian notion of "the thing-in-itself" (4). The contemporary culture industry doesn't save the work of art from its commodification, rather, on one hand we still see the booming of the art market, and on the other hand, we also see that the arts are subsumed to speculative capitalism, which doesn't rely on commodity but on financial speculation - not on the work of art itself, but on the mehrwert of the work (5). This temporal coexistence is revealed in a dialectical movement which Lash and Lury call "the thingification of media" and the "mediatization of things".

We face a problem today, which is the fate of creativity. It is destined to be subsumed once it is born and becomes the internal entropy of capitalism. It is burned out in the brush of the painter, in the logical operation of the hardware, as the bread and butter of capitalism. Creativity doesn't haunt, it only laments. One can always position oneself with respect to the (new) spirit of capitalism, hearing the convulsion of the laments, in the theoretical discourses, which already assume a real subsumption latent in its logic. We demand a new kind of creativity, without destining to death, lamenting its own death, but a creativity which revives and haunts. It doesn't limit to a particular project that we used to call critical art, but a new framework, which operates in a logic outside "industry" and "economy". We want to call this new framework "Creative Space"

Notes

1. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Verso, 1997
2. Chris Smith, Creative Britain, farber and farber, 1998
3. United Nation, Creative Economy Report, 2008
4. Scott Lash and Celia Lury, The Global Cultural Industry, Polity, 2007
5. Diedrich Diederichsen, On (Surplus)Value in Art, Witte de With, 2008, the German word "Mehrwert" literally means more value, it was also translated as "add-value"

Full text: About Creative Space