Marketing creativity as a commodity

Florida goes further than Bell and makes the same erroneous claim that many university schools also make and that is "the ultimate intellectual property - the one that really replaces land, labour and capital as the most valuable human resource - is the human creative faculty".

This is silly. Although the organisation of land, labour and capital is certainly different in today's economy as compared with the past, they're no less valuable or important than before.

One of the reasons academics and others “over egg” the importance of creativity is that they either implicitly or explicitly believe that creativity can be appropriated or taught and nowhere is this attitude most prevalent than in the “creative industries”.

In the mid 1990s the term creative industries, fresh from Blair’s UK, was making the rounds of the university media schools. QUT was first off the mark with it’s innovative but now outdated suite of creative industries curriculums.

Basically the idea was to allow students to pick and choose their subjects in the arts and humanities. So for example, students would do a photography major and concurrently study a range of subjects such as multimedia and creative writing and try import these ideas in to a new creative product.

RMIT went down the same path recently with bachelor and masters degrees in the creative industries with fees between $20,000 and $30,000. Although if you wanted to start at a diploma level and graduated with a masters degree, you’d be out of pocket to the tune of about $80,000.

That’s a lot for programs that teach you how to hold a camera or write a computer program. But they teach nothing about art theory, the creative process, the history of the creative process, aesthetics or the psychology of creativity. These subjects were buried in the 1980s by ridiculous post modernist babble.

It’s clear that when university teachers and marketers talk about creativity what they are really talking about is another "C" word - commodification.

When I worked and lived in Fitzroy, Melbourne, I would meet many people who considered themselves “creative”. They worked on “art installations”, in “marketing” or “design”. Sometimes I’d meet hybrids - people who worked in marketing communications, web development or communication design.

Yet when pressed on what they did on a daily basis, the replies were often vague. Some said they worked as real estate copywriters, computer programmers or as visual merchandise designers. There was no shame in this but somehow, for them they had not achieved the pinnacle of “creativity” - whatever that was.

To be “creative” is to be part of a club. It connotes who we are down this end of the bar. It is clannish. To be creative has a certain social cachet and university marketers are not slow to capitalise on this. This is the commodification of creativity.

Of course the great advantage of emphasising creativity over commodification is that creativity can be made to appear as nothing more than the outcome of natural processes.