INTRODUCTION TO CRITICAL THEORIES AND CONCEPTS IN THE CREATIVE AND CULTURAL INDUSTRIES (CCI)
Charlene YY
Lecture_9_61074.pptxWorking the Creative and Cultural Industries II
Working in Fashion and Music
Four themes in cultural work..
Subjectivity
Affect
Temporality
Solidarity
Working the Creative and Cultural Industries II
Working in Fashion
A day in the life…
James Steward – Fashion Designer (London)
Start 0:43
Four themes in cultural work..
Subjectivity
Affect
Temporality
Solidarity
A day in the life…
Melissa Fleis – Fashion Designer (L.A.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3XSJj3u-u0
Four themes in cultural work..
Subjectivity
Affect
Temporality
Solidarity
Reflective Exercise
How does the day in the life of a student compares to their working days?
Working in Fashion
‘I live for my work, I can’t imagine doing anything else’
‘Yes, you work long hours, or sometimes through the night, but that’s what you must to do to make the best designs’
‘I have the best job in the world, I am my own boss, doing what I love’
‘Blood, Sweat and Shears’
‘Blood, Sweat and Shears’ – study of NZ fashion students (Amanda Bill 2012)
“[w]e have all worked crazy hours [...], I don’t even want to speculate how many. We have been living it, eating it, sleeping it. It has been insane”.
“..dream preposterous dreams, be brave, be ambitious—and remember [you ] have to work really hard.”
Fashioning Subjects
What are the psychic costs on working in fashion and creative labour generally?
McRobbie, A. (1998) British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? Routledge, London.
Banks, M. (2007) The Politics of Cultural Work, Palgrave, Basingstoke, Chapter 3.
Reflective Exercise
How does the fashioning of subject (in fashion) compare to the making of subjectivity for students?
Sonia – self-employed designer
‘If I’d been on my own I just couldn’t have done it. But the girl I was with it made it easier, it was brilliant, she virtually moved into my house, one of us would be working here the other would be sewing at home. We’d come home, have tea, watch TV until about eight o clock and then we’d start work again and we’d work until about three in the morning and one of us would go to bed, whoever was going into the shop, the other person would stay up. And we did that solidly for six months and we looked dreadful. Nobody could believe how hard we worked’.
Sonia - pain and pleasure….
But if you’re successful and things are going [well], then you’re on that circle where you don’t find out anything about the business, you don’t learn anything because you don’t have the time to think hang on how can I make this easier? How can I offload some of this? Because you’re just in a panic you know?
Sometimes it’s really really awful because like your friends are all in fabulous jobs and it’s really really secure, and they’ve finished their PhD’s and just managed to find the job of their dreams and you just think…..then you remind yourself that you actually like what you’re doing and I have a fabulous lifestyle. (…) It’s not really about money long term because you wouldn’t be doing this, no way. It’s just about satisfying something.
Sally and Louise
The business was totally secondary. It was nothing to do with anything, I mean I was just….making things that I liked. Money was good but it was I kind of would have done it regardless I think. I would imagine I would have carried on, I can’t imagine not doing it.
Usually I work every day of the week, three days last week I did over 12 hours (…) But I do it not for money but for love.
Reflective Exercise
How do you see your priorities in relation to that? Money or love?
Other labour?
Modelling Labour
Manufacturing Labour
Model employees?
It's hard to be as skinny as models are anyway. I work out a lot but, I get tired. But some girls, honestly, I don't think a lot of girls eat. They smoke cigarettes. I work out every day. It's difficult. I mean, not difficult, but I have to stay on top of myself all the time with my weight.
You're always on display; you have to put on that show 24 hours a day. It's not as though you can go to the office and then go home and relax. You're always watching what you eat. You're always worrying about how you're coming across, always worried about being seen at the right places at the right times. It's just never ending.
Entwistle, J. and Wissinger, E. (2006) Keeping up appearances: aesthetic labour in the fashion modelling industries of London and New York, The Sociological Review, 54, 4, pp. 774-794
Reflective Exercise
Is modelling labour?
Global Chains of Labour
The sweatshop is as much a part of the ‘creative economy’ as fashion design – by providing manufacture and assembly, low-wage economies and precarious workers are structurally linked to the catwalk and high street…
Reflective Exercise
What do you think are the side-effects of the global sweat-shop industry?
Working the Creative and Cultural Industries II
Working in Music
Internships in Music
‘…positivity, energy….always come into work with smile’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBYMW5eIcfI
Four themes in cultural work..
Subjectivity
Affect
Temporality
Solidarity
Model Interns
….a good internship demands immersive subjectivity, tolerance of intensive temporalities, affective passion and high emotional labour, and a bit of commercial solidarity in the form of serving a ‘team ethic’.
Intern Labour - Frenette
Frenette, A. (2013) Making the Intern Economy: Role and Career Challenges of the Music Industry Intern, Work and Occupations 40, 4, pp.1-34.
A study of music industry internships in the USA, including participant observation as an intern.
Nate – the executive view
‘Sitting on a black leather couch in his Chelsea apartment, Nate recounts managing interns at an independent record company. According to him, some of these interns were not very smart, but still of some use:
There’s always shit work to be done and no one else is going to do it. And if [the intern] is that dumb, there’s always something like cleaning up the store-room that you should make him [sic] do. . . . There’s always shit to be done. Always’.
Nate – continued…
Nate describes the use of intern labor as “a pretty efficient system” for companies. Interns he deems unhirable for paid positions are not dissuaded from interning. Laughing slightly, Nate adds:
“You can stick around and just stuff envelopes and waste your time. We’re not going to hire you, but we will use you for the other crap.”
Free Labour and Orang-utans
It’s all about free labor. I mean, anyone who says [the opposite] is completely deluded or rationalizing. It’s not about getting people opportunities, it’s about getting things done without paying for it. . . .’ (Mark, record executive)
“I need you to get in a cab, go down to Sterling Sound, tell them who you are, you need to meet this girl, you’re going to pick up this CD, you’re going to make sure it’s got these three songs on it, here’s 20 bucks and I want you to come back and I want you to have two receipts. Now, a fucking orangutan can do that’ (Jerry, record executive)
Frenette concludes…
‘..internships potentially provide a democratizing path to launch careers, but the act of doing an unpaid internship far from guarantees transitioning into a paid position. The symbolic challenges of being an intern in the music industry point to a long and costly path to full-time employment, one that advantages those people who can afford to work for free’.
Reflective Exercise
How does your last internship compares to their experiences?
Reforming Internships
UK Music: Internships Code of Conduct (2018)
We believe:
Internships should be advertised openly and transparently and should be recruited on merit.
Interns should always be paid at least the national minimum wage to ensure young people are judged on their talent – not their ability to work for free.
It is important that internships are high quality, and structured to ensure both parties benefit from the opportunity.
An internship should be a short period of work experience (ideally between two weeks and 12 months).
Is Pop too ‘posh’?
In [2010] ‘60% of that year's successful pop and rock acts were former public school pupils compared with just 1% 20 years ago’.
See Sean O’Hagan (2014)
Elite professions?
See: http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/aug/28/elitism-in-britain-breakdown-by-profession
Source: Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission (2014)
% Privately Educated Senior Judges Diplomats Lords TV, Film and Music Newspaper Columnists MPs BBC Executives Pop Stars University Vice Chancellors UK POPULATION 71 53 50 44 43 33 26 22 20 7
Reflective Exercise
Why do you think is the role of education increasingly important in the music industry?
Chris Bryant v James Blunt
‘we can’t have a culture dominated by posh stars like James Blunt and [his] ilk’
‘…it is really tough forging a career in the arts….if you don’t know anybody who can give you a leg up, if your parents can’t subsidise you for a few years whilst you make your name and if you can’t afford to take on an unpaid internship’ Chris Bryant, Shadow Culture Minister 2014
‘You classist gimp. I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business’ - James Blunt
Musicians pay
The Working Musician (Musicians’ Union 2018)
Over 50% musicians earn less than £20,000 a year*
One in five earn less than £10,000 a year
60% reported working for free in the last year
Highly trained (most have a degree) but very low paid
Most have no steady income, pension or savings**
Most must take second jobs to survive
* UK average wage is around £26,000 a year (2018)
**Beyonce earned around 115 million dollars in 2017, while Ed Sheeran has to get by on around 7 million pounds a year;
Conclusions
Workers do it for the love not the money – which just happens to be highly convenient for those who do it for the money and not the love, the companies, managers, and capitalists who see in culture a means to a ready profit.
The passion and the pain co-exist….this is the contradiction of cultural work….
…but
The cultural industries, and work in culture, are precisely as we described them: part culture and part industry, places where culture as meaning, politics, ambition and identity, co-exists with the rational pursuit of economy, financial returns and accumulations
– the very idea of the cultural industries is an expression of this contradiction
