brettworks

“Cultural work holds great attraction by promising self-expression and a sense of self-worth and the industry is never short of aspirants, who ensure a reserve army of labor that suppresses wages. Distinction is elusive, however, and the market, which is not so much free as moulded by corporate interests, imposes its own standards and norms, whereby creativity is both lauded and contaminated by commercial criteria” (6).

“The fundamental problem is that the process of artistic creation escapes the quantification of labour power which is entailed by the capitalist mode of production and exemplified by the production line. There’s no calculable correlation between the effort of the artist and the amount of time taken to produce the artwork. Creative work requires skill and self-discipline but it isn’t standard, uniform or reducible to mechanical procedures, and attempts to make it so involve […] the application of formal and external controls which restrict the free play of the creative imagination” (20).

“Creativity at its highest level is the original synthesis of disparate given materials, the perception of solutions to problems and of problems that need solutions, and in its aesthetic form, the capacity for finding new forms of expression for sensations new and old” (205).

Michael Chanan, From Printing to Streaming: Cultural Production Under Capitalism (2022)