CRITIQUE OF CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
An international seminar and workshop in Helsinki from August 31st to September 2nd, 2006
The Critique of Creative Industries seminar and workshop will assemble different national and urban case studies, put up a general critique of creative industries and theorize from different angles of Europe how the paradigm of creativity contributes to constituting cognitive capitalism. The Critique of Creative Industries seminar and workshop are organised by FRAME Finnish Fund for Art Exchange and eipcp European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies. Seminar will take place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki.
When Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their famous Dialectics of Enlightenment in 1944 they also coined the concept of cultural industry. In a chapter titled The Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception they laid the ground for their fundamental critique of culture as a component of a new form of totalitarian oppression. Around 1968 the concept was again put to the foreground to criticize the repressive functions of mass media especially, but in the course of the following decades it slowly voided of its critical content. During those years it was adopted as just another principle of neoliberal cultural politics: In a completely transformed manner the concept of the Frankfurt School was (mis-)used as a key concept of Blairist cultural politics and made its way back to the continent at the end of the 1990s. With the help of blockbusters like Richard Florida’s Creative Class it became a feature of urban and economic development plans in many European cities, and finally arrived on the agenda of the cultural politics of the European Union.
Speakers include: Branka Curcic, media researcher, kuda.org (Novi Sad); Esther Leslie, reader in political aesthetics, Birkbeck (London); Maurizio Lazzarato, philosopher, sociologist (Paris); Maria Lind, director, IASPIS, (Stockholm); Raimund Minichbauer, researcher, eipcp (Vienna); Monika Mokre, deputy director, Institute for European Integration Research (Vienna); Matteo Pasquinelli, media theorist (Barcelona/London); Gerald Raunig, philosopher, art theoretician, eipcp (Vienna); Tere Vadén philosopher, professor in Hypermedialab, University of Tampere; Ulf Wuggenig, sociologist, Institution for Cultural Theory, University of Lüneburg.
As outcomes and forms of distribution both an issue of FRAME’s magazine Framework _ The Finnish Art Review, www.framework.fi and eipcp’s multilingual webjournal Transversal transversal.eipcp.net will be published.
Started in 2005 with the European Cultural Policies 2015 eipcp.net/publications/ecp2015 and a workshop at IASPIS (Stockholm), the workshop series is organised by the eipcp in cooperation with different partners over Europe. In the second half of 2006 three workshops will take place in Helsinki, Pristine and Vienna/Linz.
The seminar language is English. Registration by August 15th: Laura Karhu, e-mail: laura.karhu@frame-fund.fi, tel. 358-(0)9-6126 4225
There is no fee for participation.
For further information please contact:
Marita Muukkonen
FRAME – Finnish Fund for Art Exchange
Merimiehenkatu 36 D 527, 5th floor
00150 Helsinki, Finland
Tel. 358 9 6126 4221
E-mail: marita.muukkonen@frame-fund.fi
Website: www.frame-fund.fi
Raimund Minichbauer
eipcp – European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
1060 Vienna, Gumpendorfer Strasse 63b, Austria
Tel. 43 1 585 64 78
E-mail: minichbauer@eipcp.net
Website: eipcp.net