Artists in the Creative Economy: Inoperative Modes of Resistance

This paper illustrates the ways in which artists have become complicit within a neoliberal creative economy through their practices often situated within modes of resistance and critique, which have become impotent. It reflects also on appropriation and cooptation of practices by the market and by the alt-right. Additionally, in the rise of a knowledge-based creative economy, the artist becomes instrumentalized in processes of branding and in the commodification of culture, which creating conditions of precarity in an oversaturated labor market. Artists need to find new modes of practice to engage more effectively in today’s economy and to reclaim agency as a critical and creative force in society. The second part of this paper details the dispositions that artists can take to the market from total withdrawal to embracing the market through acceleration. This helps to illustrate the relations to the market to consider ways for artists to explore the possibilities within a market economy, which can be taken as a creative practice in-itself. The final section opens up to a reordering in considering the context in China, which is rapidly developing its creative economy. The aim is to consider alternate narratives to creative economy and modernization, which has become a hegemonic model that is exported globally. To consider another history and social and political situation allows for new social relations and disposition to the market. Though China is problematic with an authoritarian government, it presents an opportunity to imagine alternatives to neoliberal democracies now in crisis.