This paper explores how to transvaluate, to re-evaluate and to repudiate neoliberal standards for creative and cultural industries. The paper's focus is on three creative and cultural industries -- food, music and fashion -- all of which have crafts-based origins. These industries were long under the protective eye and of, in one way or another, of the cultural system of what is a nation. However since the 1970s or the 1980s these industries have increasingly been dominated and domesticated by the still continuing rise of the values of neoliberalism, subjected to wave upon wave of reengineering and reorganization, assimilated into the global market system.
At one extreme, affluent consumers, often affluent owner-capitalists or financiers, are empowered to determine what is good food, good music, or good fashion. These affluents are now increasingly co-creators of what they consider culturally meaningful for themselves. Growing amounts of resources flow in the direction of making and keeping the affluents content, which is not always in fit with culturally meaningful content from the perspective of the traditional or authentic creatives in these industries: the chefs, the artists, the designers, What the affluents desire are fancy restaurants, selective clubs, and expensive clothes. Catering to the lifestyles of these rich and famous is increasingly a trans-industry of its own, with ever less room for authentic cultural creation, as authenticity used to be understood. New bureaucratic forms of education and training drive by various forms of "positive psychology" reproduce the focus on the tongues, minds and navels of the affluent, as if their satisfaction and inspiration of these were the only global standard that matters. By virtue of their new role as co-creators, the affluents are offered what is rich in meaning and high in value to them.
At the other extreme, the authentic cultural creatives following vocation and the average citizen have received the stick, at best left holding its short end. Cultural creatives trying to follow their original call and the average citizen are now both squeezed out of being key beneficiaries of participation in these industries. What is forced down throats, into ears and on bodies are degenerated, industrialized and highly wasteful variations - fast food, fast music, fast fashion - co-created with and for the affluents. Almost explicitly hindered by market prices to access such meaning, in any case, the cultural creatives and the average citizen are face to face with the neoliberal tide that is drowning the original authenticity of arts of crafts and their meanings. Values that originally drove food, music, and fashion industries, such as sustainability, are now increasingly dominated, converted and domesticated by neoliberal, technocratic and bureaucratic values and ideologies.
Analysis of food, music and fashion industries in various countries in this paper suggests that to transvaluate the neoliberal tide what is needed is a trans-disciplinary mindset, reminiscent of authentic innocence of the crafts-minded and pre-industrial hierarchy of life-affirming values and norms: to reflect upon, to act upon, and to adhere what is good by virtue of good with local environments and authentic ways of consumption, cultural practice, and creativity. Recipes, hits and fashions to repudiate what has been wasteful and inefficient in fast food, music and fashion include good food, good music, upcycled clothes, and new technologies. The paper calls for further research on how to trans-valuate, trans-discipline and cross-pollinate across these recipes, hits, and fashions.
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23rd NORDIC ACADEMY OF MANAGEMENT CONFERENCE NFF 2015, Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, 12-14 August 2015.