The Creative Scene and its Business Models
Precarious? – or flexible, fit for the future, and worthy of funding?
Positioning the Creative Scene
Artists and creative agents work both within and outside the cultural sector, either in a self-employed capacity or as full- or part-time staff in the most diverse constellations. They hold either temporary or permanent positions, belong to local or international networks, and their professional activities are based either on existing structures or deliberately dispense with these. Three types of entrepreneurship can be broadly distinguished along the lines of existing production mechanisms:
The creative scene – a term that carries positive connotations – refers to that particular sector of the creative industries characterised by micro-businesses and determined by agents who pursue multiple tracks, whose motivation is content-driven, who aspire to no division between their private and professional life – and who mostly earn little. Established creative industries enterprises have clearly recognisable operational structures. Correspondingly, their production and communication processes largely adhere to standardised structures. Unlike the creative scene, established enterprises value business principles like stability and longevity. Creative agents situated outside the creative industries can be recognised as members of the entrepreneurial value chain outside the creative industries. Their modes of thinking and action cast them in the role of innovative problem-solvers or problem-finders (often in proximity to research and development departments).
The creative scene is of particular interest as regards the future of flexible forms of work.
Characteristics of the Creative Scene
What renders the creative scene distinct can be explained in terms of a notion of capital that distinguishes between two kinds of capital: first, financial capital; and secondly, symbolic capital, which comprises social and cultural capital.
The creative scene determines the relation between these types of capital by offsetting symbolic capital against the lack of financial capital; it is marked by the dominance of symbolic capital. Accordingly, its value chain tends toward immaterial products (ideas, concepts), symbolically high-value products (unique, qualitatively ambitious), and innovative products (unsecured references to current developments). Networking among micro-businesses generates project ideas that adopt, promote, and innovatively implement current developments.
The table below links the various types of capital to stages in the value chain. It thus offers a first overview of the distinctive features of the creative scene:
The Logic of the Creative Scene
Together, these types of capital, the characteristics of the occupational field, and the various stages in the value creation process introduced above help distinguish the creative scene from established enterprises. The motives and options of those working in the creative scene as regards the occupational field, production, products, and communication explain why working and living in the creative scene has its own distinct qualities – notwithstanding precious financial conditions. The creative scene makes for sustainable competencies unlikely to exist beyond it in quite the same way:
Openness and Stimulation: The creative scene tries out new forms of life and work that offer specific conditions: multi-tracking, hybridisation, fields of action rather than clearly delineated (and confined) occupational fields, and the proximity of oneÂ’s professional and private life. Work undertaken in the creative scene is thus characterised by dislimitation, a greater degree of openness as regards task and problem development, and a wider social and cultural field providing stimulation.
Experimental Practice and Value Orientation: The creative scene utilises production processes that are slower and less elaborate, improvisatory and conceptional, simulation-based and involving more complex communication. Such features create opportunities for greater thoroughness and sustainability, a distinct experimental practice, and complex social and cultural value orientation.
Prototypes und Impulses: The creative scene develops product categories that appear to be either variants of familiar categories or indeed new categories – thus expressing an attitude that prioritises playfulness, curiosity, and aesthetic and other modes of experimentation; for established products, it can create new impulses and prototypes resulting in new affiliations and uses in the established field.
Location Attractiveness and Niche Market: The creative scene leverages forms of communication and distribution that create particular qualities out of the paradigms of manageability, direct responsibility, and verifiable competencies; it produces and establishes niche markets, the smallest possible series and custom-built items, and its local roots makes a location attractive.
Experiment and Innovation: Its flexible project contexts and consciously deployed “entrepreneurial” liberties give rise to attitudes, procedures, and products that retroact positively on established enterprises in various ways. Creativity and innovation lie close together, and working methods orient themselves on the principles of experimental research or even redefine these.
Outlook: Funding Measures
The above discussion makes evident that the creative scene offers viable options, besides providing opportunities to realise sustainable, forward-looking models of work and life, and that the challenges facing its agents and the recognition they are granted are well-balanced. There is, however, one familiar reservation: the agents of the creative scene live and work under financially precarious conditions. The crucial question is therefore whether this empirical fact is indebted to the logic of the creative scene – or whether it can be surmounted, under changed auspices, without, however, forsaking the logic and thus the specific qualities of the creative scene.
What is sought-after is a funding model for the creative scene that would not have to change its characteristic work processes and networks but merely render these more optimal. Such a model hence needs to render conscious – and hence negotiable – the particular competencies of the creative scene through appropriate transfer processes, interdisciplinary forms of work, innovative procedures, and specific modes of communication and distribution.
