Craft labour and creative industries

Abstract

This article examines the role and status of craft labour in the creative industries. While it tends to be overlooked, craft labour is an integral part of what is ostensibly an artist‐led and ‘creative’ work process. The article highlights the necessity of craft in the creative industry ‘workshop’, and the relative autonomy enjoyed by its practitioners. However, while craft labour is depicted as vital, it is also subordinate to artistic labour, and amenable to reform through rational management and refinement of the division of labour – thus a series of likely threats to future craft production are outlined. The article concludes by appealing for further scrutiny of the conditions of craft labour in creative work, not only to reveal its particular and specific qualities, but to extend the somewhat limited scope of contemporary analyses of cultural and creative industry labour and politics.

Keywords:

• craft labour
• creative industries
• capitalism
• art
• politics

Notes

1. Partly this separation derives, at the level of production, from the belief (well established by the early twentieth century) that art must be free and undetermined in order to reveal the truth of the world and that craft, because of its insistence on tradition, skills and technique – the making and not the meaning – could not be autonomous nor attain the position of critique. Thus, in comparison to the ‘purest’ forms of Romanticism and, later, Modern conceptual art, crafts’ insistence on ‘usefulness’, and its apparent lack of radical or intellectual aspiration, came to be seen as embarrassing and shameful. Indeed, the Modernist separation of having ideas from making objects led to what Dormer termed the possibility of ‘art without craft’ (1997, p. 18) – perhaps most famously symbolised by Marcel Duchamp whose selected ‘ready‐mades’ (produced after 1912) exploded the idea that artistry was intrinsically linked to skill and technical ability (see Greenhalgh 1997, Roberts 2007 for a fuller discussion on this theme).

2. The disparities between the rewards available to the consecrated artist and the craft labour involved in the production of consecrated artistic works was no better exemplified in 2008 when the celebrated British artist Damien Hirst managed to sell an entire collection of his work for £111 million at Sotheby’s in London – 10 times the previous high for a sale of pieces by a single artist. Less then two months later Hirst made redundant around half of the workforce at Science Ltd, his main art‐producing company. It was estimated by The Guardian newspaper that these operatives – who assembled materials for his pill cabinet series and produced his butterfly paintings – were on average paid around £19,000 per annum. In June 2007, Hirst’s Lullaby Spring, a cabinet filled with hand‐painted pills, sold for £9.65 million (Jones et al. 2008).

3. The competition between artistic and craft labour is, of course, vital to theorise; studies have tended to show that artists (by virtue of their special ‘gifts’) tend to view themselves as superior to their craft colleagues and will attempt to negotiate (or demand) rewards and working conditions that befit their ‘status’ while seeking to diminish the rewards and standing of the craft labourer (see Ryan 1992, Adamson 2007 for more on this). By way of illustration, consider this recent high‐profile exchange between artistic and craft labour:

Christian Bale: Do you want me to go trash your lights? Do you want me to f*** trash ‘em? Then why are you trashing my scene?

Shane Hurlbut: I’m not trying to trash your scene.

Bale: You are trashing my scene!

Hurlbut: Christian, I was only.

Bale: You do it one more time and I ain’t walking on this set if you’re still hired.

In February 2009 an audio recording was leaked to the internet of Hollywood actor Christian Bale launching an aggressive and expletive‐laden tirade against Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut on the set of the Terminator Salvation movie. Particularly remarkable was not just the prolonged intensity of the attack, but the way in which Bale felt it was acceptable (as the ‘star’) to publicly humiliate Hurlbut, an experienced and senior co‐worker, but (in Bale’s eyes) merely a technical operative, one clearly expendable and subordinate to his ‘talent’. The movie’s Director, Joseph ‘McG’ McGinty Nichol, later defended Bale’s rant as simply ‘part of the creative process’.

4. For example, some critics have more enthusiastically embraced the radical potential of new technology for democratising creative production (largely in the form of Web 2.0 and other forms of ‘creative’ software and user‐led and interactive technology – see, for instance, Jenkins 2006, Hartley 2009), with the implication being that a social expansion of craft skills might now occur through the proliferation of DIY production – with artists, consumers and other inspired individuals stepping into the shoes vacated by the disenfranchised (and presumably redundant) craft worker. This cannot be entirely discounted, though, as Lewis has warned, we must be cautious of ‘the tendency of liberal and postmodernist commentators to utopianize the political potential of the technologies while neglecting or parenthesizing the significant invasion and appropriation of the cyber territory by the familiar forces of capital and commercial ideology’ (Lewis 2000, p. 114).