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Over the last decade or so, the notion of creativity has come to global prominence as an attribute sparking the imagination of neo-liberal elites and providing the respective policy projects (creative cities, creative clusters, creative economies, creative industries, etc.) with a token of sanctity. Of particular interest in this context is the notion of the creative industries (CI) that recently has become something of a new paradigm for policy makers, investors, practitioners and academics alike. Feeling the need ‘to bring trends and tendencies around the Creative Industries into critical question,’ Amsterdam’s Institute for Network Cultures (INC) teamed up with the University of Ulster’s Centre for Media Research for the MyCreativity conference in November 2006.http://www.connotea.org/wiki/1 MyCreativity featured designers, activists, critical intellectuals, mainstream academics, art critics, curators and even a self-invited WIPO representative.http://www.connotea.org/wiki/2 Its formula for success – and such it doubtlessly was – consisted in bringing together a variety of people who do not usually encounter one anther, thus accomplishing a sort of cross-section of the theory and practice of the creative industries.

The present article takes up some of the contributions to and impressions of MyCreativity in order to reflect on questions regarding creativity, the creative industries, and their significance for contemporary capitalism.http://www.connotea.org/wiki/3 An intructive starting point for such a reflection is provided by Ned Rossiter, one of the co-organisers of MyCreativity. His book Organized Networks was launched at the Amsterdam event, thus providing a sort of academic blueprint for the conference. Rossiter links the rise of creative industries to the emergence of two policy trajectories. One was initiated by the Blair government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s (DCMS) ‘Task Force Mapping Document’, which decreed a new post-industrial super-sector out of 13 otherwise distinct sectors ranging from advertising, interactive leisure software to performing arts. The policy initiative around this document is seen by most CI-researchers as the birth of the creative industries as we know them today. The other trajectory takes off from the 1995 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which inaugurated the juridical regime of control over the increasing informatisation of social relations.

This double foundation of CI policy makes clear that what is at stake in the global rise of the creative industries paradigm is more than simply the export of Blairite ideology. As the DCMS put it, the central goal of its initiative is ‘the generation and exploitation of intellectual property.’http://www.connotea.org/wiki/4 In other words, CI policy aims at a transformation of the structural conditions of production in such a way that ‘creativity’ (the reference here is to ‘individual creativity, skill and talent’) can be channelled into regimes of property. However, as Rossiter stresses, in order to address the political dimension of CI, the ‘structural determination’ resulting from these policy interventions has to be understood in combination with ‘the conditions and experience of creative labour as it relates to intellectual property regimes.

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