The creative industries provided twice as many UK jobs as financial services
"This Monday, [Andrew] Marr hosted a special edition of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4 to celebrate the RCA's 175th anniversary with guests including former RCA rector and Arts Council chair Sir Christopher Frayling.
In the show, Frayling pointed out that the creative industries provided twice as many UK jobs as financial services, but that this contribution went unnoticed.
'What I never understand is, there are so many column inches about financial services all the time,' Frayling told Marr. 'Financial services contributes about 1% more than the creative industries, which employ two million people whereas financial services employ one million people. So in terms of contribution to the economy generally, the creative industries actually have it over financial services in almost every way. And how many column inches about it? Very little. So there's this huge impact but people don't seem to be noticing.'
In his article, Marr argues that because the economic value of art schools is difficult to measure, politicians fail to appreciate their importance to the economy.
'And there's where I think the trouble lies,' Marr concludes. 'To invest in art and design means putting public money into areas whose value cannot be captured on a spreadsheet, where concepts like productivity, value-for-money, inputs and outputs – which so reassure the political world – simply collapse. That means faith. It means risk.
'But, without it, hard times surely stretch out rather bleakly. Other countries understand this, including China where more than a thousand art and design colleges are operating and whose students greatly benefit from colleges here too."
(Dezeen, 21 November 2012)
Fig.1 Jim Rokos "22° 36° 48°", fruit bowl [http://rokos.co.uk/].
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Neoliberal whizz-kid: Aotearoa New Zealand PM John Key in 1987
"A 1987 video has been unearthed featuring a 25-year-old squash-playing, accountancy graduate John Key. The bright-eyed Mr Key features in an early Close-Up story called Big Dealers. The 'portrait of 80s job du jour: foreign exchange dealer', shows the now Prime Minister in 'the pit' (trading room) as a senior forex dealer. 'Forex dealing is a work hard, play hard world with an image of rich brats who wreck restaurants but always somewhere else,' says the reporter. 'I am not denying that, that has happened and I guess that will happen again in the future but I personally perform in that way,' Mr Key responded."
(Deanna Harris, 02 Sep 2010, MediaWorks TV)
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The AHRC definition for Speculative Research
"The broad aim of this route is to support high-quality research where the speculative, experimental or exploratory nature of the work means that results or outcomes are uncertain or cannot be guaranteed, or where a significant degree of risk is involved."
(University of Glamorgan)
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Remaking Film: Hollywood seeks to duplicate past successes and minimise risk by emphasising the familiar
"As in some approaches to film genre, remakes can be located in ‘the material conditions of commercial film-making, where plots are copied and formulas forever reiterated'.(14) For film producers, remakes are consistently thought to provide suitable models, and something of a financial guarantee, for the development of studio based projects. In a commercial context, remakes are ‘pre-sold' to their audience because viewers are assumed to have some prior experience, or at least possess a ‘narrative image',(15) of the original story – an earlier film or literary property – before engaging in its particular re-telling.(16) In the case of cross-cultural remakings, such as The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002)/Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998) or Vanilla Sky (Cameron Crowe, 2001)/Abre Los Ojos (Alejandro Amenábar, 1997) foreign films are dispossessed of local detail to exploit new (English-language) markets. A number of commentators(17) have observed that the remake, along with the sequel and series, has become typical of the defensive production and marketing strategies of a ‘post-Jaws'(18) Hollywood. For instance, Jim Hoberman says that ‘the trickle of remakes that began . . . with Farewell, My Lovely in 1975 became a flood of recycled Jazz Singing Scarfaced King Kong 'landmarks,' Roman numeral'd replays of old and recent mega-hits, and retired mixed media figures [Flash Gordon, Popeye, Superman, and the like] pressed back into service '.(19)
This ‘great downpour' of sequels and remakes, perhaps more perceived than real,(20) is often taken as a sign of Hollywood film having exhausted its creative potential, leading into ‘conservative plot structures'(21) and ‘automatic self-cannibalisation'.(22) Equally, film remaking is seen as a trend that is encouraged by the commercial orientation of the conglomerate ownership of Hollywood, one which seeks to duplicate past successes and minimise risk by emphasising the familiar – ‘recreating with slight changes films that have proved successful in the past' – even if this leads to ‘aesthetically inferior films'.(23) As instantly recognisable properties, remakes (along with sequels and series) satisfy the requirement that Hollywood deliver reliability (repetition) and novelty (innovation) in the same production package.(24) Understood in this way, the remake becomes a particular instance not only of the ‘repetition effects'(25) which characterise the narrative structure of Hollywood film but also of a more general repetition – of exclusive stars, proprietary characters, patented processes, narrative patterns, and generic elements – through which Hollywood develops its ‘pre-sold' audience.(26)"
(Constantine Verevis, p.88)
[14] Altman, Film/Genre: 86.
[15] John Ellis, Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video, rev. ed., Routledge, 1992: 30.
[16] Altman, Film/Genre:112.
[17] Tino Balio, ‘Introduction to Part II', in Tino Balio, ed, Hollywood in the Age of Television, Unwin Hyman, 1990; J. Hoberman, ‘Ten Years That Shook the World', American Film, June 1985: 34–59; Stephen M. Silverman, ‘Hollywood Cloning: Sequels, Prequels, Remakes, and Spin-Offs', American Film, July-August, 1978: 24–30.
[18] Thomas Schatz, ‘The New Hollywood', in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins, eds., Film Theory Goes to the Movies, Routledge: 1993.
[19] J. Hoberman, ‘Facing the Nineties', in Vulgar Modernism: Writing on Movies and Other Media, Temple, 1991: 1–2.
[20] Reviewing a sample of 3,490 films from between 1940 and 1979 Thomas Simonet argues that far more ‘recycled script' films appeared before the conglomerate takeovers, and perceptions that remaking has increased in the ‘new Hollywood' may be governed by comparisons with the previous decade only. See ‘Conglomerates and Content: Remakes, Sequels, and Series in The New Hollywood', in Bruce A. Austin, ed, Current Research in Film: Audiences, Economics, and Law, Vol. 3, Ablex, 1987.
[21] Stephen Harvey, ‘Can't Stop the Remakes', Film Comment, September–October 1980: 50–53.
[22] Mark Crispin Miller, ‘Hollywood: The Ad', Atlantic Monthly, April 1990: 59–62.
[23] Simonet, ‘Conglomerates and Content':154.
[24] Ibid., p. 155.
[25] Raymond Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Constance Penley, Indiana University Press, 2000.
[26] See Robert P. Kolker, ‘Algebraic Figures: Recalculating the Hitchcock Formula', in Horton and McDougal: 36; Steve Neale, ‘Questions of Genre', Screen vol. 31, no. 1, 1990: 56; Altman, Film/Genre: 115.
Constantine Verevis, 2004. 'Remaking Film', Film Studies, Issue 4, Summer 2004
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Linkage Projects: The Australian Research Council (ARC)
"The Linkage Projects scheme supports collaborative research and development projects between higher education organisations and other organisations, including within industry, to enable the application of advanced knowledge to problems. Typically, research projects funded under the scheme involve risk.
Proposals for funding under Linkage Projects must involve a Partner Organisation from outside the higher education sector. The Partner Organisation must make a significant contribution in cash and/or in kind, to the project that is equal to, or greater than, the ARC funding)."
(Commonwealth of Australia, 19/03/2009)
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