Work In The Creative Economy: Living Contradictions Between the Market and Creative Collaboration

This paper evaluates the nature of working professionally in the creative industries whilst simultaneously pursuing an independent art and research-based practice. Those of us who work in creative professions are often caught in the double-bind between making a living or doing what we love, or trying somehow to bring the two together. Through an auto-ethnographic account of my experience working in a digital start-up in my day job and pursuing independent critical and creative projects in the evenings, I will outline and contrast the different values, language and modes of operation that illustrate the contradictions and challenges we face in today’s economy. Auto-enthnography is an approach to research that describes and analyses personal experience in order to understand culture (Ellis, 2011; Holman Jones, 2005). By drawing from embodied experience, one can find truths that may challenge or enforce theoretical presumptions and open up to new perspectives and understandings of the world. In this text, I will explore the conditions of living, working, and surviving in London in a post-crisis neoliberal economy where creative workers that bring light to the precarious nature of cultural work and also the contradictions we face between values and logics of the market and creative collaboration. The creative economy celebrates ideas of collaboration, but it is used to perpetuate individualism and personal profit over more genuinely collaborative models of co-operation and shared ownership that are valued in artist-led projects, which seek to benefit the many over the few. There is a need to find alternatives in a world where we are all overworked.