Summer is a good time to read books that otherwise pile up on tables and remain untouched. One such book that has been on top of the ‘recent acquisitions’ pile is Justin O’Connor’s Culture is not an Industry. I took it with me to Rovaniemi partly because it’s light weight paper, and read it while gallery sitting for the Gifts from the Sentient Forest exhibition in Villa Vinkkeli there. I did not underline specific paragraphs but I have turned the corners of pages as a mark to return to that page too many times. So what’s the book about? Basically it is a critical account of the trend to consider culture and art as part of the culture industry or the creative economies and why that strategy has failed, and should be replaced with an understanding of culture as a way of life and as part of essential social infrastructure. The chapters are titled Creative Industries, Culture goes missing, Necessity or luxury?, Culture and the Social foundations, Cultural infrastructures and Culture and economy. At the turn of the fist corner I read: “We have charted the move from culture as part of social citizenship to culture as consumer service industry. This is part of a wider shift to a market citizenship in which the social foundations – health, welfare, education, and basic infrastructural provision – have been commodified, privatised and outsourced.” (O’Connor 2024, 95). And the last page, with the last corner begins with: “Since the 1990’s, the global culture industry has become an integral part of global capitalism. Perhaps nowhere else in this system is the descriptor ‘neo-feudalism’ more apt, as huge cultural conglomerates and their avatars now have almost unchallenged power over the collective imagination of humanity.” (O’Connor 2024, 228) After a period of massive overproduction “the classic trajectory has now set in – glut, slump, lay-offs, elimination, more concentration.” (Ibid) As a solution he wants states to step in with regulations, breaking monopolies, socialising the databases, affirming that culture is not a commodity like any other, that culture is not an industry.
For me the book was instructive as a lesson in recent history of cultural politics and also as an updating of contemporary leftist thinking, which I am shamefully unaware of, like the debate regarding basic income versus basic services and other related topics.
 
 
O’Connor, Justin. Culture is not an Industry. Reclaiming art and culture for the common good. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press 2024.