It is clear that the cultural industries can no longer be characterised simply as the ‘other’ to authentic modernist art.Those days are well and truely gone.

Art and the market are not inimical to each other – the market is a relatively efficient way of allocating resources and reflecting choice. So the Adelaide City Council could, for instance, develop a democratic cultural policy based on an educated and informed audience demand to which publicly owned distribution companies and cultural producers alike could respond.

Wasn't that the Greater LondonCouncil’s (GLC) cultural industries strategy?

From memory it represented an attempt to break out of a cultural policy centred on the ‘arts’ – and on subsidies to artists and producing institutions as the foundation of that policy. They began to address the conditions of the commercial production of culture--- it represented an industrial approach to cultural policy, using economic means to achieve cultural (and economic) objectives.

Artist's I would argue only ever speak for themselves, it's the historians and critics, who argue otherwise.

s2@art
not everyone is an artisan prducer working for themselves or producing for the market.

Don't we have corporate professionals, where large cultural producers directly
employed fulltime salaried workers. Isn't this at its mostextensive in the ‘new media’ sector – cinema, radio, and television –
where high levels of capitalisation and technology are involved?

s2art,
the status of creative labour hasa changed.The image is one of the radically free creative genius, that has been central to the western art tradition since the 18th century. Yet we have the
absorption of the artist---and photographers---into the Culture Industries do we not

Yes I see your point/s, the nature of cultural production has shifted, shall we say, melted, Into many areas.

But are we talking about cultural production or art, I still see them as two separate and distinct activities, bad Modernist that I am!

s2art,
I agree. There are still crucial distinctions between art and non-art in photography and cultural production despite the blurring of the old boundaries.

An interesting example of the blurring is the way the Design Museum uses Flickr for its Design Cities exhibition

Hal Foster in Art after Modernism (1984) and The Return of the Real (1996--by real Foster means art's focus on the body) argued for the crucial distinction between a critical modernist art and an affirmative mass culture to be retained. His hope is that we neither abandon nor accept Modernism's legacy.

The work of Jeff Koons was criticized because his stylistic appropriation only reinforced the phantasmagoric , sensuous qualities of classy consumer products. We could say the same for Damien Hirst's dead cow into a fishtank.

Once appropriation meant Dada, the promise of an avant-garde, a rebellion. A decade ago, it meant Postmodernism, the refusal of any avant-garde and the celebration of knowing irony.