2007-8 Critical Studies Theme Statement

Producing Culture: Creators and Creativity in the Contemporary World

Late modern society, particularly as it has evolved in the West since the 1970s, is said to be characterized by the decline of industrial production and the rise of an information-based consumer culture. Expanded intellectual property rights, an increasingly consolidated media, and a growing worldwide telecommunications network have exchanged a culture of production for the production of culture. Creative producers of all kinds—architects, artists, ceramists, designers, metalsmiths, weavers, etc.—each in their own way have important roles to play in making culture, locally and globally. This series brings together artists, critics, social scientists, historians, activists, and others who illuminate ways in which culture is produced, distributed, and consumed, and the place of creativity in that process. Among the questions to be posed: Who owns the productions of culture? How do individual creative producers integrate private practice into the public sphere? What is the relationship of culture to nature? What conceptual frameworks have historically governed the dichotomy between culture and nature and what effect have they had? What lessons can be learned from the distant and not-so-distant past of the role of culture in the rise and/or fall of particular civilizations?