Template: Royal A, Font: , Date: 28/02/2015; 3B2 version: 10.0.1465/W Unicode (Dec 22 2011) (APS_OT) Dir: //integrafs1/kcg/2-Pagination/TandF/RCCI_RAPS/ApplicationFiles/9780415706209_text.3d 2 ART AND CULTURAL INDUSTRIES Autonomy and community Laikwan Pang The discourse of art and that of cultural industries does not overlap much in current scholarship, largely due to the latter’s interest in articulating its methodology and concerns, as opposed to art history’s obsession with auteur studies and aesthetic transcendence. The cultural industries are supposedly made up of contractual rela- tionships instead of individual talents, and cultural commodities are often based on fashions or quick utilities instead of timeless artistic ideals with constructed naïveté. Emphasizing late-capitalist production and an environment of consumption, cultural industries scholars, however, have perhaps underestimated the persisting relations between arts and cultural industries, and the extent to which traditional aesthetic con- cepts still directly inform the operation of cultural industries. Apple sells simplicity, Nike sells perseverance and solitude, and many tourist commodities claim to embody transcendence. The architecture of Zaha Hadid and that of Rem Koolhaas are as extravagant as they are shocking; so are their Lacoste and Prada products. The pro- ducts of cultural industries are variously marked by the existing aesthetic vocabulary of the West. While it is true that certain cultural industries, such as tourism and culinary consumptions, do not so obviously manufacture cultural representations with aesthetic value, they all deploy aesthetic means to package their commodities so as to promote consumption. Most importantly, concepts inherited from the European art tradition continue to define the identification and aspirations of many creative laborers around the world. Cultural industries are specifically defined by “new” modes of production and an environment of consumption in which products are still invested with “old” aesthetic values, particularly on the level of creative input. The sociology of art has richly demonstrated the ways that economic transactions relate to the production and consumption of art, and Pierre Bourdieu purposefully adopts the notion of capital to address the relation between art and people (Bourdieu 1993). But sociology does not deal with aesthetic value in itself, and it tends to see art in terms of personal capital that artists use to advance their careers or realize themselves, and that 45