What creative industries? Instrumentalism, autonomy and the education of artists

As the narrative of the Creative Industries becomes commonplace, arts institutions are increasingly expected to interface arts practice with business and enterprise. This article opens with a critique of the CBI’s document ‘First Steps’ (2012), arguing how this minimizes the arts’ role in schools. It then provides an analysis of two pedagogies: productivism and autonomism. Following the implications that emerge from the tension between productivism and autonomism in arts pedagogy, and reading these implications from within the contexts of the divergent and increasingly hybrid forms of contemporary art practices, this article then moves on to state that to argue for the legitimation of the arts by gathering what they do under the designation of the Creative Industries would amount to reifying art into an object of mere use, thus distorting both its productive and autonomist possibilities.