ABSTRACT

It is an obvious point but still worth making, I think: to treat cultural production as an elevated kind of work, or even beyond work altogether, has been the common sense of the middle classes in the West since Kant and the Romantic movement. Among reading publics, educated audiences and artists themselves, the cult of the artist as free-ranging genius continues to rule. If this is a lay orthodoxy, then the contrast over the last 30 years or so is with the small world of cultural and media studies. Here the strong tendency has been to treat as myth any claim that making symbolic artefacts constitutes a high point of human endeavour, or else simply to ignore it and look at other dimensions of cultural work.