Youth arts, place and differential becomings of the world

Abstract

This article considers the cultural significance of youth arts projects outside dominant, policy-driven and popular cultural discourses of youth arts and creativity. The author takes up Deleuze's concept of creativity as the differential becoming of the world (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition), in order to argue that within dominant discourses of youth arts, fixed values become bound to the becoming of creativity. This produces a situation in which creativity is given a set worth. Such perspectives have become embedded in dominant discourses of youth arts, in which ‘creative’ activities are marketed as a means of adding value to young people. This is a radically impoverished approach to thinking about the technologies of self that can be developed through arts practices. Offering a study of youth arts framed within in alternative sensibility of creativity and spatiality, the author explores the work of two UK organizations and one Australian youth arts company, each of which seeks to foster creativity in young people through particular arts projects. These projects also create spaces in which particular processes of subjectivization are actualized. This article considers these aspects of three projects alongside the politics of the arts organizations in question, politics that are also critical of discourses in which financial values are bound to ‘creativity’.