Contemporary Cultural Industries Research Articles

Analysis of the Commercial Value of China's Intangible Cultural Heritage Guangcai - A Study Based on SWOT Analysis

The contemporary Chinese intangible cultural heritage industry, represented by Guangcai, has garnered considerable attention due to its distinctive aesthetic qualities and rich historical heritage. However, a comprehensive exploration of its commercial value remains a research gap. This study aims to address this gap by employing the SWOT analysis framework to comprehensively analyze the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of Guangcai. Through an in-depth analysis, targeted recommendations have been formulated to facilitate the sustainable development of the Guangcai industry. The research findings highlight Guangcai's aesthetic advantages and geographical trade advantages in the international market, alongside challenges such as a shrinking labor market and limited visibility. Moreover, Guangcai faces opportunities arising from the increasing societal demand and the digitalization of the internet, as well as threats associated with the continuous substitution of foreign art and shifts in the international landscape. This study offers strategic and practical insights, providing valuable applications for the government, businesses, and practitioners, propelling the commercial development and cultural preservation of China's traditional intangible heritage industry.

Research on the Design of Shimao Heritage Tourism Cultural and Creative Products Based on Visual Cultural Symbols

Cultural heritage tourism has been favored in recent years. It has become a “powerful commercial force” and also brought vitality to heritage protection and revitalization and the development of contemporary cultural and creative industries. Based on the perspective of visual cultural symbols, this article explores and creatively transforms cultural elements of Shimao culture, which contains extensive and profound Chinese civilization, and constructs methods and means for the design of cultural and creative products for heritage site tourism, aiming to broaden the activation of heritage culture. Cultural heritage tourism can better continue its cultural genes, exert its charisma and influence on cultural communication, and meet modern tourists’ needs for rich cultural experiences.

Research on the Regional Artistic Characteristics of Jieshou Colored Pottery and the Path of Creative Industry

Jieshou colored pottery, as one of the precious heritages of traditional Chinese ceramic craft, has profound regional artistic characteristics. With the change of market economy, the market development of Jieshou colored pottery is slow, the audience is narrow, and it is urgent to seek new innovative development of industrial path. The purpose of this paper is to start from the historical history and artistic characteristics of Jieshou colored pottery, in-depth discussion and analysis of regional characteristics combined with contemporary creative industries, which helps to better understand the artistic characteristics of Jieshou colored pottery, and at the same time provides new ideas for its sustainable development in the field of contemporary cultural industries.

The ambivalence in the ambiguity of UNESCO’s cultural policy remit: a structural description of the Common Heritage of Mankind in the Cultural Diversity Convention

ABSTRACT United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) has adopted cultural Conventions since the 1950s, specifying aspects of culture that its Member States should protect and promote as the ‘Common Heritage of Mankind (CHM)’. This article argues that UNESCO has accumulated the concepts of the CHM in four cultural Conventions into the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions (Cultural Diversity Convention), making UNESCO’s cultural policy remit ‘ambiguous’. This article further posits that the accumulation of the concepts of the CHM into the Cultural Diversity Convention lies in a rhetorical structure; The rhetorical structure allows the Convention to set ambivalent policy agendas encompassing the protection of past culture and the promotion of contemporary cultural industries. A historical analysis of UNESCO’s five cultural Conventions demonstrates that UNESCO has developed its description of the CHM and the following policy ambit to respond to social changes in the cultural sector as well as the political relationships of its Member States and other international organisations. The discussion about the use of cultural description to extend UNESCO’s cultural policy ambit sheds new light on the ambiguity of cultural policy in the context of how to use historical knowledge of culture.

Melting the Psychological Boundary: How Interactive and Sensory Affordance Influence Users’ Adoption of Digital Heritage Service

As a result of the post-pandemic situation, enhancing digital heritage services has become one of the key issues for the recovery of tourism. Disruptive innovation in human–computer interaction technology has brought new opportunities for digitalization and intelligent transformation in the contemporary cultural tourism industry. Existing research on the adoption behavior of digital heritage services primarily focuses on users’ assessments of behavior results. There is a considerable gap in research about the interaction and value co-creation between users and digital intelligence services and users’ cognitive construction logic of digital heritage services. Following reciprocal determinism, we propose a conceptual model to deconstruct the detailed transmission path of interactive affordance and sensory affordance to digital heritage adoption. In Study 1, a lab experiment in an AI-assisted smart screen digital heritage service context revealed that interactive affordance and user adoption of digital heritage services were partially mediated by psychological distance. Findings from a between-subject online experiment in Study 2 confirmed that embodied cognition and psychological distance play a parallel intermediary role in the impact of sensory affordance on adoption. In Study 3, a lab experiment in a VR-based digital museum context further verified that information overload moderates the influence of embodied cognition on psychological distance. This research reveals the deep-bounded, rational decision-making logic of digital heritage service adoption and provides significant practical enlightenment for the optimization of the affordance experience.

Adorno’s Cultural Industry Theory in the Environment of Internet Development

Traditional cultural industry theory is confined to a specific historical context, and the theoretical level of simple denial and criticism of cultural industry phenomena has lost its historical significance. The development of the cultural industry is the inevitable result of the development of the market economy. It enables people to recover from their values in the spirit of humanism. This article was aimed at studying and evaluating Adorno’s cultural industry theory based on the development environment of the Internet and using literature review techniques to obtain, collect, and summarize research related to Adorno’s cultural industry and its subject critical theory, analyze, summarize, and classify their views and opinions, as well as data on gender significance and limitations, and compare and extract. In the research stage of the thesis, firstly, the background and conditions of Adorno’s critical theory of cultural industry were systematically investigated with a complete historical and logical method. Then, it combines theory with practice and uses Adorno’s critical theory of contemporary Chinese cultural industry to find problems and defects. Finally, based on the difference between Adorno’s living environment and the current environment, it is logical to compare Adorno’s theory with comparative research methods in modern China, but it needs to be improved and perfected.

Symbolic representations of cultural industries at content trade fairs: Bourdieu's “economic world reversed” revisited

From business events such as content trade fairs, we can learn about the institutional logics of contemporary cultural industries. In our ethnographic fieldwork at six different trade fairs in three industries (book, music and TV), we identified five ways of legitimating the commercial production and distribution of cultural goods: cultural industries are represented as an idealized form of business, as art for art's sake, as innovation and technology, as entertainment and as a public sphere. Our findings both confirm and contradict Bourdieu's theory of cultural production fields. In accordance with Bourdieu's description of the field as a reversed economic world, we observed an industry which struggles to disguise ordinary economic transactions, such as negotiating deals, ordering services or making contracts. In contrast to Bourdieu, we do not find a strong homology between a position in the field and its symbolic representation. Rather, we observed that small enterprises from the restricted field of cultural production as well as large-scale producers and distributors of cultural goods use the same narratives to legitimate their practices. Borrowing from recent advancements in organizational institutionalism, we interpret the symbolic representations at trade fairs as a cultural toolkit from which people in the industry strategically choose in order to pursue their interests.

Three Challenges for Media Studies in the Age of Platforms

Digital platforms, from Instagram to Spotify, have become central to the production, distribution, and monetization of cultural content. This essay discusses how this process of platformization poses three interrelated challenges for the research on and governance of contemporary cultural industries. First, platformization complicates the question of media concentration, as platform corporations integrate highly diverse businesses, not only hosting and curating media content, but also functioning as advertising networks, data intermediaries, and so on. Second, it thwarts the regulation of media content, as platforms channel vast amounts of heterogeneous materials, shared by a broad range of users, making it extremely difficult to maintain oversight. Third, the growing dominance of platform corporations over the cultural domain makes it vital, but also difficult, to develop and sustain online public service media and alternative noncommercial platforms. The essay closes by discussing how these challenges can and should be addressed from the perspective of media studies.

Technology vs. sublime: Critique of contemporary cultural and entertainment industry

Drawing on traditional understanding of the concept / category of the sublime, the authors approach to the concept / category of the sublime in an interdisciplinary manner, that is, from the perspective of contemporary philosophy of media. In this way, the text maintains a connection both to traditional aesthetics, on the one hand, and to critical theory of society, on the other. The authors problematize ?technologically sublime? as well as contemporary cultural and entertainment industry, both within the current social and economic constellations of relationships. The current transformation of the concept / category of the sublime, understood beyond the interpretation of nature and art, finds its new path of realization in the domain of technology, which is based on the capitalistic social and economic order, together with the industrialized, profitable world of entertainment. This technologically mediatized world, brings into relation the sublime and the world of entertainment in a dialectical way.

Pagando para vencer, parte 2: serialização, power creep e capitalismo tardio em Hearthstone

Este artigo discute o fenômeno de power creepno card gamedigital Hearthstone(Blizzard, 2012), problematizando-o a partir das perspectivas da midiatização, serialização e capitalismo tardio. O objetivo central é politizar a questão, apontando para os imbricamentos da indústria cultural contemporânea com as perspectivas epistemológicas e ontológicas do jogo enquanto chave interpretativa. Nesse sentido, empreendemos o esforço de revisar algumas teorias da midiatização, observando em particular o conceito nos videogames a partir da serialização. Partimos para uma análise empírica exploratória de relatos de jogadores profissionais no Youtube, revelando discursos nos ajudam a localizar a agência do capitalismo tardio a partir da serialização e da midiatização. Por fim, reforçamos a necessidade de contemplar os pontos desvelados pela pesquisa na compreensão da indústria contemporânea do entretenimento, bem como a necessidade de (re)pensar os entendimentos particulares sobre jogos digitais e suas culturas.

Sincere Performance in Pentecostal Megachurch Music

Drawing on the work of Webb Keane and Joel Robbins in the anthropology of Christianity, furnished with the influential work of Charles Hirschkind in the anthropology of Islam, and the ethnographic studies of Tom Wagner and Mark Jennings on Pentecostal worship music, this article critically examines ideas of sincerity in the musical practices of Pentecostal megachurches. Making use of ethnographic data from research on congregational music in South Africa, including interviews with a variety of Pentecostal musicians, this article argues that the question of Protestant sincerity, understood following Keane as emphasizing individual moral autonomy and suspicion of external material religious forms for expressing one’s inner state, is particularly acute in the case of the Hillsong megachurch. Employing the full array of spectacular possibilities made available by the contemporary culture industry, Hillsong churches centralize cultural production and standardize musical performance whilst simultaneously emphasizing individual religious experience. It is argued that Pentecostal megachurches seek to realize a form of sincere mimicry grounded in learned and embodied practices.

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Repairing the Disjointed Narrative of Ballarat's Theatre Royal

Editor's Note

Editor's Note John David Zuern I have what feels like a fairly reliable memory of reading James R. Mellow's Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company in my first year of college, but I can't recall what initially drew me to the book. Although it's likely I had heard of Stein by then in one of my introductory English classes, I'm certain I hadn't read any of her work, and I suspect it might only have been the sinuous art-deco typography on the cover of the 1982 Avon paperback edition that prompted me to buy it. Whatever it was that called out to me, I'm forever grateful for the appeal. I found Mellow's account of Stein's life and world as captivating as any novel, and it set me on an often baffling, always thrilling course of reading that stoked my own literary aspirations even as it unraveled some of my aesthetic prejudices. After devouring The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which I found in its entirety in the Vintage Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, I worked my way, much more slowly, through all the other selections and then tackled the complete versions of many of the works excerpted in that anthology. My fascination with Stein persisted into graduate school, where it culminated—and apparently exhausted itself—in a not terribly original seminar paper comparing Tender Buttons with Francis Ponge's Le parti pris des choses. While I certainly still admire Stein's genius, and while I'm indebted to her for introducing me to the pleasures and profits to be gained from writing that doesn't wear its meaning on its sleeve, until this past week I hadn't read her in decades. I don't know what happened to my copy of Charmed Circle, but I keep the fat, now-yellowed Selected Writings on my shelf among the other books I can't quite bring myself to give away. While I was writing this paragraph, I took it down and happily surrendered an hour or so to Stein's inimitable prose. I have to thank Linda Zygutis for reigniting a spark of my lapsed devotion to Stein. In her essay in this issue of Biography, Zygutis recounts the famously inscrutable author's 1934 lecture tour to the United States following the commercial success of her uncharacteristically scrutable Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Reflecting on the sometimes sensationalist press coverage of Stein's appearances, the efforts of her publishers to exploit her notoriety, and Stein's struggle to retain control over her own image and to preserve her artistic integrity, Zygutis gives us a portrait of the artist as a somewhat reluctant "personality" chafing against the expectations of a public whose interest in her was [End Page iv] largely mediated and distorted by the machinery of publicity. In the context of the ongoing memoir boom, Zygutis's analysis of Stein's ambivalence about the fame she garnered with The Autobiography speaks to the challenges today's autobiographers and memoirists face when their lives, along with their works, are drawn into the contemporary culture industry. With its exploration of the connections among publishing, publicity, and literary celebrity, Zygutis's study of Stein on the lecture circuit nicely harmonizes with all three of the other articles in this issue. Like Zygutis, Andrew Jewell reflects on a famous author's attempt to manage her public persona. Recounting Willa Cather's last years, Jewell reconstructs the psychological and historical context in which Cather issued a ban on the posthumous publication of her letters. Both Jayne Lewis and Anna Poletti draw upon book history to trace the emergence of autobiography in Europe within the material and economic matrix of an evolving print culture, focusing on different historical periods. Lewis organizes her study around the enigmatic figure of Valentine Greatrakes, whose remarkably multilayered 1666 life narrative attempts to uphold his credibility as a healer in the midst of a pamphlet war that put his reputation at risk. Jean-Paul Sartre's 1964 autobiography The Words serves as Poletti's point of departure for a wide-ranging consideration—reaching back into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—of the...

Adentro y afuera del multiplex. Los estudios comerciales de audiencias del cine en América Latina

Las maneras en que son investigadas las audiencias del cine por las industrias culturales asociadas son poco conocidas más allá de los círculos de expertos. Sin embargo, las cifras usadas por los productores, distribuidores y exhibidores tienen impactos contundentes sobre los espectadores, las políticas públicas de fomento de la cinematografía, e incluso, la investigación académica. ¿Cómo se miden las audiencias de cine en América Latina? ¿Son confiables las cifras? Se concluyó que los sistemas de medición de audiencias en América Latina y el mundo solo contabilizan las cifras de taquilla en salas y no tienen realmente en cuenta ni las otras modalidades de consumo cinematográfico, ni las ricas y complejas apropiaciones y relaciones de la gente con el cine.

Culture, Politics, and Governing: Contemporary Ascetics and the Pecuniary Subject

In Culture, Politics, and Governing, the study of contemporary ascetics provided me with a way to approach the practice of knowledge production and its intersection with cultural production that was able to take into account the institutionalization of authors and artists and the ways in which their practices were both governed and governing, often through valorization. Recently, I have worked to extend this framework to settings that are less obvious as sites for the production of governing knowledge: what Max Weber and Foucault discussed as ascetics, generated through what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno called the culture industry. The contemporary culture industry produces an art of living genre that encourages pecuniary subjects who treat the self as a site for the production of value from which to practice valorized ascetics.

Between francophonie and world literature in French: Tahar Ben Jelloun's evolving authority

ABSTRACTOne of the most prolific authors writing in French today, Moroccan born Tahar Ben Jelloun has built a rich and multi-layered career as a literary figure and public intellectual in France. He is an excellent figure to use as a case study when analysing the specificities and implications of categorising a particular author and their works within such frameworks as ‘francophonie’ or ‘world literature in French.’ In this paper, I examine the contemporary culture industry’s shaping of the authorial identity of Tahar Ben Jelloun, whether as writer or public persona. Specifically, this article considers Ben Jelloun at three particular moments in his career, and examines two fictionalised testimonials, Cette aveuglante absence de lumière (This Blinding Absence of Light) and Par le feu (By Fire). Each of the three moments represents a particular positioning of the author’s identity as, alternatively, Arab, Middle Eastern, francophone, African, some combination of these, or as a figure of World literature in French. The two texts were chosen because, despite their similarities in terms of genre and theme, stylistic differences between the two suggest that Ben Jelloun considered shaped the second with critiques of the first in mind. The positioning of Ben Jelloun at each of these junctures – whether by himself, his critics, his readers, or some combination of these – has profound implications for the way his work is read and for readers’ understanding of the role of the author more generally.

Is there drama in contemporary America? : is there postmodernism in American drama?: Shepard vs. Mamet - whose America is (more) real?

Judged by the literary research conducted over the last decades of the previous and the first decade of this century, not only was drama an illegitimate offspring in the American literature but was also treated as a weak premature-born child in the postmodernist thought in general. A stage cohabitation of the postmodern experiment and a realist frame in the contemporary theatre is well illustrated by the two popular contemporary playwrights: Sam Shepard and David Mamet. By their creative opus, not only in the fields of drama and theatre, but also in other literary genres (poetry, essay) as well as in film, through a variety of different characters and situations, these two authors reveal a rich variety of the many possible variations of American social (con)text. The society will be read in their plays as a unique cultural text outside which, as Derrida said, there is nothing. America, its myths and contemporary cultural industry, its class, racial and gender conflicts and the two authors established a mutual set of influences. The playwrights borrow raw materials from the treasury of mass culture (or should it, to be true to the new consumer culture, be more appropriate to say a warehouse) break it down and re-assemble fragments into collages that articulate the contemporary issues in more condensed, more intense and more effective ways. Mamet and Shepard borrow from the contemporary culture only to pay it back with interest: they endow the cultural (con)text with a richer content, impregnated with meaning.

The age of glance: Multitasking with mobile devices in contemporary cultural industry

The age of glance: Multitasking with mobile devices in contemporary cultural industry

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars

Festival circus, golden gnomes and cultural diplomacy. The Audi Festival of German films in the context of multicultural festivals in Australia

This report discusses the festival, its distinct profile, target groups, mode of operation, selection process, development over the years, and challenges within a wider context. International film festivals can help to broaden the viewers’ horizons, enhance cultural awareness and create public value in a city's social and cultural fabric. The prominent contemporary culture industry challenges traditional aspirations, aims and objectives of cultural diplomacy. As a multicultural festival, the German Film Festival must engage with both these contemporary and traditional objectives. This report examines how the festival has engaged, and continues to engage, with the ongoing demands of cultural diplomacy and offers cultural policy recommendations for international festivals. It will cover how the festival strategically sustains a niche not serviced by usual cinema programming, appeals beyond the German diasporic audience, takes an event-based approach to programming and pursues public–private partnerships to this end.