The confusion between the terms ‘creation’, ‘creativity’ and ‘projects’ are symptomatic of the creative industries (Tremblay 2010; Hesmondhalgh 2008) and their attempts to create value by evacuating the aesthetic and artistic issues distinctive to artistic creation, instead emphasizing individual creativity as an end in itself. Crowdfunding platforms posit themselves as new cultural intermediaries, opening the way to new possibilities for ‘supporting creation’. The issue here is the valorization of ‘making’ without the need for any kind of ‘knowing’, and the celebration of creativity to the detriment of any aesthetic or theoretical considerations.
In music, literature and cinema, the discourses circulated by project creators reinforce this positioning, both through the attention they pay to these logics and the way they represent them. We see an example of this with the following author, who submitted a book project to a French platform:
At first I sent my manuscript to publishing houses, but with hindsight I can see that was never going to work. They looked at the style first of all, and it’s true, it wasn’t good enough. I tried again with a second manuscript, and this time I got more notes. But still they told me that it didn’t fit into their current publication priorities. A friend told me about this platform, and I tried signing up. I don’t know much about it, but I said to myself, why not. (T, 27 years old, book project)
Another user proposed an album:
I saw it [financial participation] as a funding method which meant you could get a project going which just wouldn’t happen by traditional routes. I saw it as a form of funding in advance. (T, 25 years old, music project)
Most of those we spoke to saw these platforms in this way, as potential means to finance and complete their projects, with various possible alterations depending on the pledges received.
Honestly, I didn’t think it was going to work. I didn’t think people would be willing to give like that. I told myself I’d give it a try, and I reached my goal in a week! [The target was €2,000.] If I’d have known, I’d have asked for €10,000! [...] In actual fact, I got more than that. It’ll be enough for me to make more projects, a bigger book, a larger print run. (F, 32 years old, book project)
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization