Re-defining creativity within the creative industries discourse

Starting from a practitioner's standpoint, this study investigates Creativity as a system in which individual talent, desire and ambition operate. In the context of sustaining these motivations, personally and commercially, Andrew Barnum examines the Creative Industries discourse as an 'organising principle' and an 'historical evolution' of a system named to provide relevant frameworks and guidelines for the future sustenance of practitioners and patrons. This thesis has arisen from an investigation into the changed conditions outlined within the Creative Industries discourse, an argument, for a potential re-definition of 'Creativity' that better fits the conditions generated by the emerging knowledge economy. The study is viewed through the lens of Barnum's thirty three years of practice as an Artist, Designer and Musician. The study considers the intrinsic struggle of free individuals to sustain their passion to generate deeper meaning within an industrialised system of livelihood initially created through a government policy initiative. The aim is to explain the individual practitioners' relationship to a system that contains numerous and complex tensions.