Las industrias creativas y culturales: una historia crítica

The era of the cultural and creative industries, which can be said to date from 1997, brought together many different approaches to culture around an urgent call for recognition of a new reality that was «out there» and that represented the future, change, renewal and the revitalisation of the economy. However that energy for change was gradually eroded by a number of factors that reduced their initial expectations. Those factors included absorption by real-estate development, their own ability to integrate rapidly into new digital, media challenges and the scant intellectual and financial resources earmarked by most local authorities for their development. This article tracks the complex, disputed accounts of the «cultural and/or creative» industries and seeks to establish if not what they actually are at least why they are worthwhile in terms of political effort, i.e. how they came to be a «cause for concern», and what type of new concern they may now have become.