Creative Authorship and the Aesthetics of Contemporaneity: Socially Engaged Art and Precarious Subjects in the Chinese Creative Economy
Creative Authorship and the Aesthetics of Contemporaneity: Socially Engaged Art and Precarious Subjects in the Chinese Creative Economy

Summary/Abstract: Intellectual critiques, technological developments, and social, economic, and political changes have reconfigured the modernist notion of the artist/author whose identity is based on the idealized self-enclosed creative subjectivity. As this article argues, new forms of creative authorship have emerged in recent decades through expanding creative subjectivity to the entire society in the development of creative economies in cities and rural areas. Based on ethnographic and comparative research in China, the author examines two kinds of creative authorship: that of creative workers (including artists) and that of precarious subjects (such as migrants, young adults, and people with disabilities) who are trained to become creative subjects through philanthropic projects. Focusing on the dialectical relationship between the two kinds of authorship, I demonstrate that creative authorship and the precariousness of labor are co-present. This notion of the contemporaneity of creative authorship raises questions about collaborative and collective claims of creative work.

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