Recent years have seen a massive growth in the use of the phrase "the culture industry". Let's imagine for a minute that it isn't just a vacuous bit of labelling on the part of politicians who need a suitably macho, hard-hitting and financially sound-sounding umbrella term for what would otherwise still be "the arts", but that it really intends to mean the manufacture of culture on an industrial scale. With the demise of virtually all actual industry in this country, the economy obviously needs something new. We need something we can trade in at home and that can be exported abroad.
A new theory now rapidly gaining currency is that we are in the middle of a cultural or artistic industrial revolution. If we are to live in an economy based more on cultural production, then, put simply, more culture will need to be produced. Just as in the 1800s when previously artisanal practices such as weaving and farming became mechanised, so now it appears we are seeing a massive upsurge in the number of drama schools, creative writing courses, directing courses, MAs in all manner of associated disciplines and so on.
Nowhere can this new mass production of culture be observed more obviously than at the Edinburgh Fringe. From morning to night endless cultural production thunders away, churning out artistic product after artistic product. And this is where the worries begin. Quite aside from the question of quality - is a factory-produced garment ever as desirable as one handmade by a skilled craftsman? - there is the problem of the workers. It is no coincidence that Marx's Kapital was inspired by the plight of those who laboured in intolerable conditions during the first industrial revolution.
At a fascinating panel discussion of Fringe festivals from around the world, two clear models of a Fringe emerged. Representatives from the Prague and Montreal Fringes talked of how their artists were supported, their box office takings generously distributed and their programmes remained at least partially selective. Accompanying these apparently generous terms, however, was the admission that the Canadian contingent had actually gone so far as to regulate the word "fringe", and festivals not complying with their definition could be forced by law to remove the word from the title of their festivals.
On the other hand is the familiar free-market model that dominates Edinburgh, as well as Adelaide and Brighton; anyone can perform, anyone can set up a venue and register it with the central Fringe body, and then charge performers to perform. When asked "Does the Fringe exploit performers?" the Edinburgh representative quite reasonably said they did not; it tries to provide services and support for the 2,088 shows that come within its compass. However, there is the greater, less easily answered, more uncomfortable question: "Do venues exploit artists?"
Returning to the model of the industrial revolution, the analogies become oddly stark. In Edinburgh, a vast majority of venues are staffed by unpaid volunteers, serving the needs of performers who have actually paid to perform in return for an often derisory cut of their box office takings. As monster-venue empires spread ever more widely, they begin to resemble factories built on slave labour and exploited workers.
The bitter irony is, the Fringe was set up in opposition to the International Festival by artists who wanted to free themselves of its constraints, hoping to create new, more radical work. Now at the International Festival, the programming is artistically leftfield, challenging, creative, and the artists are paid to perform. Meanwhile, at the Fringe, companies worry about getting enough bums on seats and frequently aim ever more broadly at the mainstream, while making enormous profits for those who run the venues.
