According to the pre-economic crisis expert estimates, market-oriented culture industries were to grow in number and return rates. However, cultural industries, in a way, do not exist as a particular productive field and are treated within the secondary or tertiary production sector. Accordingly, comprehensive state regulations are provided for traditional cultural industries (mass media or film) and the anti-crisis governmental support was offered only to TV broadcasting. However, rather insignificant shrinkage has proved their comparative sustainability during the crisis while solvent demand remains the most important issue.
The Ministry of Culture is not influential within the sector, which is beyond cultural policy-making. The innovative approach to development of cultural industries was shaped within international projects, e.g. that of the Cultural Policy Institute and the Council of Europe, since they actively participate in international exchanges. In the end of the 1990s, the Centre for Development of Creative Industries was established in St. Petersburg to help non-commercial entrepreneurship in public cultural institutions “at the border of culture and business” and to provide related training, consultation and expertise. In the 2000s, the first “creative clusters” were established in former industrial centres of Russia’s capitals, namely the “Winzavod” Moscow Centre for Contemporary Art (http://www.winzavod.ru/eng/), the ARTPLAY Design Centre (http://www.artplay.ru/) and Loft Project ETAGI in St. Petersburg (http://www.loftprojectetagi.ru/en/). Regions also become more and more interested in such projects that need to be based on the rather unusual co-operation of economy and cultural state agencies.
Cultural industries’ development is also supported by related educational initiatives, e.g. the “Strelka” Institute of Media, Architecture, and Design in Moscow is an international project launched in 2009 to train a new generation of professionals and to acquaint the wider public with contemporary creative projects (see http://www.strelka.com/?lang=en). As the experts believe, there is a need for desetatisation of cultural institutions, for authors’ rights legislation to be more open to fair use, for diminishing piracy, for seed funding, and tax shelters to make cultural industries’ development more efficient. Research on cultural industries undertaken in the city of Krasnoyarsk in 2011 has shown that low demand, the absence of artistic milieu and elites, professional management and events, understanding from the city authorities and financial support are the main obstacles for the creative industries development in the regions.
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