The UK government's Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) defines the creative industries as being comprised of:

Advertising

Architecture

Art and Antiques

Crafts

Design

Fashion

Film

Interactive Leisure Software

Music

Performing Arts

Publishing

Software Design

TV and Radio

Visual Arts

This relatively new re-designation of artistic and creative activity as the 'creative industries' is a term that seems to have growing contemporary currency. This is, to a large extent, born of a particular focus on the role that artistic and cultural production and consumption plays within the capitalist economy. Consequently, many current discussions of the creative industries display a rather 'one dimensional' (Marcuse, 1964) analysis of cultural life, understanding it from a position firmly located within the locus of market mechanisms. The DCMS's approach to the creative industries is similar to orthodox approaches to other industrial sectors within the national economy, and its attention is routinely devoted to auditing earnings, turnover, exports and jobs within the creative industries.

Wu (2002) has charted the shift towards the commerciallyoriented focus on cultural production that has underwritten this new designation of the creative industries since the Thatcherite 19803. Wu particularly highlights the encouragement of increased interfaces between artistic production and private business sponsorship; between cultural events and corporate advertising; between culture and the 'value added' to corporations; as well as the advent of privately-owned artistic collections as economic investments during this period. This shift towards a commercial agenda was accompanied by policy changes in public organisations such as the Arts Council of England, from policies that emphasised the support of the arts as a public good to those concerned with 'value for money' and the cutting of public funding for the arts.