From an e-flux email:

CRITIQUE OF CREATIVE INDUSTRIES
An international seminar and workshop in Helsinki from August 31st to September 2nd, 2006

http://www.framework.fi
http://transversal.eipcp.net

"When Adorno and Horkheimer wrote their famous Dialectics of Enlightenment in 1944 they also coined the concept of cultural industry. In a chapter titled “The Cultural Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” they laid the ground for their fundamental critique of culture as a component of a new form of totalitarian oppression. Around 1968 the concept was again put to the foreground to criticize the repressive functions of mass media especially, but in the course of the following decades it slowly voided of its critical content. During those years it was adopted as just another principle of neoliberal cultural politics: In a completely transformed manner the concept of the Frankfurt School was (mis-)used as a key concept of Blairist cultural politics and made its way back to the continent at the end of the 1990s. With the help of blockbusters like Richard Florida's “Creative Class” it became a feature of urban and economic development plans in many European cities, and finall y arrived on the agenda of the cultural politics of the European Union."