Orange Economy? Hollywood Smile? Colombia’s New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL)

“Creative-industry” legitimizes various forms of governmentalization and commodification, diminishing the relative autonomy of art from state and mammon—a lexical and policy maneuver that transcends inalienable heritage, craft production, and resistance to racism, sexism, and nationalism. Although this discourse is fervently adopted and ideologized elsewhere, it is little known in the United States; but that country effectively exploits the way state subvention undertaken in the name of creative-industry operates in the rest of the world. After clarifying that Hollywood in particular has long been a beneficiary of such policies, we explain that creative-industry logics have been applied in Colombia, greatly to the benefit of the US.