Creative Democracy and the Arts: The Participatory Democracy of the Amber Collective

Abstract

We use the term ‘creative democracy’ – coined by John Dewey – to explore the ways in which the creative activity of artists is shaped by democratic norms and practices. Using the case of the Amber Film and Photography Collective in the northeast of England, we discuss their process of creative democracy – featuring norms of project initiation, collective scrutiny and empowerment – and investigate how this practice became a vital feature of their everyday creative lives. We discuss the significant benefits of creative democracy, explore how the collective navigated its complexities and dilemmas, and investigate its relevance for contemporary cultural activists.

Introduction

The term ‘creative democracy’ was first coined by John Dewey (1976 [1939])), the American philosopher and social critic. Dewey argued that democracy was not merely a question of political institutions and representative procedures but rather should properly constitute a ‘way of life’, a ‘moral ideal’ inscribed in everyday life (Dewey, 1976 [1939]). This commitment to democracy’s transformative potential was rooted in a ‘generous belief in their possibilities as human beings’: the passionate conviction that all people are capable of making intelligent, reasoned judgements about the wider decisions that directly affect their lives and the cognate belief that democratic life should be designed in ways that enable these innate capacities to flourish. This faith in the capacity of people for deliberative reasoning underpinned his related affirmation of the ‘role of consultation, of conference, of persuasion, of discussion’ that treats diverse views, even those we disagree with most vociferously, with equal regard and mutual respect. ‘[T]he habit of amicable cooperation … is itself a priceless addition to life’, wrote Dewey. ‘[T]he expression of difference … is a means of enriching one’s own life-experience’ (Dewey, 1976 [1939]). Over time, democracy, he believed, could generate a collective capacity for social cooperation and social learning that would prove invaluable in solving entrenched social problems and legitimating public policy.

While Dewey’s problematic was how to transform democracy into a more innovative, expressive component of people’s everyday lives – a task taken up ever since by participatory and deliberative theorists and practitioners (Fung and Wright, 2003) – our objective in this paper is to highlight the reciprocal social relation implicit in his felicitous phrase ‘creative democracy’, a relationship that has not been extensively explored in the scholarly literature. We are concerned with investigating the ways in which the creative activity of artists is shaped by democratic norms and practices. Using the case of the Amber Film and Photography Collective in the northeast of England, we explore how the group’s creative endeavours became ‘animated by the democratic spirit’ (Dewey, 1976 [1939]) and how democracy was practised as a ‘way of life’ within the group. ¹

Founded in 1969 amidst the political and social ferment of the late 1960s when oppositional movements flowered across numerous social domains and when participatory groups formed similar collective egalitarian experiments such as food cooperatives, community health care clinics and radical newspapers (Hollands and Vail, 2012; Rothschild and Whitt, 1986), Amber sought to create a vibrant, long-lasting oppositional cultural movement. Its core principles represented a radical challenge to the familiar world of British filmmaking: its innovative wage pooling and collective security confronted the traditional insecurity of the freelance cultural sector; its egalitarian wage structure and participatory decision-making defied ingrained status hierarchies; its celebration of and long-standing ties to working-class communities contested the typical representations of the commercial cinema; its efforts to create an alternative cultural economy and cultural commons represented an impassioned critique of the commodified world of artistic production and exhibition (Dickinson, 1999; Vail and Hollands, 2012).

Yet even as participatory relations infused the collective’s organizational practices, the Amber Collective insisted that democratic participatory norms should equally be a vital feature of their everyday creative life. They initiated and chose their artistic projects according to democratic criteria; they subjected all of their creative outputs (films, photographic commissions and exhibitions, campaigning projects) to a deliberative scrutiny by collective members; they encouraged all members, even those not originally involved in creative work, to participate in their artistic projects. An apt symbolic representation of this democratic sensibility was the group’s practice of offering only a collective attribution of credits (‘An Amber film’) on their films as opposed to the normal industry code of delegating responsibility to a single individual (typically the director or producer – ‘A film by’), a practice which, an Amber member suggested, ‘was a real, genuine reflection of how we were working’. As with Dewey, the collective fervently believed that this model of creative democracy produced significant benefits, both for individual artists and for the group as a whole: by subjecting their artistic outputs to collective scrutiny, they exposed their creative ideas to diverse points of view so as to enhance the overall quality of their work; joint participation in these democratic processes heightened the legitimacy of their creative outputs and solidified their collective identity; and extending participation helped improve group trust and solidarity.

Like other participatory democratic organizations, Amber faced a series of dilemmas that constrained their exercise of creative democracy (Polletta, 2002; Rothschild-Whitt, 1979). Their ability to invest their creative lives with democracy was circumscribed by the sheer time needed to organize and perfect democratic procedures as well as by the tensions and limits of a friendship-based participatory organization. As filmmakers and photographers, the prevailing divisions of labour and hierarchies associated with the dominant organization of film production also imposed constraints on both the scope and efficacy of democracy. Finally, there was a direct trade-off between the group’s practice of creative democracy and its organizational structures: group homogeneity and small numbers, which were seen as vital to the efficacy of its democratic principles, could also be antithetical to artistic creativity (Uzzi and Sprio, 2005).

In the first section of the paper, we argue that a critical interrogation of the dynamic between democracy and creativity within the arts is long overdue within cultural sociology. In the following two sections, we elaborate the Amber norms of creative democracy (norm of project initiation, norm of collective scrutiny, norm of empowerment) in greater detail and then investigate the trade-offs and dilemmas of this practice. In the concluding section, we question whether Amber’s creative democracy parallels the dynamics of cultural practice of other arts organizations and discuss the relevance of creative democracy for present-day cultural activists.

The Relevance of Creative Democracy

Scholars looking at the arts have explored a number of issues that intersect with the question of creative democracy – participatory forms of art (Bishop, 2006), the impact of the arts on social exclusion (Belfiore and Bennett, 2007), artists’ collaborative circles featuring joint problem-solving (Farrell, 2001), network relations that enhance creative innovation (Uzzi and Spiro, 2005) – yet few sociologists have investigated the importance of democratic norms and practices to creative decision-making that we emphasize. Similarly, while our project is indebted to the voluminous literature on political participation and deliberation for its many insights and for many of the analytical concepts that inform our analysis, it has to be acknowledged that this literature on participatory organizations has only rarely focused attention on arts organizations or the aspects of creative democracy discussed herein.

We therefore believe a critical focus on creative democracy will be useful for illuminating several important issues. First, cultural sociologists have not exhaustively researched the factors accounting for the formation, sustenance and longevity of artistic organizations, especially radical arts collectives such as Amber. As has been well demonstrated in the literature on participatory organizations across multiple social domains, ‘it is undeniable that most participatory democratic groups have struggled to survive past their founding, let alone realize politically transformative aims’ (Polletta, 2002: 3). Yet, now into its fifth decade, Amber remains one of the leading cultural institutions in the region – its Side Gallery exhibits and commissions social documentary photography, its Side Cinema showcases independent films and serves as a critical meeting place for filmmakers and cultural activists; its film workshop, Amber Films, has achieved a remarkable body of work, totalling nearly 50 documentaries and feature films largely concerned with the depiction and celebration of working-class life – and its oppositional spirit and creativity are still thriving. One of our objectives in the paper is to demonstrate how these democratic engagements contributed to their unprecedented longevity through the generation of mutual trust and loyalty to the group and to illustrate in what ways the group’s evolution owed to its careful navigation of the dilemmas arising from its espousal of creative democracy.

Second, following on from the paradigmatic work of Howard Becker, sociologists have long taken for granted that cooperation is an intrinsic feature of artistic creation – the production, exhibition and distribution of art works depends on an intricate web of social cooperation and coordination (Becker, 1982) – yet the extent to which this may entail distinct mixes and trade-offs of democratic decision-making has not been amply registered (Chen, 2009). Although consultation and discussion are commonplace in film production – directors consult with cinematographers about how a scene should be lit, actors conduct rehearsal readings of a script to generate suggestions for the screenwriter, editors screen early footage for directors and actors – this is typically a matter of informal discretion, which may vary widely across specific artists and film productions, rather than ingrained democratic habit. Similarly, while sympathetic feedback, encouragement and critical dialogue are a routine feature of the arts – editors offer helpful suggestions for novelists and poets; in collaborative circles, a group of painters or writers over a long period of collaboration develop a shared vision that guides their artistic work (Farrell, 2001) – these tend to be informal arrangements rather than ordained organizational procedures and pertain to individual artistic initiatives rather than group outputs. What Amber’s unique process of creative democracy demonstrated is that a democratic egalitarian pathway to collaborative governance and collective problem-solving can promise tangible benefits (a strong attachment to a common artistic mission, cohesive collective identity, solidarity) that are unlikely to be obtained through bureaucratic, hierarchical means.

Third, Amber confounds the conventional wisdom about the arts that envisions democracy and creativity as antithetical relations. This commonsense is rooted in the premise that art is best envisioned as the creative activity of singularly gifted individuals with unique artistic talents rather than as a product of group processes (such as friendship circles, collaborative brainstorming, small world networks) and that any attempt to constrain this autonomy, whether by bureaucratic fiat or democratic compulsion, will generate unavoidable tensions that make it harder to achieve creative outputs (Becker, 1982; Uzzi and Spiro, 2005). Similarly, artistic endeavour in the performing arts –film, theatre, dance, music, and the like – is seen to be organized according to a strict hierarchy of labour corresponding to a natural division of talent and craft skills (often reinforced by craft jurisdictions and status rewards), which cannot be easily surmounted without muddying lines of responsibility, thereby jeopardizing both creativity and efficiency. Even in many radical and oppositional arts groups, the role of individual creation and artistic autonomy has been seen as sacrosanct.

A fellow independent film workshop in Newcastle, which also paid its members equal wages and featured consensual decision-making, nevertheless embraced the dominant industrial model when it came to their filmmaking; as a member freely admitted, ‘We weren’t going to sit around all day to discuss a film’. Amber, on the other hand, refused to countenance any contradiction between democracy and creativity or to be bound by either fantasies of the heroic individual artist or inegalitarian craft structures. They developed a series of micro-interactional rules as the foundation for their creative democracy, which enabled them to make democracy a permanent way of life within the collective’s creative projects while still preserving their artistic ambitions.

Democracy as a Way of Life in Amber

Like many social movement groups and collectivist enterprises, the Amber collective embraced a consensual decision-making process whereby all members and associates participated in the collective formulation of problems and negotiations of decisions (Rothschild-Whitt, 1979; Kanter, 1972). Every major issue – recruitment of new members, hiring and management of employees, salaries, division of labour, collective responsibilities, campaigning affiliations – was decided collectively by its members. However, what is unique about the Amber Collective is that they extended this democratic remit to their creative decision-making. As we illuminate in this section, Amber’s practice of creative democracy espoused three democratic norms – a norm of project initiation; a norm of collective scrutiny; a norm of empowerment – to which we now turn.

The norm of project initiation

Given the diversity of artistic passions within the group and their commitment to a non-hierarchical democracy, the collective understood that they needed an effective decision rule that would enable them to decide on artistic projects without either exacerbating individual rancour from those bypassed or perpetuating creative paralysis through endless debate. ‘One of the golden rules – it was a very true rule – was that if you couldn’t get two people to be interested in an idea you wanted to pursue, then it didn’t move’ recalled a member of the collective. Amber members needed to win over at least two other members of the group (which typically fluctuated between six and ten members) through an active process of persuasion and argumentation before a film project could go forward. Once this was accomplished, the small team would be given a development period to research and conduct preliminary filming but had to return to the wider collective and present their best case for why this project rather than other competing ones should receive the go-ahead. Although projects ultimately may have faced rejection by virtue of their inability to attract sufficient funding or because of a lack of resources, members had to first win over their colleagues before these calculations even came into play. As such, project initiation was a continual process of dialogue and deliberation – ‘after every film, there was always a debate about what do we do next’, suggested a member – and for most films that received approval, these then became collective projects that elicited contributions from all collective members.

What made this process distinct from the decision-making process of other artistic groups was several factors. While all artistic groups in a world of scarce resources must prioritize certain projects over others, these judgements are typically made on the basis of non-democratic criteria. A symphony orchestra or theatre company may decide its programme based on convention (the standard repertoire in the field), hierarchy (the province of lead conductors or artistic directors in conjunction with a board of directors), or instrumentalism (commercial calculation of what will maximize ‘bums on seats’) rather than through the consensual participation of all relevant stakeholders (Becker, 1982). In Amber’s world view, their norm of project initiation was predicated on fairness and equality rather than a pre-ordained division of labour: every individual’s views counted as much as any others, each member was given a reasonable chance to win over their colleagues to the merits of a project, and every member had the right to be consulted on final project approval. This not only prevented creative decisions from being monopolized by any single individual, it also acted as a means of diffusing artistic competence and creativity throughout the collective.

Despite this adherence to democratic criteria, it was also the case that project initiation was impacted by other non-democratic forms of influence and calculation. Although some members denied that explicit bargaining or log-rolling took place – an informal schema whereby support for one person’s project could be exchanged for future support for their own project – others admitted that these kinds of calculations and trade-offs sometimes took place. ‘There was a bit of that that went on, definitely’, said one long-standing member. This process was in turn complicated by intimate relations within the group; for well on two decades, two couples, both made up of members, were at the core of the collective and there seemed to be considerable debate among the members we interviewed about the extent to which this impacted on this norm of project initiation. A member of one of those couples acknowledged the complex tensions created by these relationships but nonetheless insisted that they did not automatically constitute a permanent constraint: ‘I don’t know how other people would perceive that who weren’t in couples, but … I’m sure it must have been an issue for other people as well that there might be perceived to be blocks. … I often had arguments with [my partner] in meetings and I think I was quite conscious of trying not to be a block’. However, other members who were not part of these intimate arrangements admitted that they often felt isolated in trying to win over allies for their projects, intimating that the refusal of one member felt as if in actual practice that two were opposed, which made their chances of winning approval for a project less likely. ‘I think it would be crazy to say that the “couple thing” didn’t play out at times’, said a member whose intimate partner was outside the collective.

A far more wide-reaching constraint on the choice of projects was the collective’s original founding mission of celebrating working-class life. In deciding on which projects were given the green light, the overarching justification was whether a project was an ‘Amber’ project – in other words, whether or not it coincided with the tradition and philosophy of previous films in their oeuvre. One member argued:

I think a crucial part was whether it lived up to the remit of the group – in other words, this idea that we were going to centre our work on the representation of working-class people’s lives so if it failed to meet up to that, that would be point number one, there would be lots of questions about it.

But, of course, this presumed that there was unanimity within the collective about how to define the working class or agreement about the kind of working-class stories that mattered most, and this was far from straightforward. No matter their democratic affinities, the group was still prone to the heavily gendered conventions of the working class that prevailed at that time (Dickinson, 1999). As an example, in the 1980s three female members initiated a potential project involving women on a nearby council estate that eventually developed into their feature film Dream On (1989). They argued it was in keeping with the collective’s commitment to the region and built upon voluntary work that one of the members had done on the estate but, more importantly, it represented a much needed change of direction. ‘We’ve been doing films about male industries for years and years and years and I think it’s time that we did a film that’s about women’s lives in the Northeast’ is how one of the women involved characterized the debate. Yet the decision to move forward on this film brought to the surface gender conflicts that had been previously obscured in the founding consensus. ‘I remember there were debates’, recalled a male member of the group, ‘about what’s this film going to be called? Dream On? And we jokingly suggested “why don’t you call it All Men Are Bastards because that seems to be the basis of it’’.’ After this film, the same female triumvirate researched another joint project tentatively titled Womb with a View, bringing together members and non-members on behalf of a proposed documentary looking at women’s experiences of abortion, although the project never was given the green light within the group or attracted funding support, with one of the members involved in the project admitting that yet another project focusing on gender was seen as too divisive to support.

The norm of collective scrutiny

The forms of consultation, discussion, persuasion and deliberation that were at the heart of Amber’s creative democracy were a far cry from the everyday forms of cooperation that sociologists highlight about art worlds. Within Amber, collective scrutiny was expected to take place at every stage of artistic production and to feature everyone’s participation. On their films, editorial meetings to elicit suggestions were conducted during each phase of script development; during actual filming, screenings were routinely held for all collective members to view the emerging footage; and in the editing stage, a rough cut was previewed for all collective members as well as for funders and members of the communities where they had shot the film. In a similar vein, photographers who received commissions to exhibit at the gallery were expected to bring their contact sheets back to the group for feedback sessions where members would eagerly pour over them to register their preferences.

The Amber norm of collective scrutiny was not simply a right that everyone enjoyed, it was construed as an essential duty that all members were required to fulfil. Given that this norm was seen as a vital collective task, each member had to be prepared to devote the precious time and energy required for these deliberations (Polletta, 2002). Unlike other collective responsibilities in the group such as staffing gallery openings, film projecting or office maintenance, which were regularly rotated among various collective members, collective scrutiny was seen as a joint responsibility of all members and, as such, it was not always easy for members, especially those with family responsibilities, to make this kind of commitment:

The most important thing was to actually be available to talk about the work the group was producing. If people started not being available, it was like a shutter had come down and their focus was kind of gone. They were the things that caused, in my memory, the most friction, but they didn’t happen that frequently.

Whereas everyday cooperation in the normal industrial model of filmmaking is heavily shaped by hierarchical and commercial calculations – the feedback of sound engineers or electricians is unlikely to be solicited on creative matters outside their craft expertise and the viewing of rough cuts is largely the prerogative of producers, directors, financiers and marketers – this was anathema to Amber. One of the group’s most oft-repeated aphorisms was ‘the clapper loader can have as many good ideas as the director’, which followed from their abiding belief in the innate creative potential of all individuals. In everyday practice, this principle meant that all creative choices (plot lines, character development, dialogue, scene editing and the like) faced collective scrutiny from every member of the collective, no matter their craft position or specific involvement in production. As a member indicated:

I think anybody could put their point of view, you know, the opportunity was there if you had the imagination. The great thing about Amber is you come in with … an idea … suddenly you suggest this character in the film and everybody is saying ‘yeah that’s great’ … It may not have worked and it could have been dropped, but that was the wonderful thing with the possibility of, if you like, putting in those ideas was always there.

In essence, by extending the sense of influence that every member enjoyed on each artistic project, Amber’s creative democracy renewed their enthusiasm for their work, engendered a shared commitment to their creative outputs, and inculcated a collective belief in the value of a common artistic mission, all of which greatly contributed to the group’s longevity (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986: 65).

It is undeniable that Amber’s norm of collective scrutiny also featured a more explicit strategic rationale as well. The collective expanded its circle of critical reflection to include funders and other cultural gatekeepers who were routinely invited to view rough cuts of their films: this proved a remarkably astute means of building first hand a greater appreciation of and closer affinity for Amber’s unique organizational model and artistic methods. ‘The idea that you are a collaborator rather than in opposition to them in some way because you represent the cash is fantastic’, admitted a funder with a long history of support for Amber. The group also made it a point to showcase their work in the local working-class communities where their filmmaking had taken place: this not only generated future good will, it also was a way to repay the trust extended by those who had welcomed the group into their lives.

Of course, it was not always easy for members to subject their work to this kind of intensive critique; as in many cooperatives and social movements, the emotional intensity that is an inevitable byproduct of such critical deliberation can be difficult for many to accept even if they readily acknowledged the many benefits of the process (Chen, 2009; Polletta, 2002; Rothschild and Whitt, 1986). ‘I find it quite hard … when you’re showing what you’ve done and you have to have people rip it apart and question it [laughs]’, said a member. ‘That’s quite a hard thing to deal with but it’s always worth it. You might fight it at the time, but it always makes the thing better in the end’. A member of the filmmaking unit highlighted the benefits of being exposed to other points of view:

Whereas what my experience of it is, is that it’s always more interesting to bring in other perspectives. … What I’m interested in is the different perspectives and the journey you come to by knocking up against those other perspectives so that you’re made to look at it differently. … Everybody has their reasons and it’s trying to discover what those reasons are. … I think what it is, is an appreciation of other people’s vision, that if you’re not threatened by other people’s vision then actually someone else’s view on the subject actually adds to your own, it doesn’t take away from it. So the more collaboration you have, the more interesting the subject becomes because you’re looking at it from different angles.

Collective scrutiny, by maximizing the potential for diverse viewpoints and enabling colleagues to use each other as sounding boards for even their most outrageous ideas, therefore enhanced their collective capacity to innovatively solve artistic problems (Page, 2007).

Because this practice of collective scrutiny was guided by an allegiance to deliberative norms of reason giving, it made it easier to generate support for the norm. In offering suggestions, members were expected to conduct their discussions with openness and mutual respect and to recognize the merits of other members’ passions and reasoning, even if they had different ways of thinking about the issue (Polletta, 2002: 7). One member described how this process worked with specific reference to Murray Martin, the collective’s founder:

[Someone] would suddenly say something like ‘Oh, I don’t think that’s a good idea’, and invariably, Murray would say to them: ‘So what do you think is a good idea?’ He would want a response from you … Murray could be the most severe adversary. In other words, he was a person who really needed persuading and he’d push you and push you and make you justify what it was you wanted to do, and then there was a certain point where you knew if you stood your ground and really felt passionate about it, then you had the best ally in the world.

Collective members well understood that this critical dialogue was solely intended to improve the quality of the creative work rather than to foster the kind of competitive dynamic predicated on vindictive personal attacks and criticism that destroyed so many collectives and social movement organizations (Phillips, 1991; Rothschild and Whitt, 1986). ² ‘Basically, you can trust that people are not there to destroy your confidence or to destroy you. I think that’s a given’, suggested a long-time member. ‘You know that if they don’t get excited about your work it’s not because they have some other hidden agenda about it. It is because simply they don’t warm to what you are doing’. Amber’s creative democracy echoed Dewey’s sentiment that one should ‘treat those who disagree – even profoundly – with us as those from whom we may learn, and in so far [as possible], as friends’, and that disputes should be understood as ‘cooperative undertakings in which both parties learn by giving the other a chance to express itself’ (Dewey, 1976 [1939]). In essence, the group’s collective scrutiny constituted a forum of social learning that served as a foundation for creative innovation and solidarity.

The norm of empowerment

In Amber, creativity and the ability to participate in artistic production were envisioned as a social right open to everyone, and the group took care to nurture and encourage members to become full participants in their creative endeavours. As with other collective enterprises formed in that era, they believed that this empowerment was an elementary form of justice, a means whereby the contributions of all collective members and associates could be harnessed to the common good (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986). A member insisted in this vein:

The reason people have been drawn into the group is because of their personality and their vision of the world and what they contribute, so why would you not naturally want to draw that out, because the whole philosophy is that you get something bigger at the end. … If someone’s just doing their little menial job on the side then you’re only using a quarter of what their potential is.

Murray Martin, one of the group’s founding members, bluntly stated the Dewey-like belief in the innate creativity of every individual: ‘I assume people’s talents: the question is how do you facilitate it? I assume people’s ability: how do you create the context in which that can best express itself and flourish?’ (Martin, 2002). The group’s commitment to cross-grade working (‘researcher one day, sound recordist the next, editor the day after’ (Stoneman, 1999: 178) and refusal to abide by the familiar hierarchy of craft divisions made it easier for members to contemplate creative involvement outside their own field. Similarly, its norm of collective scrutiny, by equally valuing the contributions of all members, helped ‘demystify’ the supposed specialist knowledge and singular talent of the individual artist and created an atmosphere in which everyone felt empowered to participate in creative projects. This knowledge diffusion was seen as absolutely critical to the maintenance of their egalitarian and collectivist principles (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986: 105–6).

A telling illustration of the way in which Amber put these beliefs into practice comes in the story of a member who was hired initially as an office manager/bookkeeper but over time became drawn into the film production unit. She worked as a production assistant on their first feature film and participated in the collective scrutiny of creative outputs. Because she was one of the few members who came from a working-class background in the region, she was regularly consulted to ‘make sure that they got something right in the area’. She was invited to become part of the core group that worked on Dream On, and eventually this process of empowerment reached its culmination when she co-wrote the script for their feature film, The Scar (1997). ³ At the same time, collective members were encouraged to take on new creative roles, which positively impacted on their commitment to the collective.

Part of the Amber ethos was to give people a chance to develop their new abilities and to allow them to blossom, and I think that’s why the people who have remained in Amber have remained because it was never a stultifying experience. … One of the things definitely that has helped us stay with it for so long is that we were allowed the space to grow and to diversify and acquire new skills.

The Dilemmas of Creative Democracy

Creative democracy within Amber was possible in part because of the pre-existing egalitarian relations within the collective. The group’s embrace of a non-hierarchical division of labour was both a deeply held ideological commitment as well as a visceral response to their unhappy experiences working in the dominant industrial model. Their norms of collective scrutiny and empowerment diffused equal regard throughout the group and these were in turn reinforced by organizational practices (equal pay, consensual decision-making, collective responsibilities) that produced mutual respect and trust. Although the group could not offer its members the familiar incentives of monetary reward, financial security or status enhancement, their norms of creative democracy inculcated an abiding sense of mutual responsibility and solidarity as well as a collective identity as oppositional artists.

But, as is the case with all participatory organizations, the Amber Collective faced a number of critical obstacles to its exercise of creative democracy (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986). The first of these was imposed by both the tension between democratic participation and creative productivity as well as by the inherent constraints of the filmmaking process. As social movement activists who were committed participatory democrats often discovered, a decision rule that promoted problem-solving, such as the norm of collective scrutiny, could at the same time make coordination much more difficult. ‘[M]ultiple lines of input in problem solving and agenda setting discussions are useful’, writes Francesca Polletta, ‘the same cacophony of voices when solutions are being implemented is less so’ (Polletta, 2002: 13). Amber well understood this dilemma and a related decision rule – ‘whoever paints the wall, chooses the colour’ – was adopted to cover just this kind of contingency. What this meant in practice was that although debate was encouraged and constructive critique was welcomed, at the end of the day the final word and ultimate responsibility was given over to the individual artist. As one member testified:

We did have the final authority given to individuals, like the director did have the final say in how to direct actors. In terms of editing, obviously, you create what you’re offering for the group to view and therefore you’ve already made a lot of decisions at that point. It’s like Murray [Martin] used to say … whoever paints the wall chooses the colour. So that ultimate creative decision would be with the person who was given that final responsibility.

Solidarity engendered by the process of collective scrutiny alongside this attribution of responsibility prevented endless squabbling and generated good will and legitimacy for the final result, which everyone felt bound to support even if it might fall short of what a single individual would have preferred. An Amber film thus was always imagined as a collective creative output, as Murray Martin noted:

When you direct within Amber, it’s after a long debate and you’re delivering what has been agreed. It’s your delivery, it’ll have your stamp on it, and there’s no doubt that the films I’ve directed are different from the ones that Ellie did. I can see the differences and there’s different motivations. But I’ve also no doubt that the films I’ve directed have been shaped by the collective debate. If I had been left to my own devices, they wouldn’t have been the same film. (Martin, 2002)

Even while Amber rejected justifications for authority rooted in craft hierarchy, they still respected the expertise embodied in the craft skills of individual members. They certainly encouraged members to learn new skills and tackle new projects but, unlike some collectivist organizations, which adopted formal systems of job rotation and task sharing as a means of diffusing knowledge and promoting equality (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986: 111), Amber felt such an approach was both impractical and unfeasible. Not everyone had the artistic talents, experience or predisposition to direct, write or light a film, and because the entire success of their collective model and practice of creative democracy depended on their ability to make accomplished films that would entice future funding, they could ill afford to do away entirely with the specialization and professionalization that guaranteed their creative productivity. ⁴ However, the critical point to reiterate is that Amber took great care to ensure that craft specialisms did not harden into a status hierarchy, that they were viewed as ‘sources of mutual learning rather than as obstacles to equality’ (Polletta, 2002: 4).

A second dilemma emerged from the relationship between the norm of collective scrutiny and the patterns of organizational recruitment and membership size of the collective. What made this process of creative democracy so effective was the group’s small membership base and close friendship ties. On the one hand, this ensured that members were able to foster high degrees of direct communication and relative equality with each other; on the other, it meant that criticism was conducted according to practices of mutual respect and regard, and did not degenerate into vicious personal attacks and character assassination. But this tight-knit small world also circumscribed the actual effectiveness of creative democracy in terms of its potential for innovation and creativity. Scholars argue for the positive virtues of diversity, insisting that groups of diverse people with contrasting viewpoints are better at innovation than groups with uniform perspectives and that, when designing effective methods of problem-solving, diversity may matter every bit as much as individual ability (Page, 2007; Uzzi and Spiro, 2005). Like other social movement and collectivist organizations, Amber’s initial formation was predicated on friendship, shared ideological beliefs, and artistic affinities, and they intentionally recruited like-minded people with shared social backgrounds, values and outlooks to become members of the collective (Rothschild and Whitt, 1986). But what promoted group cohesion and consensual decision-making was not at the same time necessarily optimal in terms of marshalling diverse viewpoints or facilitating different creative projects. After its first decade of feature filmmaking, Amber returned again and again to the same subject of marginalized working-class communities at the expense of stories that encompassed the breadth of working-class experience in the region (Hochscherf and Leggott, 2007).

Lastly, the collective’s commitment to its organizational model and creative democracy prescribed particular limits on the kind of creative work that they sought to pursue or could actually accomplish. In order to preserve egalitarianism, consensual decision-making and creative democratic norms, the group restricted their size to a consistent number (between six and ten members); members ritualistically affirmed this ‘magic number’ as a hard-earned wisdom and somewhat more fatalistically as a ‘law of physics that applies to social structures’. They intentionally turned down a number of lucrative and potentially challenging artistic projects, such as a working-class Tyneside soap opera that was dangled in front of them by a British television station, which would have required them to increase significantly the scale of their operations (hiring and overseeing teams of writers and technicians, securing new production locations and the like), for fear that it would disrupt their working practices, weaken their self-management and fatally damage their creative democratic ethos.

Conclusion: The Future of Creative Democracy

Any paper that argues for the salience of a single case needs to also illustrate the wider lessons it might hold for the study of art worlds and cultural activism. We emphasize two key issues in this regard: the first concerns the extent to which Amber is representative of other organizations that share a similar commitment to creative democracy; and second, the way in which Amber is prefigurative of immanent tendencies in favour of creative democracy within contemporary art worlds.

On the first question, one feature of Amber’s creative democracy, its norm of empowerment, certainly has considerable resonance within art worlds, particularly in terms of ensuring greater forms of audience interaction and community engagement, a practice that has been enshrined as an integral feature of contemporary cultural policy and arts practice (Belafiore and Bennett, 2007; Bishop, 2006). Yet, we would argue that these forms of empowerment are actually quite distinct from Amber’s own practice. Enhancing participation is typically accomplished by the educational and cultural outreach programmes of an arts organizations (a theatre company may put on school theatre days or playwriting workshops), and while this work may be invaluable in making artistic practice more open and transparent, the focus usually is on enhancing the cultural participation of individuals outside their own organization rather than enabling the ongoing involvement of their own employees in the organization’s artistic projects as Amber attempted.

Similarly, given the paucity of actual empirical work on this subject, it is hard to estimate the extent to which the other norms of Amber’s creative democracy (collective scrutiny and project initiation) are espoused and practised by other artists, but there is some anecdotal evidence that these practices might be more widespread than what might first be imagined. Collective attribution has been a regular feature of many radical arts collectives: Gran Fury, which fused political and cultural activism in its art works on behalf of AIDS activism in New York in the 1980s, refused to identify its individual members or to offer individual credits for its collective outputs (Reed, 2005). Radical theatre companies, such as the Bread and Puppet group in the United States or the Theatre of the Oppressed in Brazil, have routinely insisted that members participate in project selection and encouraged participatory critique as a fundamental principle. Community theatres around the world typically elect their own management teams, delegate responsibility for play selection to democratically elected committees open to the entire membership, and nurture the participation of members into all creative roles (Joon and Plastow, 2004). Even some Hollywood firms have adopted a version of collective scrutiny. For example, Pixar’s animators and developers spend their mornings in ‘crit sessions’, where work completed on the previous day is analysed and critiqued by all participants; even if many have found the process to be somewhat brutal, it is also immensely constructive given that it regularly enhances creative problem-solving (stronger punchlines, better plot lines, improved character development) (Lehrer, 2012).

Second, our intent in this paper was not merely to detail participatory relations in an underappreciated domain of social life, but also to argue that creative democracy could be a positive force both in terms of organizational longevity and artistic accomplishment, as illustrated by the example of the Amber Collective. By illuminating the contours of the collective’s history, we hoped to demonstrate the salience of creative democracy for the current generation of cultural activists and radicals. There is no question that the current period is clearly less propitious for these kinds of egalitarian and collectivist initiatives. Artists seeking to accommodate to a world of commercial calculations and imperatives, with its short-term project orientations and instrumentalism, are unlikely to see many advantages in the deliberative and participatory processes coined by Amber. Similarly, in a world of pervasive funding cuts to the arts, cultural groups are compelled to expend so much energy on their very survival that designing effective rules for creative democracy may strike many as a frivolous task.

Yet, at the same time, a number of scholars have highlighted the emergence of alternative forms of cultural practice, fundamentally opposed to commodified forms of activity, reliant on gift economies and promoting autonomous spaces of cultural production and consumption (Banks, 2007; Vail, 2010). Some of these developments also share a natural affinity with Amber’s model of creative democracy. Alternative cultural spaces and social centres have emerged across Europe to provide opportunities for non-market forms of artistic production and exhibition, and many of these are voluntarily organized along participatory democratic lines. Innovative crowd funding initiatives, such as Kickstarter or Emphas.is, offer a fascinating parallel to Amber’s creative democracy. Although prior reputation and experience impacts on the projects that are ultimately funded, crowd funding widens the pool of potential artists beyond familiar status networks and makes the decision to fund the outcome of widespread participation rather than the preserve of cultural gatekeepers. The most successful projects are those that are willing to establish a collaborative relationship with supporters (featuring regular dialogue and critical scrutiny through social network sites and discussion forums) in ways that construct a community of interest based on active engagement, trust and reciprocity. We are confident that there are similar initiatives throughout the arts world that are ripe for scholarly investigation and we anticipate that Amber’s legacy of creative democracy will be newly discovered and appropriated in the years to come.