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With generative AI disrupting human monopoly of creativity, there is an urgent need to freshly rearticulate cultural labour as a marker of human creativity. I suggest we critically revisit the existing perspectives of cultural labour in cultural policy discussion (unproductive, creative and precarious labour) to reflect on their limitations and implications for our understanding of AI's challenges. Based on this, I argue that we should expand the discussion of precarious labour to elaborate the emerging 'creative precarity'. In particular, I will explore its key dimensions – the increasing uncertainty in terms of cultural workers' creative roles, rights and identity, and audience responses – and their policy implications. At the core of potential policy response to and our research into creative precarity, there are fundamental questions of how we redefine cultural work in the time of AI, what new meanings we can attach to cultural labour, what constitutes the human-ness in human creativity and why it crucially matters.

This commentary reflects on how creativity is dehumanised (and rehumanised) and how its labour aspects are hindered (and highlighted) in the three recent developments in our understanding of arts, culture and creativity: the creative industries; AI creativity; and creativity in everyday life. The creative industries discourse instrumentalises and dehumanises creativity by hiding labour perspectives and treating creativity as human capital and a generator of IP. Meanwhile, contemplating AI creativity helps us to look beyond the economic paradigm and consider key traits of human creativity and the creation process, some aspects of which are successfully emulated by AI. Yet, we also observe how AI dissociates creativity from human agency and how its cost-cutting effect can challenge human creators in many sectors. Finally, the idea of everyday creativity effectively rehumanises and democratises creativity; however, it not only lacks labour perspectives but also hinders them.

This article explores conceptual frameworks for understanding Korea's contemporary cultural policy by looking into the historical transformation of the culture-state-market relations in the country. It argues that Korea has become 'a new kind of patron state', which emulates the existing patron states in the West firmly within the statist framework and ambitiously renders government-led growth of cultural industries (and the Korean Wave) as a new responsibility of the state. The formation of Korea's new patron state has been driven by a 'parallel movement' consisting of democracy and the market economy, which has defined the political and socio-economic trajectory of Korean society itself since the 1990s. Democracy has been articulated in cultural policy as cultural freedom, cultural enjoyment and the arm's length principle; meanwhile, the market economy of culture has been facilitated by a 'dynamic push' of the state. After discussing the parallel movement, the article points out the tension, ambiguity and contradiction entailed in cultural policy of the new patron state.

Review of Adrian Athique, Transnational audiences: Media reception on a global scale. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016, hardcover $69.95 (ISBN 978-0745670218), $24.95 paperback (ISBN 978-0745670225), $19.99 e-book (ASIN B01GTYJ4GG) (224p).

This paper critically examines the fundamental premise of the creative industries discourse: human creativity as a distinctive input in the production process is the core source of economic value generation. It points out that this discourse emerged within the political economic context of our time where creativity and knowledge are celebrated while human labour itself as a factor of production and social force is increasingly de-legitimised and marginalised. The paper argues that the radical potential in the discourse (the labour-value nexus) has failed to be recognised and asks how it can be rediscovered and linked to contemporary socio-economic debates. Turning its attention to the creativity residing in the cultural sector, the paper also argues that we should better understand its economic characteristics (productivity-low) and social consequences (diversity-high), and their implications for cultural policy.

The impacts of new media and participatory consumption on the cultural sector have so far been explored mainly from the perspectives of commercial cultural businesses. Yet we are now observing that public cultural organisations for example public service broadcasters, museums and theatres, which are publicly subsidised and endowed with educational missions, are transforming themselves into new media by warmly embracing digital and online platforms to reach out wider audience. Such a move raises serious questions: how the organisations can balance their existing and online services; how their public service remits can be extended to online services; what kind of relationship they can establish with online audience; and how their authoritative voice derived from expert knowledge can co-exist with user generated content. This chapter addresses some of the questions via a case study of South Korean public service broadcaster (Korean Broadcasting System or KBS)'s development of online services. In particular, it focuses on the online services' commercialism and consumer-orientation and explains that broader discussion on their public roles has been discouraged amid the Korean society's continuing suspicion of the broadcaster's susceptibility to governmental pressure.

Using the 2009 national survey for marriage migrants, this paper examines the factors which influence the labor market participation and life satisfaction of female marriage migrants in South Korea. Comparisons are made among marriage migrants by ethnicity or source country and vis-à-vis local Korean women. The results indicate that the ability to engage in employment is hindered by lack of fluency in the Korean language and a demanding care regime for children and/or parent(s)-in-law. The socioeconomic adjustment of marriage migrants vary by ethnicity. Findings indicate that it is not employment per se, but the quality of work that contributes to life satisfaction. Having no children, a good spousal relationship, social networks and wealth also influence life satisfaction.