Editorial: The Creative Audience

Oliver Carter and Karen Seaward-Patel

DOI: https://doi.org/10.82392/vk17-jt39

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Creative industries research has traditionally concentrated on cultural production. Questions of labour, precarity and inequality within cultural work have shaped much of the field’s agenda, and that emphasis remains necessary. Yet, as Kate Oakley and Dave O’Brien (2016) argue, the relationship between cultural production and consumption requires further exploration. This perspective is reflected in Creative PEC’s (2024) Arts, Culture and Heritage: Audiences and Workforce report, which situates “audiences as part of a broader arts, culture and heritage ecosystem.” Here, audiences are not peripheral to Britain’s cultural sector; they are central to how it functions.

This issue of Makings revisits this relationship. Audiences no longer simply encounter creative work, they are enabled by digital technologies, to circulate it, adapt it and perform it. The idea of a ‘creative audience’ was introduced by Noël Carroll (2014), who acknowledged the role of the audience’s imagination in engaging with and making sense of fictional artworks such as novels, films and plays. Carroll argues that audiences creatively contribute to the functioning of fictional works through exercises of imagination. Viewers and readers complete narratives, infer motivations and construct meaning beyond what is explicitly presented. Cultural production does not function without this interpretive labour.

But audiences do more than interpret. They produce memes, remix aesthetics, cultivate creator identities, build audiences of their own and, at times, generate income through platform economies. Axel Bruns (2008) captured this shift at the end of noughties with his concept of “produsage,” describing users as both producers and consumers, while Henry Jenkins’ (2006; 2015) work on participatory culture shows how audiences shape media narratives. Such work inspired Oliver’s first monograph, Making European Cult Cinema (2015), which explored how film fans used digital technologies to produce goods that circulated in informal economies. More recently, Thomas Poell, David Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy (2022) argue that platform infrastructures have formalised this integration of user activity into media industries. These developments are not simply matters of audience expression; they reshape how creative industries operate. The four articles in this issue examine how such processes unfold in specific contexts, tracing how audience practices extend cultural texts and feed back into industrial structures.

We begin with Hyejin Jo, who introduces the concept of “intertextual play” through an analysis of meme circulation surrounding the Korean drama Stranger and its spin off series. Jo argues that cultural impact does not depend solely on organised fandom. In this case, fragments of character and dialogue migrated into everyday communication, detached from full narrative knowledge. The meme outlived the broadcast cycle, and its circulation shaped promotional strategies, contributing to the commissioning of a spin-off series. The point is not that audiences replace producers, but that ambient, distributed creativity can carry industrial weight.

If Jo traces this dynamic through digital circulation, Marlen turns to embodied performance. Her exploration of cosplay at Comic Con reworks the figure of the flâneur, positioning the cosplayer as both spectator and spectacle. Here, audience creativity generates atmosphere and visibility within physical space, enhancing the experiential and commercial value of conventions. Yet this activity unfolds within managed environments. Participation is expressive, but it is also structured and regulated. From convention floors, the discussion moves into archival space.

Daniel Dream and Ifigeneia Liangi’s study of Night Kitchen, Narrative Architecture and the Catford School of Fiction, considers collecting as a form of authorship. Screen-used film props are archived, scanned and embedded into speculative architectural picture books. The archive is not treated as static evidence but as raw material. Objects migrate from cinematic contexts into new narrative environments, making it difficult to maintain a clear boundary between consumer and creator.

Cáit Murphy’s analysis of a TikTok trend inspired by Hollywood auteur Wes Anderson returns us to platform culture, but with a different emphasis. Rather than focusing on narrative extension, the article examines aesthetic replication where thousands of users reproduce a recognisable visual language associated with Anderson’s films. These short-form videos are not simply homage. They show how an auteur signature becomes portable, circulating independently of narrative. Authorship remains identifiable, yet it is enacted by many. Here, platforms such as TikTok reward repetition, and repetition sustains visibility.

Across these contributions, audience activity is shown to be integral to how creative industries now function, unfolding within institutional and economic systems that both enable and constrain it. At the same time, cultural texts continue to evolve once they enter circulation, acquiring meanings that exceed their original production. What this issue offers, then, is a closer look at how such activity moves through institutions and, in doing so, acquires economic and cultural consequence. The creative audience is not new. What has shifted is the scale and visibility of its integration into creative industries. These articles help clarify that shift.

 

Professor Oliver Carter

Dr Karen Seaward-Patel

February 2026

 

References

Bruns, A. (2008) Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang.

Carroll, N. (2014) The creative audience: imagination and fictional works, in Paul, E.S and Kaufman, S.B. eds. The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 62–81.

Carter, O. (2015) Making European Cult Cinema: Fan Production in an Alternative Economy. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre (Creative PEC) (2024) Arts, Culture and Heritage: Audiences and Workforce – State of the Nation Report. London: Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre. Available at: https://pec.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Arts-Culture-and-Heritage-Audiences-and-Workforce-Creative-PEC-State-of-the-Nation-report-May-2024.pdf (Accessed: 26 February 2026).

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.

Jenkins, H., Ito, M. and boyd, d. (2015) Participatory Culture in a Networked Era: A Conversation on Youth, Learning, Commerce, and Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Oakley, K and O’Brien, D (2016) Learning to labour unequally: understanding the relationship between cultural production, cultural consumption and inequality. Social Identities, 22 (5). pp. 471-486. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13504630.2015.1128800

Poell, T., Nieborg, D. and Duffy, B.E. (2022) Platforms and Cultural Production. Cambridge: Polity Press.