Public Humanities in the Age of the Ideas Industry and the Rise of the Creatives

Our world is post-auratic in Walter Benjamin’s sense, but that does not mean that the humanities are left without a task. The world that Benjamin described as a world of play also affords opportunities. Humanities competes in this space with new dramaturgy of ideas (see: TED talks), and with design as a master trope for creativity. But the enduring appeal of embodied experience, typified by festivals, indicates that there is still room for the complex and unpredictable diffusion of ideas.