NESTA PROJECT: FINE ARTSITS AND INNOVATION

public goods, such as local economic development or
urban regeneration, which, at least in Europe, has
increasingly required a cultural ‘input’ through iconic
buildings, public art or content for galleries.
A second, subtler and less quantifiable, argument is that, as
Ruth Towse (2001:477) puts it:
“The Beatles didn’t just create pop music; they played
a leading role in a cultural, social, political and
economic revolution.”
In this argument, what Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) call the
‘artistic critique’ – the bohemian spirit derived from
nineteenth century attacks on perceived bourgeois
conformity, hierarchy and oppression – is the real
contribution of artists to contemporary society.
While this critique may have lost force as an anti-capitalist
argument (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Heath and Potter,
2005), the ‘bohemian’ lifestyle, celebrated by Richard Florida
(2002) and others, has itself become a source of new goods
and services.
In this version of Bohemia, the desire to ‘stand out from the
crowd’ or express one’s individuality is often articulated
through consumer purchases. As in Apple’s iconic ‘1984’
advertisement for personal computers, the ‘rebel’ individual
is the one who rejects the ‘big’ brands (at the time
symbolised by IBM), in favour of another product; in the
process they help to turn the ‘rebel product’ into a big brand.
As Heath and Potter (2005:101) argue, in this way:
“the critique of mass society has been one of the most
powerful forces driving consumerism for the past forty
years”.
Whatever accounts for the growth in differentiated
consumer products, it is clear that we are a long way from
the ‘any colour, as long as it is black’ world of Fordist
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