OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

3. PROMOTING LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BY CREATING CULTURAL PRODUCTS
The conjunction of these two traits produces an economic system that is different
from those that have preceded it. As A.J. Scott has written, “… whereas nineteenth
century workshop and factory systems were able to produce variety of output but were
limited in the total scales that they could achieve, and whereas Fordist mass production
freed industry from quantitative restraints but at the expense of product variety,
modern flexible production systems…. are able to achieve considerable variety of
output while they also often generate significant economies of scale… .” 76 .
The cultural product as a deliberate trade-off between form and utility
The opposition between art and economics often reflects the divide between
functional utility and an aesthetic value that has no utilitarian dimension, or we may
say between content and form. Since the primary objective of the economy is to satisfy
needs, content takes priority over form. The doctrine of “art for art’s sake” has
corroborated this divide, to the point of deprecating artisans who, unlike artists,
attempt to strike a balance between form and function. This tradition inspired the
famous judgment of Max Eastman, who considered that for an artist to stray into the
realm of production was to publish the obituary for his talent (Molotch, 2003) 77 . Other
criticisms were less severe, such as that offered by Beaudelaire, for whom duty had
no meaning except in the context of the living conditions and environment in which
it existed. Deprived of this context, the aesthetic message remained incomprehensible,
hence the notion of the dual composition of a work of art.
Designers today seem to have moved beyond this dichotomy by demonstrating
the difficulty of separating the substance of content from the substance of form. This
can be seen in the history of fashion at the beginning of the 20th century. The oftenneglected
automobile also illustrates the point. Take the famous model T, which
became the symbol of “Fordism” - there was no way that its shape could be curved
or rounded, for the machinery did not allow it, and with the way the shop floor was
arranged it was impossible to introduce new and more flexible machines. Ford claimed
that he would sell his cars in any colour, as long as it was black. By contrast, General
Motors hired designers who had styled cars for Hollywood stars and began to offer
models in many colours, with flowing lines and curves both fore and aft that allowed
alternate arrangements for storing the spare tire, for example. To achieve this, General
Motors developed a special steel that allowed such flexibility. By replacing nuts-andbolts
with rivets, it was able to develop shapes that improved both the aerodynamics
and the aesthetics of the automobile, to the point where people would later speak
of “sculpted cars”. As Barthes pointed out in another context (watching reactions to
the new Citroën models among visitors to the Paris automobile show) (Barthes, 1993),
“people touched the vehicle’s body, they felt its chassis, they tried out the seats, they
caressed the doors… These cars are almost the equivalent of our Gothic cathedrals…
designed with passion by nameless artists to be admired and used by people who
take them as magical objects” 78 .
CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005 99