OECD Culture and Local Development.pdf - PACA

3. PROMOTING LOCAL DEVELOPMENT BY CREATING CULTURAL PRODUCTS
Coping with technological innovations
Creative arts districts can today take two forms, with some intermediate gradations.
In one case, such a district will rely initially on recently developed technologies,
such as in the audiovisual industry, and then follow these up with further innovations.
In the other case, the district will try to revive inherited know-how, and may then be
confronted with the challenges of technology and competition. The simplest case is
clearly that of a radical shift in production technology, as happened to the images d’Épinal
(a predecessor of the comic strip). Another might be a product that evolves because
some of its factors of production change source, as in the case of perfume districts.
Or again, technological change might be such as to induce the district to invest in new
product lines, using its know-how to recast its output, as the jewellery or watchmaking
districts have done.
The introduction of microcomputers and microtechnology plays a key role here,
implying changes of a new kind — the opening of interfaces with research, and the
abandonment or at least the marginalisation of skills that might otherwise still be
employed. If these districts do not modernise, their cost structures may soon overshadow
their quality advantage, which may in any case become less visible in comparison with
fully industrialised products. If they do modernise, they may lose their originality
edge over mass-produced goods of the same kind. Districts producing furniture,
textiles and even cutlery thus find themselves balancing on the edge, and they must
cope constantly with this dual risk. By the end of the process, the customised work
that highly skilled artisans turned out for the carriage trade will have given way to making
“personalised” products in small batches, and perhaps even to mass production.
Of course, there remains the option of producing to a “model”, which can incorporate
many allusions, but even this will not necessarily be immune to commercial pressures.
As soon as direct contact with the customer is broken and costly equipment has to
be amortised, there is a great risk that products will be designed with a view to sales
and not to their creativity. This process is cumulative, and it is hard to see how it can
fail to change the power relationships between professional artists and the lesserskilled
trades involved in production. For the districts described, model creation
represents the highest level of an artisan’s achievement: for him, it is a question of
designing and making an original object, regardless of whether it is in response to a
particular customer 98 .
Another phenomenon now appears, the copy or reproduction of an original, which
may be a last resort for remaining in the field of “arts and crafts” or of “cultural products”.
Making such copies gives the craftsman’s work an undeniable stamp of aesthetic quality,
but it also signals the end of the craft, for it will soon be taken over by large-batch producers.
Cabinet making districts have slowly become furniture-making districts, reflecting this
trend 99 . The only road open to these trades, then, is to reinvent themselves: whereas
CULTURE AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT - ISBN 92-64-00990-6 - © OECD 2005 115