White paper on creativity - ebla center

Chapter 14to produce exhibitions, public artprojects or more generally to installworks in public places, a field in whichdemand is growing incessantly. In factany opportunity is a good opportunityto call in an artist. Art is everywhere,and the more it spreads the more itwhets the appetite and brings in newrequests. Fashion and life stylemagazines plan issues round art andartists, or even directly entrust themwith the creative editing. Urbanplanners vie for their services.Companies ask them to holdworkshops for managers andemployees or to design objects andcommunications processes.Artist are beginning to be as sociallyvisible as rock stars. But the differencelies, or rather lay, in the fact that rockmusic is part of the so-called industrialculture – i.e. the production sector inwhich the product on sale is made tobe infinitely reproduced, and whoseeffective size depends on demand.Contemporary art, is or (as we shouldnow say) was –part of core culturalproduction: i.e. the nucleus of culturalproduction which is organised in a waythat has nothing to do with industrybut rather the small crafts workshop.But evidently that is no longer howthings are. Even artists, in their ownway, are beginning to produce in series.Not many copies of the same object,but a host of “unique exemplars”which lie outside the confines of awork of art as traditionally defined.And here too we basically find ananalogy with rock stars who now writebooks, put their signature to perfumesand clothes, or open bars andrestaurants. This kind of practice caneven be found among artists, as in thecase of Damien Hirst.But why do art and artists attract somuch attention? The reason actuallylies in the mass markets. Consumers onmass markets are now basicallybecoming sated, and artists offer a kindof good which is still scarce in a worldof abundance: meaning. Artistselaborate systems with apparentlypointless and senseless rules, whichhowever reveal unexpected aspects ofthe world and suddenly call intoquestion apparently solid socialconventions. Consumers are nowshowing a certain impatience with theritual of increasingly predictableproducts and therefore find art asatisfying distraction. And if this is trueof people living in affluent societies, itis even truer of the new consumers inemerging countries like the Arabs statesor the Far Eastern countries, wherecontemporary art has become a symbolof the new social status associated withthe opportunities to access globalisedconsumption. The behaviouralpreconditions for this consumption areacquired quickly and then equallyquickly transgressed and abandoned inthe search for a credible, identitybuildingsynthesis of the old and new,the traditional and innovative, andconformity and transgression.In mass markets, abundance or ratherthe aggressiveness of products whichdemand our attention everywhere,drive consumers to increasinglysophisticated forms of defence. Peoplestruggle to remember the names ofproducts, confusing one with another.They consume without even noticing it,perhaps already looking forward towhat they will consume next. AndWHITE PAPER ON CREATIVITY 320