art-e-conomy _ reader - marko stamenkovic

130
More specifically to do with culture and economy, Jeremy Rifkin (2000) has
examined the emergence of what he calls ‘cultural capitalism’. According to Rifkin,
‘Cultural production is beginning to eclipse physical production in world commerce
and trade’ (p8). This is the era of cultural capitalism. Culture is becoming utterly
commercialised. By cultural capitalism, Rifkin doe not just mean the priority of
an information and service economy over an industrial economy, he means the
commercialisation of experience itself. The driving force is technological innovation,
the Internet and all that. In this high-tech world, networking and access to desirable
and meaningful experiences are becoming more important than producing and
possessing things. All economy and culture are coming closer to the prototype
cultural industry of Hollywood, dealing in dreams and meanings. In this ‘Weightless
economy… the physical economy is shrinking’ (p30). Rifkin cites the Nike model
of outsourcing product manufacture as the exemplary business case. With regard
to the motor industry, Rifkin (2001: 35) remarks, ‘If companies like Ford had their
way, they would likely never want to sell another automobile again’. It is preferable
to lease cars out on an endlessly renewable contract.
The operative term in currently advanced marketing strategy is ‘lifetime value’
(LTV). Market share is no longer a business priority, amazingly, in Rifkin’s account.
Now, the task is to obtain a share of the customer, mapping individuals’ lifetime
wants and serving them from cradle to grave. Instead of selling things to customers,
why not sign them up for life to pay the rent? Then, it gets really sinister. The goal of
cultural capitalism is to commodify human relationships tout court, catching them
young, cultivating and servicing their every need, deploying something called R
(relationship) technologies.
Rifkin also discusses the depletion of cultural resources by their incessant mining,
paralleling ruthless and unsustainable exploitation of nature. Under cultural capitalism,
marketing is at the heart of this procedure. As Rifkin (2000: 171) says, ‘Marketing is
the means by which the whole of the cultural commons is mined for valuable potential
cultural meanings that can be transformed by the arts into commodifiable experiences,
purchasable in the economy’. Further on, he observes, ‘The culture, like nature, can
be mined to exhaustion’ (p247). Rifkin argues that world music, for instance, is a
gigantic cultural mining and commodification of difference. ‘Countercultural trends
have been particularly appealing targets for expropriation by marketeers’ (p174),
he notes. Anything can be commodified and packaged up for a wider audience by
marketing these days. An obvious example would be the trajectory of hip-hop and
rap from black radicalism to mainstream and largely white youth culture.
How strangely bereft is research in cultural studies of critical insight when confronted
with such trends, which are both evident yet no doubt somewhat exaggerated by
Rifkin. In fact, the obsession of much cultural studies with popular consumption
and the ruses of the consuming subject, it might be suggested, is actually complicit
with neo-liberalism, as Thomas Frank (2001) has argued strenuously in his book
on market populism. Whether this is really so or not, there is undoubtedly a curious
homology between the active audiences, cyber surfers, readers, shoppers, spectators,
strollers and visitors of cultural studies with the sovereign consumer of neo-liberal
market ideology (McGuigan, 1997)