The 'creative industry' is the UK's second biggest export industry, and yet cultural work is thought of in a different category to all other work. Armin Medosch examines the contradictions of art and business in the information age.

Art and Urban Development

Artists settling in a specific area help cultivate its hipness factor which, in turn, encourages the creative service industry to join in. Then the rent goes up, in which case artists are often the losers and have to find a new place to live.

Government or private investors build big museums or art centres in inner city slum areas to revitalise these areas economically. The small business structures responding to and encouraging tourism help raise the economic level. Tourists, private sheriffs, police and a clean environment will drive poor people out - and others considered a threat to the 'good citizen'.

Art was historically, and still is frequently used in a more symbolic sense to make meaning out of public areas and thereby 'structure' and consequently drive out the poor and the homeless (e.g. development of Union Square, NYC).

Art is used by governments to create a positive image of a nation or city to help bring in foreign investment, and motivate corporations to settle in a specific country or city. Multinationals do care about the 'cultural climate' when they choose a new location. (See for example: "Cities turn up for a cultural hard sell", Financial Times, 6.2.98).

Many major art events receive state subsidies precisely in order to make a place attractive and put it on the map for potential investors. Linz and the Ars Electronica festival exemplify the digital version of this kind of sponsorship strategy. With the launching of the Ars Electronica festival in the late 70s, the former steel industry town has tried to publicly mark its transition into an information age town and service industry centre.

In Britain politicians are stressing the importance of the 'creative industry' for the nation's economy. Indeed, media and entertainment are now Britain's second largest industry. With manufacturing and the still dominating defence industry in decline, the 'creative industry' offers prospects for further growth. The current government uses everything, from the Spice Girls to The Prodigy to Damian Hirst to underline this issue, but is doing little to encourage new talents as yet unrecognised (or is doing quite the reverse by cutting social benefits which previously enabled young artists to develop and practice without needing to immediately enter the market).

Private Sponsors

The idea of the Maecenas - the rich entrepreneur donating huge sums to artists just for idealistic reasons - is a deeply outdated model. Nowadays sponsorship also is not simply about getting the company logo on an invitation card or poster. Companies sponsoring art events are looking for an 'integrated and multiple synergetic' effect.

Sponsorship improves vertical corporate cultural integration as well as horizontal cross-company communications (having special parties at art locations; showing business partners how cool and modern they are; giving free tickets to employees for sponsored events as an incentive or reward).

Sponsorship can be directly targeted at certain trendy sectors of society; the assumption is that if they accept the product the masses will follow. When sponsorship becomes the only reason for an event creating a social setting and a complete corporate environment, as seems to be the case with many youth-cultural mega-events like massive outdoor raves and festivals, advertisement makes the step into 'artificial reality' and creates completely 'branded environments' of which we will certainly see more in the future.

The Knowledge Gap and the Genius Model

Another accident of modernity was to exclude art from being a form of gathering 'real knowledge'. Science gained the monopoly over meaning and truth. In as much as the balance between these disciplines needs to be restored, artists also needs to lose their 'outsider' status and be regarded as part of 'normal society'. Artists are members of its elite - specialists for manipulating symbols - which, payment aside, is not so different from being a lawyer, a journalist, a researcher or a marketing specialist. But the undervaluing of art in society is, unfortunately, partly a result of the behaviour of artists themselves.

Since attempts during the 60s to replace individualistic notions of artistic genius with those of artist as cultural worker, we have seen a return to art business as usual. In this condition the artist is a 19th century figure. Artists stress their 'individuality' and 'otherness' in order to be interesting to potential buyers or commissioners and become a name-artist accumulating symbolic capital.

This obsolete notion of the artist as individualistic outsider harms artists working with new media tools particularly because it hinders necessary forms of teamwork between specialists (coding specialist, conceptual specialist, visual specialist...).

Art and New Advertisement

Now, in a consumer driven economy, products depend on being 'hip'. How to achieve hipness is as mysterious as why an artist becomes a 'name'. It is a result of 'soft warfare' in discursive and symbolic reality. Distributive power, but also the skills of imaging are essential. Therefore 'Digital Artisans' - the people with computer skills and creative skills who are actually creating the images, web-sites, CD-ROMS and games - are playing an increasingly important role. The "artists as hypermedia surface wizards" are helping to blur the boundaries between art and advertisement. Their ability to do so is what makes them interesting to their corporate commissioners.

New Media and New Technology

"New Media Art" generally carries the burden of promoting, voluntarily or not, new technologies. Artists have contributed to the degradation of their own discipline by all too often concentrating on the novelty factor of technologies (Netscape.Artists, Macromedia.Artists). High-Tech gadgetry and popularised new scientific metaphors (Artificial Life, Complexity Theory) often cover the lack of any real social dimension.
The institutional situation is compromising itself by rewarding lazy conceptualism. Institutions meant to support the creation of new art works often have to focus too much on creating spectacular events in order to be attractive for their sponsors.
Whereas in the past artists often became technologically creative and invented their own tools, nowadays they seem to be happy to use any new tool which is force fed to them by an ever more rapid technological development in the commercial technology sector.

Conclusion

I have tried to describe links between art and business not to present all of them as intrinsically evil, but rather as a reality we have to acknowledge in order to see who is doing what, who gets the benefits, how the creation of values is structured in the 'information age'.

Viewed in this light, the overall legal and institutional situation of a country (for example the legal position on intellectual property rights) is often more important than those technological aspects which catch our attention all too easily.

Art is widely considered a luxury rather than a social necessity, which results in the low renumeration of most artists. Instead, we should try to understand how cultural objects, of whatever character or materiality, can be produced and distributed to the best advantage of society and the artists/producers.

Armin Medosch [armin@easynet.co.uk]