Bernard Stiegler: "Economic prosperity relies on creativity"

A philosophy professor at the University of Compiègne and London, Bernard Stiegler also is the director of the IRI. He has been the managing director of the IRCAM and the assistant managing director of the INA, but also the President of Ars Industrialis. He wrote 25 books on philosophy of technique and industrial society.

Bernard Stiegler:

Let’s begin by considering two facts. The first is that the famous art historian and amateur Daniel Arrasse explained in Histoires de peintures (Paintings’ history) that he needed 20 years to appreciate the Joconde. The second is that an architect participating at a symposium at the Musée du Louvre in 2005 affirmed that a visitor spent, in this museum, in average 42 seconds in front of an artwork.

The relationship to artworks became increasingly quantitative, and major museums tend to become mass media. Yet, this relationship collides with what spread throughout the development of cultural industries in contemporary societies: a cultural consumerism which concretely is the opposite of this highly qualitative relationship that art lovers have with artworks.



In art and culture as everywhere else, the consumer has replaced the amateur, and this is primarily an issue of time spent in front, with and in the artworks. The museum and cultural institution in general tend to either become a kind of cultural industry, or to comply with the formats of this economic sector: their public tends to be audiences in the sense understood when talking of mass media

However, we must add here two observations that contradict these statements. On the one hand, major mass media are in crisis: the widespread digitization - implementation of what was called in the 1990s the convergence of broadcasting, telecommunications and computer technology, is creating a position of cracking of the model. On the other hand, the practices that are deployed on digital networks are much closer to the figure of the amateur than that of consumer.

This evolution exceeds by far the world of artistic culture: it is very likely that the evolution currently occurring in what could be named the field of cultural technologies (with all the questions posed and the shifts implemented by those) is the manifestation of a trend that could ultimately affect the whole new industrial world that emerges before our eyes.



With the digitization, technical functions that were inherently reserved for professional producers of cultural industries are now accessible to a wider public: filming, editing, indexing, various treatments, diffusion. This migration of technological skills radically modifies the situation of cultural consumerism which finally had become prominent, and is quite comparable to the effects that printing had on Christianity: the result has been the Reformation and the birth of capitalism.

Cultural policies should be redesigned accordingly, and in great depth - i.e. acknowledging that, as stated last year Frederic Mitterrand, digital technologies are a pharmakon: a poison that can be a remedy, a remedy that can become poisonous. Anyway, through the cultural technologies which are deploying on digital networks, a new business model is emerging in rupture with the consumerism (cultural or not) typical of the twentieth century, which had itself replaced the nineteenth century typical productivism. This is the issue of the relationship between culture, economy and technology in the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Artists and creators help regions, cities and regions create a sense of social inclusion and authenticity. Economic prosperity relies on cultural, entrepreneurial, civic, scientific, and artistic creativity. Creative workers with these talents need communities, organizations, and peers that are open to new ideas and different people. They also look to places that are authentic and unique and the large presence of artists helps a community create an identity that is distinctive. Places receptive to new forms of culture, alternative lifestyles and identities and new views on social status and power structures will benefit significantly in the creative age.
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