Over the past years, the Norwegian government has, increasingly, supported cultural or creative industries as part of both a cultural, trade and regional policy rationality. This support has had both an instrumental and an ideal argument. Cultural industries are often referred to as emerging industries, both with a direct economic potential and a complimentary potential as a creative source or role model for the rest of the industry and business life, promoting core values of today like individuality, creativity and network(ing). Furthermore, this potential is often pointed out as accelerating. Consequently, companies within the cultural industries contribute to the market economy both by offering cultural products in an industrial manner and by creating new, innovative products based on art and culture, products that we now, as we speak, have not been yet introduced to. Besides, in an indirect way, the art and culture field is thought to produce and lead way for a new, aestheticised market economy. Here art and culture is thought to be of inspiration both in product and lifestyle design, as the assumption is that artists will be able to contribute positively to such design, being offensive on individual style, trend sensibility and open-minded out-of-the-box thinking. Equally important, one assumes that traditional industry could have something to learn from the art field: effective and productive due to non regulated working conditions, a high rate of self employment and focus on the job as a central source of self-realization. Critical voices have been raised, warning about uncertainty following part time working/freelancing, low wages and below average social security systems. Others, again, reply that such co-operation has a great potential for mutual learning.
At the same time there is a persistent claim from artists, their organizations and others (including politicians) to secure the autonomy of the art. They argue for art’s intrinsic values, healthy for a society as a counterpart and a corrective to conventional, instrumental thinking. Besides, in the art world it is not obvious that economic profit from the art production is positively sanctioned. Bourdieu describes the art field as ‘the economic world turned upside down’, a place where absence of a paying market nurture the idea of great art for art’s sake.
This way art has a rather ambiguous potential for a play between seemingly self-contradictory rationalities. The mix of political cultural industries hype and the assumed artistic reservation towards the market, calls for a number of critical questions.
