PRIMER
Attempts to rectify the causality between aesthetics and profits, design in a world of business, and art in a financially driven economy has always been riddled with ambiguity. What a lot of people fail to comprehend however, is how these two things aren’t a trivial matter of personal opinion or acquired tastes. After reading this segment, there’d hardly be a reason for the inability to bridge the economic value of arts and design.
THE EYES EAT FIRST
Let’s take Europe as a prime example. Most of the architecture that has been held up by the eyes of the world as beauty and wonders are monuments inextricably linked to art. Be it Romantic architecture like the Big Ben, or Gothic architecture like the Notre Dame, there’s an inherent pattern between upticks in tourism and the propagation of art and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s not an accident that these marvels of architecture are among some of the most globally sought after. People are willing to pay and travel thousands of miles to pilgrimages in Europe from all over to world to perceive through one’s own eyes these soul-nourishing wonders.
DIVINITY AND THE SACRED
I certainly think there needn’t be a logical explanation for why this is so, the same way no one has to explain the world’s predilection for music. Such beauty is priceless and is beyond verbal articulation as are the things we hold up to as divine. And it’s almost obvious that tourism, a large attributor to the EU’s GDP has been largely influenced by the sheer gravitas by which said beauty is made readily available. People yearn and long for these awe-inspiring moments, for that chasm of raw emotion and wide-eyed wonder that reveals itself as something out of the ordinary. A kick that wakes them up from the mundane rhythms of established routines.
BEYOND CONSCIOUS PERCEPTION
It is precisely this that underlies the fundamental financial utility of art and design given it’s easily the case that design is to a business what art and architecture is to an economy. There are obviously different epochs to which design and art can be implemented; to appeal to customers into buying one good over the other, or to establish an iconography of dominance and status for a brand. Whatever that reason may be, good design will always appeal to stakeholders, inadvertently benefiting a business’s monetary structure. An excellent worker looking for new challenges, a shareholder looking to invest given his wife and children’s never-ending praise for a product they love, satisfied consumers sharing their experience about a product they’ve been obsessed with, and the list goes on. A well-designed product has the potential to reap innumerable benefits for a company, the likes that extend far beyond finances. Physical aesthetics is the first thing our visual perceptions pick up when confronted with any new object, the first tool we draw within a fraction of seconds. It’d therefore be heretical to forego the underlying presuppositions established by our most primordial senses.
A NON-ZERO SUM GAME
If we all understood the gap between creativity and economics, we wouldn’t need to have an ideological discussion about art or design, we’d have a practical one. The apprehension of artistic value may not be a common theme shared by everyone, but you don’t have to understand art per se in order to realize the scattered benefits it may accrue to things relevant to you. “I don’t get the utility of design” says the lawyer “but they generate quite a lot of income and I’m pretty happy about money”. Right, exactly. Now we can have a discussion.
