Artistic creation in the tidal range

Some of the new areas of creativity today need to be examined in the light of the relationship between art and the economy –two domains that have symbolically and ideologically opposed one another throughout the 20th century. There would appear to be a convergence happening between the two models that is turning into a long-term phenomenon, where one mines the other for organisational systems, methods of conception, sometimes even end products. So, we have two territories –art and economics– coming together, inspiring one another, redefining boundaries to the point where they even build common plat- forms. The Boolean schema that puts the artist, the exclusive guardian of the symbolic and spiritual weight of the world up against the entrepreneur, the materialist subjected to the triviality of the product and to market contingency is inapt when describing the huge upset in the norms, hierarchies and values in our contemporary world: lines are moving, social and symbolic roles are scrambling common sense in a complex game of shifts, openings and splits. There are two antithetical figures –the artist and the entrepreneur– that since the industrial revolution have built a gap between the freedom of the former and the enslavement of the latter. Whether they are real or imagined, these images no longer make any sense, as economics have now infiltrated all domains.