artist’s roles in trendspotting

Americans are obsessed with cars. I do not think this will change, regardless of the price of gas or the ethical concerns beginning to bubble up in our collective subconsciousness’s.  Granted there are few functioning examples of efficient and affordable public transportation in the US, but even if we could re-wind 150 years and put in high speed trains and subway systems run on more than one track, people in the US would still be obsessed with cars. This is a long-term trend. Or, ‘Nothing new.’ as our illustrious speaker of this week so aptly put it 42 times during the course of his lecture.

What is interesting is what sub-trends this long term trend will engender. I think sub-trends, or rather the business world’s trends put into a more comprehensive cultural context, are interesting to study through the lens of the marginal populations of the world. This can mean examining the use-value of cell phones in village economies in Saharan Africa, or it can mean the different ideas communicated about the use-value of cars in the Western Deserts of the US as interpreted by artists and craftspeople and others living on the fringes of middle American society.

Cars are designed and marketed to the mainstream consumers because the power of the market lies in the NUMBER of people willing to buy a product. Whatever they come up with will then be subverted by the marginal user-groups to meet their own needs, as they are rarely taken into account when designing the newest technology: that is why they are marginal, on the outside or the periphery of events and markets. Trend spotters (as they have been defined in this course to date) do not generally consider these people when projecting their imaginations into the future.

So why do I focus on them? Because I think they are the Black Swans we ignore until we can not ignore them, like the masses of people using mobile technology in Africa today. Because artists and people who work in the arts MUST keep an open mind to non-mainstream trends in order to be able to understand the art being produced today, because artists ARE the world’s best and more efficient trend spotters. I am not an artist myself, and so I can get away with saying this.

That there are hundreds of artists at the Burning Man festival pouring money and time and energy into rethinking the use-value, mechanics, and branding of the car indicates that the obession with personal vehicles in the US is far from threatened by oil prices, despite what the newspapers tell us. It also indicates an impulse to customize the car that may have market implications in the future; as cars become more dependant on computers, it is possible that Volvo or Ford’s main product would be the computer mainframe, and that the physical parts of the computer would be interchangeable.

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