The Dyson Dilemma
I’ve always thought that the Dyson vacuum folks were missing a trick by not going with a subversive but potentially effective ad campaign built around the phrase, ‘We suck’. Having splashed out on a Dyson some years ago, I’ve never looked back. I love seeing the granular detritus of daily existence whooshed into that clear plastic canister. Thus does each Dysoning feel like a minor, fleeting triumph over life’s invariable messiness.
‘Dyson: We Suck.’ Indeed.
That said, this potential catch-phrase popped into my head somewhat less generously after reading a recent New Yorker profile of the venerable Sir James Dyson, who is also the star ‘innovation’ advisor to the ConDems (and the apparent NBF of our PM). In what was otherwise a profile of Dyson’s attempt to do for desktop fans what he did for Hoovers, Sir James let drop a rather explosive quote:
“[The term creative industries] implies traditional industry is not creative. And, two, it suggests that art and TV and the like are an industry. They’re not necessarily industries, because they don’t make things.”
Let us first acknowledge the indignation, not to say rage, that the last two sentences above must naturally spark amongst those of us in said derided ‘industry’. Of course the arts produce products. It’s just that they aren’t always made of plastic, wires and metal.
But in its blunt simplicity, Sir James’s statement goes to the very heart of the current wrangling over arts and culture provision in the UK. Both the quote and much of his Ingenious Britain report for the Coalition underscore the popular perception that the arts are ephemeral...and worse, that they are divorced from the engines that are perceived to drive economies, societies and nations.
That this is patently false can be observed in any Dyson vacuum cleaner, which takes its design cue less from Electrolux or Hoover than from the Pompidou Centre in Paris: what’s normally inside is cheekily and gloriously on display outside. Produced by engineers and architects, both Dyson cleaners and the Pompidou are deeply influenced by modern art: Dyson himself went to art school, not engineering college, and admits to having soaked up postmodernists like David Hockney at the time. One wonders what Dyson would have produced had he not been able to lap up that kind of aesthetic inspiration.
This kind of argument—that the arts influence and even underpin so much ‘real’ industrial output, in addition to being economically valuable output in their own right—isn’t being made strongly enough right now. Why are we not tapping less literal-minded businessfolk, scientists and engineers than Sir James to help us make this case (‘us’ being the people who make a living in the creative industries)?
I’ll close with an anecdote that demonstrates, albeit obliquely, the potential power of this kind of approach. Some years back, I helped to arrange a private event in the Silicon Valley featuring Leonard Nimoy, ‘Mr Spock’ himself. Like flies to a pointy-eared confectionary, the Valley’s top-line entrepreneurs swarmed to our gig: the collective wealth in the room was surely in the hundreds of millions, the industrial output enabled by the creative minds present undoubtedly in the many billions. I sat next to one of these fellows and asked, somewhat obviously, if he was a Star Trek fan. He smiled and said, ‘As a kid I wanted to be Mr. Spock. That’s why I went into engineering. I’ll bet everyone in this room is the same.’
Nimoy is an actor. The character of Mr. Spock was created by writers. Star Trek is the product of designers, filmmakers, directors, musicians, visual artists, and other ‘creative types’. The arts, at their best, are about re-seeing the world and imagining the possible. Crush the arts and the creative industries, and we potentially crush everything that Sir James and ConDems purport to be striving towards. They need to see it that way. We need to make them.
