Epress.am News from Armenia
On Oct. 2, during the regular meeting of the “Small Council,” Nazaret Karoyan, art critic and president of AICA-Armenia (an association of art critics), gave a presentation titled “War Economy and Peace Economy.”
As a preamble to his talk, by drawing parallels between modern and post-modern cultural economies, Karoyan said that compared to modern economy, which was inclined to sameness production (originality, serialization based on a model, mass production), the globalized world’s culture economy is characterized by differences and diversity production, producing meanings and signs instead of manufactured goods.
In this post-modern cultural economy, Karoyan identified two separate types of economic management: assigning one features of peace, while the other, of war. These two types of cultural economies, according to Karoyan, are different from each other in the type of economic relationships they assume, how they manage production, do they control meaning production or not, what policy do they adopt when placed into circulation, and what volumes and markets of consumption do they anticipate?
The first, the cultural economy of war, is characterized by competitive relationships, centralized management, control of meaning production, commodification of production, a policy of representation, that is put into circulation and that anticipates a broad public, mass consumption.
The second, the cultural economy of peace, is distinguished by the fact that it places its products of difference to use with non-market aims. It does not in fact produce commodities, but rather it produces unique experience and knowledge. Its economic management is not centralized, it doesn’t control the production of meaning, and it is not a policy of representation that it circulates, but rather a policy of contact and communication. The peace economy’s consumption environment can be found not in the average impersonal society, but in limited communities and environments.
Projecting this cultural economy situation on Armenia, Karoyan said that in reconstructing cultural economy, we must guide it not toward the ways of production management and circulation of a war, but of a peace economy. Not only would this allow us to avoid competition and to build cultural relationships on the basis of cooperation, but also it would allow participants to become creators of global cultural economic development models and agendas.