On the Impossibility of Sustainable Development without Culture

Why assert that culture is intrinsic and absolutely necessary to sustainable development? Why examine art and why choose to forge ties with marketing? Why should companies, institutions, and policies include a cultural dimension in their strategies for sustainable development? How can marketing help integrate this dimension? We seek to put our work in perspective with the wealth of collections in museums, the wealth of artistic production, regardless of their origin. We also seek to study the dialogue between art and consumption. We provide a brief overview of sustainable development. Culture emerges as an issue, most oftenand insufficiently only as cultural diversity. What do the terms sustainable and development mean? What do they contain? What do they demand? What do they need to be responsibly enacted? Art and culture create meaning, as do the markets and consumption. People draw on them for their identities. Is it really possible to make cultural dimensions part of consumption and the markets? Is the notion that we proposethe poetic efficacy of artable to provide guidance? Is it possible to extend this notion to marketing and to an efficacy (poetic efficacy) of consumption that stems from the poetic efficacy of art? Research in marketing has drawn on culture for guidance. Is it not possible for art and culture to endow the markets with meaning, and for all economic activity, the production of goods, social ties, the protection of the environment, and the center of our daily lives? We have shown that, through history, culture and art have met this challenge. We have shown that the markets can integrate this efficacy to become truly sustainable markets. Without culture it is not possible to develop markets that are truly sustainable. Let us apply the same truth to marketing, for another view of consumption and of markets for the creation not of a new utopia but of a sustainable reality.