Arts Under Pressure: Promoting Diversity in the Age of Globalisation by Joost Smiers (Zed Books: London, 2003 ISBN 1 84277 263 5 £15.95 [£20.05* inc. p&p])
Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980’s by Wu Chin-tao (Verso: London, 2003 ISBN 1 85984 472 3 £12.00 [£17.06* inc. p&p])
Review by Hugh Adams, who runs Bristol-based consultancy The Art Agency and is chair of Cywaith Cymru.Artworks Wales.
Despite the potential interest that lies in the subject matter of this book, there is a certain tedium in ‘Arts Under Pressure’. It attempts to do too much in offering a global cultural analysis and hence devotes too little space to what is most interesting – the minutiae of copyright, patenting and intellectual property protectionism.
There is something in the nature of panic here. I am reminded of the metaphysical disgust and panic of Sixties cultural gurus and their much vaunted ‘alarm’ at the bastions of high culture being breached by the hideous forces of the ‘mass-media’. Different devils now, of course, but the panic continues to be profitable.
Clearly there are new pressures on the arts from globalisation but it does not follow that cultural identity and creative diversity are thereby threatened. One example given of the latter is languages disappearing, but they were doing so anyway. Indeed, globalisation, corporatism and the information super-highway have created new languages, which, as unappetizing as they appear now, we may even grow to love. On the whole, this is not a book (as the cover claims) that is ‘urgently needed’.
Wu Chin-tao’s ‘Privatising Culture’, however, is such a book. It is that rare thing: a distillation of a PhD thesis that has practical value. More confined than Smiers (in that the UK and USA are her sole fields of inquiry) she contradicts him, with her more optimistic analysis of corporate interests in art.
Where Smiers feels artistic production to be below the threshold at which multinationals are interested, Chin-tao, paradoxically, delineates the extent and scope of corporate collections and is optimistic at their capacity to operate at the very frontiers of vanguardism. She is very interesting on structures of patronage within companies.
From both books the State emerges as guardian of diversity and beacon and prophylactic against the excesses of multinational corporations. Chin-tao dismisses Thatcherite arts and business rhetoric and identifies the supposed altruism of US-style private donations of art collections and galleries as a myth, with the actuality being state generosity in forgoing what would otherwise have been tax income.
Both these books will be of value to arts managers and cultural analysts of various kinds; Smiers’ in the way that medicine is, whilst Chin-tao’s (in no way a less serious work) is more conventionally enjoyable.