Co-opting the arts

Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, by Chin-tao Wu, London and New York, Verso, 2001, 373 pages, $30.

The Golden Avant-Garde: Idolatry, Commercialism, and Art, by Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2000, 147 pages, $17.50.

We am long overdue for a new "institutional critique" of the intertwined relationship of art, money and power. While recently preparing a seminar reading list, I read Maurice Tuchman's 1971 catalogue essay for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's seminal "Art and Technology" exhibition and was amazed to discover the difficulties Tuchman encountered bankrolling the show with contributions--both cash and in kind--from corporate titans. Here was a revealing historical document about the pre-corporate-dominated era of arts funding that has never been invoked, as far as I know, in discussions of the history of institutional funding practices. (Tuchman's essay is unimaginable today for its candor.) This discovery whetted my appetite for Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, Chin-tao Wu's ambitious but flawed examination of the apotheosis of corporate values during the Thatcher/Reagan era and its legacy for the arts.

Wu currently teaches at the National Institute of the Arts in Taiwan, but between 1987 and 1991 she lived in London, where she gathered material for this book. She observed firsthand the increasingly threadbare remnants of the U.K.'s welfare state, finding that by the time she "learned to appreciate how the British system worked ... many of the entitlements were disappearing, being diluted or transformed into something else." Having grown up in entitlement-free, ultra-capitalist Taiwan, she wryly observes that any talk in today's Britain about the redistribution of wealth may brand the speaker--as in post-Communist Russia--a political conservative. Her leftist cosmopolitanism is a tonic; it helps undermine the all-too-conventional wisdom. Many of us uncritically accept the intractability of the status quo--as in Barbara Rose's oft-quoted valentine to Philip Morris: "One can only be grateful to a corporation farsighted enough to deflect PR budgets into public service rather than pouring it [sic] down the Madison Avenue drain." Wu reminds us that advertising in the form of ersatz "public service" to museums is, unlike conventional PR, tax deductible and that it is the citizenly job of writers (and readers) to remain alert to history while maintaining a detached skepticism about the present.

If Privatising Culture is a reaction to the initiatives of Reagan and Thatcher, the book also acknowledges its theoretical debt to a thinker who also gained prominence during the '80s, Pierre Bourdieu. Wu employs Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital--the prestige derived from support for the arts--to explain the social motives for corporate activities in the arts. (Oddly, Bourdieu's highly relevant book about Hans Haacke is not listed in the bibliography.) But the references to Bourdieu never really pay off. And why does Wu need to burden her narrative with such theorizing anyway? Perhaps Wu's reliance on Bourdieu is a consequence of Privatising Culture's evolution from doctoral thesis to trade book.

Her volume opens with a background chapter, "Public Arts Funding," which might have been more accurately and vividly titled "Tax Exemptions: A Privilege, Not a Right," and closes with "Conclusion: From Conservatism to Neo-Conservatism," a litany of the institutionalization of private arts funding. The best material, however, comes in the middle. Individual chapters are devoted to institutions, trustees, corporate galleries, corporate collections and corporate awards. By providing a wealth of specific detail, Wu suggests what a prosecutor might term a damning pattern of behavior. Consider her chapter on corporate art awards, which is a brilliant exposition of a subject Americans may know little about, since American museums and media have tended to withhold credibility for such overtly serf-serving activities--at least until the advent of the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize.

In Britain, on the other hand, corporate art awards have been a fact of life for more than two decades; they include the Barclays Young Artist Award, the NatWest Art Prize, the Prudential Arts Awards, the Arthur Andersen Art Award, and the John Player Portrait Awards, to name only a few. For a midsized corporation like the construction company John Laing plc, funding an art prize can provide an incomparable marketing opportunity. The Laing Art Competition, which offers just $23,000 in total prize money, begins with 10 regional contests and culminates in a final exhibition in London, after garnering local and national publicity out of all proportion to the size or status of the awards.

Wu effectively invokes her roots to analyze Philip Morris's hierarchical treatment of its Asian competitions. The multistage ASEAN Art Awards, covering all Southeast Asian countries, is budgeted for $150,000 in prize money, while the Philip Morris Art Award in Japan distributes substantially more. Wu provides no overall figure, but the seven top Japanese winners alone, selected by luminaries like Richard Koshalek and Lars Nittve, receive $15,000 each and a group exhibition at New York University's Grey Art Gallery. Increasingly staged in publicly funded exhibition spaces, such shows can make it very difficult to distinguish between art-world internationalism, with its anti-parochial effects, and corporate multinationalism, which tends to impose Western cultural bias by financial means.