Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s - Hardcover

Wu, Chin-Tao

4.13

38 ratings by Goodreads

9781859846131: Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859846130 ISBN 13: 9781859846131

Publisher: Verso, 2002

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Corporate sponsorship and business involvement in the visual arts have become increasingly common features in our cultural lives. From Absolut Vodka’s sponsorship of art shows to ABN-AMRO Bank’s branding of Van Gough’s self-portrait to advertise its credit cards, we have born witness to a new sort of patronage, in which the marriage of individual talent with multinational marketing is beginning to blur the comfortable old distinctions between public and private.

Chin-tao Wu’s book is the first concerted attempt to detail the various ways in which business values and the free-market ethos have come to permeate the sphere of the visual arts since the 1980s. charting the various shifts in public policy which first facilitated the entry of major corporations into the cultural sphere, it analyses the roles of governments in injecting the principles of the free market into public arts agencies—in particular the Arts Council in Great Britain and the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA. It goes on to study the corporate take-over of art museums, highlighting the ways in which ;cultural capital’ can be garnered by various social and business ‘elites’ through commercial involvement in the arts, and shows how corporations have succeeded in integrating themselves into the infrastructure of the art world itself by showcasing contemporary art in their own corporate premises.

Mapping for the first time the increasingly hegemonic position that corporations and corporate elites have come to occupy in the cultural arena, this is a provocative contribution to the debate on public culture in Britain and America.

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About the Author:

Chin-tao Wu specialises in contemporary art and culture, and has contributed to New Left Review and Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London and currently teaches at Nanhua University in Taiwan.

From Publishers Weekly:

The dirty little secret of the art world today lies far hidden from its everyday internecine controversies, uniting everyone from the most "subversive" installation artist to the snootiest tiara-sporting socialite: it's that they really, really like the wads of corporate cash that underwrite the whole shebang. How this state of affairs came to be and how it presently operates are the subject of New Left Review contributor Wu's sobering and incisive book, which lays bare as never before the incredibly cozy and self-serving nexus of "public" funding agencies, foundations, dealers, galleries and artists, in Britain, the U.S. and increasingly in Europe. The Thatcher and Reagan administrations, Wu argues, glimpsed a way of not only offloading onto the corporate sector the never particularly popular public funding of art, but of helping corporate interests buy art world respectability and cachet at wholesale rates. Of course, all of this has been written about before, but Wu's strength is in her meticulously researched, number-crunching descriptions of the mechanics behind it. Most surprising is the extent to which the supposedly public money-saving initiatives of corporate sponsorship were really an excuse for sweetheart tax write-offs that cost the taxpayers even more than straight funding of the NEA and similar institutions. The effect on the art world is harder to map, but Wu convincingly lays out an Alice in Wonderland world in which Donald Judd sculptures become drink holders, minimalism becomes especially valued for its lack of discernible content, and the most scabrously anti-corporate art becomes witness instead to the hipness and munificence of its intended target. Wu convincingly tells an ugly story of seduction and betrayal(and shows it in 40 b&w and 20 color illustrations), one that anyone who cares about the future of art needs to hear.

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