Arts Under Pressure: Promoting diversity in the age of globalisationby Smiers & Joost, Zed Books, London 2003 ISBN 1 84277 263 5 £15.95 [£20.05 inc p&p]
Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980sby Chin-tao, Wu, Verso, London 2003 ISBN 1 85984 472 3 £12.00 [£17.06 inc p&p] [Cost for both books £32.78 inc p&p] Cultural Panicking Art is generous: we all know that. It is also flexible and resilient, capable - like all successful viruses - of infinite mutation: it will survive us all. That, for all its interest, is why there is a certain tedium in the Smiers book. It attempts perhaps 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, all of which the author interestingly views as the church which hides the sun. There is something in the nature of panic here, if we can have moral ones then that we can have cultural ones surely follows? I am reminded of the metaphysical disgust (and the prolific profitable faux panicky publications) of Sixties cultural gurus’ and their much vaunted ‘alarm’ at the bastions of high culture being breached and their levelling by the hideous forces of the “mass-media”. Different devils now, of course, but the panic continues 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 given example of the latter is languages disappearing, but they were anyway and globalisation, corporatism and the information super-highway have created new languages and, as unappetizing as we see them now, we may even grow to love them. On the whole, this is not a book (as the cover claims) which is “urgently needed”. Wu Chin-tao’s however is. It is that rare thing: a distillation of a PhD thesis, which has practical value. More confined than Smiers, in that the UK and USA are her sole fields of inquiry, oddly she contradicts him, with her more optimistic analysis of corporate interests in art. Smiers felt artistic production to be below the threshold at which multinationals would be interested and cites the erosion of good programming and sound criticism in broadcast media. 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 artsnbusiness rhetoric and identifies the supposed altruism of U.S.-style private donations of art collections and galleries as a myth. The reality she sees as yet more selfishness: the actuality state generosity – in foregoing what would otherwise have been tax income. On the whole Privatising Culture takes a more robust and optimistic view of everything. My gut feeling is that Smiers’ concluding tautology “Thus, freedom of expression for everybody is an additional reason to restrict substantially the size and power of the cultural industries worldwide”, would find little sympathy in Chin-tao! 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 less ‘serious’, is more conventionally enjoyable.
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