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 Here was a revealing historical document about the pre-corporate-dominated era of arts funding that has never been invoked, as far as I know, in discussions of the history of institutional funding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.

When it comes to the American part of her topic, Wu's bearings are far less sure. She vastly overestimates the centralization of American arts funding--NEA funds are a fraction of the total spent by state and local arts' agencies--and of American culture in general. Her research was conducted in New York, which in no way approximates London's dominance of British art and media. Her keen eye for detail seems to have deserted her, too, partly as a consequence of relying for mass-media coverage on the New York Times, which rarely reports stories such as the NEA's unholy alliance with the Rouse company in 1990. (Characterizing shopping malls as the "new agora," the federal agency contravened its own guidelines in order to sponsor art in the corporation's privately owned--and hence First Amendment-exempt--commercial developments. The NEA thus, in effect, subsidized a Rouse-company ban on nudity and overt political content in the art displayed in these venues.) Also disturbing, Wu completely misunderstands the remarkably innovative corporate art program at Minneapolis's First Bank System, which used the collection as a tool for examining the bank's power and questioning authority within the corporation.

Despite these not-inconsiderable lapses, Privatising Culture has many virtues. It synthesizes the disciplines of sociology, political history, art history and economics. It attempts a transatlantic, and occasionally global, perspective. It alerts us to business's ever-changing tactics for enhancing corporate prestige on the cheap by using the good name of institutions legally dedicated to the public interest. And it reminds us of not only the ubiquity of such change but its recent coinage. Was it only in 1980 that Thomas Messer, then director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, said, "We would never rent out the museum"?

One issue Wu (understandably) does not take up is the effect of corporate and commercial power on artists. This is the subject of Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello's The Golden Avant-Garde: Idolatry, Commercialism, and Art, a dense and polemical hybrid of art and philosophy by two Colorado professors--philosophy specialist Sassower and artist/art historian Cicotello.

Their thesis is simple: that art's "survival will depend on the avant-garde exploration of and immersion in the commercialized technoscientific world." This, they argue, will entail a shift away from old-school elitism toward cultural criticality and "an insistence on public accessibility." Sassower and Cicotello describe avant-gardism, following theorist Matei Calinescu, as "one of the diverse intellectual responses to the problems of modernity." But while all avant-gardists are modernists, not all modernists are avant-gardists. (They explicitly reject postmodernist discourses--rarely identified--as well as romantic mythologizing of avant-garde rebellion.) To substantiate their manifestolike assertions, the authors divide the book into four (often overlapping) chapters devoted to issues and artists whose work embodies them, sandwiched between an introduction and conclusion. In "Romancing Science and Technology," they examine Marcel Duchamp and Rene Magritte; Yves Klein and J.S.G. Boggs hold center stage in "Consuming Art as Commodity"; "Private and Public Art: Selling Out?" is devoted to Andy Warhol and Keith Haring; and Christo and Jeanne-Claude are the eponymous subject of "Unveiling the Christos." These artists are key exemplars of Sassower and Cicotello's "tradition of [avant-garde] defiance" of the artistic status quo.

Despite this liberatory tone, their selection of "so-called celebrity" subjects (their term) and defense of this strategy in our celebrity-obsessed culture reveals a rather conventional approach: "Our choice of artists and their works is not construed as a way of admiring their exemplary [artistic] courage; rather, it shows the many cracks in the community of the avant-garde." Their (dubious) rationale for not including female artists--apart from Jeanne-Claude, whose collaboration with Christo began after the artist's development of the privately funded modus operandi that interests the authors--is based on women's economic marginalization. Frankly, I would have been more interested in Barbara Kruger's dance between economic success and "critical detachment"--one of Sassower and Cicotello's prescriptions for avant-gardism--than J.S.G. Boggs's performative output. Given their insistence on public accessibility, a reader might also have expected a more radical interpretation of this concept than Warhol's production of multiples, or even Haring's Pop Shop, whose negative impact on his North American career they vastly underestimate. What about the work of artists like Rachel Whiteread or Tom Otterness, who create both "private" and "public" art? Sassower and Cicotello seem to tacitly accept the commercial/institutional system as an arbiter of value, that is, the creator of a canon.

Too much of this unillustrated book is based on the debunking of pre- and postwar philosophers and art writers--ranging from Hilton Kramer, Clement Greenberg and Donald Kuspit to Renato Poggioli Roland Barthes and Arthur Danto--who often function only as straw men to be obliterated. The authors' art-historical interpretations can sometimes seem questionable and so tailored to their arguments that a glossary of definitions might help. Magritte is an avant-gardist, for instance, while the pessimism of Ernst and Giacometti, and the utopianism(!) of Dali, exclude them from the club. To cite one of many other peculiarities, the authors repeatedly assert that blending "high and low" is a key avant-garde characteristic, then tangentially observe in a discussion of Duchamp's readymades that "Judy Chicago's banquet table with its specially designed dinner plates has been promoted to the level of an artwork by galleries and museums." (When contemplating The Dinner Party [1979], Duchamp's readymades aren't the forebears of Chicago and company's handcrafted extravaganza that first come to mind.) In short, this book often reads too much like the authors' team-taught esthetics seminar from which it emerged and too little like a vehicle for critical reappraisal or even, and I hesitate to use the term, social change. But isn't such imaginative rethinking the point, after all, of theoretical writing?

Robert Atkins is the author of ArtSpeak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements and Buzzwords (1991/97) and its "prequel," ArtSpoke (1993), both from Abbeville Press.

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