Privatising Culture Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s

by Wu, Chin-Tao

• ISBN13: 9781859844724
• ISBN10: 1859844723
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-07-17
• Publisher: Verso

Summary

From Absolut Vodka's sponsorship of student art shows to BMW's logo on the banners advertising major art exhibitions, corporate sponsorship and business involvement in the visual arts have become increasingly common features of our cultural lives.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. It analyses the role of government 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 looks at the corporate take-over of art museums, highlighting the ways in which cultural capital can thereby be garnered by business elites; and it considers the ways in which corporations have succeeded in integrating themselves into the infrastructure of the art world itself by showcasing contemporary art in their own corporate premises.

Author Biography

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	ix
List of illustrations and credits	xiii
List of tables	xix
1 Introduction	1	(15)
2 Public arts funding in America and Britain: preliminaries	16	(31)
3 The changing role of government in the arts	47	(36)
4 Guardians of the enterprise culture: art trustees	83	(39)
5 Embracing the enterprise culture: art institutions since the 1980's	122	(37)
6 Corporate art awards	159	(29)
7 Showcases of contemporary art within corporate premises	188	(24)
8 Corporate art collections	212	(59)
9 Conclusion: from conservatism to neo-conservatism	271	(34)
Notes	305	(52)
Bibliography	357	(20)
Index	377