Overview

Corporate sponsorship and business involvement in the visual arts have become increasingly common features of our cultural lives. From Absolut Vodka's sponsorship of art shows to ABN-AMRO Bank's branding of Van Gogh's self-portrait to advertise its credit cards, we have borne 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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9781859844724

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Reviews

Sobering and incisive... Wu convincingly tells an ugly story of seduction and betrayal, one which anyone who cares about the future of art needs to hear. Publishers Weekly An admirably thorough study of the Anglo American art world. Washington Post Book World A meticulous account of the dominance of capital itself over the human spirit... If anyone still wants to criticize the morality of the marketplace, they must also develop a critique of [the] commercial aesthetic. Chin-tao Wu's book is an excellent place to start. Times Literary Supplement

Author Information

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.

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