Privatising Culture

Chin-tao Wu offers a provocative contribution to the debate on public culture in Britain and America as she details 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.

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 analyzes 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. AUTHORBIO Chin-tao Wu specializes 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 teaches at Nanhua University in Taiwan.