Art Business Magazine http://www.culturenet.ca/artbusiness

 

Vote Culture!

 

by David Whittaker.

 

David Whittaker graduated from Bradford University, London, with a degree in Electronic Imaging & Media Communications in 1995. At Bradford, he was Arts Editor of the university magazine, writing mainly about visual art, cinema, and music. He now works as a communications consultant specialising in new media technologies (Internet, interactive computing, multimedia). Mr. Whittaker is reading Art History part-time at Birbeck College, University of London.

 
If art's so good, how come nobody wants to pay for it? Sure, there'll always be people willing to scrape down to their last 100
million to snap up a Monet or a Van Gogh, but back in the real world, at grassroots level, nurture of the unproven, unconventional, or the avant-garde, tends to be an expensive buck that everyone's keen to pass on. Something deliberately shocking, intentionally provocative, can often be counted on to provide a quick return on investment, but what about less stentorian works, those whose quality is a slowly-released, and gradually appreciated affair? In a media-centric art world, where soundbites and headlines are the most welcome currency, what chance do artists have if they're away from the glittering circles of, say, New York and London, and, perhaps more importantly, intend to stay away? Can traditional free market economics be left to determine the successes and failures, or should the public authority take a more active role, rather than let laissez-faire hold sway on its own?
 
The place for public patronage in the arts, or not, depending on your opinion, is a dispute almost as old as the division between state and private spheres itself. So the next time you come to put that 'X' on your election ballot paper, what will make you decide where it goes? How much income tax you're going to pay? Investment in the education system? The prospective cost of health care, for you and your family? If international relations come way down the list, it's little wonder the arts are off the scale for most people. Is this because they really don't care, because politicians consciously try to bury the topic under a heap of their chosen 'important' ideas, or because people don't realise, or like to admit, what it means to them? Should someone put the arts on their agenda, like Clinton recently did by proposing an increase to $136-million for the National Endowment for the Arts next year, would they get taken seriously, or accused of side-stepping the major issues for minor ones? What if the idea were put forward by the Treasury, rather than the heritage or cultural wing of the government, in other words as a primarily economic initiative?
 
The basic business case for an official arts policy has been consistently put by certain members of that community for many years, and the tangible benefits are not difficult to prove: large-scale regeneration of whole city areas, in some cases, is hard to ignore, yet the relative pittance of state funds given across the whole cultural sector still causes furore and consternation. What's more, that pittance is continually being eroded, and a golden goose might be starving to death. The picture varies, of course, from country to country, and it's in those where you'd perhaps less expect it that some of the greatest successes have occurred. France, Holland, and Germany, for example, are far more generous, proportionally, than the U.S., and while the British government seems to have found in their new national lottery a replacement for direct aid, even though they promised it wouldn't happen, the Praxis Foundation in Argentina is not only stepping-up its operations, thus helping to 'de-primitivise' artists from south of the equator, this process, first and foremost artistic, must also assist the integration of these areas in to the wider global economy; and on more equal terms. While Praxis might not illustrate a huge material change in one particular place, as it's aim is 'the diffusion of South American arts' in general, it does show how art as a commercial proposition is more than viable, but, like anything, needs a little help to begin with.
 
It's not surprising that Praxis is a private venture in a part of the world still trying to grow out of the shadow of crippling debt,
but the faith and vision it represents should be a lesson to politicians everywhere, especially ones setting budgets in those 'advanced' countries preparing to spend billions on unemployment and social benefits. The Foundation was started twenty years ago by Miguel Kehayoglu in Buenos Aires, drawing on the proceeds of a successful carpet business, and has since opened galleries in Lima, Santiago, New York, and Buenos Aires, collaborated with various museums to organise exhibitions of important South American art, published limited edition prints and books, and helped to manage 'alternative spaces' run by and for artists themselves.
 
Now the galleries, while retaining close links to the Foundation, are independent companies and financially self-sufficient. Similarly the artists, while retaining the inventiveness, humour, and child-like wonder at the everyday world traditionally associated with Latin America, also have the intelligence, sophistication, and savvy, to be self-sufficient in any environment, competing head-on with the best 'first world' artists. Nobody illustrates this better than Ignacio Iturria, who, though shunning the bright lights of the main art centres of interest, in favour of a quiet family life in Uruguay, has work in a wide range of public and corporate holdings, recently won the Acquisition Prize at the Venice Biennale, sells well at Christie's alongside the Orozcos, Riveras, and Kahlos, has a strong following of private collectors across the world, and is making strides through Canada so far this year. Following his exhibition at the North Dakota Museum in January, and at the Plug-In, Winnipeg, through February, Border Crossings, the Canadian arts journal, featured him as a cover story.
 
Few people of course, particularly those inside the country, would claim to rank Uruguay as one of the big guns in the international business arena, and one painter, however good an export they may be, can't solve endemic economic problems single-handedly; but, as the developed nations are increasingly aware, the value of culture, in the broadest sense, both as a promotional and profile-raising tool, and as a tradeable property in itself, is more and more significant. French film noir, American all-action blockbusters, and British period drama, all generate overseas revenue for the national purse, and, possibly more important, they help to define a uniquely identifiable character, or national identity, which, in this era of monotonous production, where manufactured commodities are identical the world over, is a key fact in differentiating one product from another, and, by virtue of the qualities inherent in that identity, is a huge influence on overall trade. Art can, and does, work in the same way as the types of movie just mentioned, but while this message is received loud and clear by those entrepreneurs who've built prosperous careers in business, like Miguel Kehayoglu, it frequently falls on deaf ears when directed at politicians who may not have had such commercial experience.
 
It would be unfair, however, to be totally dismissive of state efforts, faced as civil servants are with accountability to the electorate, the majority of whom may also probably fail to see why a few million in tax payer's money wouldn't be better spent on retraining jobless youths than renovating a disused warehouse as artists' studios. As the Washington economist, Thomas Palley, observes, "The fundamental problem that confronts the arts is that a good deal of the economic value art produces goes to others." That is to the property owners, suppliers, and other associated organisations; which makes showing direct returns on public spending such a tricky job. What's needed is something at once very simple, yet incredibly uncommon in modern business circles: a long-term view. For as the artist Chuck Close argues, in support of public funding, "Each dollar leverages many more from the private sector, but you need the NEA as a seal of approval. The idea that the corporate and private sector will pick it up is ludicrous. It just won't happen." Behind the headlines of pornography, and installations incorporating supposedly HIV+ blood, the facts that the NEA costs each American 34 cents a year, and that not-for-profit arts industries employ more people than legal services, are often lost.
 
So what future then for art in this age of self-imposed austerity? There may always be an enlightened minority of well-to-do business folk prepared to finance activities that may or may not pay their own way; even those activities purely for pleasure or study, hard as that may be to comprehend in some quarters. The Guggenheim in New York, the Tate gallery in London, even the sculpture garden in the Medici Palace in Florence; all were instigated by independent means, but all were complemented by 'official patronage' in one form or other. The Praxis Foundation amply demonstrates the close and congenial relationship between culture and commerce, private philanthropy and public prudence; just as the art of Iturria, without wanting to perpetuate the 'magic realism' cliche of all things Latin American, embodies both the fantastic and quotidian, the real and the surreal. We should all now appreciate that, even in the less advanced countries, art does have a place in those daily struggles, however tangential the connections first appear, and that, despite the nature of their work making such concessions always grudging and hard-won, we should never let our governments shirk their responsibility for public arts support. One day they might even realise it's good for them.