New Left Review 18, November-December 2002

SARAH JAMES

INCORPORATING ART

In August 1998, a 35-metre high reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night Sky over the Rhône was hung from an empty building on a busy roundabout in Taipei. Lauded at the time as an exemplum of ‘public art’, the image formed part of the marketing strategy of the Dutch bank ABN–AMRO, which also included a mock self-portrait of Van Gogh proudly holding up one of the bank’s credit cards. Strikingly successful—ABN–AMRO reportedly issued 180,000 cards within six months of starting the campaign—the ploy is no less breathtaking in its brazen appropriation of culture for commercial purposes. This is not, of course, an isolated instance: global conglomerates now directly dominate many of the structures of the art world. Seventy per cent of exhibition costs in the US and Europe are met by private sponsors, with corporate giants prominent among them. The CEOs of multinationals sit on the boards of public arts institutions, which increasingly deploy the niche-marketing tactics and competitive hard sell of the business world. Permanent monuments to corporate sponsors decorate galleries’ halls—sometimes outliving the fraudulent or bankrupted organizations to which they pay homage. Corporate logos patrol the entrances to almost every cultural space. The Whitney has become the McDonalds of the museum world; the Tate logo sells paint and picture frames; the Guggenheim has transmuted itself into a global franchise.