0000000000679407
AUTHOR
Shuchen Wang
Turning Right/Turning Left? : A Neoclassical Socioeconomic Query of the Arts Signaled by Museum and Branding in Finland
ABSTRACTThe Guggenheim Helsinki Plan indicated a wishful turn of the arts and culture in Finland from the socio-democratic tradition of a welfare society towards a further neoliberalism. Following the Finnish historical timeline and from a museological viewpoint, this article reviews how national identity was built through the arts, which later integrated into formal and informal education to enhance human capital. This instrumental view now promotes the idea of useful art to fuel an innovation economy of advanced technology. Considering embarking on the intricate platform of arts, economics, and finance through Guggenheim, rethinking the contemporary art market mechanism may prove to be be…
Museum coloniality : displaying Asian art in the whitened context
The transformation of Musée Guimet and the transition of museums in the ‘countries of origin’ of its collections elucidates how white-cube crystallises Western cultural hegemony by erasing the colonial past of the objects and by representing the physical form of modernity. It contributes as well to nullifying the demand of repatriation, which seems to merely raise new power struggles rather than to recover indigenous beliefs (or identities). Through such a muséographie, the deities of the Other are ‘elevated’ from ethnographic specimen into art in the West while ‘diminished’ from sacred icons into art or historical artefacts in Asia. Museumification as such constitutes a whitening (Westerni…
Foreign (In)Direct Investment in Chinese Contemporary Art Game: The Case Studies of Uli Sigg, Guy Ullens and beyond, 1989-2013
The boom in Chinese contemporary art is the result of China’s opening to foreign investment and private entrepreneurship in 1978, and the significant contribution by the transnational art enterprises of long-term patron-investor-collectors, such as Uli Sigg and Guy Ullens, between approximately 1989 and 2013. Through the opportunity offered by the gap between the private market mechanism and national heritage process for the “art game”, these investors used a variation of the controversial “Saatchi model” to generate high ROI. A further effect has been to bring CCA onto the global stage and complete the ecosystem of the art industry, building a foundation for the art economy of post-Mao Chi…