Emerging economies and the culture boom

London, Paris and New York might be world leaders in museums and cultural institutions, but a growing number of cities in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America are starting to provide

EmErging

EconomiEs

and thE

London, Paris and New York might

be world leaders in museums and

cultural institutions, but a growing

number of cities in Asia, the Middle

East and Latin America are starting

to provide serious competition

The three most-attended art

exhibitions of 2013 were not in

Europe or North America, but in

Taipei and Rio de Janeiro

Last year Beijing’s National Museum

of China was the third most-visited

museum in the world, attracting

7.45m people, an increase of 38.7%

on 2012 Across Asia museum

attendance rose by 28% last

year, compared with a rise of 7%

globally, with particularly marked

increases at the Zhejiang Museum

in Hangzhou, China and the National

Palace Museum of Korea, where

EmErging EconomiEs

and thE culturE boom

visits rose by 75% and 118.8%, respectively, between 2012 and 2013

China has been erecting museums and galleries at a prodigious rate, opening more than 100 new institutions annually, including Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District and Beijing’s National Art Museum of China In Beijing, planners are turning the 2008 Olympic Park into a cultural quarter with an enormous new national art museum The 30,000-sq metre institution – more than six times the size of the current site - has been designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and will house 100,000 pieces of art from throughout China’s history Due for completion

in 2017, its management hopes to attract 12m visitors a year, which

at current figures would make it

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the world’s busiest art museum, overtaking the Louvre in Paris

In the Middle East, the United Arab Emirates is boosting its cultural offerings following a landmark deal with the Louvre to build its first overseas site An “Abu Dhabi Guggenheim” is also on its way, while Dubai is developing

a reputation as a contemporary art hub thanks to a new urban cultural district called Alserkal Avenue Nearby Qatar is acquiring

a private collection of modern and contemporary pieces and hosting the likes of Damien Hirst, while Saudi Arabia is building the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, which is set to open in 2015

in collaboration with the United Kingdom’s Natural History Museum and the British Museum

In Latin America too, despite an

economic slowdown, government

bodies and private institutions are

investing in new museums and art

galleries In Brazil, the Museu de

Arte do Rio opened in 2013, and the

highly anticipated Museu do Amanhã

in Rio de Janeiro and the São Paulo

Museu da Imagem e do Som are

expected to open in 2015 and 2016

respectively Mexico has won critical

acclaim for its new “contemporary

art shrine”, Museo Júmex , while Colombia’s capital Bogotá now boasts over 500 public and private cultural venues, including Maloka, the largest science and interactive technology museum in South America

What is driving such rapid building

of museums and art galleries in

these emerging economies? Are the

public investments justified when

large swathes of the population

remain poor and lack basic services?

Is top-down cultural promotion

desirable, and can it be sustained?

And what does this growing appetite

for culture mean for the West and its

institutions? These are among the

questions that attend the rise

of the culture industries in

emerging markets

raising buildings, and

raising quEstions

One driver of the boom is the growth of the middle classes, which

is increasing domestic demand for cultural activities previously out of reach for many in these countries

The trend is no different to that of the West Europe’s institutional art collections of today were amassed in part by 18th-century nouveau riche buyers, says Paul Gladston, director

of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham in the UK

Art has always been about money

and the rise of it, according to Mr Gladston, who cautions against romantic notions to the contrary:

we readily embrace the narrative

of Vincent van Gogh as a struggling artist, when in fact his brother was a well-connected art dealer “Modern and contemporary art has always been and continues to be very much tied to money,” says Mr Gladston

“But in the West we have tended

to deny that because we want to enhance the critical credentials of the art, which is its selling point.”

In the same way as they did in the

West, rising incomes in emerging

markets are driving art viewing

and collecting, and a “new cultural

infrastructure is being formed”,

says Georgina Adam, an art market

commentator and author of Big

Bucks: The Explosion of the Art

Market in the 21st Century “Billions

of new consumers have been

released onto the market, and

there are increasing numbers of

people with disposable incomes,”

she says, noting that both art and

luxury goods are symbols of newly

acquired wealth in Asia “Entering

the contemporary art market today

is a way of showing that you have

made money Collecting art is

positional, a way of showing that

you’ve arrived.”

A second catalyst of the culture boom is the ambition of cities to enhance their global profile Culture

is critical to a city’s identity and its appeal as a destination to live, work

or travel in, and governments like

to flex their cultural muscle through their capital cities

Lyal White, director of the Centre for Dynamic Markets at the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS)

at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, also identifies a “cultural catch-up” at play “Emerging powers

do still see the West as being progressive, and there is an element

of wanting to catch up with the West,” he says “Certainly in Asia there is a strong idea of what places like Paris and Rome are, and you

see Asian countries wanting to try

to replicate that – and in many cases doing it bigger and better - to earn global standing and recognition by the West.”

Dubai is also looking to museums and the arts to assert its own cultural credentials “Dubai has evolved to become a cosmopolitan city in a very short period of time,” said Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal,

a real estate tycoon and Emirati patron of the Alserkal art district

“It is not about being compared to other art capitals We have become

a hub for the region, and this is a unique achievement”

While promoting culture might be

partly about catching up with the

West or a country asserting its own

credentials, there are synergies to

be had with established Western

institutions China, Brazil and Abu

Dhabi have all sought deals with

Western cultural brands The

Louvre and the Guggenheim, under

construction on Saadiyat Island in

Abu Dhabi, will be part of a wider

a cultural quarter, parts of which

are due to open in 2015 While the

Guggenheim has been a pioneer of

overseas ventures, ranging from its

acclaimed Bilbao branch to its less

successful Las Vegas experiment,

this is the first time that the Louvre

has allowed the use of its name

and brand

Such collaborations are not without their critics Some French commentators have accused the museum of selling out Jean d’Haussonville, formerly head of Agence France Museums, which manages the development of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, describes such criticisms as ““shameful, close to xenophobia”, adding: “The money will restore France’s capacity

to acquire pieces on the international market.”

Established institutions in Europe and North America have long forged links with museums overseas These partnerships used to be more about Western museums enhancing their

collections, but now that model has been inverted “From a cultural industrial point of view, it’s a marriage made in heaven,” says

Mr Gladston of the deals between emerging-market institutions and the West “You have countries with

a lot of surplus value and capital which are hungry for culture, and the West, which has that culture

as well as the brand: the in-depth expertise, the reputations and the collections of works.”

China’s cultural push has raised a

different kind of controversy – a

view that motivations are not so

much about art as about politics

As Ms Adam puts it: “China has

made it clear that promoting culture

is about soft power, [presenting

to the world] a better face There

is quite a lot of negative coverage

of China, and they wanted to give

a positive spin on what they are

doing, to make people forget about

clampdowns on individual groups.”

Mr Gladston agrees that there has

been a strong centralised policy

push from the government to

promote culture “I think we are

looking at something similar to the

Great Leap Forward and the

five-year plans of the Maoist period,” he

explains “You have the government

saying: ‘We don’t have enough

museums and are not competitive

china’s lEap

enough with the West, we have to catch up, especially with America,

so let’s build these museums and create a cultural infrastructure.’”

He says this process is not dissimilar to what happened in the West after the second world war “I question just how organic the West’s development of

contemporary art and culture was… After the second world war many developed countries, including Britain and America, deliberately pursued programmes of cultural promotion and soft power in relation

to contemporary art and the proliferation of museums.”

All of the economies described

so far, except those of the Gulf,

have poverty challenges that raise

questions about the wisdom of

spending state funds on cultural

initiatives Most obvious is the

opportunity cost: money spent on

cultural institutions is money not

spent on sanitation or healthcare

Indeed, tough economic conditions

in South Africa since 2011 have led

to cultural projects fading from the

political agenda Some governments

are experimenting with offering

corporate tax breaks to encourage

the investment of private funds;

while this approach is less obvious than spending, it nonetheless represents a loss of tax revenue to the state Brazil, for example, allows corporations to direct 4% of owed tax income to cultural projects

According to Gegê Leme Joseph, a Brazilian architect and museologist,

it is clear that Brazil is maximising its time in the spotlight between hosting the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016, deliberately trying to “punch above its weight”

and letting people know that the country is about “more than football and Samba”

But recent demonstrations during Brazil’s World Cup, which criticised the government’s spending priorities, show that for all the high attendance figures there is still a feeling that money could be better spent elsewhere

Some experts believe that public funding for culture, even in emerging economies, is justified

on economic grounds Caroline Watson, vice-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Arts in Society, says there is compelling evidence of the contribution of culture to

the economy

an Economic

rationalE?

“Economists have not always

understood the relevance of

culture, but I think they are starting

to realise there is an economic

argument for promoting the arts,”

she says Ms Watson, founder of Hua

Dan, a theatre company and one

of China’s first social enterprises,

adds: “As emerging markets do well

at meeting the basic needs of their

people, to get to the next level of

development they will need to look

more profoundly at their education

systems, and how they empower

human potential The arts have

much to offer and provide a basis

for the emergence of new forms of

creativity that can fuel a country’s

identity and economic growth.”

The UN Educational, Scientific and

Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)

is eager to highlight the economic

value of creative industries,

including everything from art, crafts,

music, dance and film to toy design,

computer games and heritage In

its 2013 Creative Economy Report

UNESCO says that between 2002

and 2011 the creative industries in

developing countries grew annually

by 12%, and that by 2011 world trade

in creative goods and services was worth US$624bn Danielle Cliche, senior UNESCO official, says the creative sector represented between 2% and 5% of most developing countries’ GDP over this period and should be taken seriously as a driver for economic development

The Gulf’s investment in arts, culture and museums, meanwhile,

is a way of diversifying resource-reliant economies and creating new attractions for tourists It is also a way to attract professional expatriates, who are needed to bring innovation and expertise to newly built cities

While stressing the economic returns on cultural investment, Ms Cliche also argues that culture offers populations a political voice – an important part of the development process “The creative economy has non-monetary benefits, such as individual and cultural expression, which empowers people and

provides them with a platform for social and political agency and gives them a voice,” she says

xSouth Africa, where Ms Joseph has worked on several major heritage projects, including the Nelson Mandela Museum, has used museums to inform national dialogues in the post-apartheid era “A lot of money was put into cultural institutions to retell stories that hadn’t been told,” she says

“Museums were important in helping to retell South Africa’s story and reshape its identity.”

Constitution Hill, for example, is

a museum built on the site of an old fort and jail where political prisoners, including Nelson Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, were held The museum is also the site of the country’s new Constitutional Court, built with bricks from the old prison

Arts can help urban regeneration,

and citing the example of Medellín

in Columbia, where investment in

culture has reduced high crime

rates, Ms Cliche says: “There is a

strong argument that placing culture

at the heart of urban planning and

development contributes to social

wellbeing, giving new capacities and

imperatives to create and innovate.”

South Africa’s Johannesburg, also known for its high crime rates, has used cultural investments

to revitalise districts such as Braamfontein, where theatres, galleries, museums and concert spaces have now become attractions for middle-class audiences

previously preferring to stay in the suburbs The Maboneng Precinct

project, meanwhile, has transformed

a former industrial wasteland on the eastern edge of the city centre into a vibrant urban community with artist studios, restaurants and entertainment venues, as well as loft apartments, offices, a hotel and a museum