Art of the market
Why complain when private companies provide art shows that underfunded museums cannot afford to mount alone? (“Plight at the museum,” Jan. 17, page 13.)
What’s wrong with seeing two exhibits a year from Mainland artists — where among thousands of active artists, surely two deserve our attention? And even better, why not reciprocate with two equally major Taiwanese shows in China?
There have been major shows of Liu Guosong (劉國松) and other Taiwanese in China. Mainland viewers were thrilled, and the exchange worthwhile. But these, like Cai Guo-qiang’s (蔡國強) here, were staged by commercial Taiwanese agencies.
If Eslite makes money on their shows, it means our public likes them. If the public rejects them, investors lose their money. Such bets the government cannot and will not make.
It is not politicizing or commercializing art, but turning art over to the public, turning art into a free market. Democratizing art.
Look at the thriving forgery markets that have earned billions for proud owners in recent decades. Most auctioned “art” are forgeries of ancient, and in special plenitude, recent Taiwan masters for whom factories supply the goods. These fake enterprises make the albeit less educated collectors, forgers and dealers extremely wealthy — and boost our economy. Art forging has since ancient times comprised a certain portion of national industry.
Museums are no longer the lofty shrines to art they once were, imparting rare beauty to the culturally impoverished masses. Nowadays they survive on marketing skills, just as fake artists and critics market themselves with sensationalizing objects and obscurantist verbiage, and as hapless museums duly provide show space and the obscenely rich collect carcasses.
And a burgeoning economy does not in the least hurt those who know better. What’s wrong with this? Democratization of art and art appreciation, like McDonald’s and KFC, offer free choice. We choose junk food and attendant diseases. We insist on six-inch high heels and risk spinal injuries. We live in a free society in which an increasingly free citizenry choose high heels, forgeries, violence and sensationalism and boost the economy. How can we now insist that entrepreneurs stay out of art? Whose private domain is art anyway?
Taipei Times gripers may have wished themselves curators of the controversial show with its NT$80 million [US$2.5 million] budget. But they lack the commercial clout of Eslite. If exploding gunpowder or animal carcasses earn millions in dollars and viewers, why complain that the “Government undermines Taiwan Art”? Do we dare ask “What is Art?”
Now, a proud father [President Ma Ying-jeou, 馬英九] fancies himself qualified to conduct an art tour, while showing friendliness toward China, highlighting personal cultivation and mingling with the masses. Anything wrong with that? Why read state policy, rigidity and the exclusion of Taiwan artists into this American show?
If it had been the Taiwan government that spent such money on a non-Taiwanese artist with such fanfare, should we raise our eyebrows, and indeed our voices?
The Taipei Times makes mountains out of mole hills. Sad to see cultural parochialism, but I have faith that in time most of us may grow and know better.
JOAN STANLEY-BAKER
Shilin, Taipei City
David Frazier responds: If a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate is elected mayor of Taipei City in December, different and large shifts in cultural policy may follow. I’ve been equally critical of the DPP’s culture politics in the past, such as their risible attempt to turn the National Palace Museum into a museum for “Asian art” during former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration. The point is not that Chinese artists should or should not be shown in Taiwan, but that art policy should not sway wildly according to who is mayor or who is president.
The new quota system for Chinese exhibitions amounts to using art as a political tool, and that negatively impacts the credibility of local artists, curators and museums. The Taipei Fine Arts Museum has spent the last 25 years building a core of experienced professionals, so setting permanent quotas for exhibitions from particular places — be it China, Japan, France or anywhere else — is deleterious to its core missions of (1) developing local artists, and (2) educating the public about international art.
Taiwan’s museums should not be a battleground for politicians, but at present they lack the institutional independence to keep these debates from storming through their galleries.
The problem of commercialization is trickier, but it would be safe to say that major Western museums do not surrender curatorial control to commercial galleries, no matter who pays. Also, McJunkfood, sensationalism and unrestrained capitalism cannot seriously be regarded as sound models for “democracy.”
How Taiwanese museums find their balance in this brave new world remains to be seen. But the sudden changes of the last two years are very real, and had a great number of artists, independent curators, critics and museum workers not expressed concern over these changes, there would not have been an article in the Taipei Times. Democratically speaking, Taiwan’s art world surely has a right to question whether these changes bode ill.
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