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 %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 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.
RAISING BUILDINGS, AND RAISING QUESTIONS
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.
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 LEAP
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.”
AN ECONOMIC RATIONALE?
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.
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
South 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.
SUSTAINING CULTURE
A final question regarding the emerging markets culture boom concerns sustainability: will people continue to attend new exhibitions or will the novelty wear off, leaving a stock of underused institutions? Several of China’s new contemporary art galleries are struggling to attract both content and visitors, with crowds moving on to the next new place as quickly as they arrived. High-profile shows in Qatar have attracted disappointing numbers, raising questions about whether the country – with its small population – has a sufficiently large audience to make big museums sustainable.
“Powerful marketing tools can attract visitors for a while, but considerations of sustainability do not always get taken on board”, says Ms Joseph. “There are some amazing big structures in Brazil that, attract many people to start with, but their long-term vision is poor so their initial ‘bangs’ are huge, but then they find it harder to know how to make it interesting for the long term and how they will be able to attract audiences and continue to generate income.” She adds that the Brazilian tax break has been “a nice mechanism … but the easy access to money doesn’t force the planners of cultural projects to conceive them based on sustainable or entirely viable plans.”
The key to long-term success will be for institutions to forge a unique cultural identity that will draw in crowds, both domestic and foreign, for the long term. Some institutions have learned their lessons, Ms Joseph says, citing the Museu do Futebol in São Paulo, which realised that it needed to do more than just tell the story of football. Whether,in developed or emerging markets cultural institutions that their voice and identity will stand the test of time.
ABOUT THIS REPORT
Emerging economies and the culture boom was written by The Economist Intelligence Unit. It examines the rise of museums, galleries and the arts across emerging markets, its drivers, its supporters and its critics. The report is based on desk research and seven expert interviews.
The Economist Intelligence Unit would like to thank the following individuals (listed alphabetically) for sharing their insights and expertise during the research for this paper:
Georgina Adam, art market editor-at-large, The Art Newspaper; art market columnist, Financial Times; and author of Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century
Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, Emirati patron of Dubai’s Alserkal arts district
Danielle Cliche, secretary of the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions and chief, Section on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions at UNESCO
Paul Gladston, associate professor of culture, film and media and director of the Centre for Contemporary East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham; and editor of the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art
Gegê Leme Joseph, Brazilian architect and museologist who worked in South Africa between 2004 and 2013 on heritage strategies and products for flagship museums including Constitutional Hill, the Nelson Mandela Museum and Kliptown Open Air Museum
Caroline Watson, vice-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Arts in Society,
Lyal White, director of the Centre for Dynamic Markets, Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) University of Pretoria, South Africa
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