An undergraduate program advertised by the Loyola University Chicago maintains, “All roads continue to lead to Rome as the center of culture…” whilst a culture guide posted at LastMinute.com claims, “Athens probably has the most long-standing and impressive cultural heritage of any city in Europe. However,” shrieks the guide, “this pedigree is not confined to past greatness – a continued enthusiasm for the arts is expressed annually at the Athens Festival.”
Actually, the LastMinute.com guide is shrewder than first appearances might suggest. For it is festivals and other significant and apparently necessarily exuberant ‘cultural events’ – like displays of public art designed for giants, or equally large and expensive touring exhibitions and performances – that seem to form the bedrock of any modern citadels’ claim to be a centre for cultural goings on.
Nowadays, the major cultural capitals are considered by those pillars of Western secular standards, Lonely Planet, to be, in no particular order of preference: London, Paris and New York.
These cities, each with a long and varied history (which in itself denotes a cumulative cultural component that comes into being over time), are practically bending over themselves, to anthropomorphotize the cultural policies politicians are adopting in order for such places to remain centres of culture, both in terms of what is happening within their boundaries, and how they are percieved by the public – those already living in the city and, crucially, others who may like to pay a visit and spend a buck some time in the future. It is a process that has been gaining strength and speed since before the war (that’s WWII, not the War on Terror).
According to Dialogue on urban cultures: globalization and culture in an urbanizing world (a paper presented at the World Urban Forum in Barcelona, September 2004), the notion of cultural branding accelerated in the 1960s. It was then, argues the paper, that “Governments in Europe and the United States began to show an interest in redeveloping the centres of cities around cultural capital, passing new laws to support artists and historic preservation. When central Governments became more involved in regional redevelopment during the economic crisis of the 1980s, they took to linking economic and cultural strategies. Indeed, the more socially devastated a region appeared, and the less likely to experience new industrial growth, the more public authorities turned to marketing cities as centres of culture, in order to create a new business climate.”
The analysis cites several examples:”France felt the need to do something that would reassert its prominence on the world stage – to devise a strategy that would respond to both economic competition with the United States and cultural competition between New York and Paris. This led to the construction of a contemporary art museum of global stature, the Centre Georges Pompidou…in the 1980s, Glasgow in Scotland devised a new urban development strategy to promote itself as a cultural centre. Its new role would include business services, higher education, media industries and the arts. A new museum was opened and an annual arts festival was started. Other cities in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (all former industrial centres: Manchester, Sheffield, and Liverpool) followed suit. So did Bilbao in Spain, with the Guggenheim Museum, a cultural masterpiece of international fame.”
This approach has culminated in the awarding of annual Capital of Culture status to cities around the world. Europe, the Middle East, Canada and other regions all allocate their own capitals and then – in a manner reminiscent of the handing out of Olympic glory – cities have a finite period to complete any relevant infrastructure, and attract the arts, media, and performance notararies that will enable them to live up to their new title.
It’s all good for business of course but what does it mean in cultural terms? By all accounts the opening ceremony at Cork (Europe’s 2005/6 Capital of Culture) was a grand affair, featuring serpent headed displays and the usual barreload of fireworkers, capped off with Beethoven’s 9th. But can a series of events conceived and funded by policy-makers really make Cork, or anywhere else, any more cultural?
Are cultural products more real or ‘better’ if the people creating them do so on their own volition, rather than because they’re invited to submit tenders for evaulation by a committee whose job it is to allocate government or arts council funding? Do we have any way of knowing whether the ‘cool cats’ who gathered in Greenwich Village in the sixties and seventies were any different from the arts connoisseur cabbies, currently snapping up the grants in Liverpool – Europe’s Capital of Culture for 2008?
Sociologist Sharon Zukin suspects there may be big differences, and an inherent irony to excessive cultural branding for the sake of tourism.
Loren Goulder offers an insightful critical summary of Sharon Zukin’s book Loft Living, in which Zukin argues that de-industrialisation and gentrification of inner city real estate has worked to erode the bohemian and artistic cultural protagonists who played a significant role in making inner cities cool and culturally enticing in the decades leading up to the 1980’s. Zukin observes that the main difference between the bohemians of New York in the sixties and seventies, and those of the current millennium, is how much money is tucked into their rainbow coloured headbands.
Zukins argues that the bohemians who made inner city Greenwich Village hip, and whose counter-cultural cool fuelled urban legends of what was groovy, now cannot afford to live either there or in any other inner city borough. They have been replaced by an affluent Creative Class of graphic designers, architects, publishers, and middle class Generation Yers and Xers who look like bohemians but aspire to the everything your average capitalist surbabanite holds dear.
At the same time, cities host lavish ‘cultural events’ to lure tourists keen on having a cultural experience – often playing on old ties with bohemian cultural celebrities (such as The Beatles in Liverpool, Studio 54 and Andy Warhol in New York). Only an ‘elite’ group of affluent artists or members of the new Creative Class can actually live in the city centre, but they are still attracted to commute there in order to work for the cultural institutions (museums, theatres, and galleries) that, more than the collections of individuals who defined culture and artistic movements in the past, have come to represent and control today’s culture.
But for some, the advantages of cultural branding extend beyond the economic. For Beruit, Arab cultural capital in 1999, the title afforded the chance for international dialogue and a powerful symbolism that helped it rise from the ashes of recent military conflict.
The formal and informal branding of cities as cultural hotspots will doubtless continue, as the creative and socio-economic impact are absorbed and contextualized. The end-effect, like art itself, will likely be in the eyes of the beholder.
