From Absolut Vodka’s sponsorship of student art shows to BMW’s logo on the banners advertising major art exhibitions, corporate sponsorship and business involvement in the visual arts have become increasingly common features of our cultural lives.

Chin-tao Wu’s book is the first concerted attempt to detail the various ways in which business values and the free-market ethos have come to permeate the sphere of the visual arts since the 1980s. It analyses the role of government in injecting the principles of the free market into public arts agencies…in particular the Arts Council in Great Britain and the National Endowment for the Arts in the USA. It looks at the corporate take-over of art museums, highlighting the ways in which cultural capital can thereby be garnered by business elites; and it considers the ways in which corporations have succeeded in integrating themselves into the infrastructure of the art world itself by showcasing contemporary art in their own corporate premises.

“… a meticulous account of the dominance of capital itself over the human spirit. The patrons of postmodernity are not white patriarchs of the haute bourgeoisie, aming to bolster their privilege by imposing timeless, conservative verities on the masses. Instead, they transmit their values by sponsoring art which is disorienting, shocking, rebellious and cool. If anyone still wants to criticize the morality of the marketplace, they must also develop a critique of this commerical aesthetic. Chin-tao Wu's book is an excellent place to start.” — Times Literary Supplement

“An admirably thorough study of the Anglo-American art world.” — Washington Post Book World

Chin-tau Wu has contributed to New Left Review, the Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft and Art China. She currently teaches at the National Institute of the Arts in Taiwan.

“A profoundly original and extremely important contribution to the study of corporate interests as they seek to benefit from and reshape the art world.” … Carol Duncan

392 pages

20 color and 40 b/w
photographs

Cloth
1 85984 613 0
£20 / US$30 / CAN$45

Paper
1 85984 472 3
£12 / US$17 / CAN$24