Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Art (Gi) which ran from April 11 to 27 2008 was said to be loosely based within the theme of ‘public/private’. It was also promoted as being inclusive of the contemporary artistic communities with a “showcase of curated commissions” and “new work by established Glasgow-based artists alongside responses to Glasgow by artists from across the world and pieces by a new generation of artists living and working in the city … in over 30 venues alongside installation in a fascinating array of off-site and found spaces.” The level and energy of constituent participation has been praised within the art press for its ‘party atmosphere’.

Rather than duplicate the surface immediacy of the cultural-tourist review, or engage the specifics of individual projects and practices as some critical writing has already reported (where it has been able to take a foothold) instead, following these, I want to try to examine Gi as part of a wider institutional phenomena of a mesh-work of public and private interests.

A Curator Talks

Gi included both a series of ‘International Curator Research Visits’ – “fifteen influential international curators will be visiting Scotland and the Gi as part of a research visit organised by Gi and the Scottish Arts Council”, “to see work by Scottish artists and to experience at first hand the special quality of Glasgow’s visual arts community” – and a series of ‘Curator’s Talks’. The first of these talks (they weren’t billed nor set up as discussions) was by Nina Möntmann, who until 2006 worked as a curator at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NIFCA) in Helsinki and in the same year edited ‘Art and Its Institutions: Current Conflicts, Critique and Collaborations’, published by Black Dog Publishing.

I suspect Möntmann’s invitation came more closely from the forming kernel of the festival, Director Francis McKee, supported by the Goethe Institut Glasgow. This early event in the festival calendar did connect with there being at some initial period an underlying concern for an element of self-reflexivity within the programme with regard to its structure and cultural engagement with capital – in which sense it shares a more ‘european’ curatorial current. Möntmann gave a talk that is probably overly familiar to her by now. Much of what informed it is also the raison d’être for the book: how the rise of neoliberalism across europe was experienced in Finland, and in this case the localised manner of the dramatic shift from a social-democratic to a more heavily marketised and competitive nationalist view of the role of culture and cultural institutions. Though Möntmann ultimately views these through the effects on the cultural and civic elite – or co-ordinator class, as anarchist theorist Michael Albert would position them – particularly her and her colleagues’ negative experiences of governmental pressure resulting in closure of NIFCA.

Möntmann’s concerns, based on ongoing critical discourse notably emerging in institutional structures in both the north and east of europe, stood in curious isolation within the proceedings of Gi. Unusual for an art event in Glasgow, if not Scotland, was Möntmann’s decisive unpicking of the civic utopianism that surrounds constructions of a public sphere and her refreshingly forthright questions of how art institutions deal with demands to deliver on political expectations, develop room to manoeuvre, and “relate their work to the political contexts they are confronted with and thus also to the activities of other institutions”?

To put this more in context, NIFCA in 2006 ran a nine month project ‘Rethinking Nordic Colonialism: A Postcolonial Exhibition Project in Five Acts’ curated by Kuratorisk Aktion that took place in Reykjavik (Iceland), Nuuk (Greenland), Tórshavn (The Faroe Islands), Rovaniemi (Finnish Sápmi), Copenhagen (Denmark), Helsinki (Finland), Oslo (Norway), and Stockholm (Sweden)”: “Fifty-six internationally recognized artists, theorists, politicians, and grassroots activists from all over the world participated in the project and exchanged colonial and postcolonial experiences and strategies during its course. Together, they examined why this past has been forgotten and how it continues to reproduce itself as waves of intolerance, xenophobia, and nationalism.” And Möntmann’s once co-worker at NIFCA, Marita Muukkonen, published a detailed article ‘Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Art Institutions and Creative Industries’ following NIFCA’s forced closure in 2006 that details the rise of competitive nationalism as a trans-european cultural policy discourse. She worryingly identifies the strengthening tendency of the transformation of cultural politics into cultural economics, and the idea of arts and culture as a competitive factor of national economic growth where the separatism of global competition can act as a vehicle for national and cultural chauvinism.

Möntmann, while critical and aware of its foreclosure, seemingly laments the crisis of legitimation of the enlightenment project where “the bourgeoisie was given a public forum that … supported its own legitimacy”, as much as she is hostile to its contemporary replacement of ‘corporatist institutionalism’ with a “public conceived as consumers”. At Gi, I suspect this was as close as it got to ‘someone in the tent pissing in’.

However, having just arrived in the city, Möntmann praised Gi for what she perceived as its institutional ‘interconnectedness’, before having chance to assess how this actually manifested in practice, not least with regard to equity across projects, and to what end? With Möntmann prematurely shying from art’s affirmation with capital in this instance, Gi exemplified in many ways the features of the nationalist competitive instrumentalisation of culture she and her colleagues have identified – i.e. the spectacular rise of the biennale and the exploitation of cultural capital in relation to city branding and property speculation, the naturalisation of competitive cities and competitive cultural nationalism discourse.

The geographer David Harvey would otherwise describe this as Urban Entrepreneurialism: “the pattern of behaviour within urban governance that mixes state powers and a wide array of organisational forms in civil society and private interests to form coalitions to promote or manage urban/regional development. ... This is what urban growth machines are often all about: the orchestration of investment process dynamics and the provision of key public investments…to promote success in inter-urban and inter-regional competition. ... The aim is to create sufficient synergy with the urbanisation process for monopoly rents to be created and realised by both private interests and state powers.” (David Harvey, ‘Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography’) These are the collective monopoly powers that urban governance seeks to command.

There is a received notion within policy delivery, such as with Culture and Sport Glasgow (Glasgow City Council’s public/private delivery instrument), that there is (or at least there should be) a highly mobile ‘creative class’ intensely interested in cultural goods of many kinds, which in turn gives rise to the idea that cities must ‘invest’ in and through culture; supposedly benign terms such as ‘creative cities’ and ‘creative clusters’ have become increasingly prevalent as a way of describing culture-led regeneration strategies where the ‘moral prestige’ of the creative artist has become extremely useful to policy-makers, consultants, etc.

“Peck and Tickell see neoliberalism articulated in the city through a combination of market ideologies and forces. For them, neoliberalism embodies a growth-first ideology, backed by a pervasive naturalisation of market discipline. Neoliberalism operates through and alongside active state partners, scanning the horizon for investment opportunities in an increasingly competitive urban environment. Neoliberalism locks-in public sector austerity and growth-oriented investment. A symbolic language of innovation – ‘dynamic’, ‘pioneering’, ‘daring’, ‘entrepreneurial’ – obfuscates a familiar cocktail of state subsidy, place promotion and local boosterism (talking up or promoting a locale), and suppresses the opportunity for genuinely local development. Neoliberal policy in the urban framework is characterised by uneven development, creating massive social polarisations in and between cities as highly mobile capital seeks profit unhindered by a regulatory framework.”
‘Constructing Neoliberal Glasgow: The Privatisation Of Space’, Friend of Zanetti, Variant issue 25

Möntmann attempts to retrieve institutional space for the exploration of a critical and affirmative institutional agenda for creative practice that employs links to other disciplinary fields. This is seemingly only possible as an enlightened refuge within smaller institutions (that she now inhabits) closeted from complicity in cultural neoliberalisation by the utilisation of their ‘opaqueness’: a process of disapearance for a period of self-reflection to reformulate the institution’s ‘societal role’. This is where Möntmann’s reformist proposition broke down in confusion if not contradiction. Curator, Jason E Bowman, present at the talk, asked how Möntmann would then go about assessing the qualitative value of the work of the institution? Bowman appeared to be trying to winkle out if what was being alluded to was anything different to an expected ‘trust’ in the privileged taste of the co-ordinator class. Pierre Bourdieu has shown “how social class tends to determine a person’s likes and interests and how distinctions based on social class get reinforced in daily life … how canon formation, culture and language have a connection to the manifestation of social power.” (‘Bourdieu and the Sociology of Aesthetics’, Jonathan Loesberg) One was left wondering if this latest maintaining of the privileges of the exercising of ‘taste’ of the co-ordinator class (we might be less forgiving in calling it the ‘aesthetic fundamentalism’ of the possessors of legitimate culture) on institutional precincts is anything other than a defensive retreat to the boudoir…?

Anthony Davies, also a contributor to Möntmann’s anthology, sets out in ‘Take Me I’m Yours: Neoliberalising the Cultural Institution’ in Mute magazine, how a focus such as Möntmann’s that contrasts a “nightmare vision of neoliberal cultural lockdown with a wet dream of agile, socially responsible and responsive transnational infrastructures … elides any significant debate on class power within art institutions themselves and across the commercial sectors with which they interact.”

Davies goes to great length to identify and examine such proposals for “tactical models of [institutional] engagement, looking to new constituencies and standards of practice to offset the crisis of legitimation which opens up as institutions are subjected to neoliberal agendas.”

In Möntmann’s book, Davies – along with Stephan Dillemuth and Jakob Jakobsen (formerly of Copenhagen Free University) – make it clear: “There is no Alternative: The Future is Self-Organised”, so as to “put a lid on the bourgeois project”, where self-organisation “should not be confused with self-enterprise or self-help, it is not an alternative conduit into the market [for ‘career collectives’]. It isn’t a label, logo, brand or flag under which to sail in the waters of neo-liberalism…”

Fake Tales of San Francisco

‘Next Level’ is a glossy photo style-mag. Each issue is ‘themed’ and no.12 was ‘The Glasgow Edition’. According to seeglasgow.com (run by Glasgow City Marketing Bureau), the ‘editor’ Sheyi Bankale concluded: “The wealth of material in the Glasgow issue just wouldn’t have been conceived without the contribution of Glasgow City Marketing Bureau, the Scottish Government and a wide range of individuals …” The content was unashamedly pushed towards marketing the fictions of the Creative City and, with Glasgow’s east end being blitzed for Common Wealth Games ‘regeneration’, some more embarrassingly so than others:
“Let off a gun in any Dennistoun thoroughfare, so the local wits say, and you’ll most probably ground a dozen artists. Drop into a bar in the area around King St. and you’ll very possibly have to squeeze between a platinum-selling music icon and a turner prize winner to reach your pint.” ‘Greg White Polymaths’, by John Davidson, Next Level: The Glasgow Edition

The issue was paid for by “Glasgow: Scotland with style, the Scottish Government and Glasgow 2014 [Common Wealth Games]”. A website “for marketers, by marketers” said of the content: “‘Next Level’ has played a key role in allowing the city brand to reach style adopters. Working editorially and placing advertising, the October 2007 edition of the magazine carried 220-pages devoted to the city.” This included a 16-page feature on Gi.

There is clearly a high degree of institutional aggregation at work to accumulate marks of distinction and collective symbolic capital. As Harvey makes clear, these “claims to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity and speciality underlie the ability to capture monopoly rents”. Harvey explains: “All rent is based on the monopoly power of private owners of certain portions of the globe. Monopoly rent arises because social actors can realise an enhanced income-stream over an extended time by virtue of their exclusive control over some directly or indirectly tradable item which is in some crucial respects unique and non-replicable. ... The most obvious point of reference where [extracting monopoly rents] works is in contemporary tourism, but I think it would be a mistake to let the matter rest there. For what is at stake is the power of collective symbolic capital, of special marks of distinction that attach to some place, which have a significant drawing power upon the flows of capital more generally. Bourdieu … unfortunately restricts them to individuals (rather like atoms floating in a sea of structured aesthetic judgements) when it seems to me that the collective forms (and the relation of individuals to those collective forms) might be of even greater interest. The collective symbolic capital which attaches to names and places like Paris, Athens, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Berlin and Rome is of great import and gives such places great economic advantages relative to say, Baltimore, Liverpool, Essen, Lille and Glasgow. The problem for these latter places is to raise their quotient of symbolic capital and to increase their marks of distinction to better ground their claims to the uniqueness that yields monopoly rent.”

Harvey, though, points out the inherent contradictions at work. That “while uniqueness and particularity are crucial to the definition of ‘special qualities’, the requirement of tradability means that no item can be so unique or so special as to be entirely outside of monetary calculus”, and that “the more easily marketable such items become, the less unique and special they appear. In some instances, the marketing itself tends to destroy the unique qualities … particularly if these depend on qualities such as … the purity of some aesthetic experience, and the like.”

The Creative Industries hyped by the likes of Next Level, while seeming to offer workers a certain creative autonomy and self-realisation, is in fact explicitly bound up in finding new articulations of existing power relations – the way in which notions of passion for, and pleasure in, work serve as disciplinary devices, enabling very high levels of (self-) exploitation, noting the extremely low levels of union organisation in most cultural industries:
“[T]he cultural industries are seen as complex value chains where profit is extracted at key nodes in the chain through control of production investment and distribution and the key “creative” labour is exploited not, as in the classic Marxist analysis of surplus value, through the wage bargain, but through contracts determining the distribution of profits to various rights holders negotiated between parties with highly unequal power (Caves 2000). ... [T]he political economy approach placed its major emphasis on the technologies of distribution, on the ways in which key economic and regulatory debates were to be seen as struggles over access to distribution under shifting technological conditions without any necessary effect on either the nature of the product being distributed or the relation with the audience. In particular, this analysis stressed the ways in which the profits of the whole process were returned to controllers of technological distribution systems rather than to the original producers of the cultural products or services.” ‘From Cultural to Creative Industries: An analysis of the implications of the “creative industries” approach to arts and media policy making in the United Kingdom’, Nicholas Garnham, International Journal of Cultural Policy Vol 11, No. 1 2005

Gi Generation

“The Gi Festival is made possible by support from Event Scotland, Glasgow City Council, Glasgow: Scotland with style, Scottish Arts Council, and Scottish Enterprise Glasgow.”

“Glasgow International promotes Glasgow’s internationally recognised strength in visual arts and is a key event to help attract niche short break markets to the city. Scottish Enterprise Glasgow is delighted with its progress and is committed to supporting GI to become a biennial event and bring additional visitors to Glasgow.”
Mairi Bell, Tourism Manager, Scottish Enterprise Glasgow

With the transition of the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen to the combine ‘Creative Scotland’ a step closer (the consultant Anne Bonnar appointed as Transition Director “to lead and manage the project to establish the new cultural development body”, who also wrote Gi’s business plan) the SNP minority-government have been forced to renege on electoral promises of an Irish-style £2,000 “tax exemption scheme” for artists, as the Scottish Parliament doesn’t have fiscal powers to deliver this directly, which the SNP should have known. There is now an SNP-ordered review (yes another one) to find other forms of funding avenues for an enlarged field of “cultural and creative industries”. This is said to include trialled loans and a review of how to attract extra resources from philanthropists, venture capitalists and corporate sponsorship. The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) was the outcome of such an exploration of copyright- and profit-orientated approaches to ‘investment’ – “set up with Lottery funding to help people turn bright ideas into products, services or techniques with social and commercial benefit”. NESTA advocates its retention of patent rights for intellectual property resulting from publicly funded work and the wider state exploitation of IPR. This is a significant shift from previous public sector models of support (however partial and problematic they continue to be with regard to elite power and their exercise of cultural taste) to a commercial model of exploitation still ultimately based on monopoly power.

As the state seeks to reorganise (in part withdraw) its already limited forms of public sector support (such as artist’s grants) and economically mobilise culture, cultural institutions are being given the task of attracting inward investment and contributing to cultural tourism and urban regeneration. We are, then, caught in the midst of various forms of neoliberal enclosure and restructuring, which is seen by competing individuals, networks and agencies to offer openings for a range of agendas seeking to gain purchase on institutional structures/bureaucracies – i.e. Harvey’s search for monopoly advantage whose trend is towards oligopoly (‘an economic condition in which there are so few suppliers of a product that one supplier’s actions can have a significant impact on prices and on its competitors’). It is precisely this meshing of market interests that effaces any significant debate of the underlying economic antagonisms in Scotland.

Guilding the Lolly

The Common Guild was established in 2006 as the ‘not-for-profit’ arm of the private dealership The Modern Institute, of which Katrina Brown was a board member 1999 – 2005. In 2006 Brown became Director of the Common Guild, under which auspices she programmed for Gi with Douglas Gordon lending his town house as the venue. Artists represented by The Modern Institute in Gi included Jim Lambie (its central spectacle in GoMA) and Simon Starling. It has just been announced, “after an international tendering process”, Brown will be Director of the Glasgow International Festival of Contemporary Visual Arts in 2010 and 2012. Luckily, she is also on the Venice Biennial Advisory Committee (British Council) 2008-09; Arts Council Collection Acquisitions Committee, 2007–09; and Glasgow School of Art Board of Governors.

For all artists’ prior whining about the instrumentalisation of culture – the statist dissemination of culture as a catalyst for models of socio-economic development – the silence of the positioning and wider exploitation of Gi was and is stunning: “It [Culture and Sport Glasgow] posits a strategy for economic regeneration that depends on the whims of elite tourism and its pace of consumption in a period of economic crisis. It demonstrates an ethos that is smothering this city and others like it, regarding Culture solely in terms of its use value, stripped of any emancipatory potential.” Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, ‘The New Bohemia’, Variant issue 32, Summer ‘08

The self-organised was seamlessly integrated and instrumentalised, “as various institutional actors become the unacknowledged legislators of neoliberalism and work to pioneer a socially acceptable form of its hegemony.” (Anthony Davies) Just what separates the commercial and non-commercial activities – the oligopoly of Modern Institute/Common Guild aside – what with the artists’ studios SGW3 transformed into an ad hoc club venue for Gi laughably marketed on seeglasgow.com as a “former Comme des Garçons warehouse”. Offsetting the institutional crisis of legitimation recognised by Möntmann and of genuine concern elsewhere, an infrastructure connecting a cartel of art institutions and individuals up with self-interested self-organised events, obscures the interests of those ultimately served by Gi. For all the immediacy of a ‘themed’ (and perhaps intended) auto-institutional critique, and for all the talk of transnational networks, what tangible ‘progressive’ change has occurred within art institutions? Wasn’t it just institutions talking to institutions talking to institutions – precisely the problem with Möntmann’s invisibility in the absence of an insulated institutionality? As Davies states: “Those at the top of the institutional pile claim to facilitate … while acting as a buttress to elite class power. The question is the manner and extent to which these infrastructures function in the wider service of capital.”

Reaffirming this, an invited visiting curator based in Parnu, Estonia, Rael Artel, asked an unanswered question as to where the ‘alternative’ work might be? Artel happens to be working on developing an international seminar in the series of Public Preparation events “addressing the growing tendencies of nationalism on Eastern borders of Europe (from Helsinki to Istanbul) and its relation to contemporary art … aiming to turn attention to alternative ways how to think about society in the era of global democracy as a counterperspective to narrow nationalist mindsets…”

Manufacturing (Cultural) Consent

While Herman and Chomsky, two decades ago, wrote a ground-breaking analysis of the processes of ‘Manufacturing Consent’ in the US mainstream media, to momentarily stretch this to apply to those working in a contemporary take on the ‘cultural industries’: most biased choices then also arise from the preselection of right-thinking people, internalised preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the principles required for their ‘social purpose’.

With that in mind, under the header ‘The Nation as Narrative’, Robin Baillie of National Galleries Scotland has written: “Modernity imposes itself through its power to construct the history of a nation. History is formed in the collecting, classification and streamlining of objects, images and memories into a pedagogic form. ‘The origin of the nation’s visual presence is the effect of a narrative struggle’ [M. Bakhtin]. This statement asserts that any image in order to be seen will enter into a field constituted by this struggle. A reflexive reading of this struggle will allow the forces that hold the imagery in place as evidential documents to be recognised as constitutive of those same images.”

In the visual arts in Scotland there is a highly mobilised myth of the self-created triumph of individual thinking (Enlightenment proponents reign), with artists’ structural relations glorified as being horizontal rather than hierarchical – self-organised, artist-run, artist-led. Whereas in reality the treatment by cultural apparatchiks is, more than ever, the ‘amateur’ as organised, or herded, from above (as with the Scottish Arts Council’s recent ‘networking’ wedding disco in Tramway). And, as with Scotland’s superficial status symbol the Venice Pavilion, there is a turn to visual art forms to announce and embody an inflated brand of a unique and self-sufficient country. With the consolidation of a national cultural identity in an official cultural cannon, artists have been enlisted into the formation of this national narrative seemingly as much by chance as design, yet this approved culture has quickly become a mutually self-serving ‘regime of truth’.

By focusing on the dominantly visible but refusing to explore ‘how’ it is indeed visible in the first place – the socio-political framework of its existence – it is impossible to consider alternative readings being established which are not part of the existing image map of Scottish history. This is the mutual reinforcement of cultural capital that comes with the floating monopoly of resources – both in terms of legitimation, (media) presence and state support – and a lack of visible alternatives based on this conflux of funding, education, necessary resources, etc., and, importantly, who would be up for considering an alternative…

The Art of Rent

Dublin’s Temple Bar Culture-led regeneration is often cited as a positive model that enhanced the city’s image and increased tourist numbers which in turn was to encourage further investment and economic regeneration in a self-sustaining virtuous circle. John McCarthy, in ‘Dublin’s Temple Bar – A case study of culture-led regeneration’ , European Planning Studies, June ‘98, points out that despite the large degree of public subsidy the ‘trickle down’ effect often fails to materialise. Moreover, he finds, there may be more negative effects of displacement of lower-value uses such as artists’ studios, which may have provided the initial rationale for development. “In addition, culture-led regeneration initiatives may be aimed primarily at high-spending visitors, which may serve to further alienate and exclude those who lack access to the new facilities. Furthermore, in many cities, high-profile city centre cultural projects diverted public funds away from areas where poverty and disadvantage were most concentrated. ... The development of a residential community in Temple Bar has also been problematic; while the area contained a residential population of 900 people in 1996, this fell far short of the population of 2,000 anticipated…” And this of course was before the impact of the ‘credit crunch’ on such relatively narrow property speculation projects. There was also a higher degree of gentrification than was anticipated, as well as a dilution of social aims. Rising rents also displaced existing businesses, adding to financial uncertainty. Becoming a major tourist attraction also brought its own social problems.

As Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt writes: “The second exercise in branding extant visual arts activity within [Glasgow] is Trongate 103, which is due to open in 2009. Led by Glasgow City Council’s Department of Development and Regeneration, this will see the [ £7 million] redevelopment of a block at the corner of Trongate and King Street – which has long housed eight arts organisations – to form a unified arts complex. Tapping into a familiar, and often disastrous, strategy of culture-led regeneration, this dovetails neatly with the Five Year Action Plan devised for the regeneration of the Merchant City area at the east of the city centre. This badly-punctuated document is explicit about the Council’s intentions to capitalise on the potential of this area, ensuring that derelict properties are renovated and inhabited. At the time of writing, the cultural tenants of Trongate 103 have been offered five year leases based on existing rents, after which time their future is uncertain.” As Gordon Nesbitt notes: “In Dublin, regeneration of the Temple Bar area led to hiked rents which precluded its former cultural tenants; the same pattern has been seen in the Shoreditch area of London, notably through the spectacular demise of the Lux Centre. Benedict Seymour, ‘_The Last Picture Show_’, Mute, 22, December 2001 documents the rent support originally offered to the Lux by the British Film Institute (themselves renting the building from Glasshouse developers) which was reneged upon when the BFI underwent a funding squeeze, and concludes: ‘With the forced exodus from New Labour’s bathetic grands projects already begun, the challenge now is to discover a ‘third way’ between the unaccountable bureaucracy that consumed the Lux and the culture pimping that sustains the ICA. If anything good comes out of the eclipse of the Lux it will involve creating a better, viable and contemporary form of the autonomy sought by the original co-operatives a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away’.”

Futurology is a Cult

With the director of The Glasgow School of Art (an early needlessly expensive rebranding exercise that added the article), Seona Reid, having awarded herself a 14% pay rise, and her management now ransacking the Ceramics dept., GSA staff from across the school were recently subjected to a day of motivational speaking on the future commercialisation of GSA by the neoliberal think tank Demos at the Hilton hotel in Glasgow. Demos were commissioned “by GSA to undertake an analysis of the political, economic, social and technological changes that may shape our world over the next few years” [my emphasis], so as to qualify the process of change which is being presented as discursive engagement. And what if they don’t shape our world? Why is a political think tank, intimately linked to the new Labour neoliberal project, being employed to influence staff opinion, and at what cost the whole event to the detriment of existing educational need? The revolving door of such policy-based consultation means that much consultancy and policy formation work is both reliant and caught up in its own construction and naturalisation of its particular world view – an established critique of NGOs (see James Ferguson). For all the money that has been passed from public to private, no such consultation predicted the ‘credit crunch’, the first run on a UK bank in a century, or the effects of speculation on global food security… Instead, the purpose is to make common sense the implementation of economic restructuring today for a deigned vision of a future, in this case one which relies heavily on an overly celebratory and highly questionable literature on the construct ‘The Creative Economy’. But then GSA and Demos have form on such infantalising futurology.

‘The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the power of mass imagination’ a ‘consultation’ exercise written up by Gerry Hassan, Melissa Mean, and Charlie Tims also has a presence on the GSA website, if not their name on a GSA office as yet. “Glasgow 2020 was an 18 month long project, promoted by a Demos led consortium”, that “aimed at empowering Glasgow residents to imagine the future of their city.” The Members of the consortium included GSA amongst an astroturf package of public/private institutions – Glasgow City Council, Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, Glasgow Housing Association, Glasgow Centre for Population Health, Communities Scotland, Greater Glasgow and Clyde NHS Board, Firstgroup, Strathclyde Police, Strathclyde Fire and Rescue, Glasgow University, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow School of Art, Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Scottish Arts Council, VisitScotland, Scottish Executive National Programme for Mental Health and Well-Being, Glasgow Anti-Racist Alliance, Scotland UnLtd and the Evening Times – incredible, given it was alleged to be “a new ‘non-institutional’ story about the future of the Scottish city, collecting stories and images through workshops, competitions, events and creative projects, culminating in a book and exhibition based on ‘public imagination’.” Also of concern in relation to empowering everyday folk is that in 2002 “the funding councils published figures which placed Glasgow School of Art as having the second-lowest number in the country of students from a working class background. With just 7% of its students coming from social classes IIIm, IV and V (skilled manual, semi-skilled or unskilled workers), the figures put it above Oxford and Cambridge in terms of exclusivity.” Which is to say nothing of students actually coming from Glasgow, regardless of their class background. If that trend continues, and there’s no reason to believe otherwise not least given GSA’s operations with Beijing, why would Demos be seeking to embed itself in such an elitist pedagogic institution for such an allegedly publicly-minded exercise?

Initiated while still students at GSA, Cabin Exchange was an artist-run, week-long, annual public art event that took place in 10ft by 8ft storage containers sited in various parts of the city – and successful within its own terms of engagement with a broader public. In 2006, in its fourth year, artists’ submissions were invited for Cabin Exchange 2020: “With a view towards questioning methods, approaches and techniques of researching we invite you to begin to investigate the three areas in Glasgow – Dennistoun, Tradeston and Pollockshaws. These different settings provide a broad range of environments determined by fascinating histories, land use and community dynamics.” Cabin Exchange 2020 was supported by GSA, Gi and Glasgow 2020. However, Cabin Exchange turned down longer-term funding due to funders interference in the project, in particular Demos’ attempts to wrest all aspects of publicity of the project, which was successfully resisted by Cabin Exchange. Was – is – Demos using GSA, with their knowledge and on the cheap, as an ‘entryist’ opportunity to take advantage of and seek to influence emerging artists’ research and artist-led projects with regard to prescribing a positivistic image of the Creative City through the media…?

A Critical Geography?

“By now, critics will complain at the seeming economic reductionism of the argument. I make it seem, they will say, as if capitalism produces local cultures, shapes aesthetic meanings and so dominates local initiatives as to preclude the development of any kind of difference that is not directly subsumed within the circulation of capital. I cannot prevent such a reading, but this would be a perversion of my message. For what I hope to have shown, by invoking the concept of monopoly rent within the logic of capital accumulation, is that capital has always to appropriate and extract surpluses from local differences, local cultural variations and aesthetic meanings of no matter what the origin. ... The shameless commodification and commercialisation of everything is, after all, one of the hallmarks of our times.”
David Harvey, ‘Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography’

Harvey also believes that geographers rightly argue that it is a “categorical error to view globalisation as a causal force in relation to local development”. Rather it is a “more complicated relationship across scales in which local initiatives can percolate upwards to a global scale, and vice versa, at the same time as processes within a particular definition of scale – inter-urban and inter-regional competition being the most obvious examples – can rework the local/regional configurations of what globalisation is about.”

In the era of capital hypermobility, the whole Creative City idea seems to merely dignify precarity at the level of urban planning. Perhaps with that as a premise, what then becomes most interesting is the vulnerability of the model, especially at this time when finance capital is in crisis and the speculative economy is moving ahead into new commodity packages – e.g. grain speculation. The relationship between urban and rural economies is worth considering here given that the Creative City is increasingly a non-productive city in terms of real wealth. This urbanised political economy based as it is on a futurological sense of the world in which neoliberal globalisation continues in just the same way, its proponents’ faith in this future seems extremely precarious.

To conclude, or perhaps start over, with Harvey, then: “The problem for oppositional movements is to use the validation of particularity, uniqueness, authenticity, culture and aesthetic meanings in ways that open up new possibilities and alternatives rather than to allow them to be used to create a more fertile terrain from which monopoly rents can be extracted by those who have both the power and the compulsive inclination to do so.”

The Editor would like to make clear that the views expressed in this article are those of the essay’s author, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or experiences of the PAR+RS team

Leigh French is editor of Variant which presents in-depth coverage in the context of broader social, political & cultural issues. Variant can be contacted at: variantmag@btinternet.com or visit: www.variant.org.uk
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