Follow the money: cultural patronage and urban elite geographies

ABSTRACT

Cultural patronage has since long been a domain where urban elites can showcase a sense of philanthropy. The paper develops a heuristic that starts from cultural patronage activities in order to trace urban elite households and their professional and residential characteristics. The heuristic is deployed in Brussels, Belgium, where we use cultural patronage listings from five key high-culture institutions as an empirical entry-point into urban elite geographies. Contrary to the common claim that current urban elites are global elites, our analysis shows a clear national reproduction of Brussels elites. Specific for Brussels is a remarkable level of nobility resilience, based on its more-or-less successful entanglements with haute finance as well as art market intermediary functions. Furthermore, the residential analysis suggests that elite reproduction also predominantly depends on socio-spatial segregation in inner-city neighborhoods, yet lacks morphological segregation strategies typical of enclave urbanism or super-gentrification generally found across global cities.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban elites
• super-rich
• elite theory
• cultural patronage
• Brussels

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank three anonymous referees for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this paper. We also thank the Urban Geography editors and the special issue manager Susan Moore for their guidance throughout the revision process. The authors share equal responsibility for all remaining errors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Bozar: Amount unknown. La Monnaie / De Munt: 5000 Euro (Maecenas). Flagey: 1000 Euro (Great Friend) or 2800 Euro (Fellow). Queen Elisabeth Music Chapel: 1250 Euro (Patron) or 12,500 Euro (Sponsor). Wiels: 1000 Euro (Blue Member) or 2500 Euro (Gold Member). Median yearly income in the BrusselsCapital Region was ca. 15,800 euro for the year 2014 (BISA, 2017a); in 2015 72% of the population earned less than 30,000 EURO, ca. 17% between 30,000–50,000 euro, and ca. 11% earned more than 50 000 (BISA, 2017b). This makes even the lowest fees in the database steep for the lowest quartiles and the highest fees unaffordable for the second quartile and may even put some stress at the lowest incomes of the upper decile (i.e. those earning more than 50,000 euro a year). An observation we cannot develop here is that compared to research on cultural patronage in the US (where the vast majority of research on patronage is conducted), these are very small amounts. Most likely, this has to do with radically different cultures of patronage between the two continents and the fact that economic elites in the US tend to be wealthier than their counterparts in Europe. A result is that in Brussels access to these elite settings is also affordable for upper middle classes. Our sample also shows this to be the case, although overall most households included in the sample are more usefully positioned on the elite end of the social spectrum. A possible explanation is that although the “entrance fee” of 1000–12.500 Euro is affordable in some ways, it gives access to a world in which further expenses seem almost obligatory (buying art, expensive travel, …).

2. Our empirical unit of analysis was the household, which we derived from the entries as provided in the patronage listings. Households can be individuals, but also – and often – couples. In the vast majority of cases, couples were listed with the first name of the male partner only (e.g. Monsieur et Madame Mickey Boël; Monsieur et Madame Jacques Zucker) and further desktop research showed that it was mostly the male partner to which the main income and wealth could be linked. This observation is in line with other research that shows wealth to be predominantly concentrated in male hands.

3. In principle, it would be possible that the majority of the 44% to which no address could be assigned live outside of Brussels or even Belgium. But there is no substantive reason to assume that this 44% shows a different spatial distribution than the other elite households.

4. The identification of individual actors in our sample as Belgian or non-Belgian is based on an “informed guess”, since our dataset does not explicitly identify nationality. But on the basis of extensive LinkedIn and Google searches, we identified those actors as Belgian that followed their higher education in Belgium and/or that have spent most of their career in Belgium. This applies to the vast majority of all actors in our sample. French émigres, for example, have almost always studied in France and have a substantial career trajectory in France.