The art of tourism-driven development: economic and artistic well-being of artists in three Balinese communities

Abstract

One route from coastal to inland Bali traverses three communities with different types of art, from mass-produced art for beachside tourists in Sanur, through the village of Mas, home to mask and wood carving workshops, to several high-end galleries and renowned museums in Ubud, known for painting. This comparative case study, based on our interviews with artists, museum directors, collectors, community activists and leaders, arts entrepreneurs, and civil servants, focuses on the economic and artistic well-being of artists in three communities. This well-being approach overcomes a preoccupation with ‘authenticity’ characteristic of older scholarship on tourism and the arts in Southeast Asia. We conclude that the impact of tourism-driven development on artists' well-being varies tremendously even within one region in Bali and that ‘slow’, purposeful arts tourism and forward-looking, hybrid approaches offer the most artistic and economic benefits to local artists. Examples, both positive and negative, provide lessons or strategies for other communities that have distinctive artistic heritages and increasing numbers of tourists.

Keywords:

• art
• economic development
• tourism
• Indonesia
• Bali
• sustainability

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank our research team, especially Putu Desy Apriliani, Flavia Bastos, Emily Casagrande, Victoria Fromme, Alexandra Hancock, Emily Lewis, and Andrew Neutzling. Finally, we truly appreciate the ideas and feedback we received while presenting our research in Quebec City at the international conference ‘Tourism, roads and cultural itineraries: Meaning, memory and development’.

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge an interdisciplinary research grant from the University Research Council at the University of Cincinnati for fieldwork in Indonesia.

Notes

1 Snowball sampling consists of identifying an initial list of respondents who are then used to refer researchers on to other respondents. While this approach violates sampling principles of randomness, it has the advantage of sampling populations difficult to access, define, or enumerate, or small groups in which members know each other, and its results are shown to be nearly as good as those of full statistical samples. Its disadvantage is that it may ignore isolated members of a group (Atkinson & Flint, 2001; McKenzie & Mistiaen, 2009; Smith, 2010).

2 In response to the dramatic drop in the quality of Balinese paintings and woodcarvings brought about by increasing tourism demand, and in an effort to uphold the artistic quality standards of the past, Ubud's prince Cokorda Gede Agung Sukawati, with the assistance and support of the architect/sculptor Gusti Nyoman Lemped and of the expatriate painters Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet, founded the Pita Maha arts movement in 1936. The group's aim was to preserve the high artistic standards of Balinese art and to discourage its mass production. In its short life, the group reached a membership of about 150 local painters and woodcarvers, organized a number of exhibitions, and assembled a remarkable number of paintings and sculptures that eventually became the core of the art collection of the Puri Lukisan museum in Ubud (Barley, 2009; Pringle, 2004; Stowell, 2011).