Constructing habitus: promoting an international arts trend at the Singapore Arts Festival

Abstract

The Singapore Arts Festival (SAF) is Singapore’s largest government-supported international arts festival. SAF presents the best in international and local arts, in an attempt, to develop what it perceives to be a lack of cultural knowledge of the Singaporean arts-going public. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s key concept of ‘habitus’ together with an analysis of the programming of the festival, this paper will highlight how the festival seeks to create a specific cultural taste in Singaporean art-goers through privileging and promoting works that are internationally marketable to European countries. The paper will conclude that this programming style occurs at the expense of Singaporean artists and hinders the development of the city’s state cultural and artistic development.

Keywords:

• Singapore
• cultural production
• artistic habitus
• Bourdieu

Notes

1. In 2003, the Singapore Government released The Renaissance City Report II, which examined how the areas of media and design could contribute to Singapore’s attempt to become a global city for the arts.

2. The NAC of Singapore is the main funding body for the arts and cultural sector in Singapore. It receives money from its parent ministry, the MICA and distributes it via various funding schemes to the five art forms under its remit: dance, literary arts, music, theatre and visual arts.

3. As a point of clarification, I will be primarily concerned with artistic habitus in this article. The artistic habitus is manifest in behaviours inculcated largely through culturally-oriented social conditions (such as an educated family life) as well as explicit institutionalised cultural social formations, such as art histories, criticism and scholarship, art schools and art galleries or museums. The ‘dispositions’ inculcated by an artistic habitus can be described in terms of ‘artistic competence’, which is often the result of ‘a long process of inculcation which begins in the family’ that is commensurate with their ‘level of economic, academic, and cultural capital’ and ‘reinforced by the educational system’ (Bourdieu, p. 23). A key difference in the formation of artistic habitus from other forms of habitus is that, as part of this inculcation, agents have had ‘prolonged exposure to the arts’ and gain an understanding of a work of art by being in ‘possession of the code into which it has been encoded’ (Bourdieu, p. 23).

4. An example of such a scheme can be seen in the Speak Good English Campaign. This campaign was launched in response to the popularity of a fictional television character who spoke ‘Singlish’ a truncation of the word Singaporean English. Singlish is a form of Pidgin English which utilises words from a mix of local dialects, Malay, Tamil and nonsensical words. It is spoken by most if not all Singaporeans. The broadcasting company being a government-linked firm eventually broadcasted an episode where the character was seen attending English lessons (see Nirmala 2000, Han 2001)! This is by no means the only campaign that sought to create certain behaviours in Singapore. Other schemes and deterrents include the Courtesy Campaign to the Clean and Green Campaign.

5. Attendance figure for the 2008 edition of the festival was the lowest since the 1980 edition of the SAF. Then Chief Executive of the NAC, Lee Suan Hiang, would state that low tickets sales could be attributed to a recession in Singapore, however, news articles also highlighted that the final released figures also included complimentary tickets. As a further point of comparison, tickets sold for the 2008 edition were even lower than tickets sold for the 2003 edition, which took place during the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic and a recession.