The Production of Regime Culture and Instrumentalized Art in a Globalizing State

Abstract

The argument of this paper is that, in the age of globalization, culture, in the generic/anthropological sense, is produced, and varies by group, subject, and time. In the United States today the leaders of the state produce a specific kind of culture, here called regime culture, which reinforces the power of the existing regime. It features patriotism, values financial success, espouses a narrow definition of family values, promotes a culture of fear limiting civil liberties, reinterprets the past, legitimates the status quo, and tolerates racism. The handling of the International Freedom Center at the World Trade Center site is a striking example. Culture, in the humanist/arts sense, has been increasingly used to press culture in a specific direction, here called instrumentalized culture. It is promoted as a contributor to economic development, as fostering the growth of an economically productive creative class. In the process, its critical and transcendent potential has been eviscerated. While such instrumentalization may help artists in the short run, it also poses a danger to the ultimate social role of the arts. The policies generated around the concept of a Creative Class, and the use of the arts as a tool of economic development, are striking examples. Globalization accentuates each of these tendencies.

Notes

1. By ‘ideology’ Mannheim (1968) meant thought systems, and specifically those promulgated by society's ruling groups that preserve their own power and obscure the reality that might challenge it.

2. Not only in the US. The culture of the private economy probably spreads faster than state culture, e.g. an article in The New York Times, 26 February 2006, as this is written, is headlined ‘In India, Going Global Means Flaunting It’, and describes the spread of designer labels and bling bling (diamonds, jewelry and all forms of showy style), was coined by New Orleans rap family Cash Money Millionaires back in the late 1990s to describe the rich of India. But the handling of issues of terrorism, the spread of surveillance, the limitations on speech, are also spreading rapidly. See Graham (2004).

3. Quoted by Dowd (2006). ‘Personal responsibility’ has become a code word for programs like workfare, intended to discipline the work force.

4. ‘Ground Zero “Freedom Center” Quashed Phil Hirschkorn’, From CNN, 28 September 2005. Available at http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/09/28/wtc.rebuilding/. See http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res = FA0611F639540C7A8EDDA00894DD404482 for The New York Times account.

5. See http://www.renewnyc.com/plan_des_dev/wtc_site/new_design_plans/Sept 2003_refined_design.asp.

6. See Mahoney and Feider (2005) and Healy (2005). A chronology of the controversy is at: http://www.fepproject.org/commentaries/worldtradecenterchron.html#15.

7. Office of the Press Secretary, 11 September 2001, ‘Statement by the President in this Address to the Nation’. Available at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010911-16.html.

8. The line between purely commercial culture and ‘authentic’ culture is not simply the relation to financial success, for ‘authentic’ artists may also in fact be commercial successes (everything from Shakespeare to Verdi or Les Enfants de Paradis). Exploration of the substantive content and quality of art is inescapable.

9. This is rather an over-simplification. There are different arts, artists differ, and art patrons differ. It requires a much more careful and detailed analysis to be accurate.

10. For instance, Ann Markusen's work (Markusen and Johnson, 2006) or the studies of the Center for an Urban Future (2005) in New York, or the efforts recounted in Nataraj (2006, pp. 55–56).

11. Set forth at http://downsideupthemovie.org/RFP.pdf.

12. For a complete list see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Capital_of_Culture#Past_European_Capitals_of_Culture.

13. See the work of Anne Markusen, for instance, or Kleiman et al. (2002) (which incidentally uses the terms ‘creative’ and ‘cultural’ interchangeably, e.g. in attempting accurately to identify the creative sector, it is the cultural sector that is referred to), or the film Downside UP, ‘describing how art can change the spirit of a place. What happens when an impoverished working-class town [North Adams, Mass.] decides that its only hope for survival lies within the world of contemporary art?’ (New Day Films).

14. For a full account of Florida's arguments and responses, see Peck (2005).

15. The withdrawal of the Drawing Center, one of the cultural institutions planned for the World Trade Center site, because of concerns that some of its exhibitions might present potentially discordant messages, is a recent very public case (see Pogrebin, 2006). Wikipedia summarizes the story succinctly: ‘At one point there was a plan for the site to house several cultural organizations and the Freedom Center. Due to objections from victim's families and the New York State Governor, George Pataki, the plans for the site have been reconfigured. The Drawing Center, an arts organization that has a long history of showing a wide spectrum of works, including an exhibition which was critical of the Iraq War, was asked to censor itself in order to be a part of the future reconstruction site. Both the Freedom Center and The Drawing Center, argued that freedom of expression is integral to the institutions and artists involved’. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Drawing_Center.

16. See the early work of Damaris Rose (1984), who first pointed to the process and much work thereafter, including particularly that of Neil Smith. For the specific case of New York City, see Zukin (1990).

17. From Baudelaire's ‘L'invitation au Voyage.’

18. It is an argument made in detail in Marcuse (1978).

19. See the painting at http://www.blackcommentator.com/175/175_art_richardson_venture_and_freedom.html, in which the image of imprisonment and the desire for physical escape is blurred with the image of mental freedom within the mind. See the discussion at Marcuse (1978).

20. For a fuller discussion, see Marcuse and Van Kempen (1999a, pp. 5, 261–262), and Marcuse (1997, pp. 29–48).

21. And, I believe, in a different way from nineteenth century or earlier conquests, in which the dominant language would become combined with the local, e.g. Creole, Yiddish, and Afrikaans.

22. See note 2 above.

23. The New York Times, the paper of record for the United States, heads its section on ‘the arts’ in its widely read Sunday edition: ‘Arts and Entertainment’.

24. Which explains why critical or political art is necessarily often subtle and seemingly esoteric; more in-your-face phenomena would not be tolerated, or at least would not be funded.