Commodification of Culture: Money, Aesthetics and the Contemporary Art Racket – Part II
Commodification of Culture: Money, Aesthetics and the Contemporary Art Racket – Part II

Summary/Abstract: Another problematic aspect of the contemporary art scene is the role of the state in promoting culture, which inevitably includes a good deal of junk culture. Much questionable artistic production today is financially underpinned by taxpayer’s money and the art of extracting money from the state for art projects is prone to landing up in the hands of well-organised cliques. This is a perennial grievance of the conservative press, whose readers resent having to pay for shows that a small clique of banal anarchists and revolutionary groupies (according to this view) foists on the general public. The left on the other hand believes that it is the mark of a civilised state to encourage dissidence in art as in everything else, sidestepping the fact that state-subsidised art has rather lost its martyr’s aura of bold contrarianism. Otto Mühl, for instance, was celebrated with two major shows of his work at Vienna’s Museum für Angewandte Kunst on exiting gaol in 1997, and thirteen years later he was also exhibited at the Leopold Museum. Both of these venues are sustained by taxpayers’ money. It is an open question whether the Mühl exhibitions, at least at the MAK whose Director was obsessed with fashionable provocation,1 were more designed to create a scandal (and thus attract visitors) than to celebrate an important artistic talent. Less open in retrospect is the question as to whether the Province of Burgenland should have supported Mühl’s authoritarian and partly criminal commune by offering building subsidies.

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