Cultural Soft Power

As American museums struggle to maintain an audience, how interesting that China is now projecting a museum boom. The US Government shrank cultural budgets internationally and dismantled USIA after the fall of the Eastern Bloc, believing there was no need to exert cultural influence any longer (and this before YouTube and Facebook!). Within several years of this decision, having succeeded in competing economically, China decided to make an effort for cultural influence as well.

The Chinese government is backing these efforts with, for example, $4.45 billion in 2009–not including construction costs. One hundred museums are being added each year. I wonder what exactly about or showing. Most historic museums are free, but as of March the government decided that all museums of contemporary and modern art would be free. The new National Museum opened this month with a floor area quoted by a Chinese official as being "a little bit bigger than the Met" at 2.07 million square feet on Beijing's Tiananmen Square.

attributed to Johann Heinrich Lips

The leading show is "The Art of the Enlightenment", on view for a year, and a massive diplomatic feat between Germany and China. Collaborating with Germany on this show is an extension of the cultural exchanges that have taken place since 2005 in an effort to foster mutual understanding- a typical phrase of diplomacy the meaning of which is left to be deciphered in whatever context it is raised. The museums of Munich, Dresden, and Berlin have lent 579 artworks, scientific instruments and costumes.

A portrait of Voltaire holding a lantern, shining a light outward beyond the picture frame, concludes the show. Intentionally so as "It tells everything" said a curator of the museum, Chen Yu to Andras Szanto of the Art Newspaper (from which all this information has been gathered).

Soft power, defined by Harvard professor Joseph Bye, is "the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion or payment", a concept that Stalin's soviet communism certainly never mastered. In 2007 at the the 17th Party Congress, president Ju Jintao said, "we must enhance culture as a part of the soft power of our country" as this would allow the spread of Chinese influence abroad. Seems soviet China gets the idea quite clearly.

Most western countries have reduced cultural budgets with the expectation that private foundations would provide the support instead, so that we have a libertarian policy towards the arts and a deeply socialist policy towards our banking system–but besides making such a flagrant remark I will not discuss this now. The problem with this idea is that private foundations are uncomfortable, and reasonably so, with supporting international programs. Private grant foundations operate generally on a local, or specific interest basis. The issues of the nation are not a relevant concern to private funds. If we live in a global economy and international culture, a reduction in art exchange is undeniably the beginning of a fall from significance, and thus eventually power.

Let's face it. The current attitude towards the arts and humanities is a disgrace to the very notion of 'civilization' that the US is so proud to tout. Working in public schools, be they elementary or the college level, makes it too obvious how embarrassingly uneducated we have permitted ourselves to become. We treat the arts as an unnecessary, even irrelevant, part of the world because we have allowed ourselves to believe that we 'gain' nothing from it. It is interesting to note in this context how often prisoners not only produce exchange systems for food, cigarettes, or not getting screwed, but also pictures and poetry. Because whether in the concentration camps of the Holocaust or the prisons of Guantanamo, what keeps those bodies human under duress is the beauty in their pained creative acts.

The art that is produced in this country, though I may disparage much of it, is a part of the vision of this great nation. To let it waste away will be to encourage the transfer of that knowledge to other places. I, for one, am considering moving to the Middle East. The children of the West, in the arts, humanities and sciences, were raised capitalist and will follow the money. The potential cost to the nation? Irrelevant.