Shifting Sites: Cultural Desire and the Museum
By Philip Dodd / C-Arts

On 17 May 2008, the Asia Art Archive and the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies,Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK ) presented a one day international conference focusing on museums and cultural districts. Prominent speakers converged from Great Britain, Japan, Australia, United States, China, and elsewhere.
Philip Dodd, Chairman of Made in China (of London and Beijing), provided a thought provoking introduction.
In the last two months, I have been to Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong and Shanghai and talked to city governments about the importance of arts and culture. Some governments want to develop a cultural quarter, for economic reasons, others want to use culture to rebrand a city; yet others to redesign a city’s tourism potential.
I want very simply to identify why arts and culture matters more and more, to more and more groups in societies across the globe.

Culture and city branding
Culture is extremely important for the branding of cities and countries. In London the opening of the new gallery of national art, Tate Modern, and the opening of the Eye, a large wheel on which you can travel and see the whole of the city, have been iconic images of London; for Beijing, the new CCTV building designed by the Dutch architectural company OMA will provide the first modern visual icon of this metropolis for a global audience. The CCTV building will be to Beijing in the twenty first century what the Empire State Building was to New York last century.
Governments clearly now recognize just how important culture is to the branding of a national or a city identity – something extremely important in a globally competitive environment where cities have to compete for investment and talent. But such cultural rebranding is equally important for the host population. If the local population believes that the city or nation to which it belongs is creative, it will help change their own career choices.

Culture and Tourism
Culture is also more and more important to the tourism industry. More and more people travel as cultural tourists – and visit Europe not only to experience the history of culture but also contemporary culture. 59% of visitors cited museums as an important reason for visiting London in the 1991 census; 34% for the performing arts. The 1997 front cover of Newsweek, the American magazine which celebrated 'cool Britannia,' was a spur to a tourist interested in contemporary British culture, as much as the Tower of London.

Often the creative industries provide the soft infrastructure of tourism develpment - the small arts-orientated enerprises that create local fashion, small consumer goods, galleries, shops, stylish bars and cafes that city visitors enjoy visiting independently. This year St Petersburg celebrated its Tercentenary and is trying to exploit it extraordinary cultural heritage through cultural tourism. But it is accutely aware that it needs a cultural industries strategy to complement its tourism strategy. I say this to remind all of us that traditional definitions of culture and cultural industries are not in all circumstances in opposition. Or take Beijing’s cultural quarter, 798, where around 300 hundred art galleries, cafes, bookshops and creative businesses reside. Six years ago, it was such a problem for the authorities that it was rumored it might be closed down. Six years later, it has been named one of the top tourist attractions in Beijing.

Culture and Identity
In an increasingly complex world where traditional notions of family and community and even nation are being reformulated, and where all of us recognize that all communities are ‘imagined communities’, culture is increasingly the space in which people discuss who they are and might be. In this sense culture will become ever more important.

Culture and Education
In the new information age, creativity as a skill is more and more important. In the UK, there is now an increasing, if sometimes grudging, recognition that cultural subjects in the curriculum are important spaces in which people can learn to exercise creativity. Equally, there is a recognition, particularly at the university level, that cultural and creative students need business skills at the same time as it is recognized that business people need creative skills. When I was director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, I set up a club for young entrepreneurs targeted at students who wish when they leave university to set up their own company.

Culture and Urban Regeneration
Culture is a very good vehicle of urban regeneration – that, at least, is a common public sector perception.
The large scale urban renovation carried out for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics created a new infrastructure, but the city authorities were concerned to ensure that local neighborhoods shared in the benefits by matching the international aspect of the Olympics with community-based participatory events involving the creative industries. In the Berlin Mitte, part of the old East Germany, abandoned buildings and low rents allowed small cultural businesses to move into the area. These small companies dragged other services in their wake, in the form of bars and cafes and restaurants – reinvigorating the area and helping to regenerate it. When Tate Modern in London was first imagined, the site was partly given such a large element of public support because that part of London needed regeneration.

Culture and the Economy
Above all culture has become of interest to governments and policy makers because it is clearly now an important feature of the economy. When manufacturing industry has moved from Europe to other parts of the world, it is inevitable that policy makers will examine the sectors whose activity is an increasing revenue earner. In terms of global trade I have already indicated how important culture is. Even in the most powerful economy in the world, the US economy, industries related to culture had overtaken aircraft manufacture as the biggest export earner, employing over 10% of the population.

In the UK, statistics in 2001 show that creative industries generate approximately $112.5bn annually accounting for 9.2 of gross domestic product and employ more than 1.3m. In Milan in Italy, there are now, on one estimate, 50,000 creative industries and small enterprises, comprising one third of the total. One third of the entrepreneurs are women. Culture and the cultural industries are important not least because they are attractive to marginalized groups who have often found it difficult to find a place in the workforce. When I was at the ICA I set up a house on a housing estate in a difficult part of London, to provide local residents with digital training. It is very interesting how many of the local residents – who come from a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds – are interested in entrepreneurship, especially in the cultural field. In a society which sometimes makes judgments on ethnic grounds, to start up your own business is a way of bypassing the structures of power that determine most people’s opportunities.