Om kunst og penge

Abstract

Summary On art and money The reason for the writing of this essay stems from the reflections of a museum curator at a national art museum when confronted with two factors: the inclusion of national cultural policies in the government's general inclination towards privatisation, and the pressure on the curator to achieve as high a degree of sponsorship as possible as a basis for his work. Basically, the author wishes to point out, national and municipal cultural institutions are the common property of each and every one of us, and it is the duty of the community at large to maintain its own institutions and not that of industry or business. In Denmark we have had good experience of support for cultural activities from certain sectors of trade and industry (the Carlsberg Breweries and Novo Industry), which provide subsidies via standing committees either wholly or partly composed of specialists within the respective areas of cultural life. It is however quite a different matter when the curator himself is supposed to track down potential sponsors from an economic world more or less unknown to him. If developments take this course, curators will increasingly have to rely on their own and their wives’ excellent contacts within the world of industry and economic life rather than on their scholarly qualifications. In terms of sponsorship, the representatives of the economic community are a fickle race. Their objectives are often far from being identical with what a museum curator considers most important in a given cultural context. Undeniably the business and economic community often tends to give cultural affairs a more conservative and mundane twist, and also serves as a sort of platform of censorship between cultural activity and general public. One can hardly imagine the Shell oil company, for example, wishing to subsidise the filming of Karen Blixen's book Out of Africa. On average, curators are not very good at fund‐raising, and quite a number of them regard it as a distraction from more important work. While this phenomenon is well on the way to becoming a kind of problem, it is nonetheless evident that cultural activities are increasingly expected to be financed through sponsorship. Not that money in itself is a filthy item or repulsive. The author has indeed cited in his essay the many ties which over the years have linked art with money—patrons, the art trade, art collectors, art exhibitions, and the peculiarly Danish cooperative artists’ associations. The author emphasizes how art increasingly has become a commodity, and suggests how closely linked even parts of art historical research are with the art market. In sum, the writer's point is that public cultural institutions are best served on the basis of public contributions. Supplementary funds should only be resorted to in cases of rare importance and then only from sponsors who are more or less permanently established as such and as negotiating partners have given proof of sincere endeavours to encompass a real degree of expert knowledge. Art itself has mostly managed to survive its perennial symbiosis with money and market quite happily and uncontaminated.