Privatizing culture

Lecture by Chin-tao Wu, followed by a debate with Jordi Martí i Grau

Chin-tao Wu's Privatizing Culture is an ambitious attempt at explaining the ways in which mercantile values and the free market's ethos have permeated the Visual Arts since the 1980s. Following the many public policy slidings, which made it possible for big business to enter into the cultural market, Chin-tao Wu studies governments' role in inoculating the rudiments of a free market in public institutions in charge of organizing the Art world, particularly the Art Council of Great Britain and the National Endowment of the Arts in the United States.
The author will analyze this "businessman's assault" on Museums, the paths followed by the social and mercantile elite, and how these companies have succeeded into integrating themselves into the infrastructure of the Art world, turning their buildings into art exhibitions.

Chin-tao Wu wrote the book Privatizing Culture (AKAL, Madrid 2007). She specializes in Contemporary Art and Culture, and has written numerous articles for the New Left Review and Kunst und Politik: Jahrbuch der Guernica-Gesellschaft. She is an Honorary Research Fellow at University College London, and teaches classes at Taiwan's University Nanhua.

Jordi Martí i Grau is an ambassador of Culture at Barcelona's City Council.

With the collaboration of Universidad Nómada/Ateneu Candela and Ediciones Akal