Culture Incorporated. Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships
Mark W. Rectanus
University of Minnesota Press, 2002
ISBN 0816638527

Much literature on corporate or arts sponsorship tends to be of a hands-on nature and aimed at practitioners – sponsors themselves or employees of corporate sponsorship, marketing, PR and/or development departments. As a corporate practice and business strategy, corporate sponsorship for the arts and most of its literature assume a given framework of institutional and social relationships within which its success is assessed in terms of cost per audience reached, degree of recall or recognition generated and so on.

It is surprising to find a publication on corporate sponsorship by a scholar and professor of German language, literature, and culture. And indeed, Mark W. Rectanus’ book Culture Incorporated. Museums, Artists, and Corporate Sponsorships is a critique of corporate sponsorship in/of the arts, arts institutions and artists that abandons the “how to” in favour of the “why” and “so?”. Informed by a paradigm familiar from cultural and media studies, Rectanus conceives of arts events such as exhibitions and their accompanying sponsorship as contested sites where artists, arts institutions, nonprofit organisations, governments and corporations define their multiple relationships and struggle for space and social power.

Through arts sponsorship, corporations – according to Rectanus – actively participate in the production, reception and dissemination of meanings and social identities; indeed they may engage in sponsorships as a response to challenges of their legitimacy: By (re-)defining social, political and economic boundaries, they aim to deflect attention from and criticism of themselves. Appropriately, artists who in their work undermine or critique the role of corporations, or who explicitly do without corporate sponsorship are interpreted (both by Rectanus and in public discourse) as acts of resistance. Rectanus’ work thus addresses corporations engaging in arts sponsorship as a powerful force not only within, but also of culture.

Much of Rectanus’ argument is not surprising to those familiar with cultural or media studies, and within this intellectual context, its novelty lies more with the area to which he applies it. From within sponsorship studies, however, his points are compelling because he manages to tie familiar arguments (such as widespread finger-pointing at the Guggenheim for its “commercial” programming) into a larger critical perspective, and allows the reader to think out of the box. Rather than analysing the commercial success or failure of individual projects, Rectanus points the reader’s attention to its cultural effect.

One of Rectanus’ points is that cultural institutions are faced with blurring boundaries: between public and private, content and commercial, high and low art, global and local, product and image, non-profit and for-profit, consumption and pleasure; and that this emergent conceptual change forces many arts administrators, particularly in museums, to rethink their programmes, audience targets and ethical guidelines. Indeed, Glenn Lowry’s (Director of MoMA New York) recent lecture at New York University, entitled “Museums and the Public Trust”, addressed the difficulties facing museums when maintaining their public’s trust while re-negotiating their relationships with ever-increasing demanding funders and sponsors. Rectanus’ claim for “full disclosure” – calling for a new ethos of transparency and honesty by arts institutions in terms of the involvement of funders/sponsors/partners in strategic alliances in their activities – sets a high standard that comes at the right time.

While I find Rectanus’ argument novel and compelling, I feel that the downsides of the framework of thought he adopts are also manifest in his book – a framework that is homogenising and fails to address the particularities of different national and cultural settings. For instance, there is a great discrepancy between the US and Germany (the two sites from which he chooses his examples) in terms of the prominence of sponsorship in the arts and public attitudes toward it; the functions of and relationships between government, enterprise and the individual as they pertain to “third sector” purposes (including the arts and culture), along with concepts of “artistic freedom”, are vastly different in both countries.

Except for readers who are entirely unfamiliar with concepts and language of cultural studies, Rectanus is a smoothly flowing and stimulating read. The various chapters are buttressed by a plethora of examples (among them: Absolut, Annie Leibovitz & American Express) that serve well to illustrate and “colour” the author’s points. The book has much to offer to the practitioner willing to take a step back and open up to reflection on the cultural consequences of the larger project he/she is involved in. Nevertheless, its perspective, language and publisher predetermine the book (unfortunately, in my opinion) for a career within academia.

Note: An interesting “read-along” to Culture Incorporated might be Derek C. Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: the Commercialization of Higher Education (Princeton University Press, 2003).

Uli Sailer
USailer@aeaconsulting.com