The Culture of Capital

摘要

This article aims to reconcile the critical potential of culture with the privatisation of the cultural field and, in the process, to question the autonomous claims of art. Centred on Glasgow, it draws on the methods of investigative social research to reprise the creation of Culture and Sport Glasgow, a private company with charitable status, which assumed responsibility for all cultural and leisure provision in the city in April 2007. Written in the wake of action taken by Culture and Sport Glasgow to prevent published research into its personnel from being distributed, this account explores the role of art in challenging the neoliberal consensus in the face of attempts to block such challenges at the point of research, development and display. Based on interviews with artists practising in Glasgow, this research examines the implications for radical art of Culture and Sport Glasgow controlling the major commissioning mechanism and one of the main funding lifelines for artists in the city. In the process, it demonstrates the repressive intolerance of neoliberal attitudes towards culture.