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Business or culture?
Art is what happens to a place when it matures. And the UAE must invest in artists if it wants to be right up there with the best.
- By Dr Rod Monger, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 September 28, 2007
Signs are popping up everywhere that art is finding its way into public life in the UAE. Abu Dhabi seems determined to become the GCC's cultural capital with its high-profile partnerships with the world's leading museums like the Louvre and the Guggenheim.
Dubai has already announced the Dubai Opera House designed by renowned Iraqi-born architect Zaha Hadid, to be located on an island in Dubai Creek in The Lagoon along with two museums. Replicas of these buildings are currently in the main atrium in The Mall of Emirates.
Roberto Lopardo, chairman of Visual Communication at American University in Dubai and observer of Dubai's cultural scene, sees other encouraging signs at the grass roots level. In Al Quoz, for example, a number of art galleries have opened which, along with cafés and other businesses, are helping revive the area into a trendy place-to-be.
When artists move into a less desirable areas, Lopardo notes, other people soon follow. They want to visit and even live in a creative environment, he says.
The inevitable result is a run-up in real estate prices as 'Bohemian' neighbourhoods of struggling artists evolve into expensive haunts for affluent sophisticates.
New York City's Soho area, once a run-down desolate industrial district, is now both fashionable and pricey with a vibrant lifestyle. Of course, the artists themselves are soon forced to seek cheaper accommodations, and thus begin the process again elsewhere.
Art brands a city, says Lopardo. Sydney has long been identified by its iconic opera house and Bilboa Spain by the soaring, metallic Guggenheim Bilboa Museum designed by architect Frank Gehry.
Even major cities like London and New York garner much of their identities from museums like the Tate Gallery and Museum of Modern Art, respectively.
Lopardo thinks great art and architecture communicate to the world that this is the "level of achievement that is supposed to happen here".
"Museums are what happens when you have luxury," he says. "Having museums of quality is the beauty of living in a big city. Little towns don't offer museums."
Economic impact
Art and architecture are also good for business, especially in cities that rely on tourism. In London, for example, the Tate Modern was created in 2000 to house the contemporary art portion (since 1900) of the Tate Collection. Tate Modern is housed in a renovated power station with a powerful presence on the South Bank of the Thames River.
In a recent survey, 26 per cent of all people now associate the area with the museum, which says volumes about the ability of art to provide brand identity.
According to Donald Hyslop, Head of Regeneration and Community Partnerships for Tate Modern, the economic impact is £100 million (Dh738 million) annually, twice what was originally estimated.
Fifty to 70 per cent of that amount is attributable to Southwark, the immediate area around the museum.
Hyslop further estimates that the museum created 3,000 new jobs, half in Southwark, mostly in hotels and catering. Tate Modern itself employs 467 staffers in addition to the 283 workers who renovated the building. Evidence also suggests the property prices and commercial investments in the area have increased.
Beyond that, twenty cultural organisations banded together in 2005 to form the Cultural Quarter for London consortium, which Hyslop describes as "the largest and most diverse consortium of arts organisations in the world." Together, members account for 12 million visitors per year.
The consortium also attempts to provide every youngster in the area with experiences in performance, art, film, learning, employment, life skills and the environment through cultural activities.
That's important because research studies have linked participation in arts by children with academic performance. For example, when compared to other children, those who have had exposure to cultural activities perform better in their studies, participate more in school activities like math and science fares, win more writing awards and have better class attendance records.
That's music - pardon the pun - to the ears of the business community because research results show that culturally-enriched kids develop better problem-solving and critical thinking skills, more orientation to task quality, and a better work ethic. They also learn to use creative solutions to more successfully negotiate a diverse, complex world.
Direct intervention
Results like these have made many business communities into arts activists. In Dallas Texas, for example, business leaders long ago concluded that if the city was to attract more corporate employers, it would need to increase its commitment to arts and culture.
The reason was simple: executives, managers, professionals and others expect access to art and value the aesthetic qualities of the environment that surrounds them.
One initiative was to create the North Texas Business Committee for the Arts, a collaborative which promoted regional development of arts groups. The Committee, among its other activities, conducts a Leadership Arts program, to train business professionals to serve on boards of directors of arts organisations.
Each year, Leadership Arts graduates about two dozen individuals who are then dispatched to different arts organisations depending on the skills and expertise - finance, legal, accounting, marketing and so forth - needed by each.
The committee also tracks arts activity in the region with the help of accounting giant Deloitte & Touche. The Committee's 2006 annual study showed, for example, that spending on the arts was approximately $830 million (Dh3 billion) in the North Texas area, mostly the Dallas-Ft Worth 'metroplex.'
Regional arts activity included an estimated 7,000 performances and exhibitions, almost 8 million admissions, provided learning opportunities for 789,000 school children, and involved 493,000 documented volunteer hours.
Perhaps this is why arts organisations in London have now launched Eye on the Future Education Project with £1.8 million (Dh13 million) in funding. The consortium will cooperate with universities to examine the concern that there is "a significant mismatch between the needs and aspirations of young people and the range and reach of cultural experiences actually available to them".
Indeed, one objective is "to see young people at the centre of a group of cultural institutions as visitors, creators and advocates."
Similar evidence comes from a number of other sources.
For example, Stephen Sheppard, Professor of Economics at Williams College and Director of the Centre for Creative Community Development, has conducted research that shows that "the claim that having a diverse and active cultural scene can produce direct economic benefits for the local economy." That includes significant employment and income gains.
Moreover, Sheppard associates greater cultural amenities with improved quality of life for knowledge workers and others. "Evidence for this is that increasing cultural activities results in greater demand for residence in a community and this in turn has an impact on property value."
Dr Donald Marnelli, Professor of Arts Management at University of Pittsburgh, also notes that significant anecdotal evidence is available attesting to the positive impact of the arts.
While he believes that hard data is elusive, he also observes that the evidence in the US "appears to connect an educated, professional work force - the true wage earners, decision-makers, and movers-and-shakers in modern American society - as being interested in urban areas with myriad artistic opportunities."
Leadership
If the goal is to be recognised as a leader in global business, then it's hard to segregate that from the need to attract the best educated and most creative people in the world. If art matters to these people, it must matter to Dubai.
But can Dubai create a vibrant identity of its own without being an also-ran against major cities with their older, more established art institutions? Lopardo thinks so.
Certainly, with enough money, collections of great, recognised art works could be amassed here, he says. But why create collections of Impressionists or Abstractionists in Dubai when you can go to London or Paris to see those?
Another approach might be for Dubai to create its own identity in the art world by becoming the centre for contemporary Middle East artists who are increasingly being given recognition elsewhere.
Last year, for example, New York's Museum of Modern Art featured an exhibition of regional artists like Jananne Al Ani, Mona Hatoum, Shirin Neshat, and Shahzia Zikander - all of whom have gone to live and work in the United States or Europe.
Fostering contemporary Middle Eastern art might contribute more to Dubai's unique cultural identity, and perhaps help bring Middle East culture back home.
Lopardo's view is that art is what happens when a city matures. Austin, the once sleepy capital of Texas, boomed culturally as companies like Dell Computer transformed it into a high-technology, economic powerhouse.
"The bones of any city are its businesses, says Lopardo, "but art is its soul."
The writer, a business professor at American University in Dubai, can be contacted at business@gulfnews.com.
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