States’ Interventions and the Transformation of Urban Art Worlds: Comparative Studies of Western European, North American, and East Asian Cases

How do states affect urban social networks of the arts? This paper focuses on the organizational and institutional transformations of art production, distribution, and consumption from the 1960s to the 1980s, a time when welfare states actively promoted the arts. Existing studies such as those by White and White, Becker, and Bourdieu have respectively examined institutional transformations of the arts. Although these studies have made critical contributions to understanding the structural changes of art production, they focus mainly on the differences between premodern and modern society in Western countries, or as White and White described it, the transition from “academy system” to “dealer-critic system.” Yet few studies examine structural transformations in the twentieth century.

The greatest factor changing the art world in the twentieth century was an expansion of global primary and secondary art markets, but states’ interventions, such as promotion by subsidies or censorship, are also critical. In particular, after WW II, welfare states that developed in Western European, North American, and East Asian countries implemented various cultural policies to promote the social welfare of their people and national prestige. Cities were the main sites for such interventions. Central and local governments constructed museums and subsidized artists and non-profit art organizations in urban areas. My question concerns the relationship between such state interventions and the organizations and institutions for the arts in cities.

In order to pursue the research question, I compare three visual art worlds in London, New York, and Tokyo during the postwar period. In particular, I select case studies from the 1960s to the 1980s because they represent a highly important period for welfare states’ initiation of cultural policies and the establishment of their cultural bases. Utilizing mainly primary and secondary sources, I examine the historical contours of urban art worlds.