"Performing companies now have to find the market," Li Dongwen, minister-counselor for cultural affairs at the Chinese Embassy in Washington, tells The New York Times. While international dealers were bringing their art wares to Santa Fe as a way of broadening their markets, Chinese officials and "managers" of art charged with overseeing the changed government policy attended workshops at the Kennedy Center in Washington to learn how to create a cadre of donors, organize budgets, develop electronic ticketing systems and write mission statements.
Market-driven art has limitations. It sometimes aims for the lowest common denominator, commercializing and vulgarizing art for the consumer. While there were patches of authentic creative excitement in the Santa Fe exhibitions, much of it, especially some of the high-tech conceptual art, appeals to a Disneyland sensibility more appropriate to a theme park than to a museum. One "art" piece is made up of dancing abstract designs arrayed across a television-like screen that incorporates the visual image of the viewer standing in front of the "art," thus making the spectator a participant in the composition. Children love it.
Art, like architecture, is the reflection of who we are, and we're presently suffering an "anything goes" culture. It takes time to sort the wheat from the chaff, original brilliance from glib trendiness. The cliche that "art is anything you can get away with," attributed variously to Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan, echoes the idea that "the medium is the message." Art and politics are linked in contemporary society.
Whether "Rove, Rove, Rove," or "art, art, art," we're the spectators participating in the projected image. To put it all together, we naturally go to the Bard, and his marvelous dialogue between Hamlet and the Queen in their search to find out what had gone wrong in Denmark:
Hamlet: Do you see nothing there?
Queen: Nothing at all; yet all that is, I see.