Actually I should have known better: the fate that lies in store for outsiders at a convention of theater buffs was famously dramatized by the fifth-century Athenian poet Aristophanes, to the study of whom I dedicated several precious years of my youth during the 1990s, attempting to develop a theory of the tendency of comedy of social critique to allow its revolutionary power to be re-contained by the very hegemony it would ostensibly overthrow.(1) At any rate, in AristophanesÂ’ comedy Thesmophoriazusae (The Women at the Festival), the tragedian Euripides attempts to eavesdrop on a group of women assembled to discuss the playwrightÂ’s scandalous portrayal of their sex. When EuripidesÂ’ cross-dressing spy is discovered, he escapes death by exposure to wild beasts only by deploying some rather far-fetched coups de théâtre involving a wineskin and a dancing girl.

Nevertheless, I did not hesitate long before saying yes when Beat Mazenauer and Adi Blum asked me to attend the IETM in Zurich this past November in the role of an observer, along with Anna Kim of Austria and Daniel de Roulet of French speaking part of Switzerland. I did take one precaution, however: when I met with my fellow observers on the eve of the conference to determine our coverage of the meetingÂ’s three thematic threads, I chose the economic strand over its artistic and political counterparts, reasoning that a discussion of the economic role of the arts in a liberal democracy would be less likely to produce a risky moment of vulnerability in which the inner circle might turn on the intruder in its midst and throw him to the dogs, as it were.

And indeed, when the conference got underway on Friday, my hunch seemed to have been correct. The meeting had been officially opened the evening before with a reception at city hall. Zurich’s mayor, in his speech welcoming delegates, barely skirted economic issues by noting with pride the local electorate’s recent decision to maintain funding for the Cabaret Voltaire, the “birthplace of Dadaism”, imperiled not long ago when the building’s proprietor, an insurance company, announced its intentions to use the site for a (Philistine) corporate purpose. When those plans were scotched by militant squatters, the city stepped in, and, fortified by the recent poll, will now be continuing to pay the rent on the museum-cum-nightclub. Zurich, Mayor Ledergerber thus seemed to be suggesting, is a place where the arts are respected, not simply with petty-bourgeois lip service, but in coin of the realm; and this in a world in which “public funds” are otherwise all flowing the other way at the moment, into the “private sector”. The attendees could thus afford to relax, forget workaday cares, and spend the conference reflecting on the less sublunary concerns of their craft.

So when IETM Secretary-General Mary Ann de Vlieg kicked off the proceedings at the plenary held on Friday morning by wondering whether the current financial crisis might in fact be “just another global misunderstanding”, I was for a moment longer lulled into a false sense of security, thinking I had detected the familiar academic tones of the east coast, where I had spent all those years studying economic allegory in ancient comedy; and, feeling sure I was now safe among fellow ivy-league ironists, who are wont to dismiss the “real economy” with a ÂŽižekian paradox before returning to their cleverly revisionist history of German idealism, I looked forward to a weekend spent formulating theses on the economics of performance and the performance of economics à la The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

The next words out of Mary AnnÂ’s mouth, however, made me sit up straight in my seat: far from testifying to a desire to turn her back on the crisis and its potential ramifications for the arts, the Secretary-General was now citing Naomi Klein, the tenacious and hard-headed Canadian critic of global corporate imperialism who has recently put us on alert by suggesting that capitalism may well simply emerge revitalized from its present trials. And when I subsequently learned that Mary Ann hails originally from Detroit, AKA Motor City, the only major metropolis in the 48 contiguous states that is due north of my Canadian homeland – and is thus entitled to respect from my frost-tested compatriots – I realized that the “real economy” was likely to be very much a matter of pressing concern during the sessions. As I left the building in which the plenary had been held, I noticed that we had been convening in what was once ZurichÂ’s Chamber of Commerce, and now serves as a popular discothèque and concert hall. I could hardly have wished for a more vivid demonstration of the practical nexus between the market and the arts.

In the first of the three sessions devoted to economics, “Sounds Chinese to me – or how to meet another world”, the China evoked in the title functioned at one at the same time as the proverbial figure of cultural opacity (from a western point of view) and as a metonym for those actual economies whose “emergence” is commonly interpreted as both a boon and a bane for what we used to call the “first world”. (I recall hearing the CEO of a medium-sized Swiss enterprise speak of her plans to “outsource”, from providers in the BRIC countries, some of the services her company supplies to its predominantly western European customers. Upon being asked what these countries might be, she explained that the term was an acronym composed of the names Brazil, Russia, India and China: that is to say, those entities whose very intermediary or hybrid status renders them classifiable only as members of the group to which they belong.)

TodayÂ’s entrepreneurs, in other words, whether commercial or artistic, must come to terms with the new realities of globalization, in particular the growing need not merely to placate foreign partners (such as China) with a Berlitz grasp of local customs, but more crucially to expand their concept of multiculturalism to encompass their own cultural identity as merely one among many, and thus no longer the neutral ground zero against which all others are measured. Eva Lüdi Kong, a long-time resident of China, spoke about her arrival as a Swiss-born student in Hangzhou in the early 1990s. She was confronted with the fact that, at the time, the Chinese saw all non-Chinese as westerners, regardless of their provenance, and she experienced at first hand the loss of oneÂ’s own cultural codes that can result under the pressure of assimilation. Pascale Reinhardt, a French psychologist who has also lived in China, gave an account of her experience as an “egg” (or westerner with an Asian core) among “bananas” (Asians with a western core) and added a drastic formulation of east-west cultural relations as they have evolved since the 1990s: the glib dichotomy of “target” and “non-target” cultures, which ostensibly reflects the “post-national” segmentation of markets that is a function of globalization, reveals the ancestry of present-day commercial imperialism in the gunboat diplomacy of the colonialist Golden Age.

In the discussion that followed, each member of the panel was asked to provide an anecdotal account of his or her personal experience with bridging the culture gap. Sharon Fernandez, a Canadian creative-policy consultant, reported that cultural diversity has now become commonplace in the art world, and commended the positive effects of the friction produced by cross-cultural contact, while Sandro Lunin, artistic director of ZurichÂ’s Theaterspektakel, spoke about his work developing cultural connections with African nations and noted the special importance of Swiss engagement in this area, given SwitzerlandÂ’s long and shameful history of support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. Lüdi Kong sketched the difference between China and Germany when it comes to conversational gambits: whereas a German, she observed, will tend to plunge in medias res by addressing the subtext of a given encounter, a Chinese person typically prefers to approach the subject obliquely, and may go so far as to joke with shocking political incorrectness about a taboo topic as a means of initially deflecting attention. (She offered an example of the stock Chinese retort to a foreign interlocutorÂ’s reference to the death penalty in China: There are too many Chinese anyway!) Reinhardt in turn warned of the pitfalls in store for a westerner keen to do business in Southeast Asia but unequipped with a knowledge of the relevant cultural codes. At the same time, she noted that the efficacy of a simple list of dos and donÂ’ts is illusory, and recommended that westerners develop a sense of their own foreignness in a foreign land, as well as of potential commonalities: the French penchant for answering “no” at the outset of a negotiation, far from establishing an insurmountable difference, actually serves as a deictic signaling the speakerÂ’s need for more information before reaching an agreement – and is thus not so very far removed from the Chinese habit of initial indirectness.

The session closed with a survey of the delegatesÂ’ opinions on how the performing arts might benefit “the rest of the world” – that is, one supposes, the world beyond the borders of the Americas and Europe. And it was here, oddly enough, in response to what seemed the woolliest, most classically “humanist” of the questions considered by the panel, that the discussion took on its sharpest tone. While Fernandez and Lunin offered practical examples of political activism on the part of artists in the Caribbean diaspora and the Middle East, and Lüdi Kong noted the ultimately positive effects of foreign observers in China in the 1980s interpreting all avant-garde art as necessarily dissident, and thus sowing the seeds for the current crop of cross-cultural collaborations, ReinhardtÂ’s report on her work with marginalized communities triggered a debate on the floor about the conflict potential of a politically-driven arts funding. The session left me slightly uneasy, with the remarks of a UK delegate on the ominous financial sway enjoyed over local artists by the relevant “Asian and Jewish communities” ringing in my ears. Shades of an international Zionist conspiracy to fund mediocre and tendentious art!

The next morning, fortified by Stefan Pucher’s excellent production of The Persians by Aeschylus, the only extant Greek tragedy to treat recent history rather than a mythological subject, I took my place at the second of the IETM sessions devoted to the intersection of economics and the arts, and to the misunderstandings arising from such encounters. The organizers’ relatively traditional formulation of the opposed interests of art and commerce – the former autonomous and anarchic, the latter profit-driven and market-oriented – and their tentative call to its Hegelian sublation (“Aren’t artists also market entrepreneurs?”) evoked for me the paradigm shift effected in Systems of Survival, a latter-day Platonic dialogue by Jane Jacobs, Canada’s late doyenne of urban studies.(2) In Systems of Survival Jacobs stages a freewheeling debate among various representatives of the bourgeois professions on the alleged moral opposition of commerce and politics, and the threat to deontology posed by an intermingling of the two spheres. In the course of this debate, one of the book’s protagonists develops a zany theory of the emergence of art in response to the dangers of resource depletion faced by prehistoric hunters and gatherers: to prevent over-hunting, the interlocutor suggests, primitive communities invented the arts, including performance and music, as a means to distracting would-be hunters during the periods in which their stock of wildlife was regenerating. By these lights, art and commerce – understood broadly as the business of meeting human needs by way of a division of labour and an economy of exchange – are not so much opposed as complementary, and exist in a delicate symbiosis, whereby each supplies the lack occasioned by the other: while commerce provides the sustenance required for human life (and thus, a fortiori, culture), the arts provide a meaningful activity to fill the leisure time necessary for the replenishment of vital resources.

And indeed, the panelists at the morning session went on to describe a contemporary art world that increasingly operates in accordance with just such a synergetic model, and is no longer automatically subject to the anti-materialist dictates of 1968. Today’s young artists emulate the very same entrepreneurs reviled by a previous generation, and are busily acquiring such pragmatic (not to say prosaic) skills as application writing and courting corporate sponsorship. What’s more, the phenomenon is international, in keeping with the liberalization of the “real” economy known as globalization. Panel-member Hans Abbing, a practicing artist who is also a trained economist, noted that his book Why Are Artists Poor? is now available in translation in Japan and Korea, where until very recently artists had been able to rely on public support, and the romantic/Bohemian figure of the starving artist was thus practically unknown.(3) Originally published in 2002 and subtitled The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, Abbing’s book explicitly addresses the problems arising from the conventional dichotomy of art and business as irrevocably opposed in their relationship to utility: “Art as something holy is contradictory to the notion of calculation and monetary exchange,” he writes. “Although the arts earn approximately half of their income in the market, [they] can only maintain their sacred status when people associate [them] with the values of the gift sphere rather than the market sphere. This status entails a denial of the economy.”(4)

While Abbing’s co-panelists, Katrin Kolo and Christoph Weckerle, offered field notes from their own work at the interface of the arts and business (as a professional choreographer and an academic expert in cultural policy, respectively) to support the view that an artist’s cultural capital must be good for some financial capital, and to downplay anxieties about the privatization of arts funding, commentators from the floor were less wholehearted about the ongoing liberalization of the art world. The skepticism voiced ranged from the practical (“Does the best application for funding necessarily lead to the best art?”) to the theoretical (one delegate aired the familiar sociological topos of the dangers of commodifying the gift, understood deconstructively as an exceptional but necessary component in a society otherwise based on exchange). Those participants who were prepared to envision an art world increasingly dependent on the private sector, and who had themselves already been involved in efforts to “professionalize” the process whereby artists apply for corporate support, now hedged their bets with a social-utopian proviso: if artistic products are to be subject to market forces, the argument from the floor ran, and if the choice of one product over another is dictated by one’s educational level (as opposed to the influences on one’s choice of a non-artistic product, such as toothpaste), then the entire educational system needs overhauling, to ensure that young citizens learn not only how to balance their checkbooks and what to sing on their national holiday, but also how to distinguish genuine art from chintzy knockoffs.

Needless to say, Abbing reacted with skepticism of his own to what sounded like a re-sacralization of the art world, and cited his own experiences with the current crop of young artists, who display admirably hard-headed savvy at the negotiation table as well as in the matter of juggling moneymaking jobs while leaving themselves enough time to create. In fact, he reported, an older generation of European artists, having been able to take advantage in the postwar world of a still-booming academic and consulting market, often find that their “day job” proves more absorbing and fulfilling (not to say financially rewarding) than their career as an artist, and may thus be lured away from the Bohemian life altogether. The consensus among the panelists, in the end, and shared by some of the less rigidly idealist members of the audience, was that today’s art world requires the development of an intermediary class of agents, advisers and communications experts to assist professional artists in their quest for support from foundations, corporations and, although less so than in the past, the public sector. It occurred to me as the session drew to a close, however, that, what with one national government after another spending public money to bail out its private sector, the ultimate provenance of the funds deployed by corporate sponsorship departments was probably moot.

The third and final session in the economic misunderstandings series, an open debate about the social significance of art and culture moderated by Hans Abbing, returned in part to the themes of the previous roundtable discussion to consider the proposition that “only too much art is enough art”. While the academies had controlled the production of art in the nineteenth century and during the zenith of classical modernism by certifying only a finite number of licensed practitioners, the individualist, rebellious second half of the twentieth century saw a veritable explosion of artists, proving Joseph Beuys’s claim that “everyone is an artist”. Demand will not always keep pace with supply, however, and today’s aspiring artists must therefore begin early on to consider a “Plan B”, Abbing noted: a means to supplement their readily available social and cultural capital with its economic counterpart. The other alternative, of course, as proposed in the earlier session, is simply to increase the demand for art through the educational system, a Keynesian approach to the expected downturn in artists’ fortunes brought about by a deepening recession that is marred by one central flaw: the resources needed thus to fine-tune (not to say overhaul) national educational systems are the very same resources that are in short supply as a result of the economic recession.

The only hope, then, the assembly seemed on the point of agreeing, is that the private sector, which has in recent times revealed itself as little more than a mask for the public sector (or is it the other way around?), may come to recognize the utility (i.e. profitability) of art for its own, corporate purposes, and thus make the crucial leap, in its policy of support for the arts, from sponsorship to investment. Such a leap could, however, while guaranteeing longer-range and deeper-pocketed funding, prove ultimately fatal – for the arts, which would thereby run the very real risk of becoming co-opted by the military-industrial piper who is paying their tune.

Tan Wälchli, a Swiss cultural theorist, has written interestingly about the art-business nexus, in particular as regards the recent renaissance of performance art.(5) “The current popularity of performance,” writes Wälchli, “is by no means limited to the art world: it also serves as a key concept of capitalism, which speaks of the ‘performanceÂ’ of a share, a company, a product, or indeed an employee.” This affinity is at first glance counter-intuitive, since, as Wälchli notes, citing the work of the philosopher Judith Butler, “performance art appears to be diametrically opposed to the popularity of performance as a key capitalist precept, which serves to draw the very social boundaries and prop up the very order its artistic counterpart seeks to subvert, along with its defining categories.” And yet, as Butler herself argues, “performance qua subversion is quite capable of functioning despite the dependence of the social order itself on performance”.

In other words, although the objects of performance artÂ’s subversive attention may themselves be perfectly aware of the theatricality of their own “performance” – as executives, political leaders, or sovereigns – performance artÂ’s power nevertheless lies in its ability to demonstrate to the subjects of traditional hegemonic systems the utter contingency of those constructs: “By explicitly staging itself,” Wälchli writes, “performance art shows that our ‘normalÂ’ regime is a world of illusions, a theatrical stage on which we are all constantly performing. The state of emergency in which performance art temporarily undermines social conventions thus serves to point up the constructedness of those same conventions. The aim is to highlight the fact that the social order depends on a game of charades, and hence offers a virtually infinite space for the creation of a host of performative identities, despite the official refusal to recognize this process.”

By these lights, artists must play a challenging double game if they are to secure the funding they need to do the work they want: while persuading business sponsors of the affinities between artistic creativity and such corporate virtues as managerial prowess, streamlined productivity, and cost effectiveness, they will also have to avoid becoming too comfortable with the trappings of commercial success, and thus blunting their own critical acuity and objective discernment. “As for those whose success as performers has been rewarded with rank and prestige,” Wälchli concludes, “they too continue to exhibit a constitutive suspicion of the very social order in which they have risen to their position – indeed, their success depends upon the sophisticated manner in which they express this mistrust. Performance artists would seem to be among such subjects. Is the enormous success enjoyed by contemporary members of their guild not in fact evidence that their standing is equivalent to that of the performative subjects who figure as the pillars of society?”

As I reflected on this balancing act, one intent on securing (to employ the relevant corporate-speak) “sustainable performance” for the arts by convincing the market that it stands to benefit in like manner by investing in (and thus sustaining) a rather different kind of performance, I recalled my own attempts, all those years ago, to formulate a Jamesonian theory of the dangers of co-option faced by critical creativity, from classical Athens to the Elizabethan period. Like the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear, who is doomed to suffer the same fate as the King whose folly he has chastized, today’s progressive social critique in the form of art, once in the pay of the very market it would criticize, risks not only being co-opted, but also brought low, whether under the pressure of its own critique, or dragged down by the weight of the juggernaut to which it has hitched its donkey. The arts must therefore learn to cozen the corporate world into paying for its own send-up, while remaining sufficiently aloof to forestall charges of hypocrisy, and independent enough to avoid going to ground with their master, in the night which “pities neither wise man nor fool”.