Hans Haacke: Corporal

“I think it is important to distinguish between the traditional notion of patronage and the public relations maneuvers parading as patronage today. Invoking the name of Maecenas, corporations give themselves an aura of altruism. The American term sponsoring more accurately reflects that what we have here is really an exchange of capital: financial capital on the part of the sponsors and symbolic capital on the part of the sponsored. Most business people are quite open about this when they speak to their peers. Alain-Dominique Perrin, for example, says quite bluntly that he spends Cartier's money for purposes that have nothing to do with the love of art.”

Hans Haacke

Pierre Bourdieu and Hans Haacke, Free Exchange, Stanford: Stanford University, (1995), p. 17.
1990s

Love , Money , People , Art

“In an ever-advancing spiral the public was made to believe that only Hollywood-style extravaganzas were worth seeing and that only they could give an accurate sense of the world of art. The resulting box-office pressure made the museums still more dependent on corporate funding. Then came the recessions of the 1970s and 1980s. Many individual donors could no longer contribute at the accustomed rate, and inflation eroded the purchasing power of funds. To compound the financial problems, many governments, facing huge deficits—often due to sizable expansions of military budgets—cut their support for social services as well as their arts funding. Again museums felt they had no choice but to turn to corporation for a bail-out.”

Hans Haacke

1980s, "Museums, Managers of Consciousness," 1983

World , Art , Support , Problem

“Starting on a large scale towards the end of the 1960s in the United States and expanding rapidly ever since, corporate funding has spread during the last five years to Britain and the Continent. Ambitious exhibition programs that could not be financed through traditional sources led museums to turn to corporations for support. The larger, more lavishly appointed these shows and their catalogues became, however, the more glamour the audiences began to expect.”

Hans Haacke

1980s, "Museums, Managers of Consciousness," 1983

Support

“A liberal public is interesting to have as an audience. It is for that very reason that corporations make such an effort to ally themselves with cultural institutions.”

Hans Haacke

Deborah Solomon " The Way We Live Now: 3-26-00: Questions for Hans Haacke; School for Scandal http://www.nytimes.com/2000/03/26/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-3-26-00-questions-for-hans-haacke-school-for-scandal.html," in: The New York Times Biographical Service, Vol. 31 (2000), p. 588
2000s

Effort

“I have a particular interest in corporations that give themselves a cultural aura and are in other areas suspect. Philip Morris presents itself in New York as the lover of culture while it turns out that if you look behind the scenes, it is also a prime funder of Jesse Helms, someone who is very hostile to the arts.”

Hans Haacke

Hans Haacke in: Roberta Smith "A Giant artistic Gibe at Jesse Helms," in New York Times, April 20, 1990; Republished in: The New York Times Guide to the Arts of the 20th Century: 1900-1929, (2002) p. 2929
1990s

Hostility , Art , Lovers