IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

76 Chapter 4
a city for passive participation in entertainment. Sustainable cities will be
postspectacular.
The trouble is that place marketers are not alone in missing this point.
Cultural producers, too, are stuck in a point-to-mass mindset. I attended a
meeting in Amsterdam on the subject of ‘‘hosting.’’ The invitation posed
an interesting question: ‘‘What is the relationship between art biennales
and their host cities?’’ Many international art power brokers turned up for
this meeting, which was hosted by an organization called Manifesta. At the
meeting, the curators and critics and producers seemed to be most interested
in ‘‘viewers’’ and ‘‘audiences’’ and ‘‘publics.’’ It dawned on me, as I
listened to the art world’s heavy hitters in action, that art has become
most attractive to the interests it once ridiculed. The tourism industry loves
art because its events and museums are ‘‘attractions.’’ Property developers
love art because a bijou gallery lends allure to egregious projects. For city
marketers, an art biennale bestows an aura of intelligence on a city. Planners
are bewitched by the idea that if they can only lure the ‘‘creative class’’
to their city, their place will become more glamorous. ‘‘Our events are not
summer camps,’’ pleaded Franco Bonami, director of the Venice Biennale.
Bonami invited more than five hundred artists to that year’s event. But he
did not mention one single word about what, if anything, these five hundred
people had to say—or why the rest of us should care. After two hours I
had to leave. ‘‘Hosting’’ felt like a sales meeting for Saga Holidays.
So then I went to Japan where Prada, which at the time was said to be 1.5
billion euros in debt, had lavished 87 million dollars on a new Herzog and
de Meuron–designed store in Tokyo. ‘‘Shopping,’’ a public relations person
gushed in the press, ‘‘is the fundamental purpose of cities today.’’ In a busy
Tokyo street the new store’s Plexiglas exterior, which is like bubble wrap,
certainly stood out—and so it should, for that much more. A creative
consultant named Christopher Everard told The Economist that ‘‘by using
iconic architects, the label is building brand equity.’’ 9 (Everard’s firm is
called InterLife Consultancy. I e-mailed him the suggestion that he change
its name to ‘‘Get A Life Consultancy’’—but he has not replied.) For me the
Prada project smelled like the last days of Rome.
My desolation at this sad consumerism was not diminished by a
visit on that same trip to Tokyo’s Roppongi Hills tower, an eight-hundredthousand-square-meter
giant that had just opened when I was there. No expense
has been spared by Yoshiko Mori, its developer, to compensate local