Emerging economies like China, UAE, Brazil, and others are experiencing a boom in new museums, art galleries, and cultural institutions as their middle classes grow and governments seek to enhance their global cultural profiles. While investments aim to promote economic growth and national identity, questions remain around justifying large public spending on culture when basic needs remain unmet and the long-term sustainability of the new cultural offerings. Western institutions are also partnering with emerging markets through deals that benefit both parties.

1. Emerging
economies
and the
culture boom
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2. Emerging economies
and the culture boom
London, Paris and New York might
be world leaders in museums and
cultural institutions, but a growing
number of cities in Asia, the Middle
East and Latin America are starting
to provide serious competition.
The three most-attended art
exhibitions of 2013 were not in
Europe or North America, but in
Taipei and Rio de Janeiro.
Last year Beijing’s National Museum
of China was the third most-visited
museum in the world, attracting
7.45m people, an increase of 38.7%
on 2012. Across Asia museum
attendance rose by 28% last
year, compared with a rise of 7%
globally, with particularly marked
increases at the Zhejiang Museum
in Hangzhou, China and the National
Palace Museum of Korea, where
visits rose by 75% and 118.8%,
respectively, between 2012
and 2013.
China has been erecting museums
and galleries at a prodigious
rate, opening more than 100 new
institutions annually, including
Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural
District and Beijing’s National
Art Museum of China. In Beijing,
planners are turning the 2008
Olympic Park into a cultural quarter
with an enormous new national
art museum. The 30,000-sq metre
institution – more than six times the
size of the current site - has been
designed by French architect Jean
Nouvel and will house 100,000
pieces of art from throughout
China’s history. Due for completion
in 2017, its management hopes to
attract 12m visitors a year, which
at current figures would make it
the world’s busiest art museum,
overtaking the Louvre in Paris.
In the Middle East, the United Arab
Emirates is boosting its cultural
offerings following a landmark
deal with the Louvre to build
its first overseas site. An “Abu
Dhabi Guggenheim” is also on its
way, while Dubai is developing
a reputation as a contemporary
art hub thanks to a new urban
cultural district called Alserkal
Avenue. Nearby Qatar is acquiring
a private collection of modern
and contemporary pieces and
hosting the likes of Damien Hirst,
while Saudi Arabia is building the
King Abdulaziz Center for World
Culture, which is set to open in 2015
in collaboration with the United
Kingdom’s Natural History Museum
and the British Museum.
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3. In Latin America too, despite an
economic slowdown, government
bodies and private institutions are
investing in new museums and art
galleries. In Brazil, the Museu de
Arte do Rio opened in 2013, and the
highly anticipated Museu do Amanhã
in Rio de Janeiro and the São Paulo
Museu da Imagem e do Som are
expected to open in 2015 and 2016
respectively. Mexico has won critical
acclaim for its new “contemporary
art shrine”, Museo Júmex , while
Colombia’s capital Bogotá now boasts
over 500 public and private cultural
venues, including Maloka, the largest
science and interactive technology
museum in South America.

4. Raising buildings, and
raising questions
What is driving such rapid building
of museums and art galleries in
these emerging economies? Are the
public investments justified when
large swathes of the population
remain poor and lack basic services?
Is top-down cultural promotion
desirable, and can it be sustained?
And what does this growing appetite
for culture mean for the West and its
institutions? These are among the
questions that attend the rise
of the culture industries in
emerging markets.
One driver of the boom is the
growth of the middle classes, which
is increasing domestic demand for
cultural activities previously out of
reach for many in these countries.
The trend is no different to that of
the West. Europe’s institutional art
collections of today were amassed in
part by 18th-century nouveau riche
buyers, says Paul Gladston, director
of the Centre for Contemporary
East-Asian Cultural Studies at the
University of Nottingham in the UK.
Art has always been about money
and the rise of it, according to Mr
Gladston, who cautions against
romantic notions to the contrary:
we readily embrace the narrative
of Vincent van Gogh as a struggling
artist, when in fact his brother was a
well-connected art dealer. “Modern
and contemporary art has always
been and continues to be very much
tied to money,” says Mr Gladston.
“But in the West we have tended
to deny that because we want to
enhance the critical credentials of
the art, which is its selling point.”

5. In the same way as they did in the
West, rising incomes in emerging
markets are driving art viewing
and collecting, and a “new cultural
infrastructure is being formed”,
says Georgina Adam, an art market
commentator and author of Big
Bucks: The Explosion of the Art
Market in the 21st Century. “Billions
of new consumers have been
released onto the market, and
there are increasing numbers of
people with disposable incomes,”
she says, noting that both art and
luxury goods are symbols of newly
acquired wealth in Asia. “Entering
the contemporary art market today
is a way of showing that you have
made money. Collecting art is
positional, a way of showing that
you’ve arrived.”
A second catalyst of the culture
boom is the ambition of cities to
enhance their global profile. Culture
is critical to a city’s identity and its
appeal as a destination to live, work
or travel in, and governments like
to flex their cultural muscle through
their capital cities.
Lyal White, director of the Centre
for Dynamic Markets at the Gordon
Institute of Business Science (GIBS)
at the University of Pretoria, South
Africa, also identifies a “cultural
catch-up” at play. “Emerging powers
do still see the West as being
progressive, and there is an element
of wanting to catch up with the
West,” he says. “Certainly in Asia
there is a strong idea of what places
like Paris and Rome are, and you
see Asian countries wanting to try
to replicate that – and in many cases
doing it bigger and better - to earn
global standing and recognition by
the West.”
Dubai is also looking to museums
and the arts to assert its own
cultural credentials. “Dubai has
evolved to become a cosmopolitan
city in a very short period of time,”
said Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal,
a real estate tycoon and Emirati
patron of the Alserkal art district.
“It is not about being compared to
other art capitals. We have become
a hub for the region, and this is a
unique achievement”.

6. While promoting culture might be
partly about catching up with the
West or a country asserting its own
credentials, there are synergies to
be had with established Western
institutions. China, Brazil and Abu
Dhabi have all sought deals with
Western cultural brands. The
Louvre and the Guggenheim, under
construction on Saadiyat Island in
Abu Dhabi, will be part of a wider
a cultural quarter, parts of which
are due to open in 2015. While the
Guggenheim has been a pioneer of
overseas ventures, ranging from its
acclaimed Bilbao branch to its less
successful Las Vegas experiment,
this is the first time that the Louvre
has allowed the use of its name
and brand.
Such collaborations are not
without their critics. Some French
commentators have accused
the museum of selling out. Jean
d’Haussonville, formerly head of
Agence France Museums, which
manages the development of the
Louvre in Abu Dhabi, describes such
criticisms as ““shameful, close to
xenophobia”, adding: “The money
will restore France’s capacity
to acquire pieces on the
international market.”
Established institutions in Europe
and North America have long forged
links with museums overseas. These
partnerships used to be more about
Western museums enhancing their
collections, but now that model has
been inverted. “From a cultural
industrial point of view, it’s a
marriage made in heaven,” says
Mr Gladston of the deals between
emerging-market institutions and
the West. “You have countries with
a lot of surplus value and capital
which are hungry for culture, and
the West, which has that culture
as well as the brand: the in-depth
expertise, the reputations and the
collections of works.”

7. China’s leap
China’s cultural push has raised a
different kind of controversy – a
view that motivations are not so
much about art as about politics.
As Ms Adam puts it: “China has
made it clear that promoting culture
is about soft power, [presenting
to the world] a better face. There
is quite a lot of negative coverage
of China, and they wanted to give
a positive spin on what they are
doing, to make people forget about
clampdowns on individual groups.”
Mr Gladston agrees that there has
been a strong centralised policy
push from the government to
promote culture. “I think we are
looking at something similar to the
Great Leap Forward and the five-year
plans of the Maoist period,” he
explains. “You have the government
saying: ‘We don’t have enough
museums and are not competitive
enough with the West, we have to
catch up, especially with America,
so let’s build these museums and
create a cultural infrastructure.’”
He says this process is not
dissimilar to what happened in
the West after the second world
war. “I question just how organic
the West’s development of
contemporary art and culture was…
After the second world war many
developed countries, including
Britain and America, deliberately
pursued programmes of cultural
promotion and soft power in relation
to contemporary art and the
proliferation of museums.”

8. All of the economies described
so far, except those of the Gulf,
have poverty challenges that raise
questions about the wisdom of
spending state funds on cultural
initiatives. Most obvious is the
opportunity cost: money spent on
cultural institutions is money not
spent on sanitation or healthcare.
Indeed, tough economic conditions
in South Africa since 2011 have led
to cultural projects fading from the
political agenda. Some governments
are experimenting with offering
corporate tax breaks to encourage
the investment of private funds;
while this approach is less obvious
than spending, it nonetheless
represents a loss of tax revenue to
the state. Brazil, for example, allows
corporations to direct 4% of owed
tax income to cultural projects.
According to Gegê Leme Joseph, a
Brazilian architect and museologist,
it is clear that Brazil is maximising
its time in the spotlight between
hosting the World Cup in 2014 and
the Olympics in 2016, deliberately
trying to “punch above its weight”
and letting people know that the
country is about “more than football
and Samba”.
But recent demonstrations during
Brazil’s World Cup, which criticised
the government’s spending
priorities, show that for all the high
attendance figures there is still a
feeling that money could be better
spent elsewhere.
Some experts believe that public
funding for culture, even in
emerging economies, is justified
on economic grounds. Caroline
Watson, vice-chair of the World
Economic Forum’s Global Agenda
Council on the Arts in Society, says
there is compelling evidence of the
contribution of culture to
the economy.
An economic
rationale?

9. “Economists have not always
understood the relevance of
culture, but I think they are starting
to realise there is an economic
argument for promoting the arts,”
she says. Ms Watson, founder of Hua
Dan, a theatre company and one
of China’s first social enterprises,
adds: “As emerging markets do well
at meeting the basic needs of their
people, to get to the next level of
development they will need to look
more profoundly at their education
systems, and how they empower
human potential. The arts have
much to offer and provide a basis
for the emergence of new forms of
creativity that can fuel a country’s
identity and economic growth.”
The UN Educational, Scientific and
Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)
is eager to highlight the economic
value of creative industries,
including everything from art, crafts,
music, dance and film to toy design,
computer games and heritage. In
its 2013 Creative Economy Report
UNESCO says that between 2002
and 2011 the creative industries in
developing countries grew annually
by 12%, and that by 2011 world trade
in creative goods and services was
worth US$624bn. Danielle Cliche,
senior UNESCO official, says the
creative sector represented between
2% and 5% of most developing
countries’ GDP over this period and
should be taken seriously as a driver
for economic development.
The Gulf’s investment in arts,
culture and museums, meanwhile,
is a way of diversifying resource-reliant
economies and creating
new attractions for tourists. It is
also a way to attract professional
expatriates, who are needed to bring
innovation and expertise to newly
built cities.
While stressing the economic
returns on cultural investment, Ms
Cliche also argues that culture offers
populations a political voice – an
important part of the development
process. “The creative economy
has non-monetary benefits, such as
individual and cultural expression,
which empowers people and
provides them with a platform for
social and political agency and gives
them a voice,” she says.
xSouth Africa, where Ms Joseph
has worked on several major
heritage projects, including the
Nelson Mandela Museum, has
used museums to inform national
dialogues in the post-apartheid
era. “A lot of money was put into
cultural institutions to retell stories
that hadn’t been told,” she says.
“Museums were important in
helping to retell South Africa’s story
and reshape its identity.”
Constitution Hill, for example, is
a museum built on the site of an
old fort and jail where political
prisoners, including Nelson
Mandela, Walter Sisulu and Oliver
Tambo, were held. The museum is
also the site of the country’s new
Constitutional Court, built with
bricks from the old prison.

10. Arts can help urban regeneration,
and citing the example of Medellín
in Columbia, where investment in
culture has reduced high crime
rates, Ms Cliche says: “There is a
strong argument that placing culture
at the heart of urban planning and
development contributes to social
wellbeing, giving new capacities and
imperatives to create and innovate.”
South Africa’s Johannesburg, also
known for its high crime rates,
has used cultural investments
to revitalise districts such as
Braamfontein, where theatres,
galleries, museums and concert
spaces have now become attractions
for middle-class audiences
previously preferring to stay in the
suburbs. The Maboneng Precinct
project, meanwhile, has transformed
a former industrial wasteland on
the eastern edge of the city centre
into a vibrant urban community
with artist studios, restaurants and
entertainment venues, as well as loft
apartments, offices, a hotel and a
museum.

11. A final question regarding the
emerging markets culture boom
concerns sustainability: will
people continue to attend new
exhibitions or will the novelty wear
off, leaving a stock of underused
institutions? Several of China’s
new contemporary art galleries are
struggling to attract both content
and visitors, with crowds moving on
to the next new place as quickly as
they arrived. High-profile shows in
Qatar have attracted disappointing
numbers, raising questions about
whether the country – with its small
population – has a sufficiently large
audience to make big museums
sustainable.
“Powerful marketing tools can
attract visitors for a while, but
considerations of sustainability do
not always get taken on board,”
says Ms Joseph. “There are some
amazing big structures in Brazil that
attract many people to start with,
but their long-term vision is poor,
so their initial ‘bangs’ are huge, but
then they find it harder to know how
to make it interesting for the long
term and how they will be able to
attract audiences and continue to
generate income.” She adds that the
Brazilian tax break has been “a nice
mechanism … but the easy access to
money doesn’t force the planners of
cultural projects to conceive them
based on sustainable or entirely
viable plans.”
The key to long-term success will
be for institutions to forge a unique
cultural identity that will draw in
crowds, both domestic and foreign,
for the long term. Some institutions
have learned their lessons, Ms
Joseph says, citing the Museu do
Futebol in São Paulo, which realised
that it needed to do more than just
tell the story of football. Whether
in developed or emerging markets,
cultural institutions that their voice
and identity will stand the test of
time
Sustaining
culture

12. About this
report
Emerging economies and the culture boom was written by The Economist Intelligence Unit. It examines the
rise of museums, galleries and the arts across emerging markets, its drivers, its supporters and its critics.
The report is based on desk research and seven expert interviews.
The Economist Intelligence Unit would like to thank the following individuals (listed alphabetically) for sharing
their insights and expertise during the research for this paper:
Georgina Adam, art market editor-at-large, The Art Newspaper; art market columnist, Financial Times; and
author of Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century
Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, Emirati patron of Dubai’s Alserkal arts district
Danielle Cliche, secretary of the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of
Cultural Expressions and chief, Section on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions at UNESCO
Paul Gladston, associate professor of culture, film and media and director of the Centre for Contemporary
East-Asian Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham; and editor of the Journal of Contemporary
Chinese Art
Gegê Leme Joseph, Brazilian architect and museologist who worked in South Africa between 2004 and
2013 on heritage strategies and products for flagship museums including Constitutional Hill, the Nelson
Mandela Museum and Kliptown Open Air Museum
Caroline Watson, vice-chair of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Arts in Society
Lyal White, director of the Centre for Dynamic Markets, Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS),
University of Pretoria, South Africa