What’s the world’s best city for contemporary art? It all depends on how and what you measure, of course, but such assessments have traditionally been made on vibes (“does this place feel buzzy?”) plus some feel for how much money changes hands (mostly at aucrtion). Now the Centre for International Competitiveness believes it has applied some rigour to the assessment in its newly published World Art Cities Index.
The Centre is a consultancy operation that as the name suggests researches competitiveness in terms of economic geographies. It’s best known for the World Knowledge Competitiveness Index, European Competitiveness Index, and UK Competitiveness Index, which all seek to measure how places and businesses build competitiveness through knowledge, innovation, skills, networks and entrepreneurship.
Now it has brought this thinking to the art world, via this paper by Robert Huggins, Professor of Economic Geography at Cardiff University. His World Art Cities Index (WACI) is “a composite measure of aesthetic innovative capacity” that ranks 50 cities around the world.
The basic argument is that a great art city is not simply rich, busy or full of museums; it needs a functioning ecosystem for viewing art, buying art and producing art. Or as the report puts it, “aesthetic innovation in the field of contemporary art, working alongside technical and social innovation, feeds into the institutional, behavioural and economic development of the city that hosts it”. And elsewhere: “Art has been a maker of cities, not merely an ornament to them”.
Local knowledge would argue for the inclusion of more Gulf representatives, and maybe Vancouver could’ve scraped in; but the list seems solid enough. The index scoring (more on that later) has produced some spectacular contrasts – 150+ index points between 1st and 2nd, more than 100 between 2nd and 3rd; but never more than 8 points between successive entries from 8 to 48. Which suggests the top scorers are way ahead, and the rest have relatively little difference between them.
The Index actually has the usual suspects out front, though New York at No.1 is a long way ahead of the rest (the chasing pack is headed by London, Berlin, LA, and Paris – the full table is at the end of this piece).
Fun as league tables are, it’s only numbers. What’s more interesting is the methodology and some of the broader conclusions.
The fundamental model says an art ecosystem involves interaction between four elements:
So far so good, though the scope of ‘agency’ might be expanded to include financial resources (how many local buyers have the disposable income to buy the work) and even urban resources (where are the cheap studios and garrets that mean artists can do their thing without the need for a day job or rich parents). The real trick comes in putting a value on each of these – both a score and a weighting – and we suspect that this necessarily involves a good deal of subjectivity. How important is the presence of an art school to a ‘creative city’? How about four or five art schools?
The premise of the Index itself is that a city’s standing in the contemporary art world has three distinct elements, or “capacities”: and each of these conveniently has three subcomponents
- Production Places: a city’s capacity to generate aesthetically innovative work. Measured through …
- a city’s resident base of acknowledged leading contemporary artists
- schools that train new practitioners
- the international recognition the city’s artists command
- Market Places: a city’s capacity to circulate, valorise, and transact that work. Measured by …
- a city’s commercial gallery sector
- art fairs
- the international standing of its dealers, collectors, curators and funders
- Consumption Places: a city’s capacity to exhibit, contextualise, and “confer institutional legitimacy” on contemporary art. Measures:
- contemporary-facing museums
- the city’s wider museum culture
- any recurring platforms like biennials
The report rates cities on each of these, and combines the scores into the composite index. It goes into much detail for the measures used, identifying sources for the data in each case. That of course doesn’t guarantee their validity, and often it comes down to judgement calls: for “number of acknowledged leading contemporary artists”; someone somewhere who produced the original data had to decide first what ‘leading’ means, who’s doing the acknowledging, and even whether ‘contemporary’ refers to the style of art or whether the artist happens to be alive. You can count the number of museums or art schools or galleries, but it’s more difficult to say how good or respected or influential they are. And so on.
There’s no easy answer to this. At least the report spells out its assumptions and sources in detail; you might disagree, but at least you get the opportunity to do so.
Overall, this is an ambitious – indeed, valiant – attempt to apply some statistical rigour to the subject, even if ‘art-city strength’ is not the same thing as artistic quality, cultural relevance, public participation, the value of local practice, or even the KPIs of CCI policies.
So perhaps the Index is best used as a structured provocation. It does ask what actually makes an art scene durable and influential, and it makes the assumptions behind that question visible. That in itself is a useful and usable approach, if only for economic planners at City Hall; your mileage may well vary.
But the index is not merely a league table. The broader underlying claim is that aesthetic innovation works rather like other forms of innovation: it emerges from networks of artists, institutions, education, markets, audiences, criticism, curators and informal connections.
The major takeaway is that a city cannot become an art capital simply by throwing money at the matter – building starchitect-designed museums, scattering artworks by big-name sculptors around public places, importing prestigious brands or staging flagship events. Those can be important signals, and they may in time generate the required results: they do not automatically create the deeper conditions that enable artists to develop careers, take risks, form networks and gain international recognition.
So what can we adduce about the local art ecosystem? Well, Dubai ranks 42nd of the 50 cities examined on the overall index, and no other Gulf city makes the cut. Dubai’s modest ranking – below the likes of Cologne (32), Taipei (34) and Johannesburg (37) – obviously doesn’t mean that it lacks an art scene. But on this index, and with this index’s parameters, Dubai has not yet converted its cultural infrastructure, market activity and international visibility into the same kind of integrated ecosystem found in the likes of New York, London, Paris and Berlin.
Dubai ranks 14 on the Production Places Index, which seems a bit optimistic to us – there aren’t many art schools per se, but it does have an increasing reputation for the number and reputation of individual local artists. Dubai is at 35 on Market Places (so not so many places to sell art) and a lowly 48 on Consumption Places (not enough places to see art).
Maybe the implication is that the UAE should focus less on headline moments and more on the underling conditions that could build a genuinely self-sustaining creative ecosystem – affordable studio and exhibition space, public grants and other support for practitioners, more critical writing and stronger links between art education and professional careers, and so on.
Many of us have been saying that for some time, of course. Maybe the World Art Cities Index can provide a bit more weight to the argument.
The World Art Cities Index is available as a free download here.
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