{"id":71552,"date":"2026-09-08T21:27:48","date_gmt":"2026-09-08T17:27:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/?p=71552"},"modified":"2026-09-13T16:35:49","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T12:35:49","slug":"how-to-find-the-worlds-best-city-for-contemporary-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/magpie.ae\/staging4\/how-to-find-the-worlds-best-city-for-contemporary-art\/","title":{"rendered":"How to find the world’s best city for contemporary art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What\u2019s the world\u2019s 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 (\u201cdoes this place feel buzzy?\u201d) plus some feel for how much money changes hands (mostly at auction). Now the Centre for International Competitiveness believes it has applied some rigour to the assessment in its newly published World Art Cities Index<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Centre is a consultancy operation that as the name suggests researches competitiveness in terms of economic geographies. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now it has brought this thinking to the art world, via this paper<\/a> by Robert Huggins, Professor of Economic Geography at Cardiff University. His World Art Cities Index (WACI) is \u201ca composite measure of aesthetic innovative capacity\u201d that ranks 50 cities around the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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, \u201caesthetic 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\u201d. And elsewhere: \u201cArt has been a maker of cities, not merely an ornament to them\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2013 the full table is at the end of this piece).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fun as league tables are, it’s only numbers. What\u2019s more interesting is the methodology and some of the broader conclusions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fundamental model says an art ecosystem involves interaction between four elements:<\/p>\n\n\n\n