“The winner takes it all”? Art sponsorship in Switzerland since the 1980s1
Emblazoned on the leaflet for the opening and exhibition of the 2017 Swiss Art Awards in blue writing on a white back-ground were the various non-artistic part-time jobs held down by the participating artists. The 2017 recipients were honoured at an awards ceremony in Basel that coincided with Art Basel. The communication for this year’s Swiss Art Awards focused on working conditions in artistic production. In addition to day jobs and sales, sources of income include funding from the Confederation, cantons and communes as well as private and corporate sponsorship. Originally established to “raise the mediocre level of Swiss art”2, the Swiss Federal Art Competition has been operating under the name “Swiss Art Awards” since 2002. The awards are now probably the most important means of promoting art for the Swiss Federal Office of Culture (FOC), and they receive the widest media attention.
The Swiss Federal Art Competition has undergone many changes and adaptations throughout its history, and these allow us to trace the development of art funding in Switzerland since the 1980s. Many issues have repeatedly been subject to debate and remain so to this day: besides the selection criteria, the question of whether to reduce the number of candidates so as to award higher grants or, alternatively, to support as many artists as possible with small amounts was raised in the early days of the grant system and has remained an important topic of discussion ever since. In 2014, the FOC cut the number of awards in half, from twenty to ten, with the aim of raising the visibility of the award-winning artists. The focus on “winners”, the packaging of grants as prestigious awards and the glamorous awards ceremony are central components of present day art funding.
Let us take a look back. As late as the 1950s and 1960s, the Swiss Federal Art Commission looked at the question of whether the economic situation of applicants should be included as a selection criterion or whether the grant instead constituted a recognition of artistic work. This would not change until the 1970s, naturally in keeping with the changing conditions in the art world and the transformed image of the artist. Hence the atmosphere in the 1970s remained primarily market-critical. Artists striving for attention sought to be defined as exhibition artists and cared less about galleries than they did about the Federal Art Grant. By about 1980, a momentous paradigm shift had occurred.
As the possibilities for artistic expression diversified, strategies and actors in art funding multiplied as well. Besides private and corporate sponsors, additional opportunities for Swiss artists to gain access to the international art scene started to emerge during the 1970s in the form of major curators and the Art Basel fair. Starting in the early 1980s, Swiss art was lifted out of the context of national significance and assessed increasingly on the basis of internationally established criteria. The international art establishment was now met with acceptance among artists, too. Rather than positioning themselves outside of the “system”, they acknowledged their involvement or even reflected on it in their art. Once the 1990s arrived, market strategies and efforts to produce and present one’s work in a media-friendly way had become commonplace.
The commoditisation of culture
This connection to the international art scene was equally important for federal culture promotion. Growing recognition of the diverse artistic activities and the international success of Swiss artistic production contributed to the discovery of their economic potential. After 1980, the emphasis in terms of motivation and logic shifted accordingly. Instead of primarily maintaining the country’s cultural heritage, priority was now given to contemporary art and thus to socio-cultural and economic considerations.
Terms borrowed from economics, such as “multiplier effect”, found their way into debates on cultural policy. For the public and private sectors alike, a broad array of cultural offerings was crucial with regard to image and geographical competitiveness. Creativity and innovation came to be the most important productive forces of the future, which consequently made artists — as independent, creative people and thus agents of these forces, so to speak — especially interesting, perhaps even to the point of becoming thought leaders. As all areas of life started to undergo commoditisation, even art and the art industry were co-opted by the capitalist system, pervaded by commodity logic and transformed into consumer goods. As a result, the industry inched closer and closer to competition and performance-based scrutiny. In the 1980s, marketing and communication departments discovered the value of art and culture sponsorship, which subsequently developed into a widespread source of funding.
The increased importance of culture was eventually reflected in a repositioning of the Federal Art Competition as well. The process of bestowing the Federal Art Grants only started to move towards its present form in the course of the 1990s. In 1994, three major modifications were made to the federal competition: the first involved changing the name from “Swiss Federal Grant” to “Swiss Federal Award”.
The grant beneficiaries were now called award recipients, removing the merely “encouraging” character that had previously prevailed and instead emphasising the act of honouring a work that had already been created. The FOC cited a need for clarification as the reason for the new designation, but it was probably more about a change of image. In the new meritocracy, where performance and competition hold sway, giving out awards seemed more in keeping with the times than grant-based support. As a second modification, the exhibition featuring the artists invited to the second round was to find a home in a place where a large audience of people from the field gathered.3 Since 1994, the exhibition has coincided with the international Art Basel fair. Today, the competition aims not merely to add financial value for the artist but also (albeit not primarily) to create a reference for future exhibition opportunities. This links funding and market both geographically and in terms of content with the aim of offering artists and funding providers alike an opportunity to expand their networks.
The positioning of the award as an honorary distinction and the flirtation with the international context of Art Basel culminated in the 2002 renaming of the award for independent art as “Swiss Art Award”.
Prize and prestige
Awards are an integral part of present-day funding. Bestowing awards is considered a popular approach with great media impact, since they are easier to justify than a work or project grant that is prospective in nature. In its first Dispatch on culture, the Swiss federal government explained: “Prizes, awards and distinctions are to be understood as part of a national performance showcase. They constitute official as well as commercial and media recognition.”4
The reputation individual jury members enjoy is especially crucial in deciding who wins an award as the jury is there to imbue the whole enterprise with credibility. The more highly regarded or renowned an art expert, the greater the weight of his or her vote. The German architect and urban planner Georg Franck refers to these prominent figures as “the classical capitalists in the economy of attention”.5 The public announcement of an award and the awards ceremony itself also satisfy the need for prestige felt by private-sector art sponsors. Public/private funding partnerships are interesting in this context. Private sponsors use the platform provided by the state to raise their own profiles, for instance by turning up to present the awards they sponsor as part of the federal art competition.6 Quite often, nonpublic players base individual sponsorship and acquisition decisions on the outcomes of public art promotion. What amounts to a kind of reinsurance by the federal government at the same time reflects the frequently seen dynamics of observation and imitation among the various sponsors. The downside of this process is that it risks undermining the much-lauded goal of promoting artistic diversity.
And the winner is…
In modern society, success has taken on a general cultural importance. It is considered an obligation of sorts for anyone seeking social recognition. In a neoliberal, competitive society, the successful, brilliant artist leaves his or her competitors in the dust as a “winner”. That this depiction of artists — which, to some extent, is also a matter of selfpresentation — is something today’s funding bodies actually call for is evident from the almost inflationary use of the term “outstanding” in the texts forming the legal basis for art and culture promotion. The federal government, for instance, acknowledges “outstanding achievements in all cultural sectors”7, presents a Grand Award in honour of an “outstanding artistic career and oeuvre” and supports “outstanding emerging talents” to whom it ascribes the “potential for a national or international career”.8 Tellingly, the private sector uses the same vocabulary. Thus, Credit Suisse described its art-sponsorship philosophy in 2011 under
the heading Enabling Outstanding Achievements as follows: “Credit Suisse supports institutions that achieve excellence in their fields”.9
To this day, there is a repeated insistence on the clearly distinct objectives between public and private players. On the one hand, there is private-sector sponsorship, which comes with the expectation of a quid pro quo and is concerned about image cultivation and therefore seen as highly selective with regard to artistic content. On the other, there is the state, which is tasked with supporting art that is difficult to communicate and not marketable and focusing on artistic diversity. For the public and private sectors alike, a broad array of cultural offerings is, as mentioned earlier, important not just in terms of labour market policy, but also with respect to image and geographical competitiveness. As early as 1993, then Federal Councillor Ruth Dreifuss referred to “public cultural promotion as opposed to corporate sponsorship”.10 The idea of selfpresentation or image cultivation that is associated with it for all players does not ultimately vary much. Art serves as a vehicle for conveying societal and social responsibility.
The current Dispatch on culture focuses on the steady convergence of business and culture over recent decades using the concepts of “creation and innovation”. The objectives are to further intensify the “proven […] cooperation between cultural promotion, industry, business development and the promotion of innovation”11 and to harness synergies and thereby achieve “economic benefits” in certain areas.12
Cooperation between culture and business is certainly a good thing, but we should be wary of blindly adopting the corporate jargon common in the business world. By the same token, the range of funding must extend beyond the pursuit of profits and individual promotion of singular “winners”. Given that Swiss cultural promotion has prioritised cultural diversity throughout its history, an official commitment to real diversity is crucial here. This ensures that there is just as much scope for promoting undiscovered young talents as for supporting established artists, which is often dismissed as no longer necessary. Encouraging autonomous, non-commercial structures, for example, makes it possible to work in a way that is not necessarily geared to a specific product or target. Only art promotion that actually sets itself the task of mobilising its funding to further the cause of artistic and cultural diversity can meet the demands placed on it by the eternally diverse development of the arts.
Patrizia Keller is an art historian. In 2015, she earned her Ph.D. from the University of Zurich with a dissertation on funding for the visual arts in Switzerland since 1980. Since the beginning of 2016, she has been Curator and Deputy Director of the Nidwaldner Museum in Stans. As a member of the Aargauer Kuratorium, she
has been chair of the department of visual arts and performance since 2016.
1 The following remarks are based on research conducted as part of my dissertation: Patrizia Keller, Vom Holzboden auf das internationale KunstParkett. Die Förderung der bildenden Kunst in der Schweiz seit 1980 (diss. University of Zurich, 2015). For the period from 1950 until 1980 see Gioia Dal Molin, “Von der schwierigen Kunst, Kunst zu fördern.” Staatliches und nicht-staatliches Engagement für die bildende Kunst in der Schweiz zwischen 1950 und 1980 (diss. University of Zurich, 2014; being prepared for publication).
2 Quoted by Pierre-André Lienhard, “Gedanken zum Wettbewerb 1999”, in Federal Office of Culture (ed.), Eidgenössische Preise für Freie Kunst 1999. Exh. cat. Kunsthalle Zurich, 6 Nov.–30 Dec. 1999 (Bern, 1999), n. p.
3 A third modification of the Federal Art Competition involved the prize money, which was appreciably raised from 18,000 to 25,000 Swiss francs.
4 Dispatch on the promotion of culture for 2012–15 (Dispatch on culture),
23 Feb. 2011, p. 3019.
5 Georg Franck, Ökonomie der Aufmerksamkeit. Ein Entwurf (Munich, 1998),
p. 118.
6 The first (since 1976) to use this platform was the private Kiefer Hablitzel Foundation. From the 1990s onwards, the number of prizes awarded in this context increased. In 1993, for instance, the Federal Art Commission was confronted with a request of the Fondation Moët & Chandon (Suisse) pour l’Art. Another prize that was awarded in the context of the Swiss Art Awards by a private company was the Prix Mobilière of the Swiss insurance company Mobiliar, which was ran from 1996 to 2012.
7 See Dispatch on the promotion of culture for 2016–20 (Dispatch on culture), 28 Nov. 2014, p. 16.
8 Ibid., pp. 33–4.
9 See <http://www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch/uploads/tx_zephirkmdownload/media/Factsh… .pdf> (accessed 7 March 2011).
10 Ruth Dreifuss: “Staat und Kultur”. Presentation by Federal Councilor Ruth Dreifuss at the GDI Symposium Brot und Spiele, 23–24 Sep. 1993, Rüschlikon/Zurich, in Kulturförderung: Eine gemeinsame Aufgabe von Staat, Unternehmen und Mäzenen (Rüschlikon, 1993), pp. 8–9, here p. 7.
11 Dispatch on culture 2016–2020, p. 5.
12 Ibid., p. 91.