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| LOCAL CULTURAL EMBEDDEDNESS OF THE FINE ARTS INDUSTRY IN BEIJ ING |
| ZHOU Shang-yi1, SHEN Xiao-ping2 |
1. School of Geography at Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China;
2. Department of Geography at CCSU, USA |
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Abstract Beijing supports its cultural and creative industries in its 11st City Development Plan. Creativity is the emphasis of cultural industries which Beijing is developing, and art industry is the relatively pure creative one in six kinds of cultural industries. A scholar holds that creative industry is the sum of creative art and cultural one. Fine art is one of the creative industries. Beijing is an important center of it. In the recent years, some of fine art clusters emerge in Beijing's. How to guide and promote the healthy and rapid development of fine art creative industry becomes a hot issue in academic circle. This paper explores the relationship between fine art industry and Beijing's system culture and ideological culture from a geography perspective, in order to provide a basis for making policies which promote cultural and creative industries.
This paper uses the concept of embeddedment by economic geographers, which has been discussed frequently for more than 10 years. The authors prefer to the embeddedness of Karl Polanyi, that is embedding into local ideological culture and institutional culture, rather than to local economic network. Taking three fine art clusters (798 Art District, Songzhuang Artist Village and Guanyintang Cultural Avenue) in Beijing as fieldwork places, the authors collect information from the interviewees and websites of Beijing's fine artists, and then analyse the styles, marketing orientation, allocation of ateliers and galleries, etc.. The paper tries to find how deep the fine art in Beijing embeds the local culture. The conclusions are:
1) In the stage of creative production, the artists do not embed into local culture sufficiently, although they may do it necessarily.
2) In the stage of exhibition and selling, artists and galleries only consider how to embed into city's cultural milieu than the local cultures.
3) After locating on a well known art district, a gallery should consider how to embed to succeeded culture, in order to get extra benefit of the local name brand.
4) Artists and galleries have weak relationship with local social network while they pay more attention to local institutions.
All of the conclusions proved that municipal of Beijing have more influence on Beijing's fine art industry by policies than by cultural milieu construction. It should be discussed further about how to avoid overterritorialized for the fine artists.
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Received: 20 February 2008
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2008, Vol. 23 
