Art, Performance, and Outsourcing in Corporate Art Commissioning: An American Scenario

At a time when corporate sponsorship of contemporary art has become increasingly widespread, allowing sponsors to enhance their brands and receive return on investment in the shape of tax breaks and publicity, business has maximized this association by also capitalizing on what it perceives as the work ethic and entrepreneurial skills of the art world. The art world has indeed become a benchmark of production and management for the business world which praises its ever-youthful energy, its inventiveness, hipness, and sense of freedom, its flexible working hours and short-term or zero-hour contracts. Following the success of the creative industries, private companies have been keen to embrace this post-Fordist work model and link it to the global neoliberal market economy. This article looks into the way different performance artists have engaged with a corporate environment, but also more generally at the way art has navigated new relations with its economic context in recent years. And since performance management is largely the result of the export of American business models to Western Europe since World War II, it makes sense to look for the roots of this phenomenon on that side of the Atlantic.