新作坊

新作坊 Humanity Innovation and Social Practice

Chinese performing arts: from communist to globalised kitsch

摘要:

While Chinese authorities closely monitor artists, artistic venues and performances, they give free rein to commercial culture as long as stability, prosperity and consumerism are sustained. The result, given China’s blistering urban economic growth, is that commercial pressure, more than government restriction, determines the conditions of cultural production and export. This has led to a kind of mass production of the art and culture the state approves of and a snuffing out of what it does not. This is how Chinese communist kitsch has transformed into a kitsch of globalised capitalism.