Arts under pressure: promoting cultural diversity in the age of globalization

* Introduction * 1.The arts and the world * The arts: an arena of struggle * Specific forms of communication * A triangle and a high-tech-archipelago * 2.The power to decide * The effects of sheer size * The question of ownership * Cultural package, political freight, economic weight * Second-tier corporations * Production and distribution on a mass scale * Visual arts markets: as nervous as the stock market * After the magnetic telegraph * 3.Doubtful originality * The twenty-first century's most valuable commodity * Hunt the pirates? * Mp3, Napster, freenet? * Originality * Artists still create * A Western concept * 4.Local artistic life * De-localization * A vast domain of cultural production * Diversity destroyed in less than a decade * Traditional, folk, popular, world? * Identities: demarcations of differences * Hybridity everywhere, but why? * 5.Corporate-driven culture * Aesthetics and the land of desire * Something to tell, something to sell * Surrounding the commercial message * Violence travels well * Influence * Arousing desire, awakening memory, creating fantasy * The story corporate culture doesn't tell * 6.Freedom and protection * Squaring the circle * Trade: another world war * Re-thinking economic globalization * A new international treaty on cultural diversity * The road away from cultural conglomeration * Cultural policies * Regional infrastructures for the distribution of films * The meltdown and abolition of copyright The need for respect and new creative dynamics * Substantial remunerati-on for artists * Protecting cultural heritage * The raid on art * All that's fragile needs protection * The production of discourse is always controlled * The digital domain is not what it seemed to be * 7.'Everything of value is defenceless' * References