Turning Hong Kong into a capital of cool
In the louche demimonde of Manila in the 1960s, David Medalla was the unlikely peacock of a medley of American draft dodgers and Peace Corps dropouts, Boyboys and Peachy Girls, who struggled against the odds to define the city's counter-culture.
A member of one of the Philippines' wealthiest families, David - who pronounced his name in the French manner, stress on the second syllable - entered Columbia University at the age of 12 to study Greek drama. By his teens he had such icons of continental culture as Louis Aragon, one of the founders of surrealism, hailing his 'genius'. He swished about Manila's elite with callous disregard, his doting British lover towering over him.
Even with David around, however, Manila was no capital of cool. In 1969, at the opening of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines, built on landfill that destroyed the beautiful sweeping curve of Manila Bay, David carried out a guerilla action in keeping with the performance art that has marked his career (since conducted mainly in London and Paris).
As the ceremonies began, David unfurled a banner that read, 'Down with the Philistines' - expressing his opinion of Imelda Marcos' hugely expensive creation. Instantly, security guards whipped into action, mistaking 'Philistines' for Philippines. A comical chase ensued in which David would hail one or the other of his society friends just as the cops were catching up with him. He escaped arrest.
I tell this story at length because it illustrates so well the misunderstandings that seem to be a natural by-product of the relationship between government and the arts. In Hong Kong, we have the recent memory of the Harbour Fest fiasco, the current tangle over the Central-Wan Chai bypass, and the looming fight over the West Kowloon arts hub. In each of these cases, the process of trade-off has given way to knockdown fights that pit government, usually with business as an ally, against representatives of the 'people' - often with widely divergent interests.
The subtext of many of these arguments is that culture has no demonstrable market value. Theatre, the arts - even the kind of culture generated by people walking around in a gracious, uplifting, well-designed public space - are high-risk ventures from a commercial perspective. Thus, the government, while covering the risks, tends to view the voices of the 'people' as annoyances.
There is a better way. Taking a leaf from the experience of the environmental movement, arts administrators globally are beginning to think in terms of cultural audits and cultural indices, measuring urban artifacts (like buildings) in terms of their cultural effects.
Increasingly, they are also using the tactics of the environmental movement to involve public views in decisions that affect culture. Recognition has been dawning that high culture is not only big business, but plays a key role in the emerging global competition among cities for talent and investment. To put it simply, a city that has great artists is a city where other people want to be.
'Earning billions is not enough,' says Franz Patay. 'Especially if you have billions, you want more from the place you live. So what's the difference between Hong Kong and Singapore if it's not the cultural environment?' Mr Patay, a lawyer, chairs a Ford Foundation-backed project to establish a cultural counterpart to the World Trade Organisation - a 'World Cultural Forum' that will bring 1,000 leaders in the arts, government and business together every three years in order to develop new models of public involvement in the arts.
Conceptually, the World Cultural Forum (WCF) draws on the ideas of economist Helmut Anheier, who argues that culture and diversity create measurable economic benefits. The object of the first summit, planned for next year, is to draw up cultural and diversity indices that can be used to measure the performance of cities against each other.
Practically, the WCF is driven by two forces - the example of Mr Patay's home town, Vienna, and the promotional energies of Danny Yung Ning-tsun, founder of Hong Kong's innovative multimedia production company, Zuni Icosahedron. Although Vienna provides heavy subsidies to its theatre and opera companies, it figures that for every euro it invests it gets back at least an equivalent amount in tourism, restaurant, and employment revenues.
Mr Yung has been as tireless in promoting the WCF as he has been in putting together any of his 100 or so theatrical productions. Like David Medalla, Mr Yung may be better known outside Hong Kong than in his home town. But if Hong Kong is to become a capital of cool - let alone the venue for the World Cultural Forum summit - it will be in large part because of the electricity that he and other Hong Kong-based artists provide.
Edith Terry is a Hong Kong-based writer
