Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art ed. by Jody Berland, Shelley Hornstein (review)

380 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 content and visual aspects of the staging, it will be difficult for people to get a clear picture of Lepage=s imaginistic theatre if they have not seen the productions. (PIA KLEBER) Jody Berland and Shelley Hornstein, editors. Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art McGill-Queen=s University Press. xviii, 268. $65.00 It=s always a question of timing. I read Jody Berland and Shelley Hornstein=s edited volume Capital Culture: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art before, during, and after the somewhat anticlimactic events of the first of May, 2001. No longer primarily a date to commemorate and celebrate International Workers= Day, the first of May has now become largely usurped by anti-capitalist demonstrations. This year in London, these demonstrations took on a variety of forms: from peaceful protests such as handing out veggie-burgers outside McDonald=s and cycling through the streets bringing sections of the capital to a virtual standstill, to more violent clashes that led to rioting, looting, outrage, and injury on all sides. Unlike last year, the authorities were prepared for trouble this time around. The socalled mob was contained, the government hailed the operation a success, and the media=s sympathies lay firmly with the police. (That is of course if one follows accounts given by the likes of the populist London Evening Standard rather than, for instance, indymedia.com, whose political leanings are somewhat differently inclined.) All that remains visibly to mark the events are a few broken windows and carelessly daubed anarchist logos adorning the occasional ATM. Similarly, I wrote this review of Capital Culture with two voices B really it was many more B ringing in my ears. One of the voices can be recognized as the hackneyed, lacklustre, derivative, and repetitive bleating of Naomi Klein=s NoLogo B rather, its cacophonous aftermath. Following exchanges between Klein and others on the matter of (anti)capitalism, protest, activism, critical consumption, community building, and so on during and after the events of the first of May on bbc.online and guardian. unlimited, as well as elsewhere, it became clear, once again, how disheartening and worthless such public dialogue can be. These instances were naïve to the point of monstrous banality. (I must say, it is not Klein=s fault by any means that the media, the British media at any rate, are too lazy to find additional spokespeople in order to elicit further analysis. It is notable that they go to a Canadian rather than, say, an American to understand the New World Order and the means by which it might be thwarted.) Another of the voices is that of Michael Hardt and Toni Negri=s Empire. This remarkable, mighty tome opens with the premise that we inhabit a new global form of HUMANITIES 381 sovereignty, Empire, whose political and economic creepers are heterogeneous, borderless, deterritorialized. It reaches its finale by prophesizing, really, actually, soliciting us to become Militants and join the swelling ranks of imminent revolutionary Militancy. These events, and these voices, are just a few of the conditions through which I read and wrote on Capital Culture. Capital Culture is a weighty, multilayered, adventurous, and ultimately rewarding volume. Its subject and purpose, outlined in the very first sentence of Hornstein and Berland=s introduction, is as follows: >As culture becomes increasingly vulnerable to policy, fiscal, technological, and institutional changes in Canadian society, the task of understanding these changing social contexts becomes increasingly foregrounded for scholars and critics who think about Aculture.@= The collection certainly rises to this challenge. Beginning with an essay by Berland (on the nation, modernism, power, place, and practice after Harold Innis) and ending with an essay by Hornstein (on history, time, value, and spatial dynamics), Capital Culture is made up of articles on aesthetics, politics, and censorship in the age of global markets (John Fekete, Thierry de Duve, Paul Mattick, Jr); marketing culture and the politics of value, work, and labour (Bruce Barber, Nicole Dubreuil, Mark A. Cheetam, Anne Whitelaw); cultural policy and state funding (Michael Dorland, Johanne Lamoureux); and information technology , and...