Shaky Attempts by big Finance to decide a Direction of Culture

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The world's No. 2 media company, and Hollywood's most profitable movie company, is now -- if the financial experts are right -- one of the world's safest investments.

A debt bond payable in 100 years, the first bond so long-term since 1954, was issued this past year for what appears to be a Sure Thing: the Walt Disney Company. On Wall Street, in London and in Tokyo, those with a considerable power to decide the future, raising billions in finance capital, have determined that Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Disneyland will all be with our great-great-grandchildren as much as they were with our parents.

Can anyone name an entertainment figure or company from the 1890s which is popular, alive or even relevant in the 1990s?

In 1894, the dominant world culture was Victorian England, and boys born then were 20 in 1914: look at what happened to them, to their glorious Empire, and to their entire set of visual and leisure values. How can one be confident that nothing in the next 100 years will shatter the empire of Disney? And who among the deciders of culture, at least, would presume to say that entertainment in a century would not be totally different from what it is now?

Consider who is being called upon to make sure of Future Taste. News arrives, on 2 June 1994, that the Euro Disney venture, still failing to take off, has won salvation as a `Prince Rides to Euro Disney's Rescue.' A Saudi prince. A Saudi prince assured in his wealth by Desert Storm, and also the largest shareholder in the largest bank of the United States, Citicorp. So, a man whose fortune was guaranteed by a recent military campaign, which the top brass themselves say cannot be afforded again, being that it cost (reports say) $700 Billion, has committed up to a third of a billion dollars to rescuing Euro Disney from its own unpopularity, and to possibly building a convention center nearby to attract businessmen, as well as tourists and kids, into a visit with Donald Duck. Why is a desert prince being requisitioned to make sure that a culture shaped around World War II is chiefly what our children get?

Perhaps culture is being decided not primarily by the museums, not by the mega-curators like Jan Hoet, not even so much by government ministries, but by the investment bankers who have been making giant commitments extending far beyond any art-historical time frame. The next exceptional 100-year debt issue will be for ABN-AMRO, the biggest Dutch bank, but this is hardly a Source of Taste. Some people have no doubt that recent victories ensure that Disney is here to stay, and their time frame of certainty -- now centuries -- is similar to that of the Pharaohs.

But media is a short-lived phenomenon, unlike other businesses, and attempts to endow permanence to culture, which is evanescent, very likely face an absurd end.

Look at what happened to Hitler's plans for Berlin, where megaliths were supposed to become ruins, beautiful ruins, only 1,000 years later. One need only look at Rome, the Eternal City, and at its counterpart razed to the ground, Carthage, to detect a human need: to be Remembered in History.

Here is a prime reason for War. It's fought first on the battlefield, next in the media. Anglo-America may have won supremacy over continental (German) Europe in World War II, but now fights to maintain that lead by pushing London, not Frankfurt/Hamburg/

Kassel/Berlin/Cologne, as the Decider of Art History. Anglo-America may have also won supremacy over Japan, but will this extend to Hollywood? There is a struggle for the `hearts and minds' of the peoples of the world, and this rages on in every aspect of High Culture and Pop.

How else might one explain the colossal gamble being made on Euro Disney? 61 banks, 16 from Japan, 5 from North America and 40 from Europe, have committed capital to making sure that a not-so-going enterprise will survive the first years of life, and then go on for decades. So they cut costs, slap up ads in subways, promote cut-rate travel arrangements throughout Europe, even start enticing old folks in to relive their days as kids. They can't give up now. There's a 100 year loan on the company. Think of the careers and reputations lost if it doesn't work. How will Anglo-America, or the underwriter of those bonds, or the banks lending millions, all look in history, or even in their lifetimes, if Disney goes downhill? Who's making a giant investment in all this Art (which is what it is), and who cannot afford to have it decline in value?

So Mickey Mouse will be with us. We're not sure about artists like Claes Oldenburg, who made Pop Art work about the Mouse. No one, not even a museum, not even Barbara Rose, took out a 100-year loan on a Claes Oldenburg. Which may explain the strategy among US power brokers of promoting Pop Art: it's not that the art must last; it's that what it's about -- Coca-Cola, Hollywood, US Air Force jets, Uncle Scrooge -- must last.

The foundation for this consumer culture is a vertically-integrated cities service industry, basing the well-being of society on fossil oil and gas, set up first at the end of the American Civil War, in the 1860s. This is the same time that new industrial powers emerged in Italy, Germany and Japan. Much history has happened since. More is likely to follow.

So in NewsRoom there are doubts about Disney's future. We reason:

1 Culture is cyclical. What is In during one century, or even decade, is usually Out in the next: this even happened to currently-recognized giants like Shakespeare; there are moves afoot now to reject his values as wrong.

2 The West purveyed by Disney represents a small elite of the world's population roughly proportionate to that of the aristocracy in France before the Revolution, and very many in the poorer countries may not share the attitude towards wealth and its accumulation of Donald Duck or his Uncle Scrooge. For example, China.

3 The underground assets of the fossil oil and gas firms are depleting fast relative to world demand; who develops the socially-accepted replacements is not clear; the guarantors of the New World Order rest on a foundation about as secure as that of the coal magnates at the end of the last century.

As usual, the downfall of a regime comes less from outside forces (Communism ?) than from stepping out of bounds. From going too far. This year, armed with its 100-year financing plan, the Walt Disney Company announced plans to build a giant theme park commemorating (a certain version of) the American Civil War. Trying to cast the past in a fixed form. With special help in the form of grants, altogether $193 million, from the Government of Virginia.

So far it's been bad for Disney's public relations. Sharp objections have come from environmentalists, Old Guard Southerners, historians, architecture critics, even scholars and consultants for Disney. When it was reported that Disney's Chairman, a Mr. Eisner, just earned $203 million, the question was, Why do you seek government support (presumably `for the arts or humanities') when the same amount from your chairman would leave him still with $10 million in his pocket? Generally: how does a giant corporation and the government decide what we think? The time is ripe for a florescence of new world views.

For the first time in its history, Disney declared an embargo on its cultural products in a specific country. It announced that whatever still claims to be Yugoslavia (namely, Serbia and Montenegro) could no longer have Disney culture. It declared, therefore, a zone of No-Disney. What is to happen in this zone than a new popular culture which is... Post-Disney. Or even Un-Disney? And after the war, or even while the war rages, what is to prevent this new pop culture from spreading among the countries which overtly or covertly are friends with Yugoslavia, like Greece, or Russia, or China, or the nearly 85% of the world's population it led as the head of the non-aligned movement, or even its traditional ally France? The same France where desperate efforts now rage to prop up a failing Disney park. Shall a South Slav alternative to Disney surely perish as soon as the war comes to an end?

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