Setting a price on art bedevils China's cultural treasure houses Source: Global Times [00:42 March 30 2010] Comments For many Americans, the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2008 Beijing Olympics were such a mind-boggling success that many of us suspected the Bird's Nest was not built as a sports arena but as a stage set for Zhang Yimou.

At about that same time, I took my daughters to New York's Guggenheim Museum to see postmodern Chinese art master Cai Guoqiang's I Want to Believe exhibit. Cai creates modern masterpieces that are also "site specific" to the exhibition spaces where they appear.

Cai had envisioned the shape of the Guggenheim – a giant helix with a vast rotunda – as wasted art space. So he hung nine real cars from the ceiling and rigged them with flashing light tubes to simulate a car bombing.

As you climbed the circular ramp, the "car bomb" took on different perspectives, like a series of stop-action photos, another mind-boggling effect, which although not as profound as traditional Chinese art, certainly had a "wow!" factor that pleased crowds willing to pay the $18 admission fee.

Meanwhile, my daughters flinched at another Cai exhibit, Head On, featuring life-size replicas of wolves smashing into a Plexiglas wall and a lifesized replica of a tiger, using real animal pelts, shot through with dozens of arrows.

Grandiose artistic visions such as these are enormously expensive to stage and a work of art has no monetary value until somebody buys it. The value of a DaVinci painting is the last price somebody paid for it.

All of which raises the question of preserving contemporary masterpieces in Chinese art museums, which are already under increasing financial pressure and have limited space for artists who think big.

The Ministry of Culture requires that in order to qualify as a top-priority museum, the institution must spend a minimum of 3 million yuan ($440,000) on collecting artworks each year.

For several years now, postmodern Chinese artists have been the darlings of the international art market and 3 million yuan is hardly enough to buy one of their sketches at a Sotheby's auction.

If you apply the Ministry of Culture's bottom line to the Shanghai Art Museum, one of the most acclaimed treasure houses in the nation doesn't qualify as top-notch.

Not wanting to price themselves out of posterity, some modern masters like Wu Guanzhong have donated their paintings to the Shanghai Art Museum, but financial realities almost guarantee that only traditional Chinese art will survive in other great repositories of Chinese culture.

At times, the Chinese art world seems as surrealistic as a painting by Hieronymus Bosch. Over Spring Festival, there were murmurings that new artworks were being used for money laundering – purchased as gifts that have no paper value when given to government officials, but can be cashed in later for big bucks. The rumors further complicate questions surrounding creative freedom and censorship and who decides which Chinese artworks will be timeless and immortal.

Future generations will decide which artworks best describe the Chinese character and culture of the new millennium. But with so many financial complications surrounding art museums, it will be hard to let the people decide.