From Use Value to Space to its Spectacular Value

What has caught my eye in an Australian newspaper article on the relations between contemporary artists from Australia and Japan is how graphically the urban space of the former has played a key role in promoting relations of cultural exchange between the two countries. The uneven balance of economic relalations that defines how Japan relates to Australia is apparently offset by the effect that the urban spaces of Australian cities have on promoting the media visibility of Japanese artists. Not being able to financially contribute to joint art projects on the same scale as Japan, Australia has successfully leveraged its urban spaces in order to provide an effective foil for the works of its and Japanese artists. It did not appear that the success of these art initiaitives hinge exclusively on the use of museum premises. Its nexus of relations at play apparently feeds on urban, regional and global interconnections that allowed the value of urban spaces in Australia to be translated into something akin to a spectacular value. The latter I construe as capability to become integrated into urban spectacles of various kind, such as art biennials, open-air concerts, cultural festivals. The global component that goes into making Australian urban spaces spectacular, as opposed to Japanese, may be a decisive one since it is Australia's relation to European and North American strategies of cultural accumulation that differentiates it from Japan. The rise of China in this respect poses a question of global shifts in the centers of cultural accumulation as its cities possess developmental, spatial, and populational density that is hardly matched internationally. This probably explains the networking of art biennials in East Asian and ASEAN regions to each other. This wave of cultural networking reaches also Australia as it starts prmoting the rise of Australasian cultural initiatives.