Book Review: “The State and The Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions”
about 62 months ago (04/09/2019)
Book Review: "The State and The Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions" | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Images courtesy of Institute of Policy Studies, Singapore April 9, 2019 By Chin Ailin (734 words, four-minute read) Commissioned by the Institute of Policy Studies of Singapore (IPS) to trace the course of cultural policy in Singapore from the 1950s to the present, The State and the Arts in Singapore: Policies and Institutions is a comprehensive tome that should serve as an essential text in time to come for any student’s introduction to Singapore’s arts and cultural policies. While much of this scholarship from the who’s who of arts and cultural research has been published elsewhere, gathered here together they cement a narrative where the arts are alternatingly valued and devalued based on political expediencies, and often instrumentalised for whatever trending political buzzword(s) existed at the time. Being a survey of how the arts landscape has changed or been shaped through successive iterations of arts policy, the book opts for a chronological organisation.