ABSTRACT
Shop eat chill Of all the marketing strategies deployed by the Singapore Tourism Board in recent years, the slogan “Shop Eat Chill” perhaps best encapsulates the marshaling of affect for an economy of consumption. Singapore has long had a well-deserved reputation as a Mecca for shopping and eating, but in a world where the global proliferation of clothing chains such as Topshop, Zara, and Uniqlo can offer relatively cheap consumer goods at any number of locations around the world, the nation can no longer style itself as an Asian bazaar and a haven for tax-free electronic goods. If some visitors still see Singapore as the “only shopping mall with a seat on the UN council”, as writer William Gibson allegedly said, they have missed the point. Since the 1990s, Singapore has rebranded itself as a “Renaissance City” (Singapore Government 2002) and a “Global City for the Arts”. The reality has not failed to live up to the promise of a city of culture. For the annual Singapore Arts Festival, it seems that no expense is spared to attract an impressive array of international theatre and dance companies, philharmonic orchestras, and other smaller-scale local and imported performances. The plethora of arts and cultural events appears with such frequency and on such an extravagant scale that public life in Singapore imparts a sense of continuing carnival and a dramatization of urban life (see Hudson 2012). The collective affect generated by such an array of spectacles that appear not only in theatres but also in parks, shopping malls, and other public spaces is one of the keys to the government’s economic agenda in the post-industrial era. Culture is now a strategy for capitalist accumulation and instrumental for private interests (see Kearns and Philo 1990; Zukin 1995), or as Lash and Urry express it, the economy is increasingly culturally inflected while culture is more and more economically inflected (Lash and Urry 1994, p. 64).
