ABSTRACT
During the last decades, global spending on corporate sponsorship has grown rapidly. In Sweden, the case described in this chapter, sponsorship-deals in the world of cultural production and consumption was first established in the 1980s. This paper describes how the emergence of cultural sponsorship equipped actors in the business of art and museums with an expanding repertoire of narratives and practices formatting their ability to make their cultural capital calculable and transformed into financial capital. Cultural sponsorship, as a specific form of marketing practice, enabled actors in the business of arts and museums to create new alliances, framed and negotiated as mutual and market-oriented interests. Cultural sponsorship as legal agreements of mutual interests and obligations rendered social relations economic in new ways and we argue that sponsorship can be understood as a ‘market device’, used to establish a new market in marketing. We argue that the rise of cultural sponsorship in Sweden is an interesting case of market orientation of cultural institutions, but more generally illustrative for how specific forms of economic value are negotiated and constructed under specific historical and contextual circumstances.
