Essay: Fair Trade

FAIR TRADE

If you thought Expos were just celebrations of human achievement, think again

By Paul Greenhalgh
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Number of participating countries
Sources: Bureau International des Expositions: BIE/Wikipedia/Expo Milano 2015
Nationalism, brand identity, propaganda, politics and economics, all wrapped up in spectacle and shiny architectural gestures: Expos, says author and historian Paul Greenhalgh, are a quintessentially modern invention – the most effective peaceable way to wage war.
When the Shanghai Expo closed its doors for the last time on October 31 2010 it was the most heavily attended Expo of all time. 73 million visitors strolled and queued around the spectacular site on the banks of the Huangpu River in the heat and the rain, to see structures and buildings built by the Chinese and by 246 participating countries and international organisations. In all dimensions it outstripped everything that had gone before and appeared to signal the complete revival of the Expo medium.

So as we watch the final preparations for the Milan Expo 2015, the next fully official universal exposition after Shanghai, the question presents itself as to what, in the twenty-first century, these enormous undertakings are actually for? What are they actually about? First of all, and without being too cynical, we can say that over the last 150 years the success or failure of Expos has never really been to do with culture, education, social improvement, the arts, urban planning, or international understanding, to cite some of the themes they have purportedly been about.

These were invariably the grand rhetorical messages trumpeting out from the sites, and obviously significant displays onsite dealt with these themes: in the golden age of Expo however, the driving forces were not these but something else: politics and economics. Expos are a quintessentially modern invention, the physical manifestation of material progress, and their rationale can be found in the need for money and national cohesion.
That is why governments and the private sector have invested in them, and why they were often created on gargantuan scales. They were the most effective peaceable way to wage war.

World’s Fairs haven’t enjoyed an even history since the founding event, The Great Exhibition of the Works and Industries of All Nations held in London in 1851. There were two periods in which the medium took on a frequency and a drama that effectively made them into golden ages: the fin de siècle, and the 1960s.

During the first, beginning with the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, there was an epic-scale Expo somewhere in the world every few years through to the First World War. In some years, such as 1888 (Glasgow, Barcelona, Melbourne), or 1906 (Toronto, Marseilles, Bucharest, Christchurch) there was more than one. Every one of these was spectacularly ambitious and, judged by their own criteria, highly successful. Each one would have made the Millennium Dome, the last feeble and ill-fated attempt at the medium in England in 2000, look like a village fête.

Major cities, such as Paris, Chicago, Philadelphia, Barcelona, Brussels, San Francisco, Buffalo, Turin and St Louis were transformed by them, and as this list shows, at that point Expo was basically a creature of Europe and North America. The second golden age, boasting far fewer but truly spectacular events, was the 1960s. The sequence then was Brussels (1958), Seattle (1962), New York (1964), Montreal (1967), and Osaka (1970). The five shared a stylistic, artistic, technological, and intellectual consistency that helped shape and define that brilliant short run of years. One of the more remarkable statistics is that at 51 million visitors, more than double the population of Canada attended the Montreal Expo.

These two golden ages, contained Expos that in so many ways shaped, influenced and reflected the culture and ethos of the societies they decorated.
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Total costs

(In USD millions)
»Pessimism doesn’t make Expos: the model is Star Trek, not Blade Runner.«
Sources: Bureau International des Expositions: BIE/Wikipedia
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Number of visitors

(in millions)
Expo visitor statistics. (source: Bureau International des Expositions: BIE/Wikipedia)
- Paul Greenhalgh is a writer, historian, university and museum professional in the fine and decorative arts. He is currently Director of the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, one of the UK’s principal research institutions for the study and display of all forms of visual art. Prior to this, he held a number of senior posts around the world, including Head of Research at the V&A Museum in London, President and Director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and College of Art and Design in Washington DC, President of NSCAD University in Canada, teacher at the Royal College of Art and Cardiff College of Art and Design. He has organised various large-scale exhibitions in a number of countries, including the UK, USA, France, Spain, Japan, and Canada, most notably Art Nouveau 1890-1914 (2000-2001, London, Washington, Tokyo). He has lectured all over the world and has published a number books and articles across his specialist areas, which include fin de siècle art and design, Modernism and Modernity, Art Nouveau, Symbolism, Cubism and Abstract art; the History of Ceramics; and the contemporary crafts. His books include The Modern Ideal: The Rise and Collapse of Idealism in the Visual Arts from the Enlightenment to Postmodernism, The Persistence of Craft: The Applied Arts Now, and Art Nouveau 1890-1914 and Fair World: A History of World’s Fairs and Expositions.
The Paris Expositions Universelles of 1889 and 1900 branded the city forever, and brought every great artist, designer, musician, novelist, scientist, and businessman in Europe into the French capital; the Chicago Columbian of 1893 created the city and St. Louis was a different place after 1904.

And later, the sixties Expos provided a vision of optimistic flamboyance that provided a template for urban life across the planet. The Seattle Fair marked the arrival of the West Coast as the capital of hi-tech; Montreal defined modern Canada; and the Osaka Expo, the first in East Asia, signalled the arrival of the new Japan as a world power.

After 1970, as glib irony increasingly defined urban existence, and the postmodern world defined itself through texts that no one had read, the Expo slid into decline. Pessimism doesn’t make Expos: the model is Star Trek, not Blade Runner. There were still large-scale events, but collectively they were less visions of the future, and more educationally inflected, consumer-driven funfairs.

But now it appears Expo is back. Shanghai was a seriously important event for China. The city recovered hectares of decayed land; the Chinese population flooded to the city; the possibility of transformation flashed across the minds of millions. Once again, it seems, Expo was concerned with its historic themes: politics and economics. Interestingly, for over twenty years the American government had determined not to take part officially in Expos: but when they looked at the prospectus for Shanghai, at the eleventh hour they scrabbled together a pavilion with a speed that bordered on panic. Politics and economics do that to governments. So, how will Milan be received? Can the Expo 2015 lift the fortunes of the city and the country? Will our vision of Italy shift? Will trade increase? Will immigration peak? Will companies flood into Lombardy? Will Europe once again be pulled south? Is there another Renaissance afoot? We will know the answers to these questions soon enough. I

About Paul Greenhalgh