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In 1992, the government began to promote a policy to make the city-state not just a Global City, but, indeed, a Global City for the Arts. Unfortunately, if predictably, an overall instrumentalist attitude predominated. Some leading politicos had discovered that to become a “serious” Global City capable of attracting and retaining the “foreign talent” of senior business executives who could further “globalize” the city-state, we needed Western metropolitan-style cultural infra- and superstructures that would enable Singapore to become a sort of “London of the East.”
As is often the case in Singapore, an it-needs-to-happen-tomorrow social engineering imperative and paradigm were adopted for the new cultural policy. The entrenched position of this paradigm gave rise to the central tension between the professed wish for a dynamic creativity and the existing instrumentalizing and rationalist mental set. Arts funding increased and theatre, as the most visible art form of the 1980s, was a major beneficiary. The pretentiously entitled Renaissance City Report: Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (2000) advocated for even more funding to be made available (some S$50 million—nearly U.S.$30 million—over five years), and these funds have started to have an impact on the cultural scene.
Source: Creating High Culture in the Globalized “Cultural Desert” of Singapore by CJ.W.-L. Wee. In The Drama Review, 47(4), p.87.