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At the Bangkok Art and Culture Center, conformity, consumerism, and bad taste suffocate creativity.

About a week ago, I ventured into the Bangkok Art and Culture Center (BACC) for the first time. I had seen the building around for a while and I had always wanted to go, but hadn’t gotten around to it, as is so often the case with attractions in the city you live in. So when a visitor expressed interest in the artwork there, I decided to tag along.

Little did I know that the sculpture of a giant trash can in front of the center was an apt symbol for what was awaiting us inside.

I really didn’t have high expectations. I’m not generally overly critical of art, and I’m very easily entertained. (I once paid cover to see a poor recreation of René Magritte’s “periode vache” exhibition, a series of intentionally bad paintings which Magritte specifically designed to be a slap in the face of the Parisian art scene. I thought it was money well spent.)

Inside, the BACC looked more like a shopping mall, with many small store-sized compartments spread over several levels. The upper level rooms actually were art-themed stores, but on the lower levels every compartment was like a mini-exhibition, and the works on display didn’t seem to be for sale. However, it would be a stretch to call the pieces art.

We saw some admittedly nice design studies for furniture and pottery, and a room where a fashion designer put some dresses on display. The few paintings we saw were such terribly uninspired, well-behaved arrangements of colored brush strokes, that they seemed like dull parodies of abstract art. Imagine a really bad soap opera where one of the characters is a painter, so the director tells the guy who usually holds the microphone to prepare some artsy-looking paintings as props. The result would be more interesting than the paintings at the BACC.

I could go on about what I didn’t like about the artwork, but tastes do differ and mine certainly isn’t refined enough to give you a comprehensive critique of the pieces based on their artistic merit. Instead, I want to argue that the BACC’s concept and its approach towards art is so fundamentally flawed that it is is difficult to imagine that the center’s management has any worthwhile education in the arts. Or taste, really.

The commercial aspect of art often sparks criticism from purists. Museums and galleries have to be financed somehow, and where public funding isn’t enough (is it ever?) we encounter annoying entrance fees, gift shops, or exhibitions with a sales pitch. But the BACC takes this commercialization to a whole new level. Here, the roles are reversed: commerce no longer sustains art, it is the art that sustains commerce. Art becomes a theme to a shopping mall, its role is simply to attract tourists. In retrospect, the BACC’s location between MBK and Discovery Center makes perfect sense.

A sad testament to the dominance of commerce over art can be witnessed at a stall rented out by a local NGO on the upper levels. Along with several feminist slogans, you can also read “BACC: art center, not shopping center” – a protest against the center’s commercial theme – itself printed on a t-shirt for sale at 200 Baht.

But commerce isn’t the only thing that stands between the BACC and, well, art. There is also a noticeable theme of political conformity throughout the center. On the wall of an exhibition room with some mediocre pottery that, quite honestly, I wouldn’t have been surprised to find at Chatuchak market, there was the slogan: ไทยแข็งแรง (“strong / healthy Thailand”) – a sound bite taken directly from a government campaign to restore faith in the Thai economy during the recent crisis.

On the upper levels, in between the gift shops, there are some guys in artists’ costumes who will draw tourists’ portraits for a few hundred Baht. They also paint pretty pictures of temples and Thai flags and other symbols of national unity (see photograph).

I’m not saying that art has to be political. But when it is, it has to be reflective, critical, and subversive. Instead, we get mindless repetition of government propaganda. Unsurprisingly, in the current political climate, government-sanctioned art in Thailand fails thoroughly on this level. So does the BACC.

On the upside, there is a designer ice cream shop that sells experimental ice cream flavors, like Wasabi and Global Warming.