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01Consuming Media 10/4/07 11:17 am Page 173

‘you actually get enriched by looking at visual arts.’ The striking parallel to the
market striving for economic enrichment is ensuring productive cooperation
between the two systems, local state authorities and the private market interests.
People need to buy, ‘but also to get a chance to enjoy,’ said the curator, explaining
how shops and public cultural spending happily combine. Art was readily integrated
in a consumption-promoting experience industrialism.
At other times, however, the curator instead stressed the division between the
systems that is the basis for their mutual exchange to be at all meaningful. For
instance, she said, ‘the municipality has a small free zone’ in front of the town hall,
where ‘it owns the ground; therefore it’s free’. She also mentioned instances of a
‘cultural clash with the commercial’, so that art had to be protected against the intru-
sion of marketing. Here was a conflict between symbolic and economic power, where
state-employed civil servants as representatives of political power defended cultural
interests against the commercial ones. In front of the town hall was a large square area
with a mobile sculpture hanging under the roof, made by an established Swedish
artist. The curator did her best to prevent advertising posters to interfere with this
public art space, thus trying to safeguard a non-commercial zone in the centre. The
open view became a sign of publicness in an ideological attempt to embody the
democratic ideal of free exchange of ideas. 5
Another state-dependent pocket of resistance was the public library that through
its very existence as a cultural institution on the most central square of the place
could be seen as a challenge to economic power. It had sparse collaboration with the
local centre management, who had talked about sponsoring certain cultural events,
but refused to do so inside the library building, for which they received no rental
income. As was shown in previous chapters, libraries are no longer exclusively for
borrowing and reading books. Nearly half of Solna library’s visitors neither borrowed
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nor returned any books there. Instead, they read papers and magazines, borrowed
CDs and videos, studied, or used computers and the Internet. Books remain the
medium that dominates the library (from which it derives its name: liber is Latin for
‘book’), but many other media are found there too. Today’s libraries tend to function
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like mediatheques. The traditional image of libraries as seats of official high culture
of the cultivated upper classes has also changed. The chief librarian was very
conscious of the library’s role as servant of the people in the cultural sphere. She
defined their task to stimulate people to look for knowledge and experience, to offer
all citizens free access to information, to improve literacy and general education, and
to seek to eradicate all social and physical hindrances for people to use the library
services, and more specifically to meet the needs for reading among young people.
She regarded the library as ‘a resting-place from the commercial, this demand to
always have to pick up a wallet as soon as you enter a door in this centre’. The need
for alternatives to commercialism within the centre was particularly strong for chil-
dren and the elderly, who often lack sufficient economic resources. The library also
serves many other needs besides free reading: it is a quiet and restful place, a calm
oasis for reflection and concentration in the midst of the cross-currents of marketing

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