The Dome - which has just entered what may be described as the last-chance zone - was intended as a symbol of Britain's entry into the 21st century. Instead, it stands as a monument to the folly of late 20th-century rulers, both political and corporate, and to a society obsessed by image and logo. In our age, almost nothing is sold for its intrinsic value: shoes and clothes depend on designer labels; pubs, restaurants and wine bars prosper according to their "themes"; newspapers clutter their front pages with holiday offers; publishers pay infinitely more attention to a book's dust-jacket than to what's inside it. Marketing and branding, image and concept have replaced content. What was once an accessory to the production of goods and services has taken over as the core function. New Labour itself is a form of branding, which may soon need a rethink before, like all brands, it eventually becomes tarnished. It has carried branding into government, presenting Britain as Cool Britannia, "a young country".
The Dome is the apotheosis of the branding society. Marketing and sponsorship are not themselves new: Marlboro Man long predated Nike; and from Renaissance Italy onwards, artists have depended on the goodwill of the rich and powerful. What is new, as the young Canadian writer Naomi Klein points out in her recent book New Logo, is that increasingly the brand itself becomes the culture. Rather than simply adding its name to sporting events, concerts or exhibitions, the brand creates its own events or so takes over an existing event that its original purpose is lost or obscured. The host culture is stripped of its inherent value and becomes nothing more than a promotional tool, a phenomenon that has been apparent for some years in the fate of entertainments as diverse as popular music and rugby league. Increasingly, sponsorship invades the social world, so that parties, dinners, even private weddings are sponsored. Go to the Labour Party conference and it is evident that sponsorship has taken root in the political world. As Klein writes: "We become collectively convinced not that corporations are hitching a ride on our cultural and communal activities, but that creativity and congregation would be impossible without their generosity."
The sponsored culture almost entirely explains the genesis of the Dome and its failure to enthuse the public on the scale intended. It was created solely as a promotional vehicle not for something of real and substantial value, but for ideas that are themselves marketing artefacts. That the project could be transferred so seamlessly from the Tories to new Labour says everything: one day, it was Michael Heseltine's representation of "the Conservative achievement", the next Tony Blair's embodiment "of the spirit of confidence and adventure in Britain". It had no coherent theme or purpose beyond the politicians' wish to show that they had some ill-defined vision thing and the corporates' rush to use the year 2000 as another marketing opportunity. The two came together in a union of vacuous circularity, whereby the organisers wanted enough sponsors to achieve something "absolutely dramatic, fantastic" (Peter Mandelson's words), but needed to promise the dramatic and fantastic to get the sponsors in the first place. (The large majority of dot-com projects proceed on similar lines and they, too, now face their nemesis.)
So even though the Dome is the biggest popular attraction of the year, it cannot meet the targets set for it and requires a subsidy of £90 a visitor, four times what any museum or art gallery in London gets. It has proved a step too far in the sponsored culture, the contrast between image and content being so unusually great and so unusually obvious that many potential visitors who might otherwise have helped meet its over-inflated targets have seen through the whole thing. The Dome has been undone by its own hype.
What is most absurd is that, while the government brings private-sector management and finance to such public services as healthcare, education and tube travel, it has tried to run and partly fund what ought to be a project of the entertainment industry. The scandal is not just the waste of money, but also the waste of ministerial time, energy and brainpower. But that is the nature of the marketing culture: the best brains in business and politics devote themselves to hyping the ephemeral and perfecting the brand. In that sense, the Dome, a magnificent building that signifies nothing and contains nothing, has succeeded, after all, in representing the spirit of the age.
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