“(...) Your policies and support will be the canvas and playground for all the creators.” - Will Artists Really Thrive Under Capitalist Investments?

“Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art; the art of words…the name of our beautiful reward is not profit, it is freedom.”

• Ursula Le Guin

Picture 1 - RM delivering his speech

The annual APEC CEO Summit brings together political and business leaders to discuss trade, innovation, economic integration, and shared global challenges, such as demographic shifts, increasing opportunities for women and people with disabilities, and food security. It is a powerful grouping that is currently represented by 21 member states. The APEC CEO Summit of 2025 was hosted in Gyeongju, South Korea, and it was the first Summit that included cultural industries as a key agenda item. For this section, Kim Namjoon (also known as RM) - the leader of one of the most recognisable K-Pop boy bands called BTS - has been invited as a keynote speaker. With the 2026 Summit approaching, it may be a good time to recall last year’s highly impactful, yet controversial moment of the event.

Kim Namjoon’s speech opens up a floor for an interesting discussion regarding art and culture’s place in society. On the stage, RM delivers a complex message that flows between themes of cultural diplomacy and soft-power advocacy. The central message of the speech is that culture does not merely serve the purpose of entertainment, but is a transformative social and diplomatic force that helps society build solidarity across borders. When delivering this message, RM operates through both autobiographical storytelling and political appeals. Listeners are immersed in the recap of BTS’s journey towards international success; a journey that serves as an example of the cultural industry’s significance and the uniqueness of K-pop. Finally, the crowd arrives at the most interesting and controversial part of the speech, in which RM calls for economic leaders to invest in creators and the culture industry. It is this final appeal that sparks controversy and will be further analysed in this article.

Just an artist, … 

Before diving into the controversies, let’s look into a broader discourse analysis of the speech and the picture painted by Kim Namjoon. The speech begins humbly, as if coming from a place of self-awareness, when he states that “he is just an artist and not a business leader”. This modest opening creates a sense of authenticity, but also draws a line between the emotional truth and cold economic statistics. RM positions himself as a practitioner rather than an expert or a bureaucrat, setting the scene for the speech to come across as sincere storytelling. He then tells a story of going from the margins of pop culture to global recognition, with an underlying post-colonial twist, felt especially when Kim Namjoon points out the experiences of cultural misunderstandings and lack of recognition. Overall, he draws attention to the difficulty of entering the Western cultural markets. 

The story of BTS, then, is also a story of South Korea’s transformation from a peripheral country to a cultural powerhouse. This journey, as he points out, was not a single human struggle. RM highlights the collective agency of all the members of BTS, their producer, and fandom famously called “ARMY”, in the boy band’s success. When RM underlines the importance of the community surrounding his and other BTS members’ success, he decentralises the myth of a lone genius and promotes a relational understanding of creativity. Art indeed does not exist in isolation. It is produced through networks of collaboration and is given life by the communities that live through it. The ARMY, then, is given a political dimension. They are a borderless community standing at the forefront of a cross-cultural dialogue. In addition, the fandom has in the past mobilised itself to lead humanitarian and philanthropic actions such as the #MatchAMillion fundraiser, where they raised over one million US dollars for the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. In RM’s speech then, ARMY acts as an international civil society brought together through art that surpasses borders.

Reaching the climax of the speech, Kim Namjoon asks the audience: “What is your favourite song?” This rhetorical question shifts the atmosphere into a moment of reflection on a personal memory. After all, even the professional business leaders sitting in front of him are human beings emotionally impacted and even shaped by art. This universalises his argument. Culture is a powerful transformative force, and everyone has experienced its emotional power. After drawing the listeners even closer in with this personal question, RM moves on to making a rather direct request. He asks that world business leaders include culture and arts in their investments. He encourages them to provide financial support for creators and use their capital to help create opportunities for creativity to bloom. 

However, one might wonder what the implications of framing culture as a tool for economic growth are. In very simple terms, when a person or an economic entity invests, they put money into assets that have the potential to generate higher gains in the future. Is asking leaders of the capitalist class to make art part of their financial agenda a good idea? While it can be assumed that the APEC business leaders could donate money to artists and creative communities out of pure philanthropy, the idea feels rather gullible. On the surface, RM argues that culture deserves to be invested in because it fosters human connection and innovation. Within capitalism, however, investment is rarely altruistic. Capital flows toward activities that can generate profit and market expansion. This is why RM’s final call to economic leaders for more investments in the culture industry begs the question: When capital invests in art, does it empower creativity, or transform culture into another instrument of accumulation?

Art is not economically neutral. There is no denying that commercial art has existed for centuries. As a matter of fact, some of the greatest artworks have been produced for commission. Much of Christian Art, such as the Sistine Chapel, the Last Supper, or The Pietà, that we consider to be great masterpieces, was commissioned by the Christian Church during the times of the European Renaissance. Art was commissioned by wealthy individuals and institutions for centuries and for various reasons. While the Church invested its wealth into artworks that were meant to create a feeling of divinity within its sacred spaces, and essentially “sell” religion to maintain or even increase its community of worshipers, some wealthy nobles or merchants commissioned art for legacy commemoration, showcasing of status, or simply pleasure. One must, however, understand the socio-economic circumstances under which certain artwork came to existence. Behind every work of art hides a goal driving its creation, and these goals are motivated by artists’ diverse backgrounds and systems of values they navigate their lives through. Cultural forms can both reflect and help reproduce material relations. As art is produced under different conditions and depending on ownership and infrastructures underlying its creation, we must remember to assess who owns the means of cultural production and who captures the value created by the artists and audiences.

Under capitalism, artworks became commodities. They are created with exchange value prioritised, concealing the artist labor system that produces them. One artist hardly ever stands alone behind the final product of their work. Let’s take an average BTS song, for example. It is not just thanks to the seven “Bangtan Boys” that millions of people get to enjoy their music. There are teams of producers, choreographers, make-up artists, stylists, designers, and marketing specialists that work behind the scenes. Fans (and haters) themselves contribute through the creation of content and online discourse, increasing BTS’s visibility as a result. One does not need to be an international superstar like BTS for this to be true. A smaller visual artist also relies on the labour of workers transporting and displaying their work. To accommodate this, art must generate profit greater than what the artist themselves is paid. This extra profit is referred to as surplus value. In a cultural industry, this surplus may be captured by entertainment companies, streaming platforms or exhibition sites, advertisers, or most importantly in the context of RM’s speech: investors. At the end of the day, ownership is what determines who benefits the most, and in the world of complex culture industry, ownership is hardly as easy as art belonging to the artist themselves.

… but not just a simple story.

RM’s speech is a contradictory intervention. On the one hand, he recognises that artists need material support, which challenges the idea that creativity emerges spontaneously without social investment. On the other hand, at the same time, he frames this support in a business-friendly language: culture is an engine of innovation and growth. This makes art legible to capital by emphasizing returns on investment. The contradiction of this lies in that art gains resources by adopting the logic of profit. There are real benefits behind businesses investing in art. It may support the creation of better infrastructure, higher quality of production, increased reach, generate more job opportunities for artists, and increase visibility of creators. At the same time, there are many structural risks to it. Business-sponsored art may be subject to commercial censorship, under which projects with strong revenue prospects receive funding while experimental or politically challenging art is marginalised or even dismissed. With investments in art becoming more popular, we risk concentration of ownership in the hands of the few biggest economic players who will then control creation and monetisation of art. Artists may face higher pressure for constant productivity and public visibility to make investments profitable. Finally, as artistic works become more optimised for broad market appeal, culture will get increasingly homogenised.

Still, one very important thing to consider amidst all this is the long-term benefits for communities. The answer here strongly depends on governance and ownership structures. Hypothetically, there are potential benefits, as communities could gain access to more cultural resources, more employment opportunities, higher representation, and shared identity and solidarity. Under a capitalist model, however, where profit and growth are priorities, these same communities are more likely to experience rising costs and exclusion, conversion of communal practices into monetised products, dependence on corporate platforms, and loss of autonomy. Even the smallest grassroots scenes may get captured for monetisation and get transformed into complex business ecosystems. Capital often monetises the very forms of participation that grassroots communities create, threatening inclusivity and accessibility. In this system, artists are also at risk of corporate exploitation, non-consensual rights transfer, unequal bargaining power, and pressure to self-brand continuously and publicise themselves. Within this complexity, at the end of the day, we need to always consider whether the benefits are worth the risks.

Kim Nam-joon’s APEC 2025 speech is a rhetorically elegant and politically significant statement about the power of art. Through personal testimony, vivid metaphors, and a clear policy appeal, RM presents culture as a force that transcends borders and creates new forms of connection. However, as the analysis above suggests, capital values culture only insofar as it produces returns. That’s why RM’s final appeal creates an enduring contradiction where art seeks human expression, but capital seeks accumulation. “Please help creators” can be understood as a demand for recognition that creativity requires material conditions. The political questions we should be asking are not simply about whether or not art should be funded, but where lies the control behind the funding, who owns intellectual property, who bears the heaviest risks, and who receives the rewards. Even though art seems to be an antithesis to capitalism, that alone does not remove the need for support for creative communities. Still, this case is not lost, and there are possibilities to safeguard human creativity without subjecting it to the capitalist class. There are models alternative to business investments that can support art without subordinating it to profit. Those could be public funding, artist cooperatives, creation of non-profit cultural institutions, community ownership of art, and systemic protection of labour standards for creators and collective bargaining. 

There is power behind RM speaking sincerely about art’s human and social value while addressing an audience whose institutions often evaluate culture through profitability. However, even though long-term outcomes of capitalist investment in art are not predetermined, understanding mechanisms of capitalist profit accumulation and growth logic should make the art community more cautious than not when it comes to making appeals to the business world. Acknowledging that art is not produced in a vacuum, but depends on funding and infrastructure, is valuable as it showcases the vulnerability of sectors of cultural creation. Investment can nurture culture, but without democratic control and fair labor arrangements, it tends to transform creativity into another mechanism of accumulation.