Arts in Society Groningen platform
Blijft “Cultuur van en voor iedereen” leidend? Culturele democratie vraagt om meer dan inclusie: een stelsel dat ontmoeting stimuleert. Cultuur draait om het ontdekken van het nieuwe en een open cultuurbeleid.
Door Geert Drion
“Cultuur van en voor iedereen” was de afgelopen kabinetsperiode het uitgangspunt van de minister. Op het eerste gezicht past die slogan goed bij het nieuwe begrip “culturele democratie” dat steeds vaker opduikt, vooral in relatie tot de “inclusiviteit” en “herijking van het stelsel”. Geert Drion waarschuwt voor een verborgen misverstand.
Continue reading “Cultuur van en voor iedereen”The pandemic hit culture hard: museums, theaters, festivals closed. Governments offered aid, freelancers overlooked. Institutions went digital with livestreams, exhibits. This widens access, but who benefits?
By Quirijn van den Hoogen
It is generally acknowledged that the cultural sector was hit extremely hard by the Corona pandemic. Around the globe, public life came to a standstill and cultural facilities were shut down: libraries and museums, the musical theatres of West End, pop music festivals, and amateur culture such as choir rehearsals, were all impossible because of social distancing rules. All three spheres of what British policy researcher John Holden denotes as cultural ecologies, came to a standstill: the publicly funded, the commercial, and the homegrown culture. Those institutions that have re-opened, such as the museums in Rome this week, can only receive a small fraction of the visitor numbers of before 2020.
Continue reading “Corona turns Public Culture into a OnlyFans zone”Corona forced closures, pushing virtual tours and exhibitions. Digital platforms expand access but can’t replace immersive physical spaces. Museums remain vital for hope, unity, emotional health, serving communities beyond education.
By Tooka Taheri
The museum, as an architectural typology, has its roots in the art collection which was typical of Renaissance Italy and its fascination with the past and products of antiquity. [1] However, it can be argued that its function as a cultural institution and a public service only began during the Enlightenment era. Prior to the 18th century, such collections were private and exclusive. Their aim was primarily due to their aesthetic value; for the pleasure and entertainment of the aristocracy and the wealthy. [2] In accordance with their enlightenment ideology, these private collections were opened to serve the general public. Thus, the museum was born: a building, renamed after the Greek ‘mouseion’ -μουσείο- , in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and exhibited. A prominent and early example is when Sir Hans Sloane donated his collection to the British government in 1753, with the note that it should be exhibited to all the people of Britain. This resulted in the construction of the British Museum, open and free to all.
This change of ownership, from private collections to public, had consequences, resulting in the typology becoming a cornerstone of public and civic life. Since its conception, the significance of the museum has only increased. Many of them are compelling works of architecture, designed by the world’s most renowned architects and designers. H. P. Berlage’s Kuntsmuseum in The Hague and Zaha Hadid’s The Maxxi National Museum in Rome are just a few notable examples. This both reflects and expands upon the institute’s credibility and prominence within the city and society. Furthermore, the museum has the power to influence and regenerate the urban fabric, as the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and Tate Modern in London have done. Perhaps even more crucially, the museum is the conductor and curator of the individual’s particular experience of art in its many forms. This is supported by Anne de Haij, strategic advisor at Kunstmuseum The Hague, who mentioned the value a museum can have for people and for a community. She considers the cultural institutions as ‘vital for the mental and emotional health of our society.’ [3]
This significant position then comes to the fore at a time of the global pandemic. A situation which has had widespread drastic effects. However, at a time of great anxiety and difficulty, museums were forced to close their doors to the public. While a necessary move to protect the health of the population, it offers a sensible opportunity to ponder on the response of this cultural institution during this trying time as well as its role in society.
While the museum was physically absent from public and individual life, much like many other forms of interaction during the coronacrisis, there was a very strong digital presence. Online exhibitions, virtual tours, and a stronger presence on social media platforms became the new norm, practiced by many. From the National Theatre to the Royal Opera House, there are many institutes that have contributed their content online free of charge. [4]
This trajectory towards digital means, which has been hastened due to the current crisis, is by no means a novel initiative. As far back as 2005 the British Museum boasted of its partnership with Google, which brought forth the possibility to view 5000 if its objects online. [5] It cannot be denied that digital content has the potential to reach an audience that far exceeds the boundaries of any physical building. The director of the British Museum at the time exclaimed how ‘that Enlightenment fantasy, about 25 years ago became an internet possibility, and today, thanks to the Google Cultural Institute, it is a practical reality.’ [6] There are numerous benefits in having this digital platform. Its availability and accessibility fulfill some of the institute’s roles; both in terms of education and research as well as merely entertainment and curiosity. In this way it does perform the Enlightenment’s aspiration to bring art and education to the general public which is at the root of the museum’s conception.
It would perhaps be apt to ponder on whether this move towards online platforms has rendered the cultural institute’s physical entity as superfluous. Yet, in certain places museums are slowly opening their doors, mindful of protective measures to ensure the health of their staff and visitors. It is again possible to look around The Kunstmuseum, and The National Gallery in London will showcase its collection to the public once more. It would be mistake to portray their role as merely a tool for educational purposes. Museums are also about the experience of art, within the space, at a given time. The immersive quality of certain exhibits is intertwined with the experience of the space. To reiterate Robert Oosterhuis, research coordinator at the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science: these virtual and digital contents are no substitute to art and the experience it provides up close.[7]
The coronavirus pandemic has resulted in an increase in this interaction between individuals and the museum’s online content. Traffic on the British Museum’s website is now three times higher than before the crisis.[8] However, this does not translate to a replacement or substitution of the museum experience. It rather addresses a more urgent and humane need within society during the current crisis. A study of the cultural field in Turkey during the pandemic accentuates how this online presence of cultural institutions ‘have offered people the sense of hope and unity they need’. [9] The document affirms the role that culture and arts have in dealing with the difficulties of the global crisis and refers to them as ‘one of the great uniting and healing powers for the public.’
Therefore, it can be said that the role of the museum as an institute is manifold and applies at various scales. From education, research, and entertainment on an individual level to the scale of the community and the city as a whole. While digital and online content are of value, and have offered a significant and necessary opportunity during the coronavirus crisis, it only provides a partial fulfillment of a museum’s role in society at best. It is not a replacement for the experience of the arts.
Sources
[1] Pevsner, Nikolaus. (1976) A History of Building Types. London: Thames and Hudson
[2] Newhouse, Victoria. (1998) Towards a New Museum. The University of Michigan: Monacelli Press.
[3] Interview with Anne de Haij
[4] https://www.culturalpolicies.net/covid-19/online-initiatives/
[6] Ibid.
[7]Interview with Robert Oosterhuis
[9]The Uniting Power of Art and Needs of the Cultural Field During the Pandemic
By Joanna Zienkiewicz
Due to COVID-19 the activities of many cultural institutions, as well as of creative/artistic businesses and of self-employed creative workers had to be suspended. The situation has exposed and amplified the usual precariousness of the cultural industry’s workers, being exceptionally difficult for those dealing with artistic media that require liveness or social contact: music venues, festivals, theatres, etc. Many, for instance Berliner Schiller-Theater can count the losses from the performances that got cancelled in millions of euros, threatening the existence of the institutions and the jobs they offer (Wagińska-Marzec). Although audiences are usually encouraged to keep the tickets for events they already bought to use at later dates, any need to return the revenue already made adds extra pressures to the situation of reduced income. At the same time, arts and entertainment are consumed by the society of lockdown probably more than ever: stuck at home, many turn to watching series, films, reading books, listening to music, and participating in online cultural events from the comfort of their couches. The switch to online events allowed many institutions – for instance, the Groningen music venues Simplon and OOST who decided to stream their DJs live on platforms like Twitch or Zoom – to preserve their audiences; however, as the online events are normally expected to be free of charge, they cannot make up for the revenue lost from predicted ticket sales. While arts and entertainment are then nowhere close to disappearing, the threat of cultural institutions and workers not being able to deal with the financial losses experienced in the pandemic leads to widespread calls for crisis funds, grants, and larger subsidies from the cultural sector.
In these times, it might be especially crucial to examine what leads to such vulnerability of cultural institutions in the times of crisis, and how it might be dealt with. As Bojana Kunst pointed out in 2018, precarity is at the core of cultural institutions – a highly flexible, but also insecure sector (168). With a focus on projects, institutions are grounded in projective temporality creating a peculiar loop between the present and the future (Kunst 169). They are simultaneously imagined and suppressing irrational imaginations through protocols, bound by the neoliberal falsehood of progression and economization of creativity, in a “complex rhythmical loop between acting as-if and imagining of what is not-yet” (Kunst 178). In her view, already before the pandemic there was a strong “need to develop imaginative temporal forms of working that would have the power to resist the flexibility and precarity of contemporary work” (Kunst 177). Today, this need seems more urgent than ever. In fact, the crisis appears to intensify the “not-yet” aspect of cultural institution workings: maintaining grants and previously made ticket sale profits depends largely on the promises of delivering the live performances/festivals to the public in an unspecified time of ‘once the COVID-19 pandemic is over’.
In response to the social calls for supporting the arts, many financial measures have been promised by governments, ministeries, and art funds on national and European level. In the Netherlands, funds for non-subsidized professional arts workers, programs of support for subsidized cultural institutions, and allowances to pay fixed costs have been already introduced; a few more funds and loans are waiting to come into action (CulturalPolicies.net). Some other countries- for instance Poland- still wait for the proposed financial measures for the cultural sector (“subsidies for the development of digital forms of artistic creativity and an additional programme compensating losses in culture caused by the epidemic”) to be implemented, with the only one adopted so far being the “Anti-Crisis Shield” fiscal leniency program (CulturalPolicies.net).
The pandemic – and the financial losses associated with it- do not wait. Still, the procedures for obtaining funds, grants, and subsidies continue to be lengthy, even in the times of crisis. Often, they require artists to participate in creative project competitions and to prove the economic value that their “not-yet” imagined futures (in which they obtain the funds) would bring. The bureaucracy associated with such competitions leads to their potential inadequacy for the fast-developing crisis: for instance, choosing the winning projects within the Polish ministerial program promising “20 million Polish zloty for culture on the internet” took around 2 months, causing the program to not be implemented until the end of May – the time by which many cultural institutions were already allowed to begin reopening (Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego). Additionally, as Daria Gosek-Popiołek (a Polish Left deputy) argued, many relief plans and grants assume that the no-contract employees of the cultural institutions are artists only, which leads to a failure of financial measures to address the loss of income experienced by other workers carrying out activities in connection with such institutions: an example could be workers who contribute to language, sport, and psychological courses publically available in regional cultural centers (Januszewska).
The reason for the inadequacies of some financial measures can often be traced back to deeper misunderstandings of the role of arts and culture within the neoliberal framework. Art subsidies, as Robert Oosterhuis stated, are often not viewed as legitimate by the public in the first place – this is the result of the subsidy boards catering mainly to the opinions of professionals rather than employing audiences, users, and participants in their decisions. Cultural institutions need to constantly prove their use for the society; project proposals and competitions exist to codify human creativity in the constraints of “progression” and “economystification” (Kunst). While seeking to liberate the arts from such constraints of neoliberalism can be an ultimate goal, one might also ask – within the system, why is culture regarded as inferior (for example, to the sciences) in economic value and potential of contribution to the society in the first place? Seeing as the arts make substantial contributions to the national GDP of most European countries (e.g. in the Netherlands: 3.7 percent, which is considerably more than agriculture, forestry, and fishing (CBS)), the prevalent questioning of economic and social legitimacy of art appears to be ideological rather than practical. In other words, it might be that the issue was never in an actual lesser socioeconomic value of the arts; but rather, in the difficulty to discuss the “logic of imagination” (Kunst) in terms of contained solid spaces and protocols which the current social order came to privilege.
For the cultural institutions to persist in the pandemic, the support offered to them should aim to resist precarity first and foremost. It could be beneficial for application procedures to be simplified and de-bureaucratized at least; additionally, the funds could address the crisis better if they were developed in close discussion with cultural institutions.
Works cited:
CBS. ‘’Culture and Media Contribute 3.7 Percent to GDP”. CBS, 3 Dec. 2019, https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2019/29/culture-and-media-contribute-3-7-percent-to-gdp.
CulturalPolicies.net. ’’Comparative Overview: Financial Measures”. CulturalPolicies.net, 11 Jun. 2020, https://www.culturalpolicies.net/covid-19/comparative-overview-financial/.
Januszewska, Paulina. ’’Koronawirus Zabija Instytucje Kultury. Czy Rząd Wyciągnie do nas Rękę?”. Krytyka Polityczna, 17 Mar. 2020, https://krytykapolityczna.pl/kraj/koronawirus-instytucje-kultury-daria-gosek-popiolek/.
Kunst, Bojana. ’’The Paradox of the New Institution: On Time and Imagination”. The Future of the New, edited by Thijs Lijster, Valiz, 2018, pp. 168-179.
Ministerstwo Kultury i Dziedzictwa Narodowego. ’’20 mln zł na Stypendia dla Artystów! Rozstrzygnęliśmy II Część Programu Kultura w Sieci”. Gov.pl, 22 May 2020, https://www.gov.pl/web/kultura/20-mln-zl-na-stypendia-dla-artystow-rozstrzygnelismy-ii-czesc-programu-kultura-w-sieci2.
Wagińska-Marzec, Maria. “Niemieckie instytucje kultury w okresie pandemii koronawirusa”. E-Teatr, 24 Mar. 2020, http://www.e-teatr.pl/pl/artykuly/288332.html.
By Elisabetta Cuccaro
The Covid-19 outbreak is a crisis that is showing us the true face of our society: the virus, in itself so ‘democratic’ -everybody can get it and die because of it-, reveals with crude realism the inequalities present in our times. The most vulnerable categories are suffering the most, their precarity enhanced. How can you stay home, if you have none? How can you wash your hands, if there is no water? We could say that the health crisis provoked by the virus is actually a symptom or an indicator of a deeper crisis. We call it ecological crisis, doomily summarized as climate change.
Of course, looking at this bigger crisis which is threatening our own survival as a species, the question that spontaneously arises is: what are the causes of climate change? How can we mitigate it (we are already so far that it is unavoidable)? Science is warning us since a very long time: “In 1972, Limits to Growth was published as the first worldwide report on the human environment. […] The report stated that if human habits did not change, industrial production did not revolutionize, and ecological concerns were not embedded in business models, the limits of the Earth’s resources would be reached in the next 50 to 100 years” [1].
Evidently, things did not take a different path: not only our habits did not drastically change, but also the very denial of the problem has been ongoing: “Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease behind it” [2]. We can agree that this denial seems to be the real problem, the scientific facts are ignored as not valid. But why? Following Castillo and Egginton, the spread of anti-intellectualism and the subsequent disregard for scientific indictments can be analyzed as follow: “The explanation for this apparently willful ignorance lies in today’s medialogy.”[3]. This statement summarizes in the concept of medialogy the problems of our times. This term, at once, describes both the partiality of media and their specific functioning as framing device. Medialogy, which can be intended as the logic of the media, is the current state in which media are used by a limited elite as the main tool to make people see reality in the way that will make the elite profit. The logic of medialogy is neoliberalism, and it works for the latter’s aims. Medialogy’s interpretation of the world reduces it into a series of exploitable resources, while the person is represented or intended just as a consumer. The aim of this frame is the unlimited growth of the market, its constant expansion, as well as an increase of profit. Our medialogy frames reality as such, pretending to be the only viable way of interpretation.
Thus, survival of our species seems to lie in a battle of interpretation, where what reality could be and how we should read it is at stake. Here the Humanities enters in the game, as the possible savior, being the field where to practice interpretation: “Literature, art, and philosophy have the capacity to teach us to think differently, precisely and especially when they are not captive to a strictly representationalist or objectivist logic. […] Reading literature and viewing art and thinking and writing about these experiences is the vital and indispensable foundation for any possible liberation from today’s medialogy and the self-destructive traps of desire it engenders”[4]. This because the Humanities allow us to see not just a different version of the world, but “[…] how the world can produce so many versions of itself”[5].
But here it emerges the hardest observation that is truly needed, the real crisis that the Humanities are facing. Humanities are a medicine nobody knows it is needed, and this ignorance is not only medialogy’s fault. In order to save the world, the Humanities have to overcome an even longer-lasting crisis: their own crisis, the crisis of culture tout court. A crisis brilliantly diagnosed already in 1936 by Denis de Rougemont in his book Penser avec les mains. He finds that the problem lies in the separation between culture and the productive world; in other words between intellectuals and who is described as “profane”, who is not an intellectual (I would say, who is busy with state or market affairs). De Rougemont believes that intellectuals are guilty: “The fault I imputed them (the intellectuals), is not to have badly guided public opinion. Rather, they have refused of guiding it, invoking the pretest of our cowardice: the pretest of impotence” [6]. What is the result? That culture speaks in a vacuum. This happens because: “[…] it asks nothing […] culture in considered as a commodity and not as an activity of production”[7]. The active side of culture has been lost. Culture should be a “battle, […] a means for fighting”[8]. Action and words have to join forces again, to change culture’s fate as well as human survival.
The Humanities resemble democracy in that they share the same risk of “talking to nobody”. Both should keep in mind that they have practical implications, as suggested by the title of George Huszar’s book Practical Implication of Democracy (1945). When he wrote his book, his worries were that: “[…] the nation might soon experience the kind of “disintegration” of democratic culture which enabled the rise of dictators in Europe and Japan. And this was because democracy had become a thing of words rather than actions. Huszar writes, “Democracy is something you do; not something you talk about. It is more than a form of government, or an attitude or opinion. It is participation” (xiii)”[9]. Paraphrasing it: culture is something you do. It is an active participation in the ongoing process of society. And today, this process needs all of our creativity and engagement for the good of our own survival. We need to imagine differently, and we need to make these alternative visions a shared value. This could be the duty of the Humanities right now: “In the all- pervasive market society, it is not enough to defend the value of the humanities in an increasingly corporatized university. Instead the humanities can and should go on the offensive to denounce the blinding effects of market fundamentalism and poke holes in the media- framed reality that’s coextensive with it”[10]. Humanities, let’s get our hands dirty.
Once we’re all agreed that we’re living in a world in ruins, the ways in which we go about tackling the possibilities for change are important. (Fabrizio Terranova in interview with Sophie Soukias, BRUZZ 2016).
The world is trembling, injustices hit harder and riots cannot but spread.
It is not
enough to be non-racist and we need to be anti-racist. Non-racism resembles the
appearance of talk-democracy, while anti-racism the one of do-democracy. We
need to be engaged, one by one, and take a stance, and our behavior has to
follow our values, and our values have to shape our behaviors. I think the same
of culture, of the Humanities. It is not enough to be non-ignorant. We need to
be anti-ignorance. And maybe the combination of anti-ignorance, anti-racist,
anti-homophobic acts and values will make the difference needed to break the
spell.
[1] N. Petrešin-Bachelez, On Slow Institutions, in How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse, eds. P. O’Neill, L. Steeds, M. Wilson, MIT Press, 2017, p. 41.
[2] N. Klein, This Changes Everything, 2, quoted in D. Castillo, W. Egginton, The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth, Northwestern University Press, 2019, p. 99.
[3] Ibid. p. 101
[4] Ibid. p. 98.
[5] Ibid. p. 97.
[6] D. de Rougemont, Pensare con le mani. Le radici culturali della crisi europea, Transeuropa, 2012 p. 23
[7] Ibid. p. 28.
[8] Ibid. p. 33.
[9] http://henryjenkins.org/blog/2019/5/30/participatory-politics-in-an-age-of-crisis-henry-jenkins-amp-nico-carpentier-part-i
[10] D. Castillo, W. Egginton, The Humanities in the Age of Information and Post-Truth, Northwestern University Press, 2019, p. 103.
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