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7/28/2019 Dragan k Laic Cultural Autonomy 2005
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Dragan Klaic (Amsterdam)
Culture: autonomous and interdependent
(This article is based on a speech delivered at the conference “New models of the
organization of the cultural sector”, organized by the Catalan Association of the
Professionals in Cultural Management in Barcelona on 1 Dec 2005)
I will explore the implications of the increased autonomy of the cultural organizations,
that is presumably to be one of the consequences of a prospective arts council for
Catalonia. A notion of autonomy is connected with the notions of sustainability andinstitutional development. I will point out some strategic factors to make non-profit
cultural organizations viable and dynamic in their local context and internationally.
It is easy to criticize public cultural institutions. They are big, slow, rigid, hierarchical,closed for new initiatives…, say some small cultural operators, young artists, unstable
under-funded cultural initiatives, a bit jealous of the big brothers.
Public cultural organizations are not operating enough as a business – they must earn
more of own income, find sponsors, be efficient and user friendly…, say politiciansseeking to justify subsidy cuts, and some neo-liberal theorists and market fundamentalists
who are in principle opposed to the public subsidy to culture.
Cultural organizations tend to become disoriented with those mixed messages anddemands to serve a variety of causes unrelated to their original cultural mission, such as
cultural tourism, social cohesion, employment, education…They are seeking to respondto various constituencies that foreground their own, often mutually clashing expectations.
Looking at the European cultural landscape, an observer might come up with a
preliminary diagnosis of much institutional fatigue and also notice instances of institutional panic. There is a clear need all over the continent to embark on some
institutional overhaul but there are also evident external and internal resistances and
difficulties. Internally, within the public cultural institutions, there is a strong defense of
the special privileges of civil servants that staff members often enjoy. Somewhere, the blockade is linked to the graying of the permanent staff that quietly awaits retirement and
keeps out the younger colleagues from the position of authority an influence. In many
places there is a lack of new critical skills needed for survival and development or a gapof mistrust between the managers and experts. In-rooted resistance to innovation,
prevalence of routines or even anxieties and fears complete the picture. The institutional
pathology at its worst results in the culture of complaint and depression, passivity andmalaise. A systematic institutional development would be needed to open new
perspectives and shape a developmental strategy.
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Externally, in the political circles, there is often unwillingness to rock the boot of the
institutional culture - some election are always on the horizon and no politician wants to
be depicted in the media by big-mouth culture professionals and artistic celebrities as a barbarian. In addition, there is among the politicians a visible shift of attention from the
public cultural institutions to the to profit-oriented cultural industries that are seen as a
new panacea.
The experiences of cultural systems in the countries of Central and East Europe in the
post-communist transition indicate that it is usually easier to encourage and support new propulsive initiatives than to reform disoriented, dispirited and obsolete cultural
organizations. Those new initiatives gather various means, offer strong programs within a
well defined niche, manifest a firm international orientation and diversify the existing
cultural offer with a high input/output ratio. Traditional cultural institutions aredemoralized by the loss of prestige, privilege and much of the subsidy. They often rent
their extra space to make ends meet. Shops, restaurants and disco clubs in museums,
galleries, archives and theater buildings have become common.
There are some other aggravating factors visible across Europe, such as retrenching and
growingly indifferent governments, reduced or stagnating public budgets and theexplosive growth of the cultural industry with a huge range of appealing products that
cause change in the essential consuming habits and preferences of large parts of the
public. Many cultural institutions realized with a delay that the ICT revolution modifiestheir relation with the audiences, that a web page is more than just an electronic leaflet,
that Internet is on its own a platform to create programs, offer products and consolidate
relationships with some core audiences. Furthermore, migration and the emergence of
multicultural cities made large parts of population stay away from those traditionalcultural institution, entrenched at a physical and cultural distance.
Catalonia experienced a delayed but speeded up development of own culturalinfrastructure and policies since the end of dictatorship in 1975, with exceptional
investments and creation of large emblematic institutions to emanate prestige and
embody the distinctiveness of the region and of the Catalan culture. After 30 years of thisdevelopment, the key question is how to make this infrastructure sustainable, dynamic
and inclusive? This is not just a Catalan question but one posed everywhere in Europe.
Here are some key factors to be considered in shaping the answer.
More autonomy in relation to public authorities needs to be ensured against the
tradition of political arbitrary decisions. Administrative commandeering, pressures,
patronage and clientelismo need to be replaced by operational and programmaticautonomy. Governance structures and principles are to be reconsidered. Who appoints
the boards of the cultural organizations, how is the continuity of boards to be ensured and
how are the desired profiles of its members defined? In practice, this means ponderingthe role and the limits of the authority of the boards, between formal rubber stamping
and directive behavior. Furthermore, it means fine tuning the relation of the board with
the management/chief executive and articulating a supervisory mode that is based on
trust, honesty and comprehensive reporting and sincerity of discussion, with constructive
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criticism. If profiles of the board members are defined and if the recruitment is
successful, if the frequency of the meetings of the board is established, it is up to the
executive to shape the board agenda and provide the flow of timely information, toorganize a steady insight of the board in the functioning of the organization and the
understanding of its context. The board is responsible for the succession planning and
anticipation of various developmental scenarios, including the eruption of institutionalcrisis, where the relationship of the board and the executive comes to its hardest trial. The
role of the board fuses supervisory and anticipatory tasks.
The executive needs to articulate own style of leadership and master competences and
skills needed to function in view of more autonomy, whereby the board members could
play a coaching role. A leadership sense of autonomy should be passed on the members
of the management team and project heads. A dynamic cultural organization cannotexpect to prosper with a rigid departmental structure and accented hierarchy but rather in
temporary project teams, clusters of expertise and shifting accent of activities. Core tasks,
programs and projects are conceived, implemented and realized in a steady planning
cycle, supported by a strategic plan, but with variable priorities and divergent primarylines of programming, and thanks to a constant inflow of temporary engaged
competences and skills, artists and experts, in relation to the programs.
In the past, the leader of a cultural organization could be a respected intellectual, a
writer, a prominent artist who with own authority endowed the organization and made itcredible, while guarding much of free time for own creative projects. Today, an executive
is expected to possess a broad package of skills, needed to handle the market pressures,
engage in sponsorship hunt, respond to the expectations of the tourist industry, remain
available for the media and provoke their curiosity, and to nurture a broad national andinternational network of contacts. Whether he or she is more an artist, an intellectual, an
expert or a manager, the required leadership qualities are shaped on the nexus of internal
institutional development dynamics and the steady shifts in the context of theorganization.
The essential capacity is the strategic thinking, thus a leadership style that can guide theorganization from a developmental philosophy and a strategic plan and not let it be
bounced from one incidental engagement to another, from one small opportunity to
another.(1) The output of the organization emerges as a complex, prolonged
programmatic narrative that repeatedly asserts its uniqueness in an increasingly crowdedand competitive scene. Only a developmental philosophy of the organization and
strategic planning can offer productive responses how to handle the ever pressing
dialectic of the local and the global, of the domestic and foreign, to which every culturaloperators is exposed today. The sense of local context drives the engagement in the local
alliances while an astute diagnosis of own weaknesses and insufficiencies could lead to
strategic partnerships, domestic or foreign. Active role in the international networks andconsortia adds to the professional development of the staff and the development of the
entire organization.
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Today, international engagement also supports the articulation of an emerging European
citizenship among the cultural operators and their audiences. The cultural value of an
organization is among others to be measured by its ability to contribute to theintercultural competence of the employees, associated artists and the public. Educational
tasks are increasingly difficult to separate from the core cultural tasks of a cultural
organization and no such organization can permit itself to remain without any educational programs.
For a cultural organization it is of critical importance to nurture relationships with thecontemporary artists as users, clients, experts, collaborators, advisors and friends. Even
cultural heritage organizations need to surpass their traditional preservationist mode and
recognize that creative links with the contemporary artists can ensure them radiation,
stronger impact and exposure and even new audiences.
Attitudes of cultural organizations towards the business world also deserve a
reconsideration. It is not just a sector to imitate in own organizational operation nor a
mere source of extra money but a word whom the cultural organizations could enrich andinspire by stimulating imagination, articulation of meaning and a critical look. This goes
well beyond the standard sponsorship relationship where the cultural organizationreceives money from a commercial one in exchange for visibility and association with
appreciated cultural goods. In association with the cultural and especially artistic
organization, business corporations come to consider their own core values and other motivations for their own engagement beyond the profit. Their self-perception and the
sense of the world are being altered as well, as LIFT Business Forum amply
demonstrated. (2)
Finally, a new typology of cultural institutions need to be articulated, in parallel to the
traditional typology that has been established in Europe in the last 200 years in order to
emanate the national state, national identity, national culture and national language.In the globalized world and in an increasingly integrated Europe that proclaims cultural
diversity as its treasure rather than a burden, there is need for cultural organizations that
will be less specialized, not driven by a single discipline but more transversal,interdisciplinary and inter-sectorial and also capable to use the electronic highway to
reach virtual audiences and offer their services and products.
Much of the public space is being steadily usurped by the commercial interests, zombieconsumerism and those digital oligopolies that shape our collective imagination in
stereotypical and uniform manner. Public space as a critical sphere and an inclusive zone
emerges from the niches of many special audiences but needs to transcend them as endoutcomes. Europe as a cultural realm is being created in every city and town, in every
cultural organization and not through some grand scheme, cooked up in Brussels. That is
why a systematic overhaul of many cultural organizations and entire systems is not just a bureaucratic reorganization or an economic, efficiency operation but a foremost political
question, a prerequisite to shape a Europe-wide civil society, parallel to an Europe of the
market an Europe of fragile, slowly emerging common institutions and policies. (3)
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Hopefully, the installation of an arts council in Catalonia, as envisaged by the politics and
supported by the cultural operators, will make this cultural system more propulsive and
more transparent, more in synchrony with the altered needs and opportunities - at home,in Europe and especially in the Mediterranean zone. Such a body should not be just a
distributor of public means, a dispatcher of political largesse, but a collective of authority,
capable of recognizing those shifting challenges and turn them into policy proposals for the politics.
References
1. Milena Dragicevic Sesic & Sanjin Dragojevic: Arts Management in Turbulent Times.
Adaptable Quality Management. Amsterdam: ECF & Boekman Stichting 2005.
2. Rose de Wend Fenton & Lucy Neal: The Turning World . Stories from the LondonInternational Festival of Theatre. London: C. Gulbenkian Foundation 2005.
3. Dragan Klaic. Europe as a Cultural Project . Amsterdam: ECF 2005 (see also
www.eurocult.org).
_____________________________________
Dr. Dragan Klaic is Permanent Fellow of Felix Meritis in Amsterdam. He teaches artsand cultural policy at the Leiden University.
© D. Klaic 2005
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