Cultural spending in Ontario,Canada: trends in public and private funding

Governments around the world have accepted the idea that spending on culture can have economic side‐effects such as attracting high technology industry, regenerating urban economies, or increasing a country’s status in the global economy. As governments increased their cultural spending, however, critics charged that their interest reflected an instrumental approach to funding the arts that prioritized large cultural organizations and iconic building projects with the potential to attract tourists over more mundane matters such as operating funding. This study examines flows of government and private funding to cultural organizations in the province of Ontario, Canada on the basis of the size of these organizations. The data show that in real terms, government operating grants to organizations that have received large infrastructural grants for building projects were lower in 2006 than in the pre‐spending cut era of 1990. When a larger group of arts organizations is examined by size, the reality is more complicated than either advocates or critics of the instrumental approach claim. One universal pattern across all size categories is the increase in private funding to cultural organizations in Ontario.     

Access culture: Web 2.0 and cultural participation

This article applies aspects of Jürgen Habermas, Manuel Castells and Lawrence Lessig’s theories to demonstrate how digital communication and new media platforms enhance cultural participation as well as how cultural policy affects the cultural behaviour of users who produce and are consumers in a digital convergence culture. The digital platforms and new media used in the analysis include an open source animated short film, Elephants Dream, the social networking sites YouTube and MySpace, and the BBC’s Creative Archive. The aim of this article is to study how cultural policy makers can learn from these examples and how they can make use of the participatory, self‐publishing characteristics of Web 2.0 in order to create accessible digital cultural public spheres.     

Networked practices of intangible urban heritage: the changing public role of Dutch heritage professionals

This study examines the changing roles of heritage professionals by focusing on the participatory practices of intangible urban heritage. Developments towards democratisation in the heritage sector led to a growing expectation that heritage professionals would work with local publics. This democratisation is manifested in (1) the use of digital media for grassroots heritage practices, (2) the broader scope of what is defined as heritage, and (3) a focus on communities in UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Heritage professionals are thus challenged to develop inclusive heritage practices, particularly in cities, which are characterised by a dynamic nature and cultural diversity. In this article, I analyse how urban heritage organisations and professionals have responded to these developments. Drawing on interviews and a qualitative content analysis of these organisations’ policy documents, I examine the ways in which heritage professionals reconsider their public role through what I define as networked practices of intangible heritage. This concept captures the networked structure in which heritage professionals increasingly work, and also demonstrates how heritage is given meaning through public practices that take place in both the physical and virtual realms of contemporary cities.     

Interrogating the uses of culture in the politics of diversity: a case from South Korea

This article seeks to critically examine the ascendancy of culture in the arena of politics by analysing emergent multicultural discourses and policy development in South Korea as an illuminating case study. In exploring various discursive modalities of culture in the politics of diversity, it investigates how culture is identified as a source of social problems and concurrently employed as their solution. Combining discourse analytic and in-depth interviewing techniques, the article focuses on analysing how female marriage migrants and their children are constructed as cultural other, and how the language of culture is deployed to divert attention from issues of power and structural inequalities. In particular, it examines the discourse of ‘cultural deficiency’ and ‘cultural competence’ used in relation to migrants, and assesses the proposed conceptual shift in cultural policy development from multiculture to cultural diversity.     

Public folklore dialogism and critical heritage studies

Abstract

Public folklore’s dialogic engagement with communities incorporates methodologies for sharing representational and interpretive authority, collaborative programme development, mutually constructed modes of presentation and stakeholder participation in policy-making. While recognising that heritage interventions inevitably involve power asymmetries, public folklore seeks to mitigate and diminish these imbalances as it develops approaches to enable communities to present their culture on their own terms. This paper explores dialogic public folklore practice through community self-documentation projects, folklife festivals, government folk arts funding programmes and a project promoting places of local cultural significance. It provides examples of the integration of multiple roles of public folklorists as scholars, administrators, producers of folklore presentations and government heritage officers. Public folklore praxis achieved through the integration of these roles is seen as a potential model for critical heritage studies praxis for scholars who are advisors and researchers in intangible cultural heritage (ICH) initiatives. Critical heritage scholars involved with ICH can learn from how public folklorists engage with communities and foster cultural self-determination. For public folklorists, collaboration and increased dialogue with critical heritage scholars could foster greater awareness of hegemonic discourses, reconceptualisation of the social base of ICH and recognition of the pitfalls of fostering economic development through heritage.     

Command Celebrities: The Rise and Fall of Hanzelka and Zikmund

In the 1950s and 1960s, the travellers, explorers, authors, and filmmakers Ji?í Hanzelka and Miroslav Zikmund became celebrities both in Czechoslovakia and abroad. The Communist cultural authorities actively supported the transformation of the two men into cultural icons, which could be exploited as a model for the suppression of ‘old’, ‘decadent’, and indeed ‘popular’ culture, and as a tool for recruiting members of the intellectual, cultural, and social elites into its service. Hanzelka and Zikmund’s multimedia travelogues, as well as their dashing public personae, blended in a unique way the ‘high’ and ‘low’, the accessible and unreachable, the familiar and the exotic, in the officially promoted culture of the time. But in the later 1960s, as Hanzelka and Zikmund’s political loyalties towards some form of reform socialism became more blatant, the two men fell into disfavour, and they found themselves banished from the public sphere following the events of 1968 until the regime fell in 1989. This article investigates how the curious ‘command celebrity’ of ‘H&Z’ straddled socialist ideology and capitalist consumerism, political affirmation and cultural critique.     

‘We Can Always Go Back Home’: critical lessons in helping to safeguard and promote the Singing and Praying Bands living tradition

Abstract

The article examines the process of promoting, with a view to safeguarding, the centuries-old Singing and Praying Bands living tradition, an African American musical and spiritual expression that is distinctive to the Chesapeake Bay region of the US. Discussed within the context of US public folklore, the process is understood as a co-intervention, representing an active partnership between the Bands’ community and public folklorists (including the authors) in attempting to reach new members as a means of keeping it alive. The article underscores the need for ‘bottom-up’ approaches in safeguarding living cultural traditions, bringing to light the potential strengths of public folklore work and the benefits its theories and methodologies can bring to the intangible cultural heritage discourse. Moreover, it analyses how community agency has been exercised, and community needs accommodated, through the dialogue-driven, collaborative intervention process. It also investigates how a nuanced view of ‘authenticity’ has been shaped, with regard to changes the living tradition has undergone, and is currently understood by those who embody it.     

Cultural censorship in defective democracy: the South Korean blacklist case

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to understand the cultural censorship practiced in contemporary South Korea, a liberal democracy, where cultural quangos were established after political democratization, following the arm’s length model. I will focus on the analysis of cases from the film industry which has been central to the censorship debate historically in Korea because of its popular appeal. The establishment of arm’s length cultural organizations laid the foundation for freedom of cultural expression which had been seriously curtailed under military rule. However, recent revelations of cultural blacklist cases under the two previous administrations are baffling to understand since rampant political censorship was practiced through ostensibly autonomous cultural organizations. The paper examines the ways in which the state constructed a ‘system of ideological censorship’ by using not only cultural quangos but non-cultural state apparatuses. In so doing, the paper emphasizes the role of non-cultural policy state institutions in the operation of cultural policy and the effect of state systems on cultural organizations. I draw upon the concept of defective democracy to understand the socio-political condition where these cultural organizations exist.     

Theorising the role of cultural products in cultural diplomacy from a Cultural Studies perspective

Cultural diplomacy continues to attract significant interest as a potential means for states to exercise ‘soft power’. However, policy-makers and academics who assert the efficacy of cultural diplomacy in terms of influencing foreign publics and states rarely consider how cultural products are actually received abroad. This article proposes that this process of reception can be better understood with reference to the theoretical approaches of Cultural Studies, which encourage us to recognise the extent to which audiences are implicated in processes of meaning-making, processes which are closely associated with the articulation of identity. By applying these approaches to cultural diplomacy, policy-makers and researchers could shift their focus to an exploration of realities of the reception cultural products abroad, which would better inform their assumptions about how to achieve successful cultural diplomacy.     

Designing a socially efficient cultural policy: the case of municipal theaters in Warsaw

While public support for culture has become a less self-evident privilege than in the past, the economic evidence for benefits a society gains from these goods has become essential for both cultural economics and cultural policy. The aim of our study is to investigate socially preferred ways of allocating scarce public resources among municipal theaters in Warsaw. The problem investigated is a current issue for local policy-making, but in a broader sense, it illustrates how state-of-the-art stated preference methods can be employed to support cultural policy. We find that inhabitants of Warsaw assign a positive value to the broader accessibility of the theaters, and their willingness to pay for making them a truly public good (by introducing a program of highly discounted tickets) exceeds the costs of such a policy. However, we also find that the cost-benefit relationship varies across theaters with different types of plays in their repertories. Our results imply a different level of socially efficient support for experimental, drama, children’s and entertainment theaters.     

Global heritage: perspectives from the Northern Territory,Australia

This article examines the way in which selected cultural institutions, government and non‐government organisations and individuals in Australia’s Northern Territory have responded to globalising influences on the preservation, interpretation and public face of its history and heritage. It draws upon a number of interviews with local practitioners and professionals in the field to explore the multiple understandings of cultural heritage, history and identity in the Territory, to investigate how competing interests and expectations are managed at the state and local level, and to address issues of sovereignty in the context of global heritage. Respondents indicate that, despite a strong resurgence of local cultural identities, without people on the ground who care about their heritage, efforts by international bodies will have little effect. There has been increasing concern about the protection of local cultures in the face of globalisation, and research such as this is critical in providing feedback to international heritage organisations. Without strong local support for cultural heritage and identities, they can become increasingly vulnerable in a rapidly globalising world. In Australia’s Northern Territory, however, there seems little indication of this happening.     

Designing cultural policy in a postcolonial colony: the case of Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico became a territory of the United States in 1898 with the end of the Spanish-American War. In 1952, the island became a ‘Commonwealth’ through the development and approval of a local constitution. While this political status allows Puerto Rico some degree of autonomy, it nevertheless continues to subject the island to United States federal authority. For the last 60 years, discussions on whether Puerto Rico’s Commonwealth status is a permanent or transitional status has fuelled much of the political debate and public policy of the region, and has been highly influenced by political status ideologies: to become a state of the United States, to maintain the current status, or to become independendent. Budgetary, legal, and commercial dependence on the United States causes constant conflicts in the design and implementation of Puerto Rican public policy in areas such as education, law, and economic development. Likewise, culture has not been exempt from these debates. In fact, cultural differences have caused conflict at all levels – from the theoretical conceptions of culture, to cultural policy and arts management. Moreover, the implementation of cultural policies has also been subject to political ideologies and the concept of culture has variably been seen as an obstacle or strength for specific political purposes. In the midst of a sustained economic crisis, the current Puerto Rican government has proposed the development of a comprehensive cultural policy through a participatory process. The objective of this paper is to present this process as a means of analyzing Puerto Rico’s experience through the challenges in designing and implementing cultural policy within a ‘postcolonial colony’ scenario. This paper will place emphasis on the government’s role, cultural public institutions, and cultural production.     

From culture for the people to culture for profit: the PRC’s journey toward a cultural industries approach

This paper seeks to explore the internal driving forces behind the emergence and prosperity of China’s cultural industries. The paper traces the Chinese Communist Party’s radical transformation from stressing the class stand and ideological nature of culture to concluding with the concept of ‘cultural industries’ so as to expand an orthodox Marxist/Leninist/Maoist notion of culture. The Chinese party-state legalizes ‘cultural industries’ by extending the market mechanism into the cultural arena, and acknowledges the triple statuses of culture as a public service provider, a market profit contributor, and an essential builder of the ‘socialist core value system.’ By doing so, the Chinese Party-state is able to take advantage of the economic power of the market while retaining the ideological control function of culture. As such, cultural industries become a mode of governance for the CCP to maintain cultural security and national identity, and a source of soft power to maneuver.     

Cultural Economy: Achievements,Divergences, Future Prospects

This paper reflects on two decades' scholarship in geography on cultural economy, assessing strides made against some of the expectations of early proponents. Cultural economy continues to be a polysemic term. In some quarters, it refers to a type of economic geography into which matters of ‘culture’ are absorbed. This work frequently focuses on the empirics of the so‐called ‘cultural and creative industries’. Others see cultural economic research as an opportunity to move beyond the epistemological constraints of ‘culture’ and ‘economy’, questioning their status as foundational categories. This latter approach has been used in a broader set of empirical projects encompassing technology, knowledge, and society. Contrasting threads of cultural economic research have helpfully moved geographical scholarship beyond paradigmatic limitations, but jostle somewhat uncomfortably within existing (and increasingly specialised) disciplinary and subdisciplinary fields. The risk is that by questioning the categorical underpinnings of much specialised research, cultural economy struggles to ‘belong’ in the increasingly coded and compartmentalised university setting. I conclude with a discussion of future prospects. Some measure of vitality could be achieved through incorporation of a cultural economy perspective into the pressing issues of climate change, human sustenance, and urban infrastructure planning. These are issues for which the polysemy of cultural economy could prove constructive, transcending technocentric market ‘fixes’ and bland assumptions about how best to ‘green’ our cities – promoting instead ethnographic interrogations of how humans access, use, exchange, and value financial and material resources as moral and social beings.     

Cultural actors as agents of generating social co-presences within the place: Istanbul’s contemporary art scene

This paper builds on the designation of cultural actors’ actions as a decisive factor in the emergence of urban patterns of art-driven social co-presences in Istanbul. It contributes to the creative city debate from the perspective of community development by incorporating the contemporary arts into urban social space making efforts. Methodologically, the locations of art organizations in the contemporary arts scene of Istanbul are approached as an urban pattern of art driven social co-presences that resulted from the ‘collective action’ in which a multitude of cultural actors are involved. We find that the clusters of art organizations serve as multidimensional social interactions among artist communities. There are, however, inefficiencies in spreading this interactive networking throughout different social segments. Research findings conclude that the cultural actors as agents of generating social co-presences within the place, are not effectively contributing to the society’s social coherence, particularly in terms of creating links with disadvantageous neighbourhood residents.     

The nonprofit arts organization concept and its transformation in Korea

ABSTRACT

After the Korean War, both the autocratic and later democratic South Korean governments actively fostered the development of Korea’s arts sector, in part by emulating the organizational and legal structures of U.S. nonprofits. Yet, in this policy transfer, Korea has taken a different path, notably rearticulating the U.S.-style hands-off facilitation model to reflect and accommodate Korean political, institutional, and cultural exigencies. We analyze the effects of the resulting cultural policy on Korean public arts institutions, using documentary evidence and narratives from our case studies of two national arts organizations restructured by the government: The National Theater Company of Korea and the Seoul Arts Center. We employ the concept of cultural statism, conditioned by "culture as glorification," resource dependence, and path dependence, to understand the development of Korea’s public arts sector. Specifically, we consider: the government’s desire to use the arts to enhance its image on an international stage shaped by western liberal democratic values; arts leaders’ desire for reliable support (resource dependence); and the tendancy of Koreans to want to be associated with the stability and prestige of the government (path dependence).     

Expected job creation across the cultural industries: a sectoral division and its implications for cultural policy

The cultural industries have come to the forefront as the potential job creators of the future. However, building on the concentric circles model and production system view of the cultural industries, we pose that many young and small organizations in the industries lack the motivation, ability, and opportunity to become job creator. We reason that industry location crucially affects job creation expectations. Evidence from an international sample of early-stage entrepreneurs strongly supports this thesis. We identify a divide between entrepreneurs in the ‘core’ cultural industries vis-à-vis those in the ‘non-core’ cultural industries, where the latter group is indistinguishable from entrepreneurs in non-cultural industries in their job creation expectations. Simultaneously, those in the core cultural industries are distinct from others in their expectations to maintain the same number of jobs, rather than grow. These findings have important implications for cultural policy aimed at promoting employment growth in the cultural industries.     

Democratization and museum policy in South Korea

ABSTRACT

This article examines the two distinct historical policy paths taken by the South Korean government in the late twentieth century towards the democratization of museums. One was based on the creation of a museological public sphere as an extension of the political democratization movement of the 1980s. This demonstrated the potential to become a valuable component of the wider incipient national public sphere within which civic subjects could discuss their individual and collective historical memories. However, despite this potential, a museological public sphere failed to influence the general trajectory of national policy regarding the democratization of museums that had been in development since the early 1980s. This other policy path towards cultural democratization was triggered by the award of the Seoul Olympics in 1981. It was based on public participation and entitled the ‘cultural Olympics’. An important strategy of the cultural Olympics was the construction of a new institutional infrastructure to expand the public right to enjoy culture. This path facilitated an increasing entanglement with neoliberalism in 1990s. Finally, the 1997 IMF crisis furthered the association between a superficial idea of democratization through institutional expansion and the practices of neoliberalism, a trend which continues within South Korean museum policy today.     

Cultural brownfields in European cities: a new mainstream object for cultural and urban policies

This paper develops the concept of ‘cultural brownfields’ and discusses how organic cultural projects developed in derelict sites have been progressively included in mainstream cultural and urban planning strategies and policies over the last 10?years. To do so the paper assesses the transformation of three mature cultural brownfields in Berlin, Marseille and Lausanne and their distinctive internal and external dynamics. It develops a typology of cultural brownfields which stresses the diverse nature of these spaces and their differential role in cultural and urban planning policies. The paper concludes by highlighting a series of policy lessons for urban planning and cultural strategies.     

Making creative industries policy in the real world: differing configurations of the culture-market-state nexus in the UK and South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.