Mapping cultural policy in Portugal: From incentives to crisis

Abstract

Taking into account the course of cultural policy in democratic Portugal, and against the backdrop of the international crisis of 2008 and the sovereign debt crisis of 2011, this article seeks to interpret recent changes in the cultural sector in Portugal. Using both qualitative and quantitative methods it focuses on three main aspects: institutionalisation of democratic cultural policy; government funding; cultural organizations and facilities. The 2008 crisis put an end to a period in which investment tended to grow. We place Portugal in the broader European context, concluding that the Portuguese cultural scene may once again diverge from that of other European countries.     

From Coombs to Crean: popular music and cultural policy in Australia

The many bodies administering Australian arts activity were incorporated within the Australia Council, established in 1973 by the Whitlam Labor Government to oversee Commonwealth arts policy under the direction of H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs. This article takes the establishment of the Australia Council as a starting point in tracing changing attitudes towards the practices and funding of popular music in Australia and accompanying policy discourses. This includes consideration of how funding models reinforce understandings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, the ‘cultural’/‘creative’ industries debates, and their effects upon local popular music policy. This article discusses the history of local music content debates as a central instrument of popular music policy and examines the implications for cultural nationalism in light of a recent series of media and cultural reports into industries and funding bodies. In documenting a broad shift from cultural to industrial policy narratives, the article examines a central question: What does the ‘national’ now mean in contemporary music and the rapid evolution of digital media technologies?     

From liberal to conservative: shifting cultural policy regimes in post-Soviet Russia

In this paper, we analyze the evolution of Russian cultural policy from the end of the Soviet era through the current against the framework of welfare state regimes. The end of the Soviet Union 25 years ago ushered in a decade of liberalization marked by a withdrawal of the state from cultural responsibility and hopes that market demand and private support would emerge to fill in the void. With the latter hampered by the economic hardships of the transition and the loss of philanthropic traditions after more than 70 years of communism, a liberal policy regime did not take firmly hold and has gradually been replaced by a new cultural policy consensus more akin to a conservative welfare regime, marked by a return of the state to a more dominant role with the support of core cultural policy constituencies.     

Streaming from stage to screen: its place in the cultural marketplace and the implication for UK arts policy

Live streaming of stage performances by opera and theatre companies into cinemas, and increasingly into the home, continues to grow rapidly. What the cinema audience hears and sees differs qualitatively both from what is seen in the theatre and also from what is normally available in cinemas. The ‘real-time liveness’ offered by leading companies appears to be an important attraction, though may diminish as the novelty of streamed performances wears off. The cinema audience is both socio-demographically and in cultural experience more similar to the theatre audiences than to typical cinema audiences, giving rise to suggestions that streaming might cannibalise the live audiences of the transmitting theatres, but there is no evidence of this, nor, at least in the UK, to support speculation that streaming reduces audiences for regional arts companies. Streaming should therefore be welcomed as broadening the number of consumers who can benefit from arts subsidies.     

Fiddling for outcomes: traditional music,social capital,and arts policy in Northern Ireland

Arts development policies increasingly tie funding to the potential of arts organisations to effectively deliver an array of extra‐artistic social outcomes. This paper reports on the difficulties of this work in Northern Ireland, where the arts sector, and in particular the so‐called ‘traditional arts’, have been drawn into a politically ambiguous discourse centred on the concepts of ‘mutual understanding’ and, more recently, ‘social capital’. The paper traces the recent history of these policies and the difficulties in evaluating the social outcomes of arts programs. The use of the term ‘social capital’ in the work of Putnam and Bourdieu is considered. The paper argues, through a rereading of Bourdieu’s articulation of the ‘forms’ of capital and Eagleton’s ‘ideology of the aesthetic’, the concept of social capital can be released from its current neoliberal trappings by imagining a reconnection of the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘the aesthetic’.     

The creation of cultural policy in the media: a field research of cultural discourses in Germany

In Germany, cultural policy is formally made on the level of municipalities, the Länder (federal states) and the federal government. With approximately eight billion Euros per year, they finance a large percentage of cultural and arts activities: music, theater, dance, museums, libraries, film and the preservation of sites of historic interest. The federal government sets the legal framework in which art can be produced and distributed, and finances it indirectly through tax reductions (VAT reduction), copy right laws, and special health insurance and retirement arrangements for artists (Künstlersozialkasse). Within this institutionalized legal and governmental setting, the discursive dimension of politics is often forgotten, particularly when policy creation is being discussed. This article focuses on the discursive dimensions of politics within the field of classical and contemporary music and offers a discourse analysis of mass media coverage to investigate policy‐making.     

Law, Patronage and Municipal Authority in Seventeenth-Century France: The Aftermath of the Lanturelu Revolt in Dijon

Popular uprisings have attracted the interest of early modernhistorians but the efforts of local elites to manage their consequencesremain largely unexplored. This article examines how Dijon’smunicipality negotiated the aftermath of the 1630 Lanturelurevolt. Following the uprising, Louis XIII curtailed Dijon’sprivileges, reorganized its municipality, and ordered it toindemnify the revolt’s victims. Over time, however, theavocats of Dijon’s municipal government successfully manipulatedthe Ancien Régime’s power networks—law, localinstitutions and clientage networks—to win a restorationof Dijon’s traditional city government, the reductionof damage claims, acknowledgement of the municipality’sinnocence and reaffirmation of its contested authority. Lanturelu’saftermath, often interpreted as an example of the early Bourbons’growing control over French cities, thus reveals that the lattercould remain dynamic political centres in the early seventeenthcentury and that the state’s expanding apparatus couldbe used to contest royal authority, as well as extend it.     

Deep hanging out in the arts: an anthropological approach to capturing cultural value

This article presents the findings of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project carried out from September 2013 to March 2014 by five researchers at the University of Leeds (UK), who paired off with five audience-participants and engaged in a process of ‘deep hanging out’ at events curated as part of Leeds’ annual LoveArts festival. As part of AHRC’s Cultural Value project, the overarching aim of the research was to produce a rich, polyvocal, evocative and complex account of cultural value by co-investigating arts engagement with audience–participants. Findings suggested that both the methods and purpose of knowing about cultural value impact significantly on any exploration of cultural experience. Fieldwork culminated in the apparent paradox that we know, and yet still don’t seem to know, the value and impact of the arts. Protracted discussions with the participants suggested that this paradox stemmed from a misplaced focus on knowledge; that instead of striving to understand and rationalize the value of the arts, we should instead aim to feel and experience it. During a process of deep hanging out, our participants revealed the limitations of language in capturing the value of the arts, yet confirmed perceptions of the arts as a vehicle for developing self-identity and -expression and for living a better life. These findings suggest that the Cultural Value debate needs to be reframed from what is currently an interminable epistemological obsession (that seeks to prove and evidence the value of culture) into a more complex phenomenological question, which asks how people experience the arts and culture and why people want to understand its value. This in turn implies a re-conceptualization of the relationships between artists or arts organisations and their publics, based on a more relational form of engagement and on a more anthropological approach to capturing and co-creating cultural value.     

Introduction: film policy in a globalised cultural economy

This special issue on ‘Film Policy in a Globalised Cultural Economy’ is devoted to the changing economic and technological context in which filmmaking occurs, the policy responses that these changes have generated and their consequences for the pursuit of cultural objectives. The issue offers discussions of the general economic, technological and political shifts shaping the global film industry as well as case-studies examining the specific policies adopted by different states. While these indicate how governments have been obliged to respond to the economic and technological changes wrought by globalisation they also highlight the variations in approach to film policy and the continuation of tensions between economic and cultural, and public and private, objectives.     

Settler colonialism and cultural policy: the colonial foundations and refoundations of Canadian cultural policy

This article aims to reintegrate the colonial history of Canada as part of the grids of analysis for understanding the evolution of its Federal cultural policy. Building on the notion of settler colonialism and its implication for Indigenous population (For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘Indigenous’ is used in place of, perhaps, more popular or familiar terms – such as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Native’ – in order to remain consistent with current Indigenous politics. In particular, some Indigenous scholars are reluctant to accept the label Aboriginal because they feel it is consistent with the colonial order imposed by the Canadian government [Alfred and Corntassel 2005, p. 599]). The term Indigenous also alludes to a global political awareness and to forms of alterity between different populations from North America, South America, Asia, and the Pacific. in Canada, this paper documents different transformations in cultural policy and illustrates some of its paradoxes and challenges. Building on principles developed by Indigenous scholars, this article highlights some of the components for decolonizing cultural policy in Canada. It is argued that a post-colonial cultural policy must build on the grounds of ethics (and ethos).     

Exchanging logoi for aloga: cultural capital and material capital in a letter of Michael Psellos

Abstract

In a letter to his friend Iasites (Sathas 171), Michael Psellos proposes to give the letter itself in exchange for a horse. Exploiting the polysemy of alogon and logos in Greek, Psellos is able to frame this playful representation of a gift exchange in a philosophical opposition between materiality and reason. This allows him to present his intellectual competences as an exclusive kind of cultural capital that deserves material support from other members of society.     

The continuing saga around arts funding and the cultural wars in Australia

Cultural policy, and arts funding in particular, has been a site of much contention and discussion in Australia over the past decade. The events of the past two years took this to another level showing major ideological schisms in the present political approach. While the established arts sector was protected and consolidated, the emerging sector, individual artists, and small organisations were all negatively affected. The policy changes demonstrate the implicit challenges of direct political intervention in arts funding. What this period highlights also though is the vulnerability of artists and the philosophical contradictions around the nature of arts funding.     

The process of privatisation of cultural heritage and the arts in Italy: analysis and perspectives

During the last decade, institutional changes in the cultural heritage sector triggered some fierce debate in Europe. This paper analyses the complex process of privatising cultural heritage and the arts in Italy, showing how the relationship between this process and urban regeneration policies is tacitly legitimising it, despite the harsh controversies it previously provoked. From a perspective of ‘territorialisation’ discussed in this paper, this policy process could enhance the involvement of the private sector, bringing to light new fields of research and application in the international heritage debate.     

The autonomous world reversed: comparing liberal policy and autonomy in the performing arts

Comparative studies of cultural policy commonly emphasize the way in which states treat the autonomy of the arts. Such studies often claim that liberal states promote autonomy, while social democratic states promote more external, instrumental values, such as solidarity, universalism and equality. This article challenges this conception by claiming that in actual cultural policy-making it is in fact the other way around. Based on a comparative study of theater policy in England, Norway and the Netherlands, I find that the focus on artistic autonomy is surprisingly absent in the liberal state of England, compared to what it is in the social democratic state of Norway. Conversely, English theaters are more obliged to work for, and with, the citizens and the community than theaters in Norway are. In the Netherlands, where recent development in general policy has headed in a liberal direction, artistic autonomy actually appears to be increasingly challenged.     

License to judge: fleshing out expertise in cultural policy

This paper endeavours to examine different types of expertise in cultural policy. Unlike other conceptual studies, it focuses on the abstract notion of expertise i.e. the different forms of cognition and knowledge deployed in cultural policy, rather than the personage of an expert. The article proposes a distinction between arts expertise and technocratic expertise and employs five analytical categories within which they are discussed and compared with each other. Although a clear-cut differentiation seems impossible to achieve, the binary approach helps to shed light on how different forms of expert judgement in cultural policy can be framed and legitimised as well as how vulnerable they are to political influence and the concomitant pressure of the democratisation of policy-making.