Packaging cultural history
Cultural institutions cost money. In purely economic terms, they show a slow increase in productivity and their services will therefore continue to become more expensive compared to others in the highly competitive private sector. When culture is in the public sector, its low productivity creates problems for the control apparatus that handles the financing. When it comes to the spending of tax money, proper housekeeping and discipline are essential. With such little room for manoeuvre, cultural spending has remained at modest levels – 0.8% of the state budget.
The control apparatus can easily procure audit support services. Nowadays, a model called COSO (Committee of Sponsoring Organisations of the Treadway Commission) is used, which was originally a tool for the evaluation of a company’s internal control. Public administration is increasingly imitating the private sector, but without abandoning the specific language of public authorities. It is a question of performance management and internal control. The apparatus requires efficiency and productivity, financial reporting, and operation within the law. It demands a controlled environment, which must include integrity, ethical values, competence among those involved, and respect for the management’s philosophy and leadership style. However, one can identify risks, external or internal in origin, which could jeopardise the objectives. Controls are necessary and these exist throughout the organisation, at all levels and in all functions. The process requires that relevant information is routinely identified, retained and communicated.
When the control apparatus invades cultural institutions, it may be very difficult to decide what cultural goals really look like. One example is the National Audit Board’s implementation of the COSO model in an analysis of the Swedish Arts Council and Swedish Arts Grants Committee. The Auditor General rightly points out that neither parliament nor the government can explain what artistic renewal means. It is noted that there was doubt on this point. On the one hand, review and renewal can be said to “stand in contrast to the tradition and continuity, but these concepts need not be opposed to each other”. When the battle begins between the Swedish Arts Council’s and Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s efforts to renew, uncertainty remains.
It was found that innovative culture stood outside the grants system, without identifying what innovation really is. It is said indeed that “innovative culture often is art and genres overall”, but that they are not necessarily related. The next step is in some sense related to the COSO model, namely risk management. What is here regarded as innovative is said to be risky and to require venture capital.
This blend of efficiency requirements, uncertainty and benevolence provides a fertile soil for research into culture policy. The COSO model really wants to eliminate risk. But risk is often an inherent part of innovation. Benevolence in cultural matters is politically instrumental and as such contradictory – especially when seeking economic gains at the expense of culture’s own not-for-profit values. The main risk lies in the gradual destruction of what constitutes culture’s core purposes.
Currently there is growth. In 2010, the Ministry of Employment and the Economy requires increased competitiveness by means of “culture, creative expression and design”. This is best done by “industry, researchers and the public sector concentrating resources on development environments, where cultures can meet and enrich each other”. From such meetings, it is said that “innovative new business models, products and services” are created, and the consequence is growth.
The Ministry of Culture confirms the notion that culture is important for “a country’s competitiveness”. The action plan for the cultural and creative industries aims high. It strengthens and develops “cultural heritage as well as innovative culture in new areas”. This supposed expansion of cultural heritage with all its breadth, and that which follows in the future in the form of innovation, do not require unexpected ‘creativity’.
That such things as ‘education and humanism’ are brought forth as premises for the move towards “sustainable growth in a global world”, however, remains difficult to interpret in this context. The contradictory notion of ‘sustainable growth’ makes an excellent motto. But what about ‘education and humanism’? Education is a term derived from German and is notoriously difficult to define. It implies not only teaching and being taught, not just knowledge and skills, but elevated values such as ethos, refinement and humanity. Humanism has long since lost its original meaning, namely, a profound commitment to the canonised Western tradition of education. Now the concept stands for the defence of human dignity. If this indeed exists, then it is of course only as a good thing to say. Even if these phrases are well meaning, they hide a position that pushes for the commercialisation of culture.
Vital and confirmatory research about entrepreneurship has emerged in the wake of national economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter’s work. Karl Marx had, before him, observed that it is the entrepreneurs, the risk takers and innovators that create a thriving economy. Marx realised that the capitalist economy undermined the old feudal and patriarchal systems. Schumpeter observed that in the free market’s competitive environment, the entrepreneur’s ability was to seek new solutions to break certain patterns. The process is described as an innovation – from the birth of an innovation, to product development and marketing.
Among many other notable microeconomics-orientated researchers, William J. Baumol researches the notion that innovations and their elastic application explains the remarkable developments that have occurred since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Growth seems at times like a miracle, and it therefore has to be shown a reverence of religious dimensions. Not surprisingly. For much of the planet’s population living standards, at least in an external sense, have become better.
Schumpeter, however, saw a further dimension. There is, he stressed, a constant process that can be likened to an “industrial mutation”, where the economic structure is transformed from within. Relentlessly destroying that which has previously worked, relentlessly putting something new in its place. This ‘creative destruction’ is an essential element of the capitalist process. Entrepreneurs show that a new product, process or business organisation can be efficient and profitable, which in turn lifts the whole economy, while companies whose technologies and practices have become obsolete and unprofitable fall by the wayside.
It is not possible, said Schumpeter, to avoid this. Capitalism cannot function without these sacrifices. The big machine creates injustice, but it works. To further penetrate capitalism’s and entrepreneurship’s internal mechanisms, however, exceeds my competence. As a humanist, I cannot, however, refrain from reflecting on the drama that lies in the biological metaphor of ‘creative destruction’; something more easily expressed in the saying: one man’s death, the other man’s bread.
Applying the model to the major cultural projects and arts businesses is complicated. There is one major difference between the entrepreneur’s creativity and those applying a keen intellect. Entrepreneurs do not innovate by creating ideas, but by examining the value of ideas. The time perspective is not the same. Entrepreneurship, often in good faith, seeks profit that leads to growth and prosperity. The focus is on the present, while experience suggests that the future will change things. Less discerning cultural projects may indeed be short-sighted and their symbolic value diminished. But, for cultural things, durability is an end in itself, albeit that posterity can be a fickle recipient of all that comes for free. Entrepreneurs risk market failures. Intellectual and artistic activity also risks fiascos, emotional stress, or the resignation that occurs when performances are buried in silence.
When we look at what it is that survives, there is another difference. All the innovations of generations working together to create wealth, while simultaneously providing humanity with weapons of mass destruction, are a central theme in historiography. The worlds of culture and art are dependent on innovation, but present the joy of the life that exists beyond the mere accumulation of data.
This joy appears in different ways. And fortunately it comes to us in the form of flerflödighet, which is not something obvious. Cultural life is by no means a peaceful place, and cultural establishments suffer from internal strife, conformism, intolerance, manipulation, nepotism and destructiveness. There are occasional winners and losers. Our as yet open cultural tradition has, however, the ability to correct perspective, and to have an open mind towards diversity. Entrepreneurship’s ‘creative destruction’ is something strange in this context, even for successful and insightful entrepreneurs who had and still have a crucial role in cultural development. The active patron of the arts landscape, not to be confused with redemptive charity, feels only creativity.
The risk that culture’s basic values are neglected becomes clear when the museums are affected by a strange but trendy form of governance. The tendency is toward a management culture with an erosion of its core business. We stick with museums in the hope that through their expertise they can help us be comfortable in what we call the ‘material culture’. When the step is taken towards an event culture, other rules apply. Time and space for reflection shrink when external pressure increases.
Traditionally, museums have focused on research into their collections. In addition, they come to function as institutions with a broader social responsibility. Does this mean that their activities are made superficial at the expense of an approach to information as a fresh product? Hardly, when the communication is directed against a privileged opinion. But when it comes to the mandate to act against the general public is certainly not missing evidence that a meaningful, well thought-out and innovative content gives way to media deception. One explanation for this dilemma is easy to give: an external pressure that requires publicity and high audience figures.
The scientifically trained museum director has competition from the qualified administrative manager, who is believed to be more able to meet the high public demand that is filtered through cultural policy documents and satisfied by an attractive packaging. The situation was symptomatic of the 1990s at London’s Natural History Museum. While cuts in the department’s research capacity were discussed, a delegation went from the administrative department to Disney World for inspiration and edification.
Was Francis Fukuyama right when he predicted that fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 would lead to the “end of history”? I do not believe that, but find it difficult to question his thesis that the end of the Cold War has thus far meant an “unabashed victory for economic and political liberalism”. It is also market related. Museums are not exempt. New museums with strong visibility have arrived, and high audience figures testify to the material culture’s strong attraction, around which tourism, new media, internet, education, entertainment and commerce are creating new forms of accessibility.
One seeks to achieve financial efficiency through restructuring and outsourcing. Management specialists argue for a new leadership that is able to maximise the management of information technology to adapt to politics and the market. The expansion has created a leadership gap. Traditional museum structures have often been internally self-sufficient and often in collaboration with the academic world. Activities and outcomes are defined in economic terms, which is much easier than taking a position on intellectual and cultural values.
Popular
SD behövs för bråk
Sverigedemokraternas relevans har börjat ifrågasätts i och med att andra partier ska ha anammat en striktare invandringspolitik. Men SD:s roll i politiken är knappast förbi – snarare har den anledning att intensifieras.
From a wider perspective, high culture loses its special status when the concept of culture has a wide application. The EU’s cultural bureaucracy expects a core area, consisting of visual arts such as crafts, painting, sculpture and photography; furthermore, the construction-based arts – theatre, dance, circuses and festivals; likewise, cultural heritage in a material sense, i.e., museums, libraries, archives and archaeological remains. The remaining spheres are of the industrial art kind, and include film and video, TV and radio, computer games, music, books and the press, design, architecture and advertising. The classification, which cannot be classified as anything other than preliminary, can be filled with fields such as fashion, food, tourism, experiential learning and so on.
For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the commercialised culture was a threat to man’s intellectual and spiritual liberation. But their warnings have gone unheeded. It’s now old news that high culture and popular culture interact. Criticism, particularly of Adorno’s approach, focuses on the question of the dissolution of boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures. Is popular culture only a question of capitalist exploitation, which in turn leads to ‘dumbing down’? Some pop culture survives because it corresponds to fundamental values, regardless of its form. Popular music is not necessarily morally objectionable, and it doesn’t necessarily falsify people’s social lives.
The argument is that the calculating cultural industry, through its fetish creation, stifles individuality and causes the critical capacity to atrophy. Economic interests have found the way to easily awakened needs for gratification, for which the difference between surrogate and substance is hidden. The guided culture industry does not leave room for creative imagination and creative curiosity. Thus impeded is “the development of autonomous, independent individuals, who are aware of own judgment and make their own decisions”.
If culture’s function is to release creative impulses, every form of manipulation leads to degradation. Prefabricated culture does not contribute to the aesthetic liberation project as it prevents its development. Its language serves notice not to renew. Known patterns recur in a simplified form. Adorno called this “listening’s regression” by repeating the tricks, formulas and clichés that exclude everything else. The form becomes predictable and banal. It does not develop, but works well as a distraction.
However, this is a dystopia that does not fully reflect the actual state of affairs. Ironically, the range of cultural diversity and the creative energy has hardly ever been greater – even with regard to expressions of knowledge-seeking and sensitivity that have their place in cultural life’s narrower sectors. Well and good. We do not need to cry. But the garden will not grow again.
There is a difficult-to-define melancholy in knowing that the light coming from the stars is old; similarly, in the case of our own historical documents, our own experiences. They come from separate worlds with a much narrower measure of time, absent and present at the same time. It is important to recognise the poetry of loss, to preserve the archives and give ourselves time to reflect. To fully preserve the past is an impossibility. The task should rather be to honour the hopes of the past. This is about tradition and renewal.