Economy And Cultural Production

Andrea Phillips talks to Martina Angelotti about a different way of interpreting the concept of value in the cultural field

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Martina Angelotti: What do you think about the relationship between economy and art institutions and the consequences generated by the current model?

Andrea Phillips: The geopolitical landscape changes from country to country, even within Europe. That means there’s a differentiation between the battles for survival that diverse regions need to take on. But it also means there are different points of solidarity that need to emerge and encompass those differences. In Europe we have a crisis, which is the lack of recognition of value for small-scale organisations, particularly those initiated by artists, many of which have grown into quite large institutions, but many others fundamentally retain a small-scale local strategy. There are lots of experimental social and economic models being tested in the arts, but in the US and the UK, the problem is that public funding comes attached to socio-economic strings. In the UK, for example, funding is strongly shaped by the socio-economic imperatives handed to the organisations by, for instance, Arts Council England, which in turn is regulated by governmental socio-economic imperatives. In the UK context, since the World War II, when the funding of culture became one of the pillars of the welfare state, large- and small-scale institutions have been used to receiving substantial amounts of public funding. But now the message is: you need to work on your entrepreneurial skills, which means you must move towards running your business privately. And accordingly, art institutions are now financially modelled on small-scale businesses. This is a big change that has happened in the UK, and in the USA this process is even more advanced.

MA: How can we imagine different systems of funding that are free from political pressures, and instead stem from the real needs of the people?