Cultural Infrastructure Alternatives / Un Estratagia Cultura Alternativa
Laura Rodriguez (Design Thinker & Art Project Manager) came to talk to the Arts Across Borders cohort about the cultural landscape of Madrid and Spain more generally. It was really interesting to hear about many similarities (Spain is suffering even worse than the UK through the financial crisis and responses here have meant arts and culture have been the first to be cut, for example). And, as the government changes hands every 3 years with reactionary voting, the knock on effect on the cultural infrastructure is similar to in the UK. Constantly moving ground, with renaming of administrative bodies and reallocation of arts / sport / education under varying bodies and management a tri-yearly event. To me, this doesn’t seem like it can possibly be effective for the aims and objectives of cultural agendas, and nor can it be the most economically efficient way of managing arts and culture for a nation’s people.
Spain’s public arts institutions and infrastructure only came into being after the end fo the France dictatorship and so (by comparison with the UK) is relatively young – yet it seems to suffer many of the same pitfalls. I won’t go into this in detail now, but I hope to explore this further in other posts as I spend more time here and speak to arts professionals with first hand experience.
But what I really do want to write about right now is something that I consider to be a massive point of difference between the UK and Spain. Where we have national institutions (NT, National Gallery and numerous nationally recognised collections and institutions across the country) they are not managed directly by the government / DCMS – they have leadership / directives etc from there, and yes, the government do dictate how much money there is available and where this money goes. However, as highlighted in the recent Guardian article covering Maria Miller’s departure – they tend to be pretty hands off and don’t actually run any of our arts institutions (I am pretty sure about this, but very happy to be corrected if anyone can think of arts organisations / similar that are actually directly managed by the government… please post a reply!) BUT, in Madrid there are several Arts Institutions that are run by the government – funded and managed directly.
I am not sure how I feel about this, I don’t yet have enough information about how this works. I want to know more about whether the people working for these organisations and the audiences see any benefits or negative effects of the complete control of the politicians. But, I am looking forward to finding out more and seeing whether this model of working is favourable in any way:
How does the leadership work?
How does this differ from independent organisations?
Are the government-led ones more secure?
Which do audiences prefer?
Which manage to represent the local community better? Etc, etc.
I hope to explore some of these questions through a project I am hoping to do, involving interviews and surveys of a variety of organisations in Madrid. The results will hopefully be made into some form of 'beautiful information' in the style of an accessible infographic.... let's see what we find.
All questions and opinions welcome!
For more on Laura Rodriguez, find her on LinkedIn and on Twitter