What is the international network of Asian arts management?
Shin Nakagawa
This conference was started in 2006 based on the cultural policy of Osaka City Government, and the Urban Research Plaza of Osaka City University has managed the conference. Though Osaka City stopped the financial support a few years later, we have never stopped the annual conference, and can hold the 9th today.
We have two purposes. The first one is to encourage the dialogue between researchers and practitioners of arts management. We would like to rub these two phases together which are like oil and water. The second one is to establish the network of arts management in Asian countries. It is necessary to build such infrastructure for deepening cultural exchange.
I briefly show the process of the past conferences. The 1st one was held in Japan, and practitioners from Seoul (Korea), Shanghai (China), Bangkok (Thailand) and Jakarta (Indonesia) came to Osaka. Blue points mark locations of their embarkations and orange marks the destination: Osaka. For the 2nd one, from Vietnam, Taiwan and Singapore. For the 3rd one, Philippine, Cambodia, Malaysia. For the 4th, from Bhutan, Myanmar and Indonesia. The 5th was held in Bangkok and the 6th was in Yogyakarta. The 7th one was held in Osaka again and practitioners from Korea, Thailand and Indonesia came to join. The 8th was held in Bangkok and 9th in Kuala Lumpur. We have invited 71 speakers from 13 Asian countries including Japan.
Besides this university-oriented activities, I can introduce you another important research activity in Japan, which is the publication by Japan Foundation: “Alternatives : Guidebook for Art Spaces in Asia”. This book was published in 2001 and revised in 2004. It rendered many contributions to introduce the information of alternative art spaces in Asia to Japanese people. And the current prime minister Abe make much of cultural exchange with ASEAN countries and founded Asian Center in Japan Foundation to support it.
We have been surprised at diversity and deepness of arts management in each country and promoted mutual understanding in these eight years. We have clarified and recognized the differences and similarities among them. And, we have mainly discussed possibilities of socially inclusive arts management since inauguration and made clear that there were many similar activities in various parts of Asia. In this sense, the word ‘alternative’ could be our fundamental motto or key conception, which leads to Asian typed arts management that competes against Western based one.
I am afraid that it might be the stereotyped way of speaking, but I dare to say that Western-style arts management is a technique of accurately distributing to the citizenry art produced by members of the bourgeoisie. It is premised on the existence of a market for the consumption of such art, which is frequently referred to as “high art.” Arts management includes the establishment of facilities for the arts, such as art museums and concert halls, the development of a system of financial support for the arts, formulating arts and cultural policy while ascertaining the balance between supply and demand, and managing arts activities. While there are small differences, such as between the French model, which depends on funding from public institutions, and the American model, which relies on funding from the private sector, arts management is basically the same everywhere. Namely, its purpose is to establish a sphere for the arts and culture in civil society, and to promote the arts.
However, arts management policies were designed to do more than to promote high art. For example, the 1980s saw the emergence of community art programs in the United States and England, which were implemented in an effort to revitalize economically disadvantaged communities, and the 1990s saw the appearance of the similarly-intended CCD (Community Cultural Development) program in Australia. However, these programs were founded largely to fulfill specific policy aims and many have an unstable character resulting from the fact that their funding and scale of activity varies significantly from one administration to the next.
In this conference, we offer challenge to the orthodox, Western model of arts management, which centers on the management of institutions, and propose the possibility for a distinctly Asian model of arts management. Namely, we believe that we can conceive of a model of arts management, in practice and as an academic subject, which is more in line with the nature of community and society in the various regions of Asia. Simply put, we would like to imagine a model of arts management not for the purpose of financial profit, but rather for the good of the community.
In Japan, scholars and practitioners of socially inclusive arts management have focused on disadvantaged places, such as desolate rural villages, facilities for the disabled, communities with large populations of elderly poor people, hospitals, depopulated communities, disaster areas, slaughter sites, conflict zones, slums, outcast communities, and prisons, and socially excluded groups, including transgender persons, recent Korean immigrants, long-term Korean residents, alcohol and drug addicts, recluses, and persons displaced from employment. In a word, socially inclusive arts management focuses on places where there are people suffering social hardship or difficulty, who are commonly excluded from society. In others words, it focuses on society’s “spaces of loss.” In addition, it approaches solutions to society’s problems not from the perspective of social welfare but from the perspective of art. In that sense, it is also a battle against social bias against disadvantaged persons and communities.