Major Cultural Institutions Research Articles

The Dissident Power of Queer Art and Curating in Central Eastern Europe

The text aims to explore the political, cultural and artistic implications of LGBTQ+ art and curatorial practices in Central Eastern Europe in the 21st century. Currently, queer exhibitions, are on the rise in post-communist Europe, especially those held in contemporary art centres and museums. They cast light on new queer art and activism and the volatile sexual politics in the region because of the significant increase in the number of artists working with LGBTQ themes and the topical political background of this movement and its impact on cultural debates. Curators are developing innovative perspectives on sexual, social and artistic dimensions of queer exhibitions in this geographic context still seriously affected by homophobic state policy. The objective is to feature three art shows of major queer artists which have been organised in Hungary, Poland and Estonia in the last decade. The exhibitions are: The Survivor’s Shade: The Life and Work of El Kazovsky at the Museum of Fine Art- Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest in 2015/16; Daniel Rycharski: Fears at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw in 2019 and Jaanus Samma. Not Suitable for Work. A Chairman’s Tale, Museum of Occupations and Freedom, Tallinn in 2016. The three artists and their exhibitions have been selected because they were organised by major cultural institutions in the capitals, they have achieved a significant social impact and huge audience and the artists have played an important role in the contemporary art scene in each country. Their work is a current manifestation of the queer artistic and intellectual culture that has been developing slowly in the region since the 1980s and has come to play an increasingly important role in recent years. The exhibitions and art of the three artists are a starting point for a broader outline of the themes and important figures in recent queer art in Central Eastern Europe (CEE). Moreover, in each case, they appear in a complex and difficult political context related to the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights. Hence, I would like to propose a thesis about the dissident power and status of queer art and curating in CEE.

Configurations of Islam in Contemporary Art in Norway

Abstract In this article, I explore how Islam is configured in two creative universes that have recently affected the cultural and political scene in Norway. I compare the enactment in Oslo (2019) of Disgraced by the American playwright Ayad Akhtar to parts of the artistic project Heisann Montebello (2015–2017) by the Norwegian rap duo Karpe. In both fictional universes, references to Islam, Muslims, xenophobia, racism, terror, and politics of integration are paramount. It is therefore significant that major cultural institutions in Norway such as The National Theater, the music hall Oslo Spektrum, the National Library, and the Norwegian Broadcasting Network (NRK) stage these works. Overall, my main argument is that both productions speak to wider audiences in a multireligious and multiethnic setting, demonstrating that Muslims and different configurations of Islam have become an integrated part of Norwegian cultural life.

Dusting off Australia’s Cinderella city: reflections on the Stories of Our Town Project 2020-2022

This reflection describes the highs and lows involved in the making of a set of films sharing the key historical stories of Newcastle (Australia) with the world. The Stories of Our Town Project aimed to tell Newcastle’s key historic stories through Novocastrian eyes and points of view using interviews and archival information across a myriad of formats. It was funded in part through a NSW Government Community Grant and was a great example of partnership and cooperation among the filmmakers, the University of Newcastle, and Australia’s major Cultural Institutions and local community organisations.

ВЫСТАВКА СОВРЕМЕННОГО ФРАНЦУЗСКОГО ИСКУССТВА В МОСКВЕ (1928) ПО ДОКУМЕНТАМ РГАЛИ И ОР ГМИИ ИМ. А.С. ПУШКИНА

The cooperation of the new Soviet art and the artists of Russian emigration is a subject of particular interest. The period of the 1920s became a unique in the history of art when the new Soviet avant-garde artists, as well as artists who remained at home and those who decided to leave and not return, got along at international exhibitions within the Russian section. Russian art was still perceived as a single whole, geographical boundaries did not play a role, and the abyss of “non-return” had not yet opened between the creators themselves. The last chords in that still general composition were some art exhibitions that have become iconic. One of them was the exhibition of modern French art in Moscow (September – November 1928), which is the focus of the article. The organization of the exhibition brought together efforts of highranking officials of the USSR and France (A.V. Lunacharsky, E. Herriot), major cultural institutions (State Museum of New Western Art, Tretyakov Gallery, State Academy of Art Sciences), private French galleries and art dealers, as well as individual artists. On the basis of archival documents from the funds of the RGALI and the Archive of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the author restores the events associated with the preparation, organization, negotiations and participation in the exhibition of emigrant artists.

Patronage as a way out of crisis? the case of major cultural institutions in Spain

ABSTRACT Drawing on both resource dependence theory and institutional theory, this study attempts to explore how, as a result of the financial crisis of 2008 and the drastic cuts to public funding for culture, corporate sponsorship has been acquiring an increasingly important role in the financial structure and internal organisation of large cultural facilities. Based on a sample of fifteen of Spain’s most emblematic cultural institutions located in the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, the application of these two complementary theories offers an insight into the growth in direct donors’ contributions to major state-owned cultural institutions in Spain, while also helping to explain the influence of institutional environments on organisations, with an emphasis on the central role that board composition plays in fundraising income.

Triumph in austerity? The National Football Museum for England, 2008 to 2017

ABSTRACT There are an increasing number of football museums around the world, particularly club museums, and also some national football museums, which the author has explored in a previous paper. The most significant football museum in the world is the National Football Museum for England, the birthplace of the modern game of football, Association football. This is a major new museum, a major new cultural institution, and the leading sports museum in England. It is also the leading national football museum in the world, with the largest and most significant collections of football’s heritage, including the FIFA Collection. A previous paper by the author considered the foundation of the National Football Museum and its development to 2008. This paper explores the development of the Museum and its growing cultural significance, from 2008 to 2017. It evaluates the increasing success of the Museum, despite the policy of austerity in public funding in the UK for most of this period.

The paradox of accounting for cultural heritage: a longitudinal study on the financial reporting of heritage assets of major Australian public cultural institutions (1992–2019)

PurposeThe monetary valuation of cultural heritage of a selection of 16 major public, not-for-profit Australian cultural institutions is examined over a period of almost three decades (1992–2019) to understand how they have responded to the paradoxical tensions of heritage valuation for financial reporting purposes.Design/methodology/approachAccounting for cultural heritage is an intrinsically paradoxical practice; it involves a conflict of two opposite ways of attributing value: the traditional accounting and the heritage professionals (or curatorial) approaches. In analysing the annual reports and other documentary sources through qualitative content analysis, the study explores how different actors responded to the conceptual and technical contradictions posed by the monetary valuation of “heritage assets”, the accounting phraseology of accounting standards.FindingsFour phases emerge from the analysis undertaken of the empirical material, each characterised by a distinctive nature of the paradox, the institutional responses discerned and the outcomes. Although a persisting heterogeneity in the practice of accounting for cultural heritage is evident, responses by cultural institutions are shown to have minimised, so far, the negative impacts of monetary valuation in terms of commercialisation of deaccessioning decisions and distorted accountability.Originality/valueIn applying the theoretical lens of paradox theory in the context of the financial reporting of heritage, as assets, the study enhances an understanding of the challenges and responses by major public cultural institutions in a country that has led this development globally, providing insights to accounting standard setters arising from the accounting practices observed.

French Taste in Victorian England: The Collection of Yolande Lyne-Stephens

Yolande Lyne-Stephens was an important collector of art in nineteenth-century Britain but she has entirely disappeared from public memory. In 1895 a grand sale at Christie’s attracted many connoisseurs of the time and raised the colossal sum of £227,778. Today, pictures featured in that sale hang on the walls of major cultural institutions, such as the National Gallery in London and New York’s Metropolitan Museum. However, until just before the end of her life, Yolande intended to bequeath her works of art to the nation’s museums, so that they would remain as a collection under the Lyne-Stephens name. Her change of plan resulted in her fading into obscurity, and she therefore failed to feature in most books dedicated to nineteenth-century collectors.

Opera houses as cultural white elephants? The effect of the creative city model, bureaucratic mismanagement and lack of accountability in Valencia's opera house

ABSTRACT Cultural institutions are growing in importance as tools of cultural policy and for promoting the city brand. Moreover, these major cultural institutions devour the lion's share of public subsidies, sparking debate on the legitimacy of such public largesse and its “value”. In this connection, one needs to ask to whether opera houses are “cultural white elephants” whose sheer cost greatly outstrips their supposed public benefits. This paper analyses the case of Valencia's Palau de les Arts, where the neo-Liberal discourse of management flexibility was combined with a shocking lack of accountability. Moreover, the creative city frame, neo-Liberal discourse and practices, the elitist management and disconnection from local cultural have spawned a herd of “cultural white elephants” that have become the hallmark of Valencian cultural policy.

Performing migration in Vienna: The Volkstheater trilogy

Abstract This article is concerned with the example of Vienna's Volkstheater in asking how major European cultural institutions might affectively and effectively engage with the refugee crisis and asylum seeking especially following what has become known as the 'Long Summer of Migration' (2015). It discusses what we might describe as the 'Migration Trilogy' of pieces co-developed by Yael Ronen and the performer ensembles involved, namely, the plays Lost and Found, Niemandsland and Gutmenschen.

Lessons from Launching an Alternative Architectural Practice

After graduating from an innovative Master's programme at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Kata Fodor was not ready for the confines of work in a traditional architecture firm with jobs initiated by clients. Through co‐founding the multidisciplinary design studio Atelier Kite, which proactively pitches well‐researched ideas to carefully targeted potential clients, she has been able to continue the meaningful engagement she enjoyed as a student. Here she sets out the studio's approach, reflects on the challenges she has faced, and underlines the importance of major cultural institutions in fostering creativity.

Telling the Bionarrative: a Museum of Environmental Ideas

This paper explores the history of a proposal for an ideas-based museum of ecological concepts, a ‘National Biological Centre' for Canberra in 1965, and its successors.2 The background to the proposal came from changing ideas about zoos in the 1960s, and the emerging discipline of human ecology. The mission of the centre was to explore the relations between humans, other life-forms and their physical environment through what its chief protagonist, Stephen Boyden, called a comprehensive ‘bionarrative'.3 The centre was to facilitate the understanding of biophysical and social worlds as interrelated dynamic systems. The Biological Centre was conceived as a ‘major cultural institution' for the nation, reflecting relations between science and society, and informing culture with science.4 Unlike traditional natural history museums and zoos, collections of objects (or animals) were not its primary mission. This paper considers how the 1965 proposal for the Biological Centre anticipated later ‘museums of ideas', and reviews its relevance to new twenty-first-century museums of the Anthropocene, and how museums and related institutions can shed light on the role of science in society.

The dark side of cultural policy: economic and political instrumentalisation, white elephants, and corruption in Valencian cultural institutions

Cultural policy is usually assessed as a positive element for socio-economic development and therefore, its criticism is generally confined to poor implementation and discussion of its social effects. However, it is occasionally analysed as an instrument that produces unsustainable development, as a generator of white elephants, or as a means of waste, corruption, and clientelistic domination of the political sphere. This is what we might call the ‘dark side’ of cultural policy. Our case study of the city of Valencia (Spain), focussing on two of its major cultural institutions, the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and the Palace of Arts, exemplifies this cultural policy dimension. This article aims to analyse the systemic and contextual causes of this phenomenon of cronyistic behaviour and to elucidate in what sense it can be understood as a contingent drift specific to a particular territory or as a structural condition of cultural policy.

Gallery as an Open Space. The Collaboration of the Educational Department of Prague City Gallery with a Foreign Audience

Prague City Gallery, one of the major Czech cultural institutions, organises exhibitions, educational events and other accompanying programmes that are designed not only for Czech but also for foreign audiences. The purpose of this article is to introduce its activities and its openness towards foreign-language visitors - tourists, schools and students from other countries. It is not only its exhibition and the gallery’s operation that count with guests from abroad, but also the organisation of the exhibitions and the service provided for the visitors and the promotion. The interesting topics mentioned in the article include direct communication with these visitors and their integration and active involvement in the educational events. The focus of the text is on drawing inspirational and interesting examples from practice. Other activities of Prague City Gallery that are referred to in the article include cooperation with foreign countries, especially in regard to exhibitions and other similar projects. In conclusion, the development possibilities, the potential, the plans and the other visions concerning further positive development in this area are described.

Notes from the Editors, January 2017

buy this issueShortly after the election of Donald Trump, the alt-right organization Turning Point USA introduced its notorious Professor Watchlist…, listing some 200 radical academics in the universities as dangerous professors. Stories regarding this list were soon being carried in major papers throughout the country. In contrast to David Horowitz's list of "the 101 most dangerous academics in America" a decade ago, the current Professor Watchlist has behind it the new sense of power on the extreme right provided by Trump's electoral victory.… There can be no doubt that this is part of an attempted new McCarthyism. In terms of its overall orientation, the alt-right strategy here resembles the Gleichschaltung ("bringing into line") in 1933–35 in Hitler's Germany, where intimidation was directed at all the major cultural institutions, including universities, with the object of getting them to align with the new dominant views.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Knowledge Creation and Sharing with Web 2.0 Tools for Teaching and Learning Roles in So-called University 2.0

Universities have long been accepted as major social and cultural institutions. They have been taken those responsibilities for centuries by doing research, teaching, learning and publishing in a scholarly manner. These institutions serve developments in various organisational forms such as ‘brick and mortar (traditional campus base)’, ‘click (distance-online)’, and ‘brick and click (traditional campus base with distance-online)’ types.This study aims to search new opportunities and developments brought by Web 2.0 (Social Web) technologies into university's teaching and learning roles. These innovative communication platforms encourage people to share their thoughts and experiences to collaborate thorough the interactive Social Media. Knowledge as an organizational strategic asset is distributed and created by new way of interactions within groups. Therefore universities can use Web 2.0 services in accordance with their organisational missions and strategies.

From Urban Enclave to Ethnoburb: Discourse, Space, and Community in Polish Chicago

In this paper I want to tell a story of discourse, space, and community-or more specifically, a story of how discourse and space can intersect with a community's efforts to construct its own identity. The community that interests me is the Polish immigrant community in Chicago, which is the center of my ethnographic research. By telling the story of how Chicago Poles have moved among urban neighborhoods and suburban areas over the last 150 years or so, and by drawing on research participants' ways of talking about the present-day spaces of metropolitan Chicago, I want to look at how these collective movements and discourses overlap with the community's shifting ideologies and aspirations. Also, by drawing on the idea of the ethnoburb, a term geographer Wei Li uses to describe the emerging phenomenon of suburban areas where many ethnic groups live together, I aim to show how Chicago Poles' recent settlement patterns mirror larger demographic trends. But I also want to use this specific site to develop a broader theoretical understanding of the relationship between discourse and space. In short, my argument is that discourse and space are mutually productive and constitutive forces, such that our experience of space is deeply discursive and our discursive inventions are deeply embedded in spatial experience. Even more, I want to show not only how space interlinks with discourse, and implicitly ideology, but also how it actively partici- pates in discourse as a signifier. My method for developing this argument relies on a combination of theoretical insights from fields such as spatial theory, urban planning, and rhetorical studies; evidence from historical writings about both Chicago and Poland; and data from my fieldwork among Polish immigrants in and around Chicago. It is this grounded evidence-which emerges from nearly two years of participant observation and extensive interviews with several Chicago Poles-that provides the real foundation of my argument, because, in my view, the analysis of everyday practices and ways of talk offers an exceptionally rich method for understanding the relationship between space and discourse. In my case, these are the practices of a specific group of immigrants in a specific place, and in the second half of the paper I will examine some of the ways in which Poles' unique political and social histories have influenced their discourses. However, the processes I will explore operate among many other groups, including other immigrant groups in the U.S., and the theoretical implications are much broader.As a way into those broader claims, I want to start at the level of ethnographic observation, by offering two brief vignettes from my fieldwork that I think help encapsulate, in miniature, the larger points I am trying to develop. Both scenes involve maps-our most pervasive and stylized discourse of space-and both scenes take place in a small room in the basement of a Polish church on Chicago's northwest side. As a central aspect of my fieldwork from 2010-2012,1 participated in a grassroots Polish immigrant rights organization, whose weekly meetings took place in the church basement.1 This meeting space was used by the group for the first few years of its existence, and it was attractive primarily because it was free (one of the members was a parishioner). But the location was also agreeable, since the church was in the heavily Polish neighborhood of Portage Park, where some group members lived; also, it was easily accessible from the 1-90 Kennedy Expressway, which connected to the northwest suburban homes of some other group members. The organization has grown since those times and now has its own space inside the building of a major Polish-American cultural institution. However, for that first period of development, the church basement provided a conducive setting for regular Wednesday-evening planning sessions, which were, from my perspective, events of inspiring camaraderie-but also very intimate, intense affairs that sometimes included heated debates and, on occasion, raw emotional displays. …

Energy Conservation and Green Building Design of Library Case Study on the New Hubei Library

As the major public buildings and cultural service institutions, libraries play an important role in the strategy of energy-saving buildings. In order to keep pace with the footstep of Western developed countries, China has launched a series of green and energy-saving building practices and achieved certain results. The New Hubei Library is a successful example, with Chinese national conditions and the characteristic of the library itself taken into consideration, and limited conditions in the design process fully made the most use of. Besides the designer has efficiently used energy-saving strategy on building structure maintenance, solar radiation, air conditioning control system and natural ventilation, finally achieved the goal of energy saving of library.

Producing Africa at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

Producing Africa at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

Transformations and crisis of liberalism in Argentina, 1930-1955

In this original study, Jorge A. Nallim chronicles the decline of liberalism in Argentina during the volatile period between two military coups the 1930 overthrow ofHipolito Yrigoyen and the deposing of Juan Peron in 1955. While historians have primarily focused on liberalism in economic or political contexts, Nallim instead documents a wide range of locations where liberalism was claimed and ultimately marginalized in the pursuit of individual agendas. Nallim shows how concepts of liberalism were espoused by various groups who invented traditions to legitimatize their methods of political, religious, class, intellectual, or cultural hegemony. In these deeply fractured and corrupt processes, liberalism lost political favor and alienated the public. These events also set the table for Peronism and stifled the future of progressive liberalism in Argentina. Nallim describes the main political parties of the period and deconstructs their liberal discourses. He also examines major cultural institutions and shows how each attached liberalism to their cause. Nallim compares and contrasts the events in Argentina to those in other Latin American nations and reveals their links to international developments. While critics have positioned the rhetoric of liberalism during this period as one of decadence or irrelevance, Nallim instead shows it to be a vital and complex factor in the metamorphosis of modern history in Argentina and Latin America as well.