Divers  :: Creative Industries Austrian Style

Thursday, September 25, 2008 - 12:10 AM

   As in more or less every country – and especially every big city – between Finland and India, the Creative Industries are, at the moment, a big issue in Austrian cultural and economic policy.

The hype of the CI is closely related to the change of government in

Austria in the year 2000, when the Social-Democratic Party did not become part of the

Austrian government  for the first  time since 1970, but  instead the conservative Peo-

ple’s Party formed a coalition with the radical right-wing Austrian Freedom Party. This

change of government led, in general, to a broad range of changes in Austrian politics

that  can  be  summarized  – a  little polemically –  as  the rise  of  neo-liberal  economic

concepts in combination with a considerable increase of repression towards critical po-

litical forces, not  least of all  in  the arts. However ,  it would certainly be wrong to see

the political  change of 2000  as  the expulsion  from  the  social-democratic paradise of

cultural politics. In fact, a form of commercialising culture and the arts (through festi-

vals and popular exhibitions in the 1980s as well as through debates on the economic

impact of creativity in the 1990s) was well on its way in the last decades of the 20th

century. And even today, the social-democratic government of the city of Vienna is at

least as active in  the field of  the CI as  the conservative national government. Still –

and  although  phrases  of  the  kind  “what  would  have happened  if?”  are  among  the

most  senseless in historical analyses –  I think  it  plausible that  the predominance of

the CI in Austrian cultural politics is, to a high degree, caused by the general change

of political aims that started in 2000, as this change was both an effect of the interna-

tional hegemony of neo-liberal political concepts and one of the causes for their suc-

cess in Austria.

The forms the hype of the CI takes are well known, since they are the same as eve-

rywhere else:

- Narratives on the CI start with the trivial assumption that creativity is an important

economic factor .

- Afterwards, definitions of the CI are delivered that are too broad to really be classi-

fied as definitions.

- On the basis of these definitions statistical data prove  that  the CI are (1) a crucial

economic sector with (2) virtually limitless future possibilities.

- Then we usually find the assumption shared by more or less all countries and cities

focussing their attention on the CI that the respective own country/city has especially

favourable conditions for this sector , although specific policy measures are necessary

in order to further improve the situation.

- Finally, consequential positive prospects for employment, economic growth and suc-

cess in international competition are described. And if working conditions in the CI are

mentioned at all, profits and work satisfaction for those working in the creative indus-

tries are promised.

However , these international developments and assumptions overlap with specific na-

tional situations and  it  is  out of  the combination of  these  two  factors  that  concrete

conditions  for the CI develop.  Let me  therefore briefly describe crucial  factors of the

Austrian “culture of cultural politics".



Austrian Cultural Policy



For a long time, it was something like an Austrian truism that culture and the arts are

a public  responsibility and  therefore  to be mostly publicly funded. The  roots of  this

specific relationship between politics and the arts can be traced back to the 18th cen-

tury and thus to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. The prosperity of the Habsburg ter-

ritories was an important reason for the flourishing of the arts as well as for their de-

pendence on state support, but generous public support  for culture and  the arts has

survived the end of  the monarchy. It  is also a legacy of the Habsburgs that  the lion’s

share of public funds for the arts is centrally distributed,  i.e. by the Republic of Aus-

tria. Furthermore, the strong dependence of cultural and artistic institutions as well as

individual artists on  the state led to an equally strong state influence on cultural ac-

tivities. In short, it may therefore be stated that, up to the late 20th century, Austrian

cultural policy was marked by the centralist and absolutist power of the Habsburgs. In

accordance with this tradition, most public funding for culture and the arts went  (and

still goes)  to  the cultural heritage –  including historical buildings, museums and  the

performing arts institutions that  developed  into high art. And  it  should also be men-

tioned  that,  overall,  public  financing  for  culture and  the arts  in  Austria  is  still  very

generous in comparison to many other European countries.

However ,  this  longstanding  tradition has also been  subject  to  changes. Above all,  in

the aftermath of the political movement of 1968 (and at the beginning of the govern-

ment of the Social Democrats without coalition partners) cultural policy began to rec-

ognize and also to finance more contemporary art  forms and projects. In comparison

to  the  funds for the cultural heritage, public financing for contemporary projects has

always been peanuts; still,  it was enough to bring about a certain dynamic in the ar-

tistic and cultural scene in Austria.

The support  for contemporary art by the Social Democrats came out  of a certain po-

litical sympathy with the respective artists and art  forms as well as a need to contest

the  conservative  cultural  hegemony  in  Austria.  However ,  it  always  remained  half-

hearted  and  without  a  real  cultural  political  programme.  The  programmatic  under-

standing of cultural politics was mainly a by-product of the general welfare orientation

of Social Democratic government summarized in the slogan: “Cultural policy has to be

understood as part of social policy.” Most of all,  this statement  included a mission to

open high culture to the lower classes – as audiences, not as producers. In this way, a

traditional understanding of the educational impact of high culture was combined with

the egalitarian claim of Social Democracy. And  it needed only a very slight change of

focus  to  transform  this  egalitarian  claim  into  the  call  for  commercialisation  in  the

1980s: The claim that the uneducated masses should learn to appreciate the high arts

was changed into the claim that the arts should meet the taste of potential consumers

of the arts.

It goes without saying that both concepts are highly problematic from the perspective

of a democratic understanding of cultural policies – the paternalistic public hand is re-

placed by  the invisible hand  of  the  free market. However ,  this  description  also only

partly holds true for Austrian cultural  policies. Rather surprisingly, commercialisation

in Austria went hand  in hand with  increasing public expenditure. To give two exam-

ples:



While  in  the early 1980s  the musical “Cats” was performed  in all  larger European

cities, Vienna was probably the only city where these performances were highly subsi-

dized.

-  In  an  Austrian  region,  subsidies  for  the  performing  arts  were  calculated  as  the

equivalent  of  earned  income.  Thus,  those  productions  with  the  highest  share  of

earned income also got the highest share of public money.

These contradictory or –  to put  it more bluntly –  rather senseless ways of  financing

the arts can be understood as  the overlapping of different  traditions and new devel-

opments that is also of crucial impact for the Austrian way of dealing with the Creative

Industries. While the international trend towards commercialisation was followed, the

traditional state dependence of the arts was maintained. While cultural policy popular-

ized the arts, commercialisation did not quite work out.

The most important  influence of Social Democratic politics, however , is not to be seen

in the changes of the cultural field, but in its general orientation towards distributional

politics that led in Austria to the development of a strong and very successful welfare

state. This welfare state was based on social partnership and resulted in a compara-

tively high level of social security that has been upheld for a longer time than in many

other countries.  The Austrian welfare model (like most welfare models of  this  time)

was oriented towards big enterprises (of which, in the Austrian case, quite a few were

state owned),  full  time employment  and  a high degree of  job  security  as well  as a

tight  social net. However , while social security has indeed been an  important  feature

of the Austrian model, empirical studies have frequently shown that  full time employ-

ment  in  a  secure  position  has  always  only been  the dominant model  for  a part  of

population –  specifically for male Austrian  citizens working in big enterprises.  It has

more rarely applied to women and never to foreign workers – nor to artists regardless

of their sex and/or nationality not employed  in  the flagships of  the Austrian  cultural

heritage. (Those employed in these flagships, however , have, in fact, been subject to

labour laws of a rather absurd rigidity. For example, the prolongation of a performance

or  rehearsal  of  the  Viennese Burgtheater  leads  very  quickly  to  exploding  costs  as

overtime has to be paid not only to those actually working but  to the whole shifts of

light and stage technicians etc.) Independent artists have lived precariously for a long

time  –  and  are  therefore  today  euphemistically  called  the  avant-garde  of  the  new

creative entrepreneurs. Still, the ideal of “regular employment with regular payments”

made it possible to criticize these conditions and, in fact, subsidies for small and inde-

pendent artistic projects somehow rose simultaneously with the subsidies for cultural

heritage – although on a much smaller scale.

In summary, we can state for traditional cultural politics in Austria: an understanding

of culture and the arts as a public task that  led to a financial structure based almost

exclusively on public subsidies;

- an understanding of culture and  the arts as mainly  consisting  of  the cultural heri-

tage;

- the non-existence of acknowledgement for popular culture;

- the lack of programmes and formulated aims of cultural policies;

- a welfare state based on regular employment.



Creative Industries Austrian Style

It is, in  fact, hardly surprising that the first attempts to introduce the CI in this spe-

cific national situation were mainly characterised by helplessness. When the then new

state secretary for the arts in Austria, Franz Morak, published his first press releases

in 2000, one could not avoid  the impression that he expected Austrian CI to emerge

simply due to his mentioning them. Six years later we can state that, in a way, this is

in  fact  what  happened:  Political  speeches  are  performative  speech  acts,  if  there  is

enough power behind them.  They actually make a difference – however vague  their

contents may be. And vague they were, indeed. Morak told us that everybody is crea-

tive, that creativity is part of nearly every form of activity, that creativity is important

for economy. He mentioned  the White Paper of  the Commission with  its  impressive

figures of  economic growth  and  employment  chances (and he did  not mention  that

evidence for where these figures came from was nowhere to be found in this paper),

he mentioned the CI programmes of the UK, and he mentioned the one and only ex-

tremely successful Austrian enterprise that can be regarded as part of CI, Swarovski

glass,  which  produces  jewellery  and  other  luxury  items  out  of  crystal  glass.  Then

came studies proving  the excellent conditions  for  the CI  in Austria and  especially in

Vienna, producing a lot of numbers (of equally dubious origin as the ones in the White

Paper) on the tremendous growth  rates to be expected in the CI. And,  finally, meas-

ures  to support  the CI were developed by the Republic of Austria and  the city of Vi-

enna.

 

Quartier 21

Let us take a look at these measures. One of the most prominent and also most con-

tested one was the creation of a cluster of Creative  Industries in a rather prominent

and central space, the MuseumsQuartier Vienna. The history of the MuseumsQuartier

would be a subject for another talk (maybe not a very interesting one, but certainly a

rather entertaining one), but to make a long story short: The MuseumsQuartier is, ba-

sically, a complex of  traditional arts museums  in a partly historical building near the

city centre. It was founded because (1) this historical building had to be used in one

way or another , and (2) because some big museums in Vienna needed space to show

their collections. As an English colleague of mine put it: it is a housing project for mu-

seums. As this is neither a very attractive nor a very trendy way of developing a cul-

tural quarter , the MuseumsQuartier needed a fig leaf to make it more hip. This fig leaf

was the “Quartier 21” offering space for contemporary cultural and artistic production

and, above all, the CI. In  this way the MuseumsQuartier could be peddled as a place

that  is  not  only devoted  to  the  exhibition  of  creative  achievements,  but  equally  to

their production, that not only deals with cultural heritage, but also with contemporary

cultural activities.

In a way,  the Quartier 21  fits perfectly  in  traditional Austrian  cultural politics as de-

scribed above,  since  it  is  a  centralised  top-down  project  (internationally  rather  un-

usual for the development of a cultural cluster). On the other hand, it also shows the

inability of Austrian cultural policy to deal with the CI.

The  (state  owned)  company  administrating  the  whole  MuseumsQuartier  wants  to

make money in  the space of the Quartier 21. Therefore it asks for rents – which are

subsidized because rents in this part of the city are very high, but even with the sub-

sidies, the rents are still too high for most small companies starting something in the

field of the CI. Consequently, it was difficult to find tenants. Consequently, quite a few

of them had  to leave again as they could not afford  the rent. Consequently, the only

criterion  for  the  selection  of  tenants  has been  their  ability  to  pay  the  rent. 

Consequently, no synergies between  the tenants emerge – similarly to the big museums in

the MuseumsQuartier , which do not cooperate because they did not move there in or-

der to cooperate, but in order to have new, more attractive buildings. The tenants of

the Quartier 21 do not cooperate for the same reasons.

The location of the Quartier 21 – although it is generally a very attractive site – is par-

ticularly badly suited to small companies needing circulation in order to get attention

and to sell their products. While there are lots of tourists in the courtyards of the Mu-

seumsQuartier , only the most adventurous of them enter one of the small doors to the

Quartier 21.

 

Public Support for the CI



Let us now come to another way in which Austrian cultural policies deal with the CI,

namely public  support.  The  Republic of  Austria  as well  as many Austrian  provinces

and, most prominently, the city of Vienna have developed programmes to support and

further  the CI. Probably  the most  important  of  these programmes  is  “departure”,  a

company  financed and commissioned by the city of Vienna. Departure finances “pro-

jects which encourage the development of innovative products, processes or services

possessing an artistic and creative orientation,  their commercialisation or  the devel-

opment of innovative utilisation strategies for artistic and creative products, processes

or services.”

Applications for financing from “departure” are complicated and time consuming, and,

thus,  in many cases, not manageable for the many self-employed or companies with

one or  two part-time-employees, which make up most  of  the CI  in Vienna.  Conse-

quently, many of the projects supported by departure come from relatively successful

CI companies that would probably have been able  to develop  their products without

this  support.  Although  nobody would  announce  this  officially,  this bias  towards  the

bigger and more successful CI enterprises seems  to be intended. Every study on the

CI in Austria has shown  that most  enterprises in  the CI have an under-critical  size.

Obviously,  the solution  for this problem  chosen  by the city of Vienna  is not  to help

these enterprises to enlarge, but to let  them die while focussing their support on the

fitter ones. This strategy is at odds with the proclaimed aim to foster the CI as a eco-

nomic sector , because in this way not many CI companies will, in fact, survive.

“departure”  finances exclusively projects. Thus,  even  those  lucky enough  to be sup-

ported for some time are not able to plan for a longer period than their current project

is running. This again can be seen as an older feature of Austrian cultural policy  im-

plemented in  the field of the CI: while it  seems probable that  none of us will  live to

see  the  day on  which  public  financing  for  the  big  Austrian  cultural  institutions will

stop, independent artists have always had to live from one project to the next. And we

all know what this means for individual planning, for the possibility of having children,

etc.

From a different perspective again,  the programme does not  fit  its self-defined aims.

The  internationally unavoidable Richard  Florida,  who  is currently  also becoming  the

godfather of Viennese CI, does not actually make many points in his best-sellers, but

one of the most prominent ones is that cities need a specific infrastructure in order to

be attractive  to CI people. And  infrastructure does not develop through project sup-

port, but through investment in infrastructure.

 

GovernCreativity



If we summarize the points I have made so  far , we can state with some confidence

that Austrian policy on  the CI is a failure. Therefore, we could expect  that  the CI in

Austria – which were more or less invented by cultural politics, after all – do not exist.

However , this is not true. On a small scale, CI clusters have actually developed in Vi-

enna –  one of  them around  the MuseumsQuartier ,  not  in  the Quartier 21 but  in  the

surrounding  streets,  in  cheaper buildings. Others  can  be  found  in  former  industrial

buildings,  not  financed  by  the public  hand  but  developed  by  the  initiative  of  those

working  there.  People  in  these  clusters  frequently do  not  earn  enough  to plan  for

longer  than  a  year ,  they almost  never earn  enough  to be  able  to  re-invest  in  their

companies;  they are usually young and childless, not  because  the CI are so hip but

because you have to find something more secure if you become older or want to raise

children.



And many of them like their working and living conditions, at  least  for the most part.

They feel that  they are,  in fact, a kind of avant-garde, and they pride themselves on

not holding a 9 to 5 job (but probably 9 to 9 self-employment).



I presume that, here again, international trends as well as specific national situations

are  the  reason  for this attitude. For one,  it  is simply the dogma of neo-liberal  times

that  is successfully  implemented as a  form  of  governmentality  in  the  sense of  Fou-

cault. “Bear the risk for your own life and be proud of it!” Secondly, the paternalistic

form  of  Austrian  cultural policy has  frequently  led  to  a strong  and strongly  felt  de-

pendence, not only on public funding or on an entity as abstract as the state, but on

concrete politicians and  their fancies.  It  is hardly surprising that  this is no attractive

alternative.



And  the concept  of  the creative entrepreneur  trickles down (or sideways)  into other

parts of society, not  least of all  into the artistic field in a narrower sense. While it  is

officially maintained, at least by the city of Vienna, that  the CI do not  impact classical

arts subsidies,  the director of  “departure”  complains that  the arts department of the

city of Vienna sends everyone to him that  they are not willing or able to support. And

more and more often,  I have the opportunity to listen to artists evaluating their own

work  in  terms  of  its  commercial  success  –  something  rather  unheard  of  in  Austria

where the arts were frequently defined precisely by their need for public support.

Contrary to what I said before about  the failure of Austrian CI policy, one could also –

and probably more plausibly – claim its tremendous success. After all,  it  is the main

aim of  neo-liberal  policies  to  reduce public  support  in  order  for  the  free market  to

flourish.

 

And Now?

What does this mean for the main subject of this conference, a critique of cultural in-

dustries? In which ways does it make sense to criticize what  is currently happening in

Austrian CI? If I were still the Marxist of my earlier years, I would introduce here the

notion of “wrong consciousness”. Alas, from the perspective of my older , post-Marxist

days, this notion does not  really seem helpful. Still, I think a general critique of CI as

aimed at within  this seminar of eminent  importance: to show  (1) in which ways the

hype of the CI is deeply embedded in a certain political and economic paradigm, and

(2) which consequences this hype has for the cultural field as well as for society as a

whole. At the same time, however , I think we cannot  simply ignore the fact that an

increasing number of people work in the CI and want to work there. For this reason, I

find it equally important to think about new ways of political organisation and of social

security adapted to the working and  living conditions as well as  the wishes of  these

people. Given the strong and one-dimensional tradition of the Austrian welfare state,

this  is not  an easy task. We do not have much experience with political organisation

outside of  political  parties  and  traditional  trade  unions.  But maybe,  at  least  in  this

way, it might be useful that the CI are an international hype – hopefully, not only neo-

liberals but also critics of neo-liberalism will be able to successfully copy models from

other countries.



Monika Mokre: Researcher of EIF - Institute for European Integration Research, Aus-

trian Academy of Sciences; Chairwoman of FOKUS,  the Austrian Association  for Cul-

tural Economics and Policy Studies, Member of eipcp, European Institute for Progres-

sive Cultural Policies; Lecturer at the Universities Innbruck, Salzburg and Vienna.

Research Areas: European Democracy and Public Sphere, Cultural Politics and Financ-

ing of the Arts, Media Politics, Gender Studies



More information: http://www.eipcp.net