[3] 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 [4]