| Abstract: |
Cultural policy in Europe is deeply rooted in the Welfare State doctrine that
has been prevailing during the last half century. Its implementation has gone
along with the invention and rise of educational policy, social policy and
health policy. This paper sketches its evolution as a four phase move towards
what has been emerging as the central dual content of the current public
cultural policy: preserving and promoting heritage, and bringing the creative
industries at the core of the so-called knowledge society. The general
evolutionary trend shows four distinct phases: 1) the creation of a systematic
cultural supply policy based on a limited definition of culture suitable for
public financing and based on a vertical concept of democratization by
conversion; 2) the gradual decentralization of public action, which leads to
an increasing disparity in its aims and functions, and which challenges the
initial universalist, top-down egalitarian model; 3) a revision of the
legitimate scope of public action, which declares symbolically obsolete the
founding hierarchy of cultural politics, that which would oppose high culture,
protected from market forces and entertainment culture and governed by the
laws of the industrial economy; 4) an increasing tendency to justify cultural
policy on the basis of its contribution to economic growth and to the balance
of national social diversity, which legitimises the regulatory power of public
action as well encouraging the expansion of the creative industries and the
demands for the evaluation of procedures and results. The last section of this
paper moves away from the state centered perspective and focuses on the city
as the incubator of cultural generativity, in order to suggest how a
city-centered approach to cultural development challenges the state-centered
doctrine of cultural policy. |