Corina Suteu

For former communist countries like Romania a ‘crisis’ of the cultural
system can be claimed. It is demonstrated by a lack of long-term cultural
policies and of answers to questions about the benefit of public support for
the arts in order to transfer the country to a new system after the upheaval
of 1989. This crisis stems from the diminished role of cultural and education
policies as compared to other fields of public policy as well as from
an outdated administration apparatus dealing with the cultural dynamics.
Therefore, cultural management and its tools are often used here in a purely
functional way, with no philosophy of mission behind.

In a book published in 20002
, the French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin is underlining
the need to produce a context for new humanistic studies, based on two complementary and
antagonistic pillars: the integrated study of sciences and of humanities.

The direct and indirect effects that cultural policies had on the development of Western
European societies after the Second World War is one of the issues that the cultural
community has to deal with today.2
In order to understand how the cultural sector in the
post communist countries of South East Europe tackle this issue, as they struggle to
reinvent and to reposition their cultural policies on their government agendas; in order to
understand which traditional, but also which new instruments they employ and why; the
degree of inspiration they receive from western models; and last but not least, how
cultural policy is contributing to the design of new democracies, this article will attempt to
offer some keys, based on the broad and surprising experience of the Policies for
Culture programme (2000-2004), as well as on the broader background.3

The following paper will only address a limited part of the complexity of issues
related to the academic training in cultural management regarded from a comparative,
European perspective. Its aim its to highlight a number of key topics of concern and offer a
broad perspective to further specialized debate. The perspective chosen is related in many
aspects to the author’s background. As director of a MA course in European cultural
management for the last eight years, but also as cultural operator in Europe, she is very much
aware about the importance of the present momentum to revise and reshape the reflection
dedicated to a discipline that only academically gained generalized legitimacy ten to fifteen
years ago in the whole of European countries.

Social exclusion disempowers people. It deprives them of access to
experience of the arts – when faced, as a substantial number of
people in Eastern Europe have been, with stark choices of
survival, going to the theater or cinema can hardly be expected to
be on their list of priorities. International declarations on access to
participation in cultural life are academic to those living in
poverty.1

Cultural institutions worldwide face new challenges to their financial sustainability, their organizational structures and their social relevance. This is particularly true in the European countries and the former Soviet Union. While the political and social changes in these regions differ greatly, the effects of economic liberalization in its many forms have fundamentally altered the context in which cultural organizations operate. With this context in mind, the Salzburg Seminar proposed that the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Seminar might jointly explore ideas for a program that could meet the needs of European cultural institutions.