Cultural research has been hampered by the lack of reliable and regular datasets to serve as a basis to its questionings and studies. As a consequence, cultural policy and advocacy are as well troubled. The sector would talk easier to politicians, if it would be able to present figures.
The main gap between culture and the arts and statistics goes back to the original question on “what is art?”. The lack of structure, organisation and concrete definition of the sector nationally and across borders has been making it difficult for statistics to take control.
This openness is necessary for the sake of freedom of expression and to allow creativity to flow. But on the other side it has been keeping the sector as an outsider, status that seems no longer to be appreciated. Would it be possible to map, assess and quantify cultural records and trends at the European level without enclosing its dynamism? How to proceed?
The following week, 18th-20th February, two events taking place in Brussels propose to discuss statistics and its developments with a special focus on the culture sector:
1. Between 18th and 20th the NTTS conference organised by the Eurostat, the EU statistical office, will discuss new techniques and technologies. The programme includes a communication from Cristina Ortega Nuere, University of Deusto, Spain, on cultural mapping and the new cultural decision-making tools used by observatories.
Eurostat has been slowly but finally making efforts to integrate culture into its services and set up a regular collection and analysis of cultural data at the European level. Take a look at its first publication dedicated to this field entitled “Cultural Statistics 2007”.
2. The European Network of Cultural Administration Training Centres (ENCATC) workgroup on “Cultural Observatories and Cultural Information and Knowledge” took advantage to arrange in parallel a seminar on European Statistics to happen just before the NTTS.
The aim is to discuss recent statistics and methodologies in the field of culture and the arts. Thus the programme includes as speakers officials from the European Commission and the Eurostat who are involved in statistics (on culture, creativity and innovation) and experts who will present best practices on impact assessment and methodological challenges in the cases of the Liverpool European Capital of Culture and the cultural observatories in Italy.
Getagged als:
cultural observatories, cultural statistics, EU, Eurostat
LabforCulture ist eine Partnerinitiative der European Cultural Foundation. LabforCulture dankt seinen Förderern für Ihre Unterstützung.
Just before the outbreak of the finacial crisis, cases of financial investors deciding how artist's collectives were to be run created many heated debates in Berlin, during several years business' possibilities to achieve tax reduction through the purchase of art had a disastrous stiffling effect on the art scene in Copenhagen and so on.
We should be very cautious at any attempts of measuring art's and culture's effectivity by financial, official, bureaucratic sectors. If we do not resist this, we end up compromising our traditional all-important role, i.e. comment and critique on the society that surrounds us. Anonymous User | 10 feb 2009