A year ago I was asked to teach a course called “Basics of Culture Management” for first year students at Culture College. I am a person who doubts if culture management exists at all or to be more precise – if it should exist but after a short consideration I decided that it might as well be the reason to take this job rather then to reject it. What shall be taught to wannabe culture managers? – is the issue I have been questioning ever since.

I myself do qualify perfectly for being labeled “culture manager” – I am not an artist, event not an art scientist (I got BA in Social Sciences and MA in Culture Management) despite that I have worked for art centre, curating-organizing exhibitions, art festival, I have co-founded comics magazine, after all even have gone trough one of the international qualification programs for culture and art managers. And after all that I have been asking myself – shouldn’t people like me be kept as far as possible from arts? Or actually – shouldn’t we just be removed from the production site into the visitor’s area, staying curious and active art lovers.

The thing is – I would like people to talk less about projects and more about ideas. To think less of what is possible and more of – what is not possible. Talking with a friend, “culture manager”/artist himself, he used the word “robots” to describe the type of culture managers who write, implement and report projects. They begin with deadlines, they fit guidelines and look good on reports. Let’s not be too radical – in many cases they ay even be interesting. The frightening feeling that I got after few years in a field was that – oh my God, I have acquired skills that allow me to fundraise for and organize “projects” even if they are bad or unnecessary. In fact, many of them were. As a talented culture manager you know what content should be added to please the founder number 1, which partners to add to make it sound good and how to market is well enough that it seems to be meaningful. Even if you doubt (or should doubt) if it is. What makes it a frightening instead of flattering feeling is awareness of limitations when it comes to financing arts, artists and ideas. One might say that – sure, a perfected sense of meaningful ideas (projects!), talents, etc. is one of the crucial parts of culture manager’s profession. Which brings us back to the question of teaching culture management.

Asked to teach Basics of Culture Management (I have always wondered about that “Basics” in titles of study courses – interestingly enough, some more-into-depth-next-level course in almost never provided) I didn’t start in an empty field of course. I have myself had courses of culture management, focusing on history and theory, have had another ones, focusing on practicalities (which are often taught in mode of “project management”), I had also attempt by Aleksandar Brkic to map different approaches in teaching culture management (with focus on either management, on artwork production, on link with cultural policy, on creativity discourses).

When it comes to the history and theory of management, I tend to agree to ideas expressed in article “The Management Myth” by Matthey Stewarty. Author, who has been working as a management consultant, reveals that most often there are now scientific logic or even interlinkages of management success in one or another case, management can be described but most of the cases not prescribed and it’s more about action and shouldn’t be marketed as some new branch of science. (The article is much more interesting and multilayered then that, I highly recommend it!)

Speaking about practicalities – how to develop a project, tips and tricks of fundraising, marketing and PR ideas – there would be practical knowledge to share,  it all could rather be labeled “project management” and for my disappointment I found out that indeed – it is labeled like that and is taught as a separate course in my College.

Link to the cultural policy is important indeed. To understand how the system works, to get and idea how to improve it are how to live with it. So this would be one of the assets.

But indeed – how to talk about managing culture in the way that it doesn’t produce robots? In a way that it does not encourage to thing of culture and arts as a field of projects? A field where fitting the guidelines, getting the finances, filling the evaluation forms is the measure of success? How to be constantly reminded that what we ourselves are excited about as a visitors, consumers, people – are imagination, fantasies, artistic craziness, breath-taking surprises; we tend to be much less touched by co-operations, sustainability, long-term  networks etc.

What is the knowledge, ideas, doubts and questions that should be packed in the culture manager’s toolkit next to the understanding of “how the system works” and “how to get idea funded, marketed, implemented”?

It is something that I keep asking myself every week, preparing every lecture – is it for future-robots? Won’t it make them too “correct” and “that’s-how-it-should-be”? Will it encourage them to stay a bit wrong?

There have been other lectures where I realize we are talking some robot-stuff. And I am not proud of those weeks. There are other weeks when I think we have been close to that - to staying wrong, doubting things, looking wider. It’s when we have stepped behind the skill training and discussed some ethical dilemmas of culture worker. Like – is there ethical and unethical funding? Would you take a H&M’s money? Would you take it if with your artwork you would want to criticize the social system that you live in? Or – is there such thing as management’s theory? Or – where should be the limitations of managing culture? And to be honest, I don’t know if such kind of discussions will make any of them more successful (if we  measure success with number of funded or implemented projects). In fact, I sometimes I asked myself if we don’t dive in those discussions just so that I could spend some time of culture-management that I don’t find very useful as such.

But the thing I know is that I am bored with living in the projects’ world. I want to live in the world of ideas – where one idea challenges another one, where they are controversial, where they got expressed in all kind of unexpected ways. And I think that being a good culture manager should involve the shill to see a bigger picture and step back, leaving some corner of culture under-managed.