Portugal and the creative economy

I wanted to share this article from Der Spiegel Online on the struggles of Portugal's contemporary artists. It was written by my friend, Caille Millner, and discusses Portugal's lacking public support for culture and the ways in which local artists are responding to this reality. In the article, Portugal's former Minister of Culture, Jorge Xavier Barreto, is quoted as saying that most governments regard culture as an expense instead of an investment. In many European nations, however, this is no longer the case.

The cultural policy discourse I picked up on this year in Europe was about the arts as an investment, and an economically viable one. This discussion falls under the rubric of the creative and cultural economy or the creative industries. Not only are the creative industries increasingly a priority for domestic cultural policy (in Germany, the Federal Initiative on the Cultural and Creative Economy) and EU-wide cultural initiatives (the European Commission's recently unveiled Creative Europe program), support for the creative industries is a focus of many European countries' foreign cultural policy and development assistance (see GIZ's Kultur und Entwicklung or the British Council's Creative and Cultural Economy program).

In a recent report from the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, Cultural and Creative Industries in Germany 2009, which charts the economic impact of the creative industries, these are identified as a growth industry that out-weathered several other major sectors during the financial crisis.

Such is the excitement around the creative economy as the new frame for cultural policymaking that artists and policy experts are sounding the alarm over the over-economization or instrumentation of the arts. That said, by closing its Ministry and dismissing the arts as an expense, Portugal could be missing out on some real opportunities to invest in its creative sector and even benefit from new EU funding programs.

Thanks, Caille, for bringing us the story from Portugal.