The future of public cultural institutions...

The future of public cultural institutions and their audiences

If we look into the future, say to 2033, what will our public cultural institutions look like? How will they interact with audiences? Who will their audiences be?

The vast social and political changes that have taken place in the past few years suggest that our cultural institutions should look very different to the way they look today. To be relevant to the audiences of the future, cultural institutions will need to integrate more cultural diversity throughout their own staffing structure, become smaller and more local, and prioritise young audiences.

To understand why this is the case, let’s first consider why public cultural institutions exist, and even what they are. We tend to include galleries, libraries, archives, museums and state-run performing arts venues in our list of such institutions. Public broadcasters also fit into this category; rather than bringing citizens into a specific place to experience culture, they beam culture into people’s homes.

The Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum are often regarded as the first explicitly designed public cultural institutions, established in 1602 and 1683 respectively. But most of our public cultural institutions owe their existence to the twin nineteenth-century beliefs that a community’s culture and heritage should be preserved for future generations, and that giving citizens access to that culture and heritage will improve the lives of those people and their communities.

These twin arguments persist today, but the ideas of ‘culture’, ‘heritage’ and ‘access’ have all become a great deal more complex than the founders of public institutions imagined. Indeed, even the question of what constitutes a ‘cultural institution’ has become more complex.

In Australia, Rio Tinto was reminded of this in 2021. One of the world’s largest mining companies, Rio Tinto destroyed two ancient cave shelters at Juukan Gorge in a remote part of the country, which housed Aboriginal rock art dating back 46,000 years. There was no doubt in the public mind, and that of investors, that this represented a tragic, irreversible loss of a globally significant cultural institution – not a thought that would have been countenanced by the 19th century European architects of the concept of the public cultural institution. The destruction led to the resignation of the Rio Tinto Chair, Director, CEO and two deputies.

Cultural institutions are politically important. So much so that at the height of World War II, the USA avoided bombing Kyoto, Japan, due to the cultural significance of its buildings. By providing cultural experiences to the public, institutions provide ‘glue’ to particular communities through a sense that they share a heritage. Cultural institutions are also economically important as drivers of tourism.

Today, governments invest significantly in arts and culture. South Korea, perhaps the world’s most successful soft power nation, invested $US3.7 billion in 2022. In 2020, Spain spent 1.3% of its GDP on culture and recreation, the majority of which went to cultural services. In most cases, institutions absorb the majority of government cultural funding because they are expensive to establish and run.

But it’s a rare government that avoids contention over what falls into and out of the scope of its support. The question of what constitutes the culture and heritage worth funding and preserving is often at the heart of that contention. Public institutions are often regarded as not-inclusive and inaccessible to many people. Many are experiencing diminishing audiences as their loyal subscribers and ticket-buyers age.
So what might they do to maintain public standing and interest?

Integrate cultural diversity into personnel and decision-making
Some clues as to what kinds of experience cultural institutions will provide to the audiences of the future are evident in our own lived past. If we think back across the course of our own lifetime, the principles of 19th century cultural institutions have persisted, but their content has changed significantly.

We have chipped away at the idea that our galleries, museum and theatre venues collect and show the work of a singular canon. In the past, this canon has consisted almost exclusively of the work of culturally homogeneous male artists.

Compare the program of London’s Southbank Centre this past year with its earlier programs. When it reopened after a major refurbishment in 2008/9, all of the 10 artists mentioned in the front pages of the Southbank Centre’s annual review (pages 1–8) as having work featured across the Centre’s venues were male artists, and all but two were white Europeans (the remaining two were Venezuelan). Skipping forward, in the 2021/22 annual report, of the four artists mentioned in the front pages of the annual report (pages 1–6), two were black British male artists, whose work helped audiences grapple with issues raised by the Black Lives Matter protests, and two were female, white European artists.

The National Museum of Brazil turned tragedy into opportunity after its eighteenth century building and all of its collection were destroyed by fire in 2018. Due to have its new building completed in 2027, the head of the museum’s ethnology and ethnography department, João Pacheco de Oliveira, is finding new ways to work with Brazil’s indigenous peoples to ensure they determine what artefacts are appropriate to exhibit and how they are celebrated. The days of ‘papier-mâché figures in dioramas alongside taxidermied animals’ have finally ended, write Mariana Lenharo and Meghie Rodrigues in The New York Times.

Meanwhile, the Baltimore Museum of Art made 2019 a year in which it acquired only work by female artists, aiming to begin to redress the patriarchal bias in the acquisitions policies of earlier generations.

One of the problems for cultural institutions is that they have spent many decades or centuries accumulating vast and valuable collections of works that reflect cultural bias. Rather than being held back by these culturally narrow collections, some galleries are increasingly reconsidering how to represent them. The Philadelphia Museum of Art together with the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris and the Musee Matisse in Nice, exhibited work by Matisse painted in the decade of the 1930s, problematising the relationship between the male artist and his often-unclothed female subjects.

Consultation is one important step. But to appeal to future audiences, the institutions of the future also need staff members across all levels of seniority who reflect the diversity of the societies they work within. The managers of such institutions may argue that cultural diversity in staffing is difficult to achieve, due to a concentration of skills and training in particular classes or ethnic groups, or a single gender. But those institutions have a responsibility to train and upskill diverse staff. This will ensure that all decisions are informed by an expectation of diversity.

Be content to be smaller and more local
In 2022, the Arts Council of England shocked its London-based arts institutions and their subscribers by redirecting a large pool of funding (£50m) away from its national organisations, which are clustered in London, to smaller institutions across regional England. This move was part of the Government’s ‘levelling up’ agenda, and the Council argued that audiences in regional towns deserved access to artistic production as much as Londoners, and that art should come to people rather than expecting people to come to arts institutions.

The recipients of this new funding approach are interesting. The English National Opera lost funding, as did the Barbican Centre and Hampstead theatre. In their place, 276 organisations that had never before received Council funding gained it. Amongst these were Bamboozle, a theatre company in Leicester for children on the autism spectrum or with learning disabilities. Claybody Theatre in Stoke on Trent also received national funding for the first time, to make drama based on local, North Staffordshire stories. Such a change in funding will make an enormous difference to what is seen to fall into the ‘public culture’ category, which will include a great deal more cultural variation and local specificity.

Young audiences today have access to instant and constant experiences: music via streaming services such as Spotify; films and television via Netflix, Binge and Stan, amongst others; and stories through Audible and Amazon products. The range of live experiences too seems to grow each year: bars in caves or World War II ruins, an endless run of festivals in most large cities.

Public cultural institutions struggle to compete in this environment. Bound to their expensive buildings, with the weight of their collections or history and accountability to government, they find it difficult to respond nimbly to changing tastes.

One of the key advantages that newer former entertainment have is that – being digital – they are often experienced in the home and without the active involvement of parents. As a result, children become accustomed to them from a very early age.

Public cultural institutions need to find ways to appeal to young children that do not try to replicate what these other forms of entertainment do, but rather to offer alternative or complementary forms of entertainment. The Australian Polyglot Theatre is an example of a publicly funded company that works with very young children to provide daring theatre experiences.

Younger audiences also tend to be influenced in their cultural habits by their political and moral sensibility, perhaps more so than previous generations. ‘Cancel culture’ has seen artists such as JK Rowling and Johnny Depp blacklisted through social media campaigns for their alleged moral transgressions or objectionable views. Institutions are as at risk of being ‘cancelled’ as are individual artists such JK Rowling and Johnny Depp. The Guggenheim became all too aware of this during a furore over an exhibition of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work, which led to the ‘social death’ and resignation of curator Nancy Spector over

Attention to how the practices of cultural institution align to social and ethical principles is important. We know now how the practices of the past, such as the habit of looting the cultural artefacts of colonised countries for the entertainment of western audiences, has led to the destruction of cultures. We also know that institutions have turned a blind eye to the intimate crimes of famous artists, such as Michael Jackson and Harvey Weinstein. Aware of the price of historical avoidance of these issues, many young people are impatient to see them changed.

‘Sackler’, once a name commonly given to public art collections in recognition of the Sackler family’s philanthropy, has been stripped off due to the fact that much of the family’s wealth was made through the sale of OxyContin, which has contributed to the opioid crisis in the United States. The Tate Gallery, Serpentine Gallery and British Museum in the UK, the Metropolitan Museum in the United States and the Louvre in France are all galleries that have removed the Sackler name.

While the spectre of younger audiences may encourage institutions to consider their values in relation to their practices, this reflective behaviour is important for its own sake.

Conclusion
Pre-empting the challenges of the future is very difficult for any kind of institution. It is particularly different for public institutions that carry significant responsibility: to the collections and programs established in the past, to the artists that depend on them, to the public that funds them and to their audiences.

To position themselves to be responsive to the audiences of the future, institutions need to be attuned to their audiences and their needs. Integrating social diversity throughout their staffing structure, being prepared to think locally and focus on smaller communities, and to watch and engage younger audiences are three strategies that will help in their response.

Katya Johanson