It is increasingly accepted that a robust cultural life (including a vibrant and diverse artistic landscape), is a critical component of healthy communities, cities and nations. Official and unofficial cultural leaders around the world have traditionally tended this life – shepherding the growth of their nation’s arts and culture by managing institutions, setting policy, and shaping our collective identities. But what makes a cultural leader? How are different countries approaching the challenge? And where are the cultural leaders of the 21st century headed?
Internationally renowned cultural theorist and planner, Charles Landry, suggests that cultural leaders are a frame for our ‘bigger picture’. ‘Cultural leaders should provide answers concerning personal, social and moral choices – and through their programming gain legitimacy,’ he says. ‘Their story should interweave the ideas of what their institutions could be and how to get there, in constant renewal through the interplay between their audiences and wider circumstances. The cultural leader will anticipate trends, appreciating feedback, and will encourage debate about problems and possibilities. Their communication needs to be compelling, as they will compete for attention with existing stories, such as those provided by shopping malls, leisure centres, theme parks or television.’
In a contribution to the Salzburg Seminar on International Leadership, Toward a Theory of Cultural Leadership, Dr. Bobby William Austin posits an additional point: ‘Cultural leaders can be the leaders that lift the gates between culturally diverse groups while sustaining their group identity’. He adds: ‘These leaders can expand our accepted ideas of cultural literacy so that they are inclusive, and they can provide understanding of the politics, the art, and social cultures of a nation.’
In the West, cultural leadership has been viewed as an important force for many years. The United Kingdom and the United States in particular, have devoted a substantial amount of funding to investigating the field and providing its present leaders with the skills they need to best administer arts and culture nationally and beyond. In both regions it is peak bodies and private cultural institutes that have tended to lead the way – US organisations like Americans for the Arts, the Kennedy Center, the Arts and Leadership Institute, and UK pillars such as NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) and the Clore Leadership Programme, are at the forefront of 21st century cultural leadership.
The focus of these organisations and their cultural leadership practices is the future – building the next generation of arts leaders and managers. Diversity of application is also paramount. Recognising the complexity of the modern world and culture within it, training and development initiatives covering everything from managing cultural institutions, to leading in creative education, to successful urban renewal through culture, are either in planning or already in play.
In a further boon to cultural leadership in the UK, Arts Council England demonstrated a significant commitment to the field with a budget allocation of £12 million for a new cultural leadership programme in 2006/07. The sector itself is invited to take a leading role in shaping the programme, with a call for ideas currently being floated to UK arts practitioners and policy makers.
In China, cultural leadership has long been tightly wed to socio-political leadership. Sweeping national policies have incorporated culture and the arts as a facet of prevailing ideology – one tool of many to achieve desired social outcomes. Cultural leaders rarely stood outside this spectrum, and arts management was not considered a top priority. But as China enters the 21st century, this is fast changing. Though matters of regulation and legislation are still on the agenda for cultural leaders, China is awakening to the merits of strong cultural management. Its artists, in increasing demand, are calling for leadership training meaningful to modern China, as are many of its policy makers.
Responding to Government pressure to market Chinese culture more profitably, arts leaders and managers in China are turning to the West for inspiration, attending cross-cultural leadership programs worldwide, and specially tailored seminars, such as the program held this June at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington D.C. The worldwide appetite for Chinese arts is gaining steam, and its leaders are aware they need to stay ahead of the game if they are to maximise the country’s enormous cultural assets in a way that benefits all.
In Africa too, cultural leaders face vast challenges. Charged, like their international counterparts, with setting policies and developing systems that best cultivate their people’s myriad talents, they also champion social causes (such as the proliferation of HIV), wrestle with the preservation of cultural heritage (tangible and intangible), and act as unifier to a diverse cluster of warring ideals, traditions and agendas.
In recent decades, cultural leadership, as with many other forms of leadership, has become inextricably tied to economic management. A far cry from historical personalities who would shepherd the cultural health of their people through gentle advocacy and the transmission of knowledge, contemporary leaders are expected to adopt the approach of accountants and business analysts. Cultural authority must indeed transform with the dictates of the times, and a modern cultural leader could likely not function without at least a basic understanding of economic, administrative and management principles. The ability to generate and document cultural data is vital if leaders are to effectively lobby cultural causes. But on the ever complex world-stage of the 21st century, many believe it is transformational leadership that is still more urgently required – voices that catapult us forward with grand ideas, not reduce us to column A and column B.
In the November 2002 Culturelink Review, Charles Landry calls for this renewed emphasis on the cultural ‘visionary’ within the domain of cultural leadership worldwide. ‘Unless culture creates a confident argument for itself based on its own judgements, criteria and indicators about what it thinks is good or bad,’ he argues, ‘its institutions will be run by people whose authority comes from outside the cultural domain. The best of them will share the cultural values of the institution they have come to manage and will have to participate in the search for clear cultural purpose.’
With global trends indicating a reinvigorated interest in cultural leaders and their power to influence policy and population, we wait to see if Landry’s call will be answered.
