Adress:
Industrigatan 2A, 10 tr
112 46 Stockholm
Telefon: 08-667 88 90
Telefax: 08-667 88 11
E-post: council@klys.se
Honoured guests, dear participants,
esteemed colleagues, respected public
On behalf of the Nordic Council of Artists and as president of KLYS – the
Swedish Joint Committee for Artistic and Literary Professionals – I hereby
warmly welcome You all to our Nordic Cultural Assembly.
This first day is a joint event with the Baltic Meetings, that also take place
here on Gotland, and in todays programme artists from the Nordic and Baltic
regions will talk about and perform their different perspectives on our cultures
as well as the cultural affinity amongst us.
The Cultural Assembly’s aim is to discuss the conditions of Art and Artists in our countries. Beginning tomorrow invited guests and participants from 14 countries in the Baltic and Nordic areas will report and debate existing cultural policies.
We will hear about the situation for artists in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Russia, Sapmi and Sweden, and we will discuss what we might learn from each others examples and how to face challenges of today and in the future.
Other topics during the Assembly will be: the new arrangement in the Nordic Council of Ministers, cultural policy and artistic co-operation within the European Union, the Unesco Convention on cultural diversity and the Norwegian proposal to establish culture in the constitution.
We will compare similarities and differences, debate opportunities and obstacles, how to improve the economic and social conditions and rights for professional artists and ensure reasonable payment for artistic work.
We, the artistic organizations, react forcefully when fundamental cultural values are threatened but welcome a lively and constructive debate on cultural policy to put forward new ideas, to sound the unknown, to take time and imagination necessary to peek around the corner.
And we are delighted to have these important discussions here in Visby, here in the middle of the Baltic Sea and for the first time with participation of fellow-artists and organizations from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Russia.
As Sweden is the only Nordic country that has not got a special place for Nordic affairs, we hereby express the wish that Gotland in the future can be that place.
The cultural infrastructure is both a pre-condition and a consequence of Swedish cultural policy. Sweden’s parliament laid down the objectives and principles of Swedish cultural policy in 1974 and these were revised in 1996.
Since last autumn we have got a new government – a right/centre/liberal alliance – and they want to make political changes, even so in the cultural policy field. Therefore the Minister of Culture has announced that a new official report on the objectives and principles of the cultural policy shall be launched and that this revision will be presented in December 2008. The public service radio and television are also under revision and other changes effecting the cultural field are the altered unemployment benefits, as well as other labour market issues that has been deteriorated. And then there is the commission about changing the regions from 17 to about 7 that will effect the cultural infrastructure immensely.
So one can say that we are in a transition stage – for the moment we are in a kind of waiting – but we don´t know for what for another two years. What we do know is that the changed unemployment benefits have had a bad impact on the lifes of Swedish artists.
The goal of the current Swedish cultural policy is to increase access to culture for all citizens in our country, both via contact with culture of high quality and through creative activity of ones own. And financial support for artists and cultural institutions is a key element of this policy, for which the Swedish state, the regions and the municipalities share responsibility.
Of total public spending on culture and arts the state accounts for 47%, regions for 10% and municipalities for the remaining 43%. The Swedish state pays roughly 6,5 billions per year to Culture and Arts, which is equivalent to 0,7% of overall government spendings.
Yet it is individuals, the public themselves, who account for the majority of spendings, when purchasing books, cd’s, tickets for various events, music instruments, cd-players etc.
And yet it is the artists themselves who account for the most; by not being properly paid for our work, by not being properly paid for our author’s rights and copy-rights, by not being part of the social security-systems that are supposed to regard all citizens but in fact do not include most artists and by having to deal with non-solved tax issues that effects the possibility to work.
KLYS has, as you can hear, a lot of issues to deal with and we are working on many levels trying to influence and effect all the changes, so that the transitions into the new policies will be both efficient and fair to the Swedish artists as well as to the public. At least we hope for transitions without ”considerable damages”, to quote the ”The Nordic Cultural Model” by Peter Duelund, a big study discussing how it has been, how it is for the moment and the possible future outlines of Nordic Cultural Policies.