Swedish Joint Committee for Literary and
Artistic Professionals presents
World conference on culture
World
Conference on Culture
| Programme
Conference Papers
What is culture today?
What can it be tomorrow?
Bernt Lindberg
| Bernt Lindberg |
Why is culture such a hard thing to discuss? Different meanings from one person to another, from one sentence to another. Why haven’t we invented different words for the fine arts and peoples way of living? I think the explanation is to search in the organisation of our society. When singing and dancing and telling stories was an integral part of everyday life you did not even have to have a word to group these activities together - or divide them from the rest of life. People were generalists, they did most things that had to be done, even if some of them were highly regarded for telling stories or handling bow and arrow.
In our society we are specialists. Today you have to be a professional, to be very good at the one thing that is your occupation. More specialization gives often more success. The rest of what is to be done isn’t so important, others take care of that. And so we got arts and science as one of many specialities. For every decade we become more and more specialised. We work with increasingly sophisticated techniques, often for just some special kinds of media or other way of reaching our audience.
Not only artists specialize, others do so too. And art becomes someting passive for most people, someting you buy and consume. (Fortunately many people are engaged in what they experience and some of them do their own practice as amateurs.)
Between the artist and the public stands the market. It is becoming more and more huge in scale, more worldwide and more penetrating through all societies in every corner of the globe. The market is not just a meetingplace for those who have and them who want to have. It is a sector with its own laws. And the laws of the market are decided neither by the artists nor by the public. These laws tell us what shall be the topic of today for many people, what thoughts and feelings we shall have. If we as artists could decide we would probably have quite a different way of regarding what culture shoud be. One point of wiew is to see the market as a road of communication between the artist and the public. But it is increasingly realistic to instead see it as an obstacle, for some of us as a closed gate.
In a situation like this the UNESCO report "Our creative diversity" is very inspiring and hopeful. With its way of looking at culture as a platform for all development in the world, grounded in global ethics and empowerment of ordinary people I see a chance to have the divorced different meanings of culture once again being married. It will not be easy or go very fast but there is a possibility that people in small, local groups can develop in a way that is good for them, for the enivronment, for democracy and consequently for the survival of this declining earth.
I am writing a book about a small village - 200 inhabitants - in the northern part of Sweden. When trying to figure out how they can survive in an hostile environment, with large companies exploiting the natural resources, it has led me into a voluminous research. How can these people have a good life in the future when the welfare state is eroding and the big companies need just a few employees? The answer is not a simple one but the inhabitants are themselves aware of what is probably the most important prerequisit - local culture. Local culture is much but foremost it is a feeling - we belong together, this is what we stand for and what we can do when doing it together. Behind that feeling lies an awareness of their own good craftsmanship, storytelling, music by own and invited artists, that they can do things together in lots of different associations, feasts with dances and different games (fishing games, canoe games and so forth). Of course they do not survive on only this feeling of cultural identity and pride, but it is a good start.
You can seee this development process as a circular or - even better - a spiral process.
In my view society is just crowded with broken spirals. One example. In a large scale society the people who identify a problem are far away from those who have the possibility to solve it. And they who have the solutions in their hands are often not even interested to listen.
But people who are lucky enough to take part in good processes can evolve in many ways:
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Some artists wonder why we should discuss culture in such terms. What is wrong with the fine arts that we often think of when discussing culture? My answer: It is a smal sector with narrowing ties that we must break. In "Our cerative diversity" you can see a different role for artists - to help people get into good spirals, to get a good life, to be someone to be proud of.
And that is a huge task. In Sweden today many people, not least politicians, see culture as someting not very important or interesting. To redefine our task would be to place us as artists in the middle of society, in a very important role, as those who inspire, whose initiatives can start processes among people, all over the world. g
Bernt Lindberg