Kulttuurivirasto?

Lakiesitys opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriön virastouudistuksesta on lausuntokierroksella tammikuun loppuun asti. Yhtenä osana tätä uudistusta Taike (Taiteen edistämiskeskus) sulautettaisiin yhteen Kavin (Kansallinen audiovisuaalinen instituutti) kanssa, ja meillä oli jatkossa näistä kahdesta toimijasta muodostettu Kulttuurivirasto.

Esitysluonnoksessa on 115 sivua ja se julkaistiin juuri ennen joulua. Aikaa lausuntojen antamiselle on 31.1.2025 asti. Tämä on jo lähtökohtaisesti kyseenalainen tilanne – monitahoisen lakiesitykseen tutustumiseen ja kommentointiin ei ole varattu sen vaatimaa aikaa.

Lakiesityksen tavoitteena on “selkeyttää ja yhtenäistää opetus- ja kulttuuriministeriön hallinnonalan virastorakennetta toiminnallisesti ja taloudellisesti tarkoituksenmukaisemmaksi kokonaisuudeksi siten, että virastoja on helpompi ohjata, ne ovat toiminnallisesti nykyistä selkeämpiä kokonaisuuksia ja niiden toiminta on yhteiskunnallisesti vaikuttavampaa”. On hankala nähdä, miten nämä tavoitteet toteutuisivat tällä lakiesityksellä. Kulttuurivirasto olisi jatkossa kahdesta hyvin erilaisesta toimijasta muodostettu konglomeraatti, jonka missio olisi epäselvä. Tämä mielestäni puurouttaisi toimintaa ja viestintää päätöksentekijöiden, organisaatioiden ja taiteilijoiden suuntaan.

Ote Taiken omasta lausunnosta: “Taiteen edistämiskeskus toteaa ensimmäiseksi, että Taiteen edistämiskeskuksen ja Kansallisen audiovisuaalisen instituutin yhdistymiselle ei tunnisteta toiminnallisia perusteita substanssitehtävien osalta. Virastojen nykyiset toiminnot ja toimialat eroavat toisistaan merkittävästi, eikä yhdistymisestä odoteta seuraavan merkittäviä hyötyjä.”

Virastouudistuksen kylkiäisenä halutaan myös merkittävästi muuttaa vertaisarviointia. Jatkossa vertaisarvioinnista olisi vastuussa asiantuntijapankki, jossa olisi noin 200-250 jäsentä. Uskoisin, että tämä järjestely voisi periaatteessa toimia hyvin. Vertaisarvioinnissa käytettyjen asiantuntijoiden määrä kasvaisi huomattavasti ja mukaan tulisi mahdollisuus käyttää varajäseniä, mikä helpottaisi jääviystilanteita. Esimerkiksi Belgiassa Flandersin alueella siirryttiin asiantuntijapankin käyttöön jo vuonna 2016 (lisätietoa Dirk De Witin presentaation materiaaleissa / Towards Smart Art Funding Seminar vuodelta 2019).

Ongelmallista virastouudistuksen nykyisessä nykytilanteessa on se, että:
A. Asiantuntijapankin jäsenten nimeämisestä ja toimintalogiikasta ei ole tehty tarkempaa suunnitelmaa
ja
B. Asiantuntijapankkia ei mainita varsinaisessa lakiesityksessä ollenkaan

KULTA ry:n lausunto on tästä aiheesta reippaan suorasanainen, ja lainaan sen tähän kokonaisuudessaan:

“Kulttuurin ja taiteen edistämisen rakenteiden heikkous on sen sirpaleisuus – ja lähes jokainen sirpale on aliresurssoitu. Yhden isomman viraston syntyminen ei sitä muuksi muuta, sillä Taiken ja Kavin yhdistymiselle ei ole toiminnallisia perusteita, eikä mikään rakenne näytä sen ansiosta tosiasiallisesti vahvistuvan. Samaan aikaan järjestöleikkaukset halvaannuttavat ja entisestään sirpaloittavat taiteen edistämisen rakenteita, kun toimijat joutuvat suojelemaan ydintoimintojaan tai toimintaedellytykset katoavat kokonaan.

Keskeinen huoli virastouudistuksessa liittyy apurahoja koskevaan päätöksentekorakenteeseen. Kun päätökset keskitetään yhteen toimielimeen, se on rakenteena hauras varmistamaan kädenvarren mitta -periaatteen toteutumisen kaikissa oloissa. Yhdelle keskitetylle toimielimelle ollaan antamassa liikaa valtaa, jota se voi käyttää kumileimasimena tai ohittaa asiantuntijapaneelit tai antautua käsikassaraksi politrukeille.

Virastouudistuksen kylkiäisenä ei näin suurta periaatteellista paradigman muutosta pidä toteuttaa. Keskustelu taiteen autonomian rakenteista olisi pitänyt käydä kulttuuripoliittisen selonteon yhteydessä tai ylipäänsä laajasti taiteilijajärjestöjen kanssa.

Käytännössä uuden viraston johdon ja toimielimen nimeämisen kautta ministeri voisi halutessaan varmistaa, että hallitukselle mieluisaan taiteeseen saa rahoitusta. Kädenvarren mitta -periaate voi toki jatkossakin toteutua herrasmiessopimuksen varassa, mikäli poliitikot pitävät taiteen vapautta tärkeänä. Toki näin on jo nytkin. Taiteen autonomia lepää sen varassa, että valtaa käyttävät luottamushenkilöt ja viranhaltijat ovat siihen sitoutuneita.

Laissa olisi syytä kirjata asiantuntijapaneelien käyttö luonnosta velvoittavammaksi. Toinen autonomiaa takaava pohdinta on se, miten neuvosto nimitetään eli miten varmistetaan se, ettei neuvosto ole ministerin taskussa, vaan aidosti taiteen kenttää edustava asiantuntijajoukko ja sen nimitysprosessi avoin ja läpinäkyvä.

Taiteen vapauden eli autonomian pitäisi olla rakenteilla varmistettu. Eri Euroopan maissa on vertaisarviointia halvaannutettu tai jopa kansallisten laitosten johtajia vaihdettu vallanpitäjille myötämielisiin. Tämä ajan hengessä ja käytännössä oleva huoli on otettava vakavasti, ja pyrkiä niin vahvaan taiteen autonomian rakenteeseen, että demokratiamme kestää myös demokratianvastaisten voimien nousun.

Taiteen vapaus ja autonomia on säädetty perustuslailla, mutta se pitäisi erikseen turvata tällä nimenomaisella lainsäädännöllä. Nyt uusi laki mahdollistaisi sen, ettei vertaisarviointirakenteena paneelia ole pakko käyttää. Ymmärrämme tämän taustalla olevat lakitekniset syyt, mutta sen seuraukset voivat silti olla huolestuttavat. Työjärjestyksen varaan ei ole turvallista jättää näin paljon, eikä työjärjestyksen laatiminen ole avoin ja läpinäkyvä prosessi. Taiteen autonomia pitäisi turvata laissa ja tehdä rakenne, jossa autoritäärinen poliitikko ei pääse nimittämään mieluisiaan henkilöitä tekemään taiteen rahoituspäätökset.

Kulttuuri- ja taidealan keskusjärjestö KULTA ry esittää huolensa paradigman muutoksesta Suomessa: tieteen, taiteen ja kansalaisjärjestöjen autonomia on hapertumassa. Samankaltaisia muutoksia – esimerkiksi tehokkuuden ja vaikuttavuuden nimissä – ollaan toteuttamassa myös muilla toimialoilla kuin kulttuurihallinnossa. Esitämme aikalisää virastouudistuksen valmisteluun, jotta yksi länsimaisen demokratian keskeinen perusta eli taiteen autonomia voidaan turvata.

Tuemme myös saavutettavuuskirjasto Celian esitystä, että sen asema itsenäisenä toimintayksikkönä lisätään lakiin. Vammaisten kulttuuriset oikeudet on turvattava.”

Lakiesityksestä on tämän tekstin julkaisuun mennessä tehty yhteensä 25 lausuntoa, jotka nostavat esille myös muita tärkeitä huomioita. Kaikki julkaistut lausunnot löytää, jos klikkaa ruudun oikeassa laidassa olevaa tekstiä ‘Lausunnonantajia: NN’.

Selvyyden vuoksi: tämä blogipostaus on omaa henkilökohtaista pohdintaani aiheesta, Frame Contemporary Art Finland tekee lakiesityksestä erikseen virallisen lausunnon.

Case Stevns Klint – how to make a sustainability strategy that actually works

A couple of weeks ago I did my duty as a diligent cultural worker and took part in workshops to develop the art and culture vision for the Helsinki city and the sustainable tourism strategy for Suomenlinna.

In the Helsinki City workshop one of the slides said that ‘Art will get more space and oxygen’ and that ‘The city will change from a producer of art to a platform, supporter and enabler. The cultural field is supported holistically via ecosystem thinking.’

If this would actually happen (fingers crossed that it will!) then this would be drastic reversal of the policies of the city and the cultural ministry during the past years. For a long time the needs of the nimble and networked grassroot scene have been pretty much ignored, while to focus has been in building bigger bureaucracies with more top-down control and centralising the resources to a few big institutions.

The Suomenlinna workshop that took place on the same day was very inspiring, mostly because of the presentation about how Stevns Klint World Heritage site in Denmark had *failed* in realising their sustainable tourism strategy. They had produced a strategy document that seemed great, but then nothing actually happened. Here is how it failed (writing these since my photos of the slides are so low quality):

  • Wishful thinking – underestimated the effort needed
  • No common understanding of sustainable tourism, vision or goals
  • Not sufficiently anchored in individual organisations / planning (most organisations cannot suddenly take new obligations)
  • Meetings really only included formal key stakeholders
  • No systematic follow-up

The failure caused a lot of frustration, but the folks at Stevns Klint were able to turn things around and this is how they did it:

  • One year of monthly meetings
  • Getting to know each other
  • Defining who actually does what
  • Understanding what is sustainable tourism
  • What is really the joint vision and goals?

To me this sounds a bit like the process HIAP had with Mustarinda in the Post Fossil Transition project. We had to spend the first one year in monthly meetings (mostly internal ones, some were opened up as public events) to get a shared understanding of what we want to achieve, and to also to get an understanding of how different we are as organisations.

The concluding slide of Stevns Klint presentation featured their learnings:

  • It takes time and effort
  • Essential to have a joined understanding
  • Essential that key stakeholders take real ownership (throughout their entire organisation)
  • Essential to include and empower local community (commercial and non-commercial)
  • It is meaningful to work for a higher cause

In general the message of the Stevns Klint presentation was that a strategy is just a piece of paper, what matters is what actually happens.

Stevns Klint, Zealand, Denmark. Photo by Lisa Risager https://www.flickr.com/photos/risager/4525692589

(The original post on FB)

Output, outcome, impact – measuring culture beyond numbers

I took part in an excellent Seminar on Measuring the Effect of Cultural Policy, organised by Nordic Culture Point in November 2013. The presentations highlighted how measuring culture is a complex affair, and cannot be simplified into crude numbers. It’s notable that most of the presenters in the seminar were economists and/or statisticians.

Here are some glimpses of the presentations:

In his introduction talk, Mikael Schultz set off with an example:

QUESTION: WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?

ANSWER: 42

It might very well be that the true answer to meaning of life is in fact 42. The problem is that we don’t know how to interpret this answer. The same goes for all numeric values – if they are used in isolation, they do not actually properly measure any quality. As noted in the event by Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila, since Aristotle we have known that it’s impossible to measure quality by quantitative means.

Here are a couple of slides that further illustrate the same point:
indicators

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The Unlikely Success of Pixelache Helsinki

pixelache-nyc2Pixelache 2003 NYC (live av performance on the rooftop of Gershwin Hotel. Photo by Antti Ahonen.)

(PART 1 of New Culture vs Old Structures)

Pixelache Festival was my main professional commitment for 10 years, from its inception in 2002 to year 2011. In the process of trying to establish Pixelache I learned a lot about the public funding system and below I will share some insights on how the system works – or rather how it does *not* work.

Hopefully this information will help some people to avoid banging their head against the wall as much as I did. Or hopefully they will at least choose the right wall.

Disclaimer – I’m no longer involved in the Pixelache organisation so all the thought below should be considered as my own personal views, not official statements by Pixelache.

* * *

1. THE BLACKMAILING/LOBBYING APPROACH

In year 2006 I was pretty frustrated (‘vittuuntunut’ in Finnish) with the situation of Pixelache Helsinki. It was the fifth year of Pixelache, and 12th year for me to organise events in Helsinki. Pixelache was really successful internationally – we were in the process of establishing chapters in various countries and had been invited to collaborate with many prominent events (ISEA, Doors of Perception, etc).

Unfortunately, we had not been able to get any funding for the work needed to put together the main festival in Helsinki. With great effort we had managed to scrape together money from dozens of different sources to cover some of the necessary basic costs, but there was no chance to pay anything for anyone for the actual production work. In comparison, the very first edition of Mal au Pixel (the French edition of Pixelache) received 7 times more funding than what we had in Helsinki.

In this situation I sent this email to ‘everyone’ – state art organisations, Helsinki City Cultural Office, cultural foundations and key people in Finnish media art scene. The email is in Finnish but the main point is that I made it clear that unless we received more proper financial support, the main festival would need to stop in Helsinki. This email was not just a tactical move, this was the actual reality we faced. During these years I spent most of my time abroad and only occasionally came back to Helsinki for a month or so to focus on Pixelache Helsinki planning/organising work. This had worked fine in the first couple of years but had been not been manageable (or in other words, was far too fragile and stressful) for a while already.

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New Culture vs Old Structures

k.fi.officekatastro.fi office, summer 1999 (photo by Juha Huuskonen)

After a long time of procrastination (a year or two) I’ll finally publish a few blog posts about the mismatch between new emerging culture and the established cultural institutions in Finland.

During the past 15 years (ever since katastro.fi did its first projects in Kiasma in 1998) I’ve been helping various grassroot projects to gain visibility and access to resources such as public funding. This has often been a paradoxical task, since most of the new, independent cultural projects have an uneasy relationship towards money, power and institutions. Continue reading

The new era of ‘non-disciplinarity’?

Slush 2011: Shut up and grow – Mark Zuckerberg

A quick summary: this rather long blog posting deals with structural changes that are currently going on in cultural funding organisations and other institutions, how they are trying to get rid of different specific disciplines in the name of ‘innovation’.

– – – –

The decision to name the new Aalto University School as ‘Aalto University School of Arts and Creativity’ came as a shock for many people. This new university is a combination of University of Art and Design and the architecture department of University of Technology. According to press release, the new name was needed since “the concept ’art and design’ in the current name has strong associations with the past”.

The petition to reconsider the name bring up some of the grave problems that arise from choosing such a vague name for a university. This blog posting tries to deal with this one: “A degree/research with an ‘arts & creativity’ school does not point out to any specific skill or knowledge in any specific discipline”.

One could say that ‘it’s just a name’ – that having a new name for the university should not cause any significant problems for the art, design and architecture community associated with Aalto University. But there is more at stake here than just the name – as stated in the Aalto press, the name symbolises the “amalgamation and the multi-disciplinary nature of Aalto University”.

The transformation that is going on in Aalto University resembles the process that already took place in Nordic art/culture scene and the on-going process to change the structure of Art Council of Finland. These ambitious endeavors try to deal with genuine problems and respond to changing times, but it seems that the captains of this process are not sure about how this new ship should be navigated. In fact, a key aspect seems to be that the captains should let go of their control – that academic and cultural institutions should eagerly respond to the whims of darwinistic forces such as trends in international business. If this is the case, then my prediction is that instead of becoming more innovative and competitive, the institutions will just focus on short-term goals and try to imitate what others are doing.

The Nordic ‘utveckling’

In the Nordic region, there used to be four organisations dedicated for specific forms of art – Nifca (contemporary art), NordScen (performing arts), Nomus (music) and Nordbok (literature). In the end of 2006 these organisations were closed down and replaced by Nordic Culture Point, an organisation which administers several funding programmes. The ones who were lobbying for shutting down the old organisations had the opinion that in today’s world the barriers between disciplines have become so blurry that they should no longer be enforced by administration.

The biggest one of the funding programmes is the Culture and Art Programme which in 2011 will give out 2 032 930 EUR of funding. The keyword of this funding programme is ‘utveckling’ – ‘innovation’ or ‘development’. Projects which are new (have not been started yet) and have some innovative quality (the applicants can themselves explain how they are innovative) can receive funding. I know this programme pretty well since I was a member of the Art and Culture Programme Expert Committee between 2007-2009.

This new system has two clear benefits. Since many organisations were closed down, the money that used to go to salaries of people can now be used to support individual projects. Also, a larger variety of organisations can receive financial support, as long as they create a project that does some ‘utveckling’.

But there are also downsides. Previously, there used to be organisations which were lead by experts of a specific discipline. These people were active contributors to their own fields. If you had an idea you could go and have a chat with these people and similarly if there was a problem, it was clear who was in charge.

In the new system all this is different. Nordic Culture Point is made up of administrators who just have to focus on administration – they have specifically been denied any comments or contributions to the funding decisions. Also the members of the Expert Committees cannot take any active role – they are not supposed to be in touch with the applicants and it’s not possible to appeal against individual decisions. So, in terms of an agenda related to a specific discipline, there is no one who you could talk to. This is understandable since the new system is not supposed to have any such agendas. It’s all about ‘utveckling’ and a few other concepts such as ‘communication’ and ‘Världen i Norden – Norden i Världen’ (‘The Nordic Region in the World – the World in the Nordic Region’).

The other problem is that there is no longer any support for longer term processes. If you manage to get support to realise a project and it turns out the be a success, it is not possible to get support for the continuation – it’s no longer new and thus no longer about ‘utveckling’. There is another Nordic culture foundation – the Nordic Culture Fund – but they also only support individual, one-off projects.

One could say that a third problem is that the expert committee does not have expertise to handle applications coming from many diverse disciplines of art and culture. The current expert committee seems to have strong biases – out of 8 people there are two theatre directors and two people focused on music. But in the logic of the new system this is not a problem – since knowledge of a specific discipline is no longer necessary for making decisions.

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