PUBLIC‐PRIVATE SUPPORT OF THE ARTS AND GERMAN CULTURAL POLICY

Peter M. McIsaac

14 citations0/0 files storedInternational Journal of Cultural Policy

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Arts, Culture, and Music Studies Museums and Cultural Heritage European history and politics

Abstract

This paper provides a historical context for thinking about Germany’s recent embrace of sponsorship and private donations as a means of supporting education and the arts. The paper notes that the chief architect of a new national cultural policy, Michael Naumann, has justified a turn to public‐private collaborative arts funding with the argument that a market‐driven model of private responsibility for the arts stimulates greater citizen involvement in civic life and thus greater democracy. Yet Naumann has not reconciled this argument with Germany’s own history, in particular the fact that Germany’s Golden Age of private support of the arts coincided with the authoritarian German Empire (1871–1918). My analysis of this historical constellation, presented as a case study of one of Germany’s most important museum directors, Wilhelm Bode (1845–1929), argues that private support of the arts formed part of a larger strategy designed to wrest control of arts institutions away from traditional elites. My essay seeks to show that the rise of more responsive public forums was intended to make the fruits of German imperialism and economic domination available to more Germans, particularly middle class Germans. On this basis, the essay suggests two things. First, German imperialist society was less hierarchical and more broadly participatory than is often assumed, complicating its ability to figure as a negative foil today. Second, the harnessing of market forces to German culture was expected to deepen popular appreciation for chauvinistic conceptions of German nationalism that today seem to conflict with what German democracy might ideally be. With these points in mind, I contend not that sponsorship and private donations are incapable of promoting greater public involvement in the arts. Rather, the private sector might yield more democratic outcomes when publicly funded democratic institutions retain a strong voice in the direction of culture.

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References

1988The Predicament of Culture 2000Economics and Culture 1989The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art.1988The Predicament of Culture 1984The Peculiarities of German History 1991The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Public.2001Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany 1985The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany

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2018The Economization of the Arts and Culture Sector in Germany After 1945 2020The myth of corporate art: the start of the Peter Stuyvesant Collection and its alignment with public arts policy in the Netherlands, 1950–1960 2015Pol De Mont and Friends: A Curator, Donations, and Gift Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Antwerp

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