Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 4

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS • 5.1 • SUMMER 2020
EDITORIAL:
DEMOCRATIZING THE ARTS AND THE ARTS SECTOR
RAPHAELA HENZE
Arts and cultural managers working in the fine and performing arts and heritage
engage with creative and aesthetic expressions�arts and cultural objects, exhibitions
and performances�that are inherently reflective of broader social as well
as personal cultural ideas, knowledge, and values.
Building an understanding of their work will help us understand the contribution of the
arts and its agents as to how historical, institutional and social assumptions about interculturalism,
cultural diversity, and cultural inclusion become established and challenged
in the social world. We consider this understanding essential when addressing the anxieties
that globalization and an increasing populism bring to the arts and cultural sector.
In directing, administering, and mediating artistic and cultural expressions, arts and cultural
managers work at the interface of production and consumption. In doing so, they
contribute to how the terms and conditions for intercultural exchange are set both at
home and abroad. The intercultural experiences or exchanges they help create may foster
the acknowledgement, appreciation, and valuing of alternative perspectives and perceptions
of the world or, conversely, promote and reinforce stereotypes and inequitable
relationships between individuals, communities, institutions, and even nations.
Since its foundation in 2016, the international and interdisciplinary Network ‘Brokering
Intercultural Exchange’ (www.managingculture.net) brings researchers together
with arts and cultural practitioners and policymakers. Over the last couple of years, the
Arts & Humanities Research Council funded network succeeded in bringing together
around 250 people in different places for small seminars on specific topics. Participants
from more than 40 countries have been joining the seminars, two Winter Schools�
specifically targeting master and Ph.D. students�as well as the Annual Gathering. We
aim to build an understanding of the relationship of arts and cultural management practice
and education to intercultural exchange�interaction between communities, institutions,
and /or nations with different ‘values’ and perspectives and individuals with different
social, economic, and religious backgrounds. While we have mainly been focusing
on “ethnically-marked cultural difference associated with the international movement
of peoples and, within national territories”, (Bennett 2001: 17), we acknowledge that
intercultural/transcultural exchange happens across many groups and communities and
involves concerns such as sexuality, gender, religion, class, and disability.
The texts presented in this special issue represent some of the ideas and concerns raised
during the network’s Annual Gathering entitled ‘Democratizing the arts and the arts
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doi: 10.18278/aia.5.1.1