Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 43

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
Figure 1: Buddha statues in Bamiyan (Wikipedia).
These are deliberate attacks on cultural identities. The battlefield is, therefore, no longer
symbolic but all-too-tragically real. All these hate messages and videos of destructions
�called “socially mediated terrorism” by Smith at al. (2016, 1)�are spread around
the world online for propaganda purposes. The Taliban’s use of media communication
was from the beginning highly sophisticated and flexible. The internet has provided the
fastest and most effective propaganda tool for them. They have their own, attractively
designed websites, where all data is provided in five languages. If one website gets closed
down by the CIA, for instance, they just open up a new one (Smith 2015).
We have also seen the reactions to this by the experts of digital archaeology in the form
of a 3D replica of the 1,800-year-old arch of triumph from Palmyra. We can argue with
Walter Benjamin and lament that the aura is missing, and it is. However, we could approach
it in the way one of my students recently did. While the replica is obviously not
the real one, it is now part of the history of Palmyra. We cannot deny the senseless destruction;
it forms part of the history of the city. We have to deal with it, try to react to
it, and the next chapter in the century-long history might now come out of a 3D printer.
Internationalisation and Globalisation
According to an empirical study of more than 350 arts managers from different cultural
organisations and institutions from forty-six different countries, the majority considers
their work to be international (Henze 2017). It is important to stress that these were not
arts managers working in international contexts per se�e.g., for the Goethe Institut, the
British Council, or huge funding bodies. Participants were working in the city theatre in
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