Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 44

EMPOWERMENT AND DIGITIZATION IN ARTS MANAGEMENT EDUCATION
Plymouth, a museum in Cape Town, or an orchestra in Berlin, for instance. Do we really
prepare our students for these international and maybe even more so intercultural work
environments? This is a huge topic that definitely needs to form part of our curriculae,
and it definitely goes far beyond language skills and intercultural competencies (Durrer
2019).
In many of our study programmes’ rules and regulations, we find claims like this one,
which was randomly picked from one of the many cultural management programmes in
Germany:
§ 2 (4) 1 the goal of the master programme in arts management is: to
enable our alumni to react creatively and competently to the current
challenges arts organisations are facing.
This sounds good, right?
It is not sufficient. It is about reacting. Our discipline merely reacts and does not innovate
enough. Constance DeVereaux (2009) hinted at this a long time ago already. It is
about current challenges (or about those topics that we thought important when implementing
the programmes)�what about the ones we do not yet foresee? I assume that
we will face issues concerning, for instance, fake news and propaganda spread by terrorists
and populists alike. There will be more “sophisticated” ways of destroying cultural
heritage, more ways to attack identities, and more ways to infiltrate even larger parts of
societies with right-wing thoughts that we are unable to fathom today; digitization will
play a central role in all of this. Migration, globalisation and climate change (Figueira
and Fullman 2019: 319 f.) will most likely provide us with more challenges than they do
already and require new forms of collaboration. Change and transformation will be our
constant companions. Are we prepared for this in a discipline that finds itself spending a
lot of time and effort on defending century-old institutions?
Media Literacy
There are many new thoughts, ideas, experimental formats, and courage that will better
prepare students for a work environment that is relatively alien to many of those teaching
them today. Among many other things, such as network competencies, language skills, a
sound knowledge of a variety of different narratives and methodologies, and the ability
for critical self-reflection, I argue for media literacy that is, to the best of my knowledge,
embedded in only a very few arts management programs.
According to the National Association for Media Literacy Education in the US, media
literacy is “The ability to access, analyse, evaluate, create, and act using all forms of communication.”
There are several aspects in this definition that will be important to (aspiring)
arts managers.
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