Art opens up spaces in which ideas, reflections and emotions can be developed and negotiated.
Spaces for all of society!
Art opens up spaces in which ideas, reflections and emotions can be developed and negotiated.
Spaces for all of society!
ART opens up spaces in which ideas, reflections, and emotions can be developed and negotiated.
Spaces for the whole of society! It should therefore be about participation, about shaping our living spaces, about living our dreams, and about co-determination; continually sounding out our interactions with each other as a society.
We need OLD and NEW WORKS that can entertain, comfort, and delight us. All those precious and complex poems and compositions that we love so much and want to spend a lifetime with. But we also need different works with which we can embrace contradiction, negotiate social values, and even fight battles. Music can be a mirror and seismograph for individual sensibilities as well as for social tensions. Styles, colors, expressions of the abundance of different views and interpretations – cosmopolitan instead of small-minded.
WHAT TO DO – NEW PACTS AND DECENTRALISED COMPETENCIES
Revitalizing our diverse cultural world requires decisive action.
Why not reassemble the big picture from many of the small mosaic pieces?
PLANNING
Decentralized planning – regional negotiation. With all those who are devoted to „local culture,“ with all those who want to make it their business. Culture lovers and culture creators, institutions, financiers, and administration.
In many places. In small groups. At many small round tables.
The focus may be on models that already exist to develop them further: the regional needs, embracing already existing institutions and initiatives, the local interested parties, actors, and sponsors.
Planning and financing that implement projects in detail and with fair contracts.
The diversity of the independent scene supported in this way and the breadth of the most varied concepts can also provide important impulses for better-financed institutions.
FINANCE
It would be possible for the federal government, states, municipalities, and institutions to commit themselves to use a large part of their budgets and capacities explicitly for diverse formats.
To pay the professional specialists appropriately, and yet also to bring a larger circle of different artists into employment.
With fair pay and FAIR CONTRACTS.
Solo contracts in which we pretend to be self-employed have no place in the cultural sector anymore!
We could negotiate upward and downward limits on fees/remuneration in such a way that a future system intentionally supports not just the arts at all levels, but also the artists.
CO-OPERATIVE DECISION MAKING
The experts of the respective métiers offer their expertise; they must therefore have a say and the right to co-decide. This allows for flexible and tailor-made concepts. We could organize conferences to negotiate how we work – regionally, in cities, on the local level, i.e., directly on site:
Politics, cultural institutions, artists‘ agencies, artists, educators.
And interested local residents.
INVEST IN THE FUTURE!
In this way, a future would be possible in which the affected local communities WANT to commit themselves. The diversity of culture does not have to be fought for in an abstract way according to the logic of geographical advantages and exploitation mechanisms but can be preserved and expanded regionally. Perhaps such measures would also have unexpectedly positive outcomes, for example, if theatres were transformed into more democratic, safe, and supportive places to work through transparency, participation, and consideration of local needs. It is precisely because this crisis has shaken us to our cores as individuals and as a community that we should respond in a decentralized, detailed, and multifaceted way.
A RESUME
ART is not a hobby, but highly skilled work for some, and an indispensable need for others.
We need FINANCED SPACES FOR FREE THINKING, concepts that MAKE THE FREEDOM OF ARTISTS POSSIBLE on as broad a playing field as possible, without requiring an unrealistic increase in the total amount of funding.
It’s time for artists to join their associations, trade unions, and newly founded interest groups. All those involved in „art“ should make an effort to find forums where they live, where planning and realization can be discussed „on-site“.
This requires active engagement and rethinking: with individual ideas, yet less rivalry. Art will only flourish for as many as possible if the path leads to an understanding of our common interests and to honest communication with each other.
Up until now, as artists, we have mostly been acting on our own and in our own self-interest.
We have to change that!
That is why we have founded the association krea[K]tiv – Musiktheater stands up.
Our membership is growing.
And we are growing together in the responsibility for and management of our manifold challenges.
It’s worth taking part.
It’s time to stand up for yourself and for others.
