STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
helps (…) to transform the status of certain practices in the sense of culturally “ennobling” them
(Dubois, 1999)’ and plays a large part in ‘extending the range of areas that may then come under
the heading of cultural policy’ 143 . That meant that cultural policy began to recognise ‘forms of
creation that were previously dismissed or sidelined (graffiti, tags, photos, cartoons, rock, [to
which may be added circus and street arts]), as well as the emergence of a certain cultural
relativism, which recognised the “right to be different” (Dubois, 1999)’ 144 . That article by Ioana
Popa helps us briefly to clarify the methods of legitimising a policy area. Without pretending to
identify systematically or precisely the historical, political and institutional context of all the
European States that responded to the survey, it does seem important to set out the underlying
pattern. The overview that follows is an attempt to do so.
1.2. Types of intervention
The concept of ‘cultural policy’ differs in the various European countries. Whilst the English
definition has ‘a potentially totalitarian connotation’ 145 and therefore implies a certain distrust
(hence the preference to refer to arts policy), in France, according to Robert Lacombe, that
concept ‘presupposes and assigns to the state the definition of and responsibility for a specific
area of public policy, which is supposed to respond both to the requirements of cultural
democracy and to the legitimate demands for support for art.’ 146 Robert Lacombe refers back to
the definition given by Philippe Urfalino in his work entitled L’invention de la politique
culturelle 147 : a ‘totality made up of ideas, of political and administrative practices placed in an
intellectual and political context.’ On the basis of that definition, Robert Lacombe highlights the
‘indissociable nature of support policies for live performance and national models of cultural
policy and political culture.’
If we then adopt the typology defined by the author, we can identify three sets of countries on
the basis of their institutional organisation and the distribution of their powers in the cultural
sphere:
• ‘federal or highly decentralised States’ such as Belgium, Spain and Germany assign
cultural powers to linguistic communities, regions or Länder.
• States that delegate cultural powers to ‘arts councils’, such as the United Kingdom,
Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, apply, in varying ways, what is called
the principle of arm’s length management. Here, the arts council is relatively
independent of government and parliament.
• Lastly, there is ‘the model of the centralised cultural State, where the ministry of culture
has the predominant power’, embodied in particular by France and Portugal.
Those politico-administrative considerations reflect different perceptions of the role of culture in
society, which is in some cases closely tied to the idea of the nation-state (France), in others
entrusted to private or semi-public bodies (United Kingdom, Ireland, Nordic countries), in
others to federal authorities (Germany) or communities (Belgium, Spain). They give us a rough
idea of the institutional context in which a cultural policy can be developed. By placing cultural
143 Ibid.
144 Ibid.
145 Lacombe, Robert (introduction by Emmanuel Wallon), Le spectacle vivant en Europe: modèle d’organisation et
politiques de soutien, op. cit., p. 27.
146 Ibid., p. 28.
147 Urfalino, Philippe, L’invention de la politique culturelle, La Documentation française, Paris, 1996.
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PE 375.307