Kultur in Gefahr - ITI

50 Artistic Expression in a Corporate World Artistic Expression in a Corporate World 51
chapter 4
REGULATIONS IN FAVOUR OF ARTISTIC DIVERSITY
Robust regulatory systems
In the fields of film, music, theatre, dance, visual arts, design, and
publishing (whether presented in the real world or by audiovisual or digital
means) there are dominant market positions that harm broad access to
cultural communication. From a human rights perspective this is a loss.
Some of these market-dominating cultural conglomerates are foreign to a
country; others are domestic, as in the USA or Brazil. Left to the market,
mergers and take-overs will continue. However, democracy demands the
reverse. In all fields of the arts and media, there should be producers,
distributors and promoters, who have strong local affinities, and yet
originate from many different parts of the world. National states should
regulate the cultural market in favour of diversity in order to reach this
ideal. A Convention on Cultural Diversity, that would take culture out of
the neoliberal WTO context, would hopefully give states the full right to
implement the kinds of regulations they judge necessary for the protection
and promotion of cultural diversity.
Already now, even before such a Convention on Cultural Diversity
would exist, systematic thinking should take place about the kinds of
regulations that would be appropriate, for specific categories of the arts, in
specific parts of the world. There are several categories of regulations to
consider: ownership regulations (including competition law), content
regulations, and regulations of the public accountability of cultural
enterprises, subsidy systems, tax policies and different kinds of
preferential treatments.
Gillian Doyle is right when she writes that media ownership is ‘a
difficult political minefield’, and therefore ‘the design of a regulatory
scheme to deal with concentrations ought to be robust, equitable and
squarely aimed at legitimate public policy objectives.’ (2002: 177) Thus our
mission is clear, but also extremely complicated. Regulations should be
flexible enough to respond adequately to the changing cultural landscape,
intelligently composed so that they cannot be bypassed easily or miss the
target, practically allowing monitoring, impossible to skirt around
juridically, and understandable so that they can be accepted easily.