The Economization of the Arts and Culture Sector in Germany After 1945

Abstract

The chapter argues that the implementation of the Neue Kulturpolitik in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s led to a widening of the concept of culture and, thus, to an unprecedented expansion of cultural services. Cultural policy became more and more social policy and was thus confronted with an ever-growing hybrid system of objectives. The massive costs of the German unification challenged the public finance sector in the 1990s and the cultural institutions came under massive cost-saving pressure at the time. Against this background, the calls for the liberalization of the cultural sector, its opening in favor of market logic grew louder and louder, resulting in proposals for a radical remodeling of the German cultural field. These ideas are today confronted with the slogan of “Cultural Education,” encompassing a further expansion of the cultural field toward pedagogy. The steadily increasing hybridity of the field adds more water to the mill of those who call for simple, easy-to-evaluate solutions and the democratization effects ascribed to market mechanisms. What is lacking here are studies that aim at reconstructing the cultural interests and consumption habits of these people that form audiences, by investigating their practice of visiting cultural institutions and engaging with culture and the arts. The chapter argues that studies aiming at systematically recording subjective interpretations and attitudes of culture consumption as part of everyday life could perhaps reduce existing fears and prejudices and lead to a more fruitful cultural. Policy discourse beyond antielitism and mass paranoia.