Europe's new cultural capitals

Turku, Finland and Tallinn,Estonia are the two European capitals of culture for 2011. They assume the mantle from Istanbul, Essen in Germany and Pecs in Hungary.

Turku is located west of the Finnish capital Helsinki and has chosen to highlight the links between culture and wellbeing. According to a DW report, doctors in Turku will even be able to prescribe attendance at cultural events. Turku is an old university city and the links between the arts and the sciences are also an element of the coming year in the Finnish city.

Tallinn is the capital of Estonia, one of three Baltic countries freed from Russian rule when the Soviet Union melted in history. The city's old town is a UNESCO World Heritage listed site and hopes that the focus on culture during 2011 will further boost its bid to be seen as a modern and progressive European state.

A mixed media year

For media companies and their newspapers 2010 was a year of contradictions and mixed signals. The launch of the iPad in April was hailed as the great white hope for media corporations desperate to find a profitable niche in an online world in which readers of news have come to expect free access to news. In July Rupert Murdoch's Times began charging readers to read articles on its website and other Murdoch papers are to follow. Many other newspapers have continued the race to the bottom as they retreat from any role as bastions of serious journalism in the public interest. Investigative journalism has all but disappeared from the mainstream media. Instead, newspapers have become hardly distinguishable from junk mail advertising brochures and lifestyle magazines.

In response we have seen a further growth in the importance of bloggers and other "independent" players the most famous of which is now Wikileaks. It is indicative of the current media landscape that the "investigative" side of this story was undertaken by a group of radicals and not by the media.

And to wrap up the year Hungary's right-wing government under Viktor Orbán has recently announced new laws to curtail press freedom in that country. That alone may seem unsurprising given Hungary's past experience with a Communist dictatorship but things were meant to have changed. Orbán's country is now a member of the European Union and on 1 January assumes its rotating presidency. A serious dispute about the nature of press freedom has broken out between the Hungarian government and many other members of the EU. It is a debate on which the Union should not compromise. A financially healthy, free and critical media is at the heart of democracy.

Where's your Ring?

Everybody wants a Ring these days. Wagner's Ring. Yes, it seems that every self-respecting opera house wants to have a production of Richard Wagner's four-part operatic epic - The Ring of the Nibelungen - in their repertoire. In Germany alone, Lübeck, Hannover, Essen, Hamburg Berlin and Frankfurt all currently have one. And now Opera Australia wants to get in on the act. It is mounting a co-production that will premiere in Melbourne in 2013.

But why? Performing Wagner's Ring is the biggest undertaking in the opera world. And opera has in recent years gone all out to position itself as a an artform of spectacle, especially in countries such as Australia that do not have a long opera tradition dating back centuries. That is fine. There are certainly many spectacular moments in opera, especially in the late-nineteenth century repertoire which dominates our stages. But there is more to opera than just the big, the loud and the lengthy. And it is this side that is getting blended out, with the result that many people who are not grabbed by the bombastic, the romantic and tragic are turned off by the whole operatic genre. Two of these best opera performances I have seen in the last twelve months have been relatively small affairs: Benjamin Britten's chamber opera The Turn of the Screw and Joseph Haydn's comedy Il Mondo Della Luna. Both were at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wagner's Ring. But both are still very much "operas", in the best sense. It is only when we get a rich variety of fare that we really come to appreciate what a thrilling, exciting and rewarding form opera can be. And one with much wider appeal than it currently has in Australia. Let's have the Ring but balance it with some more varied and less-frequently heard repertoire.

Image: Kugel

Chasing tails

These days youth audience programs are all the range amongst arts companies. We are bombarded with dire warnings that the audience for the mainstream arts are "dying out" and companies are throwing large amounts of money to make themselves seem more attractive to the all-important under-35s. This is, of course, money that is coming out of production budgets. The idea seems to be that we should all like the same thing, that our arts companies should be everything to everybody, that there is something wrong if people under and over 35 don't have the same tastes. Some of these programs remind me of the over-50s who squeeze into the fashions of 20-somethings in the vain attempt to convince themselves that they are still young and 'hip', no matter how ridiculous the result.

But isn't a “bum on a seat" "a bum on a seat” no matter what age it is? Is the emphasis on youth alienating the older and more mature audience, which has always been the core audience for the “heritage” arts? There is also a demographic argument that says that the population is ageing and that in terms of pure numbers the population – and therefore the potential audience – is growing fastest in the over-50 bracket, so why throw large amounts of money at a population sector that is numerically in decline?

There is quite a bit of “group think” going on in this debate, i.e. “if all the other arts companies are chasing the youth market then we had better do that too”. Maybe a company that says, “we are going to different, we are going to look after a more mature audience” would be highly successful, if for no other reason than they would differentiate themselves from the rest of the industry. Or is that kind of diversity too frightening to our arts companies?

Image St Stev

Germany's first Hitler exhibition opens

The first ever German exhibition about Adolf Hitler opens in Berlin today. Under the title Hitler and the Germans, Nation and Crime the show is being hosted by the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

The exhibition is divided into sections dealing with the relationship between Hitler and German society, the Nazi state and the dictator's rise to power. In an article published in the magazine Der Spiegel the curators describe the great caution they have taken to ensure that the exhibition does not present any opportunities for perverse "hero worship". They have aimed to achieve "critical distance" to their subject and none of the items on display are thought to ever have been touched by Hitler.

Nevertheless, the exhibition marks a new milestone in the historical treatment of the genocidal dictator. With the passing of time, the proportion of the German - and European - population with first-hand experience of Nazism is below ten percent. Germany has become a "post-memory" society; at least as far as the Third Reich and World War II are concerned. People today only "know" Hitler and his regime from history books, films, family recollections, site visits and the education system - including museums. At the same time the Nazis have moved into the realm of popular culture and there is a risk that the full horror of Hitler's regime will slowly be lost on future generations for whom Hitler is little more than a mythical symbol of evil. To some extent that is an unavoidable result of the march of history. But it is also something that well-curated exhibitions can help prevent.

Image: Ruins of buildings and vehicles lie in Berlin's Mohrenstrasse after the Anglo-American air attacks on the 3rd of February, 1945, (source: German Federal Archive)

Save the Arts

Check out this video. http://savethearts-uk.blogspot.com/ It's a great example of contemporary advocacy for the arts.

Less is more

One of the great challenges for us today is dealing superfluity and information overload. The industrialization of information production has meant that we face a constant bombardment of information that cries out for our attention. The result is that as a society we have lost the ability to see the wood for the trees. Information is power, or so the saying goes. But wisdom is information on steroids. And yet wisdom - the ability to analyze, understand and organize information - has been pushed into the background by our fascination with information.

Here is another way in which the arts can help us. The sculptures of Constantin Brancusi or Alberto Giacometti, haiku poetry or the carefully crafted words of a great novelist show us what can be achieved by focussing on the essence and cutting away the superfluous. The creative process is often about going from the raw block of marble to the core truth. Artists can spend inordinate lengths of time refining their works, usually be removing, refining and cutting back in the knowledge that it is easy to be verbose but a great achievement to be able to reduce an idea or expression to its very quintessence. If our public and political life displayed a similar desire for cutting through the superfluous, the irrelevant we be a lot closer to being able to deal with some of the other great challenges facing us today.

Image: Alberto Giacometti, Standing Woman I, 1960 (photo: Dick Heiser)