Arts & International Affairs: 2.3: Autumn/Winter 2017 | Page 5

EDITORIAL: ARTS AND CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS
J.P. SINGH
The University of Edinburgh
J.P. Singh is Professor and Chair of Culture and Political Economy, and
Director of the Institute for International Cultural Relations at the Uni-
versity of Edinburgh.
T
his issue of Arts & International Affairs explores the connections between art and
cultural institutions. Arts are symbolic practices and reflect on ways of life. Insti-
tutions are formal repositories for experiences, learning, and conventions. While
obviously related, arts and cultural institutions are not the same and this issue of AIA
explores the synergies and divergences.
Arts are creative and they are cultural. A creative experience is part of the artists’ imag-
ination, pursued both with talent and genius. Creative practices become cultural when
they reflect, or are embodied in, collective beliefs and experiences (Singh 2011). Equally
they can question cultural practices and the arts have often pushed this boundary. De-
spite all the controversies, and the groups that are marginalized or included, each year’s
arts’ awards—whether for books or films or fine arts—celebrate those who pushed the
boundaries of our thinking and told a story that needed to be heard in ways we had
not imagined before. The social world of art often either romanticizes the renegade who
defected from cultural practices or revels in one controversy or another: the Ukrainian
ballet dancer Sergei Polunin who in 2012 announced his resignation from the Royal bal-
let at the age of 22 at the height of his career; Bollywood’s Padmavaat in 2017–2018 that
ignited controversies with far-right Hindu nationalists for its portrayal of an apocryphal
Hindu Princess; or a January 2018 production of the opera Carmen in Florence, which
changed the ending for a feminist close in which the opera’s eponymous heroine kills
Don José rather than the other way around—the audiences booed the production, the
Mayor of Florence defended it.
Cultural institutions also shape artistic practices, and can embody the political econo-
mies of their time, in turn constraining or regulating art. Social scientists have shown
that arts and cultural institutions should stand at an arms-length from political processes
in order to encourage a diversity and freedom of artistic expressions (Throsby 2000;
Frey 2000). Thus, a ministry of culture controlling arts funding is very different from a
National Endowment for the Arts in the United States or the Arts Council England. On
the other hand, the problem is that arts regulators and funding agencies do not passively
reflect a “public interest” and have internal prerogatives (Rizzo 2003). There are also
macro political-economies th at arts embroil, inviting charges of reflecting particular ide-
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doi: 10.18278/aia.2.3.1