Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1

were transparent. This may be best illustrated by the efforts invested in a successful standardization of national languages, which enabled functional communication within national borders. Artistic productions tended to be aimed at people with more cultivated tastes and this became the standardized framework for communication between general audiences and artists. More or less harmonized behavioral values enabled the generalized and widely accepted evaluation of various cultural products, but also helped artists and creators to pursue more individual ideas, and their creativity resulted in the development of new cultural values and meanings. Cultures used to be financed nationally, either through public funds or individual donations, always promoting the cultural values as public values. Today such a national structure of cultures is being dissolved. In parallel, attitudes toward culture and the arts are changing and are evolving toward deinstitutionalization of cultural productivity and individualization of cultural consumption. Contemporary cultures have been actively included and exposed to radical changes in cultural production, which could symbolically be interpreted as a transition from the national to the global cultural contexts that are being re-created through the interaction of cultural creativity with all other human activities. In the process, the notion of culture has widened and has become almost all-encompassing. In this respect Terry Eagleton (��:��, ��) notes that a critical self-reflection of culture makes it inclusive of practically everything (“…lust, arts, language, media, body, gender, ethnicity…”). As globalization has activated the restructuring of national cultures, it has become possible to understand its dynamics and some of the outcomes of the ongoing cultural changes. The national and global contexts have provided a framework for a new cultural environment symbolized by a notion of cultural space (Harvey ��). The concept of a specialized space (Storper ��:��-��) and the concept of a cultural space (Švob-Đokić ��:��) are derived from analyses of cultural globalization (Beck and Grande ��), understood as an ongoing process that is open to creative efforts expressed through symbolic signs and content. Various possible interpretations of culture are not made more complicated by these concepts, but they substantiate its existence, presence, and development in a certain socio-historical reality and thus, in practice, reduce a vaguely defined cultural all-inclusiveness to a certain reality, today called globalism. Cultural spaces are defined by flexible imaginary aspects (artistic, creative, anthropological, linguistic, and other, Appadurai ��); they are constructed 97

Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 98