ARCOS sustainable development consulting

While cities are celebrating ‘the rise of the creative class’  as a solution to solving problems associated with post-industrial cities, we as cultural workers – specifically artists and small-scale art organisation – live in a contradictory position. We have to compete with colleagues and bigger institutions. We have to prove to funding bodies that the audience will accept what we offer and we are linked to an entrepreneurial, cultural industry. As a result, we are operating within working conditions whereby exhaustion, overwork, and under-pay are common. Nowadays the legitimisation of this situation derives from the negative effects of financial crisis and measures of austerity. For example, in the Netherlands in 2013, the government’s cultural policy reduced cultural support from €900 million to €700 million. Large cultural institutions with high standards were spared.  In general cultural institutions were encouraged to focus on entrepreneurship and to strengthen social cohabitation with the audience…