Global Maze - Brief Article

Going Global: Negotiating the Maze of Cultural Interactions

The 2000 Barnett Arts and Public Policy Symposium

The Ohio State University College of the Arts

May 5-6, 2000

Columbus, Ohio

Anyone wishing to move into the international cultural arena could hardly do better than this two-day conference in Columbus, offered every two years by the Arts Policy and Administration Program of the Department of Art Education, College of the Arts, The Ohio State University. The theme of this year's conference, "Negotiating the Maze of Cultural Interactions," was supported by keynote papers and panel presentations addressing issues such as McWorld-type hegemony vs pluralization; the reconciling of creativity with market forces; and the idea of knowledge transfer vs knowledge interaction. In an impressive opening talk, Raj Isar, Director of Cultural Policies for Development, the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), summarized these issues as "challenges of mutuality."

The absence of a central cultural policy in the United States, of a national "ministry of culture," was addressed by Gigi Bradford, Executive Director of the Center for Arts and Culture, by describing the integrative activities of her think tank in Washington, D.C., which develops information (by publishing bibliographies, databases and syllabii on arts and culture, and the useful book, The Politics of Culture: Policy Perspectives for Individuals, Institutions, and Communities [2000]); conducts and supports research (through 28 university affiliations and 90 expert presenters); convenes policy discussions; and develops cultural agendas (by proposing issues to Congress and government agencies, working with international organizations and working for U.S. membership in such organizations as UNESCO).

Practical advice was provided by Robert Stearns, Senior Program Director at Arts Midwest, Columbus, who reported on his extensive experience in international independent curating; Andrea Sanseverino Galan, who offered a detailed guide for working with local and foreign cultural agencies such as those in Buenos Aires, where she represents the Ohio Arts Council; Baraka Sele, producer and curator at the new New Jersey Performing Arts Center (PAC) in Newark, who described the positive economic and communitarian effects of nontraditional international programming at the center; John Dwyer, Coordinator of the U.S. Department of State, who offered guidance in working with the state department's new Office of International Information Programs (for resources or connections in a certain country, try www.usembassy/[country]); Helmo Hernandez Trejo, Executive Director of the Ludwig Foundation in Havana, Cuba, who emphasized the need for person-to-person cultural exchange to mitigate the destructive force of "sand/sun/s ex" tourism and described ways in which such exchanges can work; and Augusta Crino, Executive Director of the Chilean North American Institute, who reported on her organization's ways of working with local cultural organizations and cultural figures in the U.S.

Jennifer Williams, Executive Director of the Centre for Creative Communities, London, described how her arts organization was approached by the local school district to help K-12 students to become connected to their community and to give them the skills to build a civil society. Williams's organization showed them that since their communities were ethnically diverse, the best way to connect locally was to connect globally, resulting in a program called "Across the Street, Around the World."

William Glade, Professor of Economics at the University of Texas, presented a demystifying history of the "the cultural exception," pioneered in Mexico in the 1920s as a hedge against the cultural encroachments of Anglophone North America. "The cultural exception," or the separate treatment of cultural goods in trade negotiations, has become a sticking point in free-trade agreements including GAT and NAFTA. Intriguingly, a policy analyst for the Canadian government, Brendon Rafferty, announced from the audience that he was part of a team that intended to define and model an instrument of "the cultural exception" for the general benefit of cultural and trade-related diplomacy in our time.

Juliet Sablosky, adjunct professor in the Liberal Studies Degree Program at Georgetown University, succinctly analyzed conditions in the political culture of the U.S. that have weakened cultural policy, such as the rise of communications systems and markets, the decline of the cold war, the downsizing of government and anti-intellectualism. Unlike in other developed countries, artists and academics in the U.S. are not the national spokespersons that sports figures, entertainers and business people are. She questioned whether we really want to hand the representation of U.S. culture over to the marketplace.

Addressing the cultural dominance of the marketplace in another way, Sheldon Halpern, Professor of Law at The Ohio State University, argued forcefully that with the rise of the information economy and the Internet, the law is becoming the cultural infrastructure. Copyright legislation is currently being "harmonized" internationally and the U.S. government remains relatively uninvolved; our own copyright legislation is being driven by technology-based compromises with no consideration for the public interest. If we are not to be passively "harmonized" into McWorld, our cultural organizations, non-profits and non-governmental organizations are going to have to learn to speak the new lingua franca of, not McWord or McWindows, but copyright law.

J. RONALD GREEN co-chairs the Inter-disciplinary Film Studies Committee at The Ohio State University.

Ed. note: For more information on the conference in general and some of the papers presented at the event, visit www.barnettsymposium.org.

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