Making Space for Cultural Civil Society

Abstract

We propose an alternative perspective for the private, social, and public governance of the arts rooted in modus vivendi liberalism as opposed to political liberalism. In this perspective, the co-existence of a great diversity of social practices around the arts is the primary goal of cultural policy. We argue that to achieve this we should aim for a more complete separation between the art and state, analogous to the way that church and state are separated. This implies that the state should aim to create a stable legal framework in which practices can co-exist, minority voices are protected, and the government refrains from favoring certain art forms over others. We contrast the evolving social practices in cultural civil society with the backward looking and frequently static large organizations and monuments which are typically at the heart of cultural policy and argue that a heterogeneous cultural civil society is a better safeguard for pluralism in contemporary democratic society, and a better safeguard at attempts to essentialize (national) identities. Cultural civil society will depend to a large degree on private and social forms of governance and the chapter explores the legal forms which can enable communities to do so. Finally, we propose a few methods to measure the vibrancy of the more informal practices in cultural civil society.