Are Public-Led Arts Incubating Programs a Double-Edged Sword? A Case Study of the Arts Council Korea’s Performing Arts Grant Program

Abstract

A nation’s cultural policy is derived from its political and governance history, and its past practices. Taking the genealogical traits of South Korean cultural policies into account, the authors examine the contributions and risks of a public-led arts incubator program. One of the Arts Council Korea’s grant programs in the arts-incubating structure was involved with a public funding scandal of political intervention during the grant review process. Consequently, questions were raised about the current bureaucratic system for cultural policy. This article discusses the legitimacy of state intervention in the arts, and analyzes the case with relevant collected documents and interviews.

KEYWORDS:

• Arm’s length principle
• Arts Council Korea (ARKO)
• cultural policy
• direct public funding
• government intervention

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank an anonymous peer-reviewer and Professor Soo Hee Lee for their insightful critiques and suggestions on an earlier version of this article. However, the authors are responsible for the final contents of it.

Funding

This publication was partially funded by Chonnam National University (Grant number: 2017-2932).

Notes

1 Foucault identifies domination as a particular type of power relation. In his account, the notion of power is not equivalent with that of domination because “power relations do not always result in a removal of liberty or options available to individuals” (Lemke 2002, 53).

2 The Korea Culture and Arts Promotion Act provides a legal foundation for the definitions of the arts and culture, the creation of the Culture and Arts Promotion Fund, and the establishment of the Arts Council Korea. In that sense, this law sets distinctive boundaries around arts and culture and the cultural industry, which can be adopted for operating the Culture and Arts Promotion Fund.

3 The Culture and Arts Promotion Fund was also established based on the Korea Culture and Arts Promotion Act in 1972. According to the same law, the Fund must be created or collected through the following revenue resources: “contributions of the government,” “donations collected from individuals or corporations,” “proceeds accruing from the operation of the Culture and Arts Promotion Fund,” and “other earnings prescribed by Presidential Decree” (Korean National Law Information Center n.d.).

4 In its nascent stage, the MCTS has promoted the Arts Creation Factory (now the CJSS) grant as an arts-incubating program by demonstrating the program’s attributes, such as its multiple-phased structure from writing synopsis to its performance on stage (National Arts Center Association 2008; Kim 2012). However, although an arts incubator is defined as “a platform that empowers artists and organizations to implement their business and artistic ideas” (The Polish Art Inkubator 2013, quoted in Essig 2014, 171), the objective of the Arts Creation Factory program emphasizes that it is the artmaking process that should be nurtured, rather than the subject that is working on the creation. For that reason, we claim that conceiving the grant program as an arts incubating-based program would be more accurate (Shin and Kim 2016).

5 For detailed information about the research participants and the date of interviews, please refer to Appendix A.