Conflictual cultural politics: unpacking local tensions in three Austrian cities

ABSTRACT

In this exploratory paper, we discuss local cultural political tensions in Austria’s three largest cities (Vienna, Graz, and Linz). Against the backdrop of COVID-19, which hampered, yet also created new opportunities to host cultural events in public space, we analyze large-scale cultural events (Vienna and Graz), and a newly emerging cultural policy theme (Linz). Drawing on 30 qualitative interviews with cultural politicians, administrators, cultural producers, and artists (2020–2022), situational mapping, and the analysis of media coverage, we unpack (1) agential conflicts that manifest in unequal access to funding and decision-making; (2) symbolic conflicts that variously instrumentalize culture; (3) procedural conflicts that problematize lack of transparency and collaboration; and (4) spatial conflicts that materialize in diverging views about safety, cleanliness, and ownership of public space between state and self-organized cultural actors. Ultimately, we argue for a conflict-oriented approach to cultural policy to grasp the interrelations between power, agency, and space in cultural politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Conflict
• cultural policy
• Austria
• agonism
• political difference

Introduction

How do conflicts enter, and leave, the stages of cultural political decision-making in cities? Which cultural events are fast-tracked to take place, who is involved in their program development, realization, and funding distribution? In this exploratory, empirically-guided paper, we trace formations of conflicts – ranging from latent, ritualized, and long-standing to manifest, temporary, and publicly heated debates – in the three largest cities of Austria. We aim to demonstrate that a conflict-attuned lens to the study of local cultural policy constellations, measures, and events in public space enhances understanding of the contested urban politics of arts and culture. Our empirical case study research draws on urban cultural policy literature (Grodach and Silver 2015) and urban cultural governance (Landau and Merkel 2019; Schad 2019). As Ahearne (2009) argues, explicit policy describes tangible manifestations of cultural policy, while implicit policy can point to, but also occlude, more diffuse or ‘unintended cultural side effects’ (Ahearne 2009, 144) of cultural policy. In that sense, we trace both implicit and explicit formations of cultural political decisions that affect the logics of ‘politics’ (i.e. concrete measures such as funding-related procedures) and ‘the political’ (i.e. broader ideological priorities, value debates, and political cultures).

Extrapolated into cultural political contexts, we suggest that an agonistic approach (Mouffe 2000; Marchart 2018) lends itself to unpack various layers and interrelations of conflicts. Agonism conceptualizes political negotiation and collaboration as a moderated form of political adversity – in contrast to antagonism, which suggests a confrontational friend-enemy-relation (Mouffe 2013). Notably, the examination of political constellations permeated by conflicts has both conceptual and methodological implications. To grasp different levels of conflicts, some of which are temporarily surmountable, while others remain structurally ineradicable, we propose the notion of ‘conflictual consensus’ (Landau 2019, 80 ff; Mouffe 2013) to unpack conflicts on what we call ‘meta’ and ‘operational’ levels. As ‘conflictual consensus’ cannot definitively operationalize the complex interrelations and degrees of conflictuality, we approach the empirical study of conflict via methods of situational analysis (Clarke 2005; Clarke, Friese, and Washburn 2015; Schad 2019; Schad-Spindler, Fridrik, and Landau-Donnelly 2023).

With the objective to nuance knowledge on collaborative–conflictual relations between local cultural policymakers, artists, and organized arts advocacy bodies, this paper puts Austria on the international research map of critical cultural policy studies. To this end, we start with a brief description of Austria’s multi-level cultural political structures. After laying out our theoretical framework, we sketch our methodological approach to empirical data collection in Vienna, Graz, and Linz, collected between December 2020 and September 2022. Their respective city profiles and specific cultural policy agendas are laid out subsequently. Following this, we present data findings along four analytical lines of conflict (agential, symbolic, procedural, spatial). The paper concludes with a cross-comparison of these conflict lines. Ultimately, we provide an outlook on perspectives for further conflict-attuned cultural policy research.

Locating Austria on the cultural political research map

Research on Austrian cultural policy has been discussed within political science (Zembylas and Tschmuck 2005; Zembylas 2017; Pelinka 2006; Wimmer 2011; Mokre 2005; DeFrantz 2006), where cultural policy itself has played a minor role (Paquette and Beauregard 2019). Austrian cultural policy research has often focused on specific historical periods (Knapp 2005; Wimmer 1995; Strassl 2001; Gottsmann 2017), yet in light of a few current studies, it acutely lacks a contemporary perspective. Notably, there is no institutionalized academic cultural political research infrastructure despite the symbolic and economic significance of culture in Austria (Wimmer 2020).

The Federal Republic of Austria consists of nine provinces (‘Bundesländer’), with Vienna being one of these provinces, as well as Austria’s largest city and capital. Competences for culture are split between the federal state, provinces, and cities, according to the subsidiarity principle. Federal and provincial arts and cultural promotion acts (‘Kulturfördergesetze’) have existed since the 1980s. Cities do not formally have their own legislative competences, yet local cultural administrations can interpret their scope of action within given legal norms and given resources (Schad 2019, 88). Each level of government contributes approximately 33% of the overall public funding for culture, adding up to 2.76 billion Euros, or 0.69% of Austria’s GDP in 2019 (Statistik Austria 2021). In the Republic of Austria, federal states as well as cities own cultural enterprises. Theaters, concert halls, and museums are integrated into larger public holdings: United Stages Vienna Ltd. acts as a city-owned company, receiving a budget of 40.2 Mio Euros, whilst 183 independent performance groups and off-theaters share 30 Mio Euros of the city’s cultural budget (Stadt Wien, Geschäftsgruppe für Kultur und Wissenschaft 2021). Outsourcing of state-owned cultural institutions in the 1990s thus has not led to more independence from the state, but has given state-run cultural enterprises greater autonomy as economic actors under private law.

In the following, we unpack how negotiations and distributions of power contribute to shifts within political negotiation processes – for example, relegating debates from public to private spheres of deliberation, and constricting cultural policy to mere issues of funding distribution (i.e. reducing cultural policy to ‘operational’ rather than ‘meta’ concerns). Furthermore, we investigate the antagonizing and de-antagonizing effects of including, and excluding artists voices in cultural political decision-making.

Theorizing conflicts in cultural policy

According to Ahearne (2009, 144), explicit cultural policy, or policies, captures ‘“culture” quite simply with certain consecrated forms of artistic expression, thereby deflecting attention from other forms of policy action upon culture’. In contrast, implicit cultural policy, or policies, ‘distinguish between the unintended cultural side effects of various kinds of policy and those deliberate courses of action intended to shape cultures but which are not expressly thematised as such’ (Ahearne 2009). While we concur with Ahearne that policies indicate intentional courses of action, goals, or rationales, in this paper, to nuance our conflictual cultural policy framework, we mobilize the notion of ‘political difference’ to keep differences between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ analytically apart, and keep possibilities for ‘the political’ to emerge open. Generally, we acknowledge ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ as enmeshed (Blakey et al. 2022). ‘Politics’, briefly, captures the institutions, practices, rules, and norms that give shape to hegemonic orders. The logic of ‘politics’ aims to rationalize, order, structure, and control. In contrast, ‘the political’ as excessive, ever-evolving, and constitutively conflictual dimension of political life is not easily contained within documents, permissions, parliaments, or laws. Within this ambivalent dynamic, policy as a manifestation of ‘politics’ can potentially risk foreclosing ‘the political’, but policies also spur transformative change, and thus can moderate antagonistic conflict into temporarily agonistic solutions (e.g. ‘conflictual consensus’, where operational consensus can be reached despite deeper-seated meta conflicts). In sum, we view cultural policy to constantly oscillate between implicit and explicit rationales and goals, between antagonism and agonism, between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. It thus becomes apparent that an analysis of explicit cultural policies alone does not suffice to understand, (self-)legitimize or comprehensively address challenges of cultural equity, and power. Instead, by opening cultural policy analysis to the confluences of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, we aim to show that the enmeshments between cultural ‘politics’, ‘the political’, and policy always remain partial, and contingently nestled in structural social struggles.

Agonistic cultural politics

Political difference is related to the conflict theoretical trope of antagonism (Marchart 2018). Within an ontology of ‘the political’, conflict is considered constitutive of social and political life. While the utter conflictuality of human relations might sound daunting, conflictual encounters between different political positionalities are not necessarily articulated as a confrontational dialectic between friends and enemies, as Schmitt (1932) suggested. Rather, as political theorist Mouffe (2013, 2005) proposes, antagonism can be re-configured or ‘tamed’ into agonism. Agonism, in contrast to antagonism, assumes political actors as adversaries, who agree to abide by minimum parameters of respecting a ‘common allegiance to the democratic principles of “liberty and equality for all”, while disagreeing about their interpretation’ (Mouffe 2013, 7). From the onset, interpretations about the meaning, scope, and relevance of ‘liberty’, ‘equality’ for ‘all’ remain contested, affecting both implicit and explicit cultural policies, which we subsume under the term agonistic cultural politics. With this proposition, we capture underlying conflicts that trickle into cultural political decision-making, at levels of policies, ‘politics’ (i.e. narrowly defined as documents, laws, rules, funding instruments), and ‘the political’ (i.e. more broadly defined normative priorities, sentiments, and ‘hot’ topics of cultural political discourses).

Theories of political difference certainly do not binarize accounts of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’ (Blakey et al. 2022; Mouffe 2013; Landau 2019), but posit ‘the political’ as primary ontological reference point to institute political life. In our empirical endeavor to trace local perceptions and experiences of conflicts in selected cultural political arenas, we encountered the trope of political difference falling short to sufficiently capture, operationalize or locate conflict. Hence, we turned to the concept of ‘arena’, which points to the interwoven dynamics of politics and policy. In an arena, cultural political actors such as politicians, administrators, and civil society representatives (i.e. artists, cultural workers, unions, etc.) give meaning and concrete policy advice regarding future decisions and guidelines. Arenas are affected by surrounding, contested political norms, values, and possibilities for change. Following Mouffe (2000, 2008) as well as Clarke and Leigh Star (2008), we understand arenas as public sites where we observe how different social worlds interact, generate, and respond to discourse, and negotiate conflicts. Our empirical analysis is inspired by their theoretical-methodological-package, as an extension of Grounded Theory. To navigate through the concatenated conflicts between actors, resources, places, and themes of urban culture and art in Austria, we created social worlds and arena mappings to capture state and non-state actors’ different understandings of conflict (Clarke 2005). In relation to political difference, via the concept of arena, we propose to split the notion of policy by making analytical leeway for policies to steer conflicts in urban cultural settings, thus shaping both ‘politics’ and ‘the political’.

However, we sometimes encountered difficulties to even frame a political claim or decision as conflict (since the latter crucially depends on the beholder’s eye). Some conflicts have grown historically over time and might thus be perceived as naturalized imbalances of power. Moreover, positions and stakes in political conflicts or controversies carry different weight in how experiences of exclusion or delegitimization are internalized in the (emotionally) charged arena of cultural policy-making (Borén, Grzyś, and Young 2020). In local cultural political conflicts, disagreements can revolve around concrete, or as we call it ‘operational’ resources such as time, space, funding, and attention (i.e. reflecting explicit cultural policies), as well as normative, or as we call it ‘meta’ parameters such as artistic quality, excellence, or priority of participation (Landau-Donnelly et al. 2023). Besides resource-related or technocratic distributional conflicts about arts and culture, we consider culture, mediated via implicit and explicit cultural policies, as a constitutively contested concept (Belfiore 2020; Marchart 2019).

Methods: operationalizing arenas of conflict

For each city, we aggregated data through 30 interviews (between 1 h-2:45 h), media reports (mainly digital newspaper articles and social media) and policy documents from all three case study locations. We interviewed cultural politicians, administrators, members of juries and cultural advisory boards, representatives of cultural workers’ interest groups and artist collectives, as well as individual artists and cultural producers who were directly affiliated with the three events.

From the beginning, we created unstructured situational mappings (Clarke 2005) on a digital visual collaboration platform, identifying and ordering clusters of discursive constructions, individual, and collective human actors, key sensitizing concepts, political and economic elements, non-human actants, i.e. entities that act or to ‘which activity is granted by others’ (Latour 1996, 373), as well as implicated and silent actors and actants. In the second phase of data collection, we worked with mappings, zooming into specific urban arenas of cultural policy, and related social worlds in the three selected cities. In the third phase of data collection, we compared the city-specific arena mappings in relation to the coded data to explore differences and similarities. This went hand in hand with extrapolating conflict-oriented frameworks from the mappings and observational memos we used for structuring, reflecting, and summarizing coded data. This methodological procedure enabled cross-city comparative analysis. Situated in an interpretive policy tradition (Bevir and Rhodes 2016; Münch 2015), we organized the coded material into thematic tables (summary grids) to establish frameworks of conflictual relations. To do so, we identified and compared conflict dynamics (Marchart et al. 2023). The mappings supported our navigation through the extensive data, and individual articulations, expressed via interview statements, and related to the discourses represented in the arenas (Schad-Spindler, Fridrik, and Landau-Donnelly Forthcoming).

Interpretive approaches to policy studies and analysis (Bevir and Rhodes 2016; Fischer and Herbert 2012; Hajer and Wagenaar 2003; Yanow 2007) are guided by the objective to understand actions and actors ‘as best as possible from their own frame of reference, their own seemingly self-evident rules’ (Münch 2015, 20). Furthermore, critical policy studies advance a notion of policy as crucially co-constituted by meaning, and as constructions of meaning are inherently contested, the analytical task of our agonistic framework is to work out the conflicts between different and contingent meanings (Bevir and Rhodes 2016, 21). The combination of interpretive policy approaches and situational analysis directs attention to both explicit justificatory logics (i.e. expressed as arguments and rationales) and more implicit forms of negotiation (i.e. manifest in relations between actors and other material and symbolic elements; Schad 2019, 113–14). The methodological framework of social worlds and arena mappings helps to ground locally specific modes of antagonization (i.e. the transitions between antagonism and agonism) by grasping and visualizing contingent dynamics of conflictual-consensus-making, or other political decision-making dilemmas (Landau-Donnelly et al. 2023).

During the data collection, the global COVID-19 pandemic affected arenas of cultural political conflict. In that sense, we consider the pandemic as an accelerator of certain decision-making procedures of ‘emergency urbanism’ (Roy 2021) in response to an overarching crisis, while we remain cautious to attribute causality to COVID-19 as inhibitor or cause of conflicts.

City profiles: Vienna, Graz, and Linz

The selection of cities is methodologically justified based on three criteria: first, Vienna, Graz, and Linz are Austria’s most-populated cities. Second, the three cities constitute unique clusters of cultural activity (both in terms of artistic production, and consumption). Third, we provide an analysis of urban cultural policies against the backdrop of democratic theory: Cities lend themselves to inquire about innovative forms of self-organized political agency and citizenship. Hence, urban contexts constitute arenas of conflictual negotiation (Dikeç 2017). Within the three cities and their respective procedural and administrative structures of cultural policy, we focus on specific cultural events and programmatic themes as arenas that evolved parallel to the limited timeframe of our research project.

Vienna, with a population of approx. 1.9 million, is world-renowned for its cultural heritage dating back to the Austrian Empire. Nowadays a vastly growing city with 42% of residents with non-Austrian citizenship, the city’s cultural budget (287 million Euros in 2022) and the governing social democrats, leading local government since 1945, are confronted with the challenge to foster diversity and inclusion among contemporary cultural and artistic scenes and audiences on the one hand, and to preserve its prestigious cultural heritage on the other. As tourism came to a halt in 2020 due to COVID-19, leading to lockdowns that affected artists and audiences, the City Councilor of Culture nominated by the Social Democrats initiated the open-air event Kultursommer (‘Summer of Culture’). Under the slogan Wien dreht auf (‘Vienna turns up’), an extensive cultural program was introduced, initially stretching across 25 decentral venues in Vienna and its surroundings, accessible free of charge. It provided each participating artist with a paycheck of 500 Euros for a performance of 30 minutes. After repeating Kultursommer in 2021 (with a budget increase from four to six million Euros), the festival was still considered a temporary cultural event. By 2022, Kultursommer was incorporated as GmbH (Ltd.) and became an integral component of Vienna’s existing cultural programming. In this cultural political arena, we were particularly interested in the conflictual dynamics surrounding the fast-tracked establishment of a wholly new cultural event format with the City of Vienna as policy-maker, main organizer, and funder.

Graz, Austria’s second-largest city with a population of approximately 333,000, located close to the south-eastern border with Hungary and Slovenia, is known for international avant-garde arts such as the festival steirischer herbst, and has been awarded as European Capital of Culture in 2003. This cultural hub is situated within a conservative regional tradition of Styrian folklore. Here, we focused on Kulturjahr (‘Year of Culture’), launched in the pandemic year 2020. This city-funded and -initiated program held a budget of almost five million Euros. After a forced interruption due to lockdowns, the festival was extended into 2021. The provided budget was added to the City’s annual cultural budget (Stadt Wien, 2020, 18). Kulturjahr fostered 90 arts and science projects dealing with the question Wie wir leben wollen? (‘How do we want to live?’) and bringing together artistic methods and reflections on urban development, climate protection, and social diversity. They were spatially spread throughout Graz, notably also taking place in peripheral, post-industrial, and post-agricultural areas. In 2021, Kulturjahr coincided with a political shift in the city government from right-wing conservative to communist and green coalition. In Graz, our analysis highlights the conflictual dynamics between a city-initiated cultural event vis-à-vis urban development agendas that prioritize upscaling and real estate development at the cost of maintaining public space (including agricultural, cultural, and post-industrial spaces).

Linz, Austria’s third-largest city, with a population of approximately 209,000, is located on the river Danube in Austria’s central North. The city is governed by a social-democratic mayor, whilst its Councilor for Culture and Tourism belongs to the Conservative party. The capital city of Upper Austria, Linz has an industrial background, being particularly known for the production of steel and chemicals. In 2009, the city was awarded the European Capital of Culture, enhancing a long-term cultural development strategy that focused on the transformation from an industrial city to a post-industrial ‘city of culture’ (John et al. 2009). In Linz, we investigated how market-based strategies entered and shaped local urban cultural politics and policies. We examined the City’s prioritization of boosting cultural tourism by pushing street art and graffiti to the fore of urban re-branding (see Landau-Donnelly and Fridrik, Forthcoming). We looked at the initiative Mural Harbor plays as cultural actor within the urban and harbor area development to unpack the latently conflictual dynamics of appropriating street art and graffiti for the sake of the City’s official cultural programming.

Tracing conflicts across agents, symbolisms, procedures, and space

In the following, we present findings from our comparative analysis along four lines: First, agential conflicts are inscribed in, and come out of, local cultural political events and decisions, revealing different paces and rules of the game for local state decision-makers on the one hand, and independent cultural producers and organizers on the other. Second, symbolic conflicts occur alongside cultural events, and the subtle or not-so-subtle inclusions and exclusions, curated by official actors, for art and culture to temporarily appear in the public realm. Third, procedural conflicts unravel built-in asymmetries and (in)transparency of what and who is prioritized, funded, and promoted in cultural policy. Fourth, spatial conflicts arise when arts are temporarily placed, or displaced, in both central and peripheral urban space.

Agential conflicts: equilibrating capacity, visibility, money

The varying roles, mandates, and expressions of agency of both state and civic cultural political actors indicate framings of discontent and conflict among artists and cultural policymakers. Tensions arise in relation to different opportunities to influence or co-design policy-making. Referring to the first Kultursommer in 2020, an independent Vienna-based cultural advocate and longtime member of a cultural workers’ interest group points out the unequal capacities to organize cultural events during the pandemic: ‘And suddenly, the cultural department is competing with us. I believe that cultural policy and politics should enable art and culture, create overarching conditions, and also make sure that funds available when needed’ (Interview Vienna 27.7.21). The city’s policy actions are thus conceived of as both antagonizing and de-antagonizing: for cultural organizers, the City appears as an antagonizer by the mere fact of hosting a city-wide cultural program when established independent cultural spaces (including clubs) were still closed during lockdown. Nevertheless, according to a performance artist, member of the artistic board of Kultursommer in 2021, the city-run format can be perceived as a de-antagonizing policy for those cultural producers (including artists and performers) who were hired, and paid, while many other events had to be canceled (Interview Vienna 6.9.21). This ambivalent action reveals not only the unequal capacities of those affected by the pandemic, but also highlights the potentially conflict-producing role of the City when monopolizing cultural programming. Contrary to the original intention as a spontaneous pandemic relief measure, Kultursommer has turned into a permanent item in cultural political funding since 2022, enforcing the steering power of official actors, while Kultursommer Ltd. has been incorporated as subsidiary of the non-governmental association Basis.Kultur.Wien (‘Basic Culture Vienna’). This organization represents over 300 cultural associations; its executive board consists of members of the Social Democratic Party, including Vienna’s mayor. In such a multi-actor cultural governance arrangement, explicit differences between politicians, civil society, and economically-minded enterprises are smoothened by integrating an existing umbrella organization such as Basis.Kultur.Wien – which notably does not invite new and independent artistic voices into cultural programming – but rather reinforces existing decision-making power.

In this entrepreneurial-proprietary attitude to implement cultural policies (see Miles 2020), Vienna resembles Linz, according to a local musician, DJ and cultural organizer who has observed and participated in cultural policy-making over the past 25 years. He describes Linz as a well-organized cultural producer and supporter who is ‘very busy with their own cultural productions and festivals’ (Interview Linz 14.9.2021). Since the 1970s, Linz has integrated formerly independent cultural venues into the City’s official enterprises – tactics which the above interviewee criticizes as ‘cooptation’ of independent culture (Miles 2020). In contrast, a government employee with a leading position in cultural administration argues that the City’s involvement would be necessary to maintain fragile cultural spaces and to strengthen the City’s profile in line with explicit cultural policy priorities: ‘In Linz, we support bottom-up approaches and do not cut it off, or take it into our own hands’ (Interview Linz 15.9.21). Hence, a conflict lingers between supporting independent cultural spaces to sustain themselves and survive, and subtly incorporating these projects into a streamlined entrepreneurial-administrative logic of ‘politics’. If that were the case, the logic of ‘politics’ would constrict artistic and organizational autonomy. Accordingly, some cultural producers prefer to focus on their artistic work instead of meddling directly with politics and bureaucracy. ‘I don’t really consider this my task’ (Interview Linz 10.6.21), a local (street) artist states when asked about her involvement in cultural administrative tasks which are emblematic of the logic of ‘politics’. More specifically, the lack of engagement with explicit political processes relates to artists’ and cultural institutions’ financial dependence on the City. A Graz-based cultural political activist and former head of an established cultural institution points at self-censorship: ‘If I speak out, I get less money’ (Interview Graz 22.6.21). Yet the same person discusses a conflict between conscious self-restraint and a critical attitude as a function of art: ‘We have to advocate the freedom of artistic and creative and intellectual life with appropriate means to really argue for the cause’ (Interview Graz 22.6.21). Following from this, the interviewee puts forth a broad understanding of political engagement in the sense of ‘the political’, considers the latter as not merely distributive debates, but also encompassing space for critique and conflictual negotiations. Similar to the administrators of Linz and Vienna following executive cultural management styles, Graz’s Kulturjahr was an original idea of the mayor, to be financed from the City’s official cultural budget. There was no democratic vote or public debate about the feasibility or necessity of such an event. Only in response to public criticism, which was voiced by the local advisory Cultural Council (Kulturbeirat), consisting of civil society representatives, was the organizational structure adjusted towards an open call for project ideas – an insight we received from a member of the Cultural Council itself (Interview Graz 22.6.21). The Council’s criticism also urged the City government to provide additional budget for the Kulturjahr. While a conflict could have emerged, or been reinforced, around this, the City’s prompt reaction to, and compliance with, the Cultural Council’s requests actually led to an overall agonistic setting in the beginning of Kulturjahr. In sum, this case underscores the crucial role of civic councils in the cultural field to mediate between implicit and explicit cultural policies. Within their non-governmental position, cultural councils can problematize the lack of explicit cultural policy references, or rationales, or critique how decisions come about, thus dismantling the dominance of implicit, potentially authoritative decision-making. With regard to the spectrum of antagonism and agonism, the Graz’s Cultural Council facilitated the de-escalation of a potentially conflictual situation, smoothened by the City’s concession to adjust funding volume and scope of invitation to Kulturjahr.

Symbolic conflicts: (lack of) sustainability, over-curation

The symbolic dimension of cultural political conflicts becomes prevalent when both implicit and explicit policy-making are dominated by the logics or routinized ‘politics’ that seek to exclude more unruly dimensions of ‘the political’. This can be illustrated in cultural political decision-making contexts, in which economic drivers such as urban regeneration (read gentrification) or resource scarcity outweigh more social aspects such as diversity and inclusion. Symbolic conflicts play out between city governments’ fixed priorities for cultural programming, funding, and audience-attracting visibility on the one hand, and artist actors’ requests to be engaged in decision-making in the cultural political arena on the other. A leading representative of a state-wide cultural workers’ interest group voices concerns about the lack of sustainability of the Kultursommer programming as – even in the second edition – it ignored to include ‘the supporting civil organizations which usually shoulder the cultural offer in this City’ (Interview 25.5.21). This lack of commitment of cultural political decision-makers towards more long-term-oriented and substantial transformations is echoed by other interviewees – a politician actively involved in cultural politics (Interview Vienna 26.8.21) as well as a cultural organizer and advocate (Interview Vienna 27.7.21) – who consider Kultursommer not a very culturally and ecologically sustainable event. These impressions stand in contrast to the City of Vienna’s own narrative of cultural political sustainability, as expressed in the Coalition agreement from 2020, stating support for a sustainable infrastructure for socio-cultural spaces as one of its central concerns (Stadt Wien 2020, 90).

In Vienna, the controversy around sustainability is linked to artists’ working conditions. Kultursommer emphasizes equal payment policy for every participating artist– 500 Euros – as key element and a gesture of ‘solidarity’ (Kaup-Hasler 2021). This wording of ‘fairness’ links the event’s public claim to equity to the hotly debated discourse around ‘fair pay’ in the Austrian cultural sector (see IG Kultur 2022; EDUCULT 2022). Thus, a cultural organizer lobbying for cultural workers’ rights perceives their long-standing demands as co-opted by the festival initiators to promote the city-run event (Interview Vienna 27.7.21). The same person points out that this form of equity-oriented cultural politics pursues a reductionist idea of ‘fair pay’ that continuously fails to meet the more encompassing requirements and demands of independent cultural organizers to facilitate a professional artistic career. Despite this (partial) recognition of a substantial claim for adequate artists’ payment emerging from the realm of ‘the political’, the logic of ‘politics’ uses existing demands to reinforce their own agenda.

As described above, the normatively charged concept of sustainability is often integrated into existing city-owned or -funded structures. Artists and cultural initiatives continuously have to reapply (and thus spend significant resources of time and energy) for receiving funding under the umbrella term ‘sustainability’. If, respectively, independent initiatives claim a more stable, and thus sustainable, position in the cultural landscape, these suggestions are not followed through by funding agencies, thus reproducing the limbo of not-so-sustainable (read precarious) cultural production. According to a local architect who participated in Kulturjahr with an interventionist urbanist project, the City ‘does not want to free cultural, artistic and urbanist concerns from their general project of festivalization (…) there is this absurd dilemma that local politicians never wanted to hear that we wanted to stay’ (Interview Graz 23.9.21). In Graz, a cultural councilor and advocate for cultural workers’ rights assesses that these controversies lead to questioning whether the large-scale, project-based program Kulturjahr can have longer-lasting effects on structural social and ecological challenges after all (Interview Graz 22.6.21). Artists, urbanists, and cultural workers involved display different attitudes: Although some considered the City’s approach ‘tokenistic’ or guilty of ‘greenwashing’, they also strategically used these very political intentions for their own benefits, as a participating architectural theorist and artist states (Interview Graz 17.5.21). Here, requests from the realm of ‘the political’ intentionally work with ‘politics’, which claim to prioritize sustainability and inclusion. Conflicts about the meaning of these terms are strategically sidelined, or temporarily stalled, thus enabling the construction of a ‘conflictual consensus’. Whilst financial resources were one incentive to ‘play along’ and not antagonize conflicts, interviewees justify their participation in Kulturjahr on a symbolic level of public awareness against an agenda of art-led marketization. A team of architects points out that in Graz, urban politics ‘is a lot about having and owning – making these rules of the game more understandable for citizens is very important’ (Interview Graz 23.9.21). In sum, this strategic approach to act agonistically rather than antagonistically exemplifies how critical artistic and cultural strategies self-legitimize cooperation with the cultural political program of ‘politics’ despite ongoing ‘meta’ disagreements. Again, this points to the manifold possibilities of conflictual consensus, which can facilitate temporary agreement and collaboration in the ‘operational’ realm (i.e. participating in Kulturjahr, and accepting funding).

Procedural conflicts: transparency, dependencies, hermetic circles

Contestations between explicit and implicit cultural policies come to the fore in concrete decision- and policy-making processes. Procedural conflicts become apparent via struggles over degrees of transparency and questions of funding (re)distribution, which often further reveal logics of rivalry and competition among different cultural actors. The lack of transparency is a continuous concern in Austrian politics with recent scandals about corruption, downgrading Austria’s democracy quality in 2021 (Boese, Alizada, and Lundstedt 2022). On a municipal level, spatial and social proximity supports governance relations between elected political representatives (specifically mayors and city councilors), local administration, civic interest groups, as well as public and private cultural enterprises.

In Austria, cultural political decisions are negotiated at the forefront of municipal councils, providing a public stage for political spectacle (Lefenda 2009). In this respect, a Viennese cultural politician, member of the municipal council and opposition party criticizes:

When the mayor needs money, it just suddenly appears, without bureaucracy. Yet, this money is then missing from the cultural budget for the many small cultural institutions and have to fight their way through bureaucracy for every grant

(Interview Vienna 26.8.21).

There are, however, opposing interpretations about whether the pandemic exacerbated and simplified funding support in the face of crisis and urgency (although there were concerns about funding accounting, Rechnungshof Österreich 2022). COVID-19 aid programs at all levels of government, accessible with comparatively little bureaucratic effort, were introduced. According to a representative of a state-wide cultural workers’ interest group, this phase demonstrated that ‘it is not witchcraft to seek dialogue and bring diverse interests to the table before designing policy’ (Interview Vienna 25.5.21). Financial support serves to de-antagonize, what the same person calls ‘pacifying with money’ (Rechnungshof Österreich 2022).

Tensions about procedural collaboration also exist amongst artists: Instead of uniting under common goals, relations between artists are fragmented through competition, as the head and curator of a well-established art association and gallery in Graz states: ‘Solidarity exists in theory, but not in practice’ (Interview Graz 8.6.21). Another interviewee, working at the interface of art production and urban research, argues: ‘Culture is extremely tough […] It’s a business like any other’ (Interview Graz 17.5.21). In sum, procedural conflicts thus show that public money can de-antagonize cultural actors vis-à-vis city agencies. Yet it can also spur antagonization among competing funding recipients.

Spatial conflicts: commercialization, scarcity, displacement

Lastly, conflictual constellations bear a spatial dimension that plays out in debates about the (re-)locations, expansions, and policy-related restrictions on using public space for cultural events. Spatial conflicts about arts and culture are thus not only embedded in symbolic struggles (i.e. which culture takes place in public) but rather where culture takes place. What is more, spatial conflicts are implicated in, and emblematic of, the ‘politics’ of culture-led urban development (e.g. Miles and Paddison 2005).

Interconnected with spatial crises of affordability and availability for artistic production space, studios, and accessible presentation outlets of independent culture (including night clubs and off-spaces), artist interviewees and cultural organizers criticize the shortage of rehearsal spaces. In each city, interviewees argue that hosting temporary, city-wide events in public spaces does not alleviate these spatial problems. For example, a Linz-based musician and leading member of an urban cultural association considers it the task of cultural politics ‘to find and supply such spaces’ (Interview Linz 14.9.21). Lack of physical space, which is not structurally addressed by temporary events, leads to antagonizations between the City’s proclaimed priorities and the actual spatial need of cultural producers. A leading cultural administrator argues that, together with finances, struggles for spatial resources for culture constitute the ‘main fields of conflict’ (Interview Linz 15.9.21). According to a member of an architectural-urbanist collective, cultural political funding logics run counter to those of urban development policymakers, demonstrating conflicting funding rationales and goals (Interview Graz 6.9.21). Another interviewee, who works as an artist and urban researcher, states that there is a tendency to devalue semi-professional or socio-cultural district culture, which is relatively even more underfunded than professional inner-city institutions (Interview Graz 17.5.21). In addition, he criticizes that socio-cultural activities are dismissed as ‘charity work’, which points also to tensions over which tasks and responsibilities pertain to cultural and artistic labor.

While city-wide events such as Kultursommer or Kulturjahr animate urban cityscape, thus extending stages of where arts and culture take place, there are also concerns about where (certain) public art practices should not take place. In the case of Linz, conflictual constellations can be traced in the City’s approach to street art and graffiti. According to a cultural and urban researcher based in Linz, urban tourism is ‘almost aggressively promoted via urban art’ (Interview Linz 27.5.21). This cultural tourism strategy is linked to the increasing attention the initiative Mural Harbor has garnered over the past years from the press as well as officials operating in the field of cultural politics and urban tourism. Opened in 2012, and in cooperation with the municipal holding company for public infrastructure Linz AG, Mural Harbor invited national and international street artists to create large-scale murals in the harbor area. Although initially funded privately, only receiving public cultural funding after conclusion of our field research (Gruber 2023), Mural Harbor’s impact on the City’s cultural and/or tourist self-conception and branding can be retraced through cultural political discussions held during local council meetings. In July 2019, as well as in December 2021, Mural Harbor was not only mentioned as the ‘City’s new trademark’ (Linzer Gemeinderat 2019, 443) by the City Councilor for Culture, it was also declared that the City planned to ‘further develop towards the direction “Mural City”, as it makes the city livelier and more colorful’ (Linzer Gemeinderat 2021, 754). This explicit policy objective dragged street art from the urban margins of the harbor to the inner-city are(n)a, notably changing the conditions under which street art could be produced. A representative of Linz’s cultural administration gives insight into the material effects of their regulatory policies against graffiti: ‘We definitely have a problem with property damage. Where private property is defaced, public property is also damaged. You have to persecute that’ (Interview Linz 15.9.21). Notably, inner-city murals are mostly commissioned works, co-curated by the team of Mural Harbor. A local cultural urban researcher concludes that the centering of city-commissioned street art deprives independent street artists not only of their self-determined visibility in public space but also of their ability to speak critically, and anonymously, through art (Interview Linz 27.5.21). In sum, planning (street) art invokes the logic of ‘politics’ rather than granting space to street art and graffiti, for example, via ‘legal walls’, which would potentially resound ‘the political’ at large (Landau-Donnelly 2022).

Large-scale urban development plans for the harbor area in Linz, among other locations, affect the space Mural Harbor has occupied. A massive ongoing reconstruction project named ‘Projekt Neuland [Project New Ground]’, which will significantly alter the feel and aesthetics of the post-industrial harbor area, sets out to demolish buildings, including the complex of Mural Harbor, and be replaced by new office spaces, hotels, public green spaces, and some residential areas. According to the website of the holding company Linz AG – who owns the entire commercial harbor area – Masterplan Hafen Linz (2014) aspires to interlink a ‘cultural axis’ with an ‘industrial axis’ within this newly built quarter. However, this (de-)construction process challenges the initially de-antagonizing cooperation or conflictual consensus between Mural Harbor as a space-seeking actor and the Linz AG as a municipal space-providing actor. To conclude, the current urban development trajectory for the harbor area reveals the fragility of conflictual consensus: Although ‘Projekt Neuland’ foresees cultural platforms to be situated on rooftops of new building developments with specific areas dedicated to street art – as a team member of Mural Harbor states (Interview Linz 25.6.21) – this initiative also depends on the ‘good will’ of Linz AG. Another Linz-based cultural organizer, and musician, also actively involved in Mural Harbor, foregrounds the arbitrariness and precarity of this situation. He indicates that the City’s commitment to create space can easily change with turnover in personnel or due to unforeseen political changes (Interview Linz 14.9.21). As a local cultural policy researcher and artist remarks, the harbor redevelopment agenda is centered around economic objectives rather than a experimental and open-ended approach to urban placemaking and street art (Interview Linz 18.5.21).

Another axis of conflict unfolds around the usage of public space for cultural events. In City-run event such as Kulturjahr, public space is considered ‘over-curated’ by a participating architectural theorist and artist – as public space turns out to be so heavily programmed, independent cultural projects find it difficult to mobilize the public’s attention for their own activities (Interview Graz 17.5.21). A similar situation is described for Linz by a local musician, who has been affiliated with a cultural association and space for many years. According to him, ‘big cultural players’ occupy public space and thus ‘produce a clash with the independent scene’, leaving independent cultural producers to wonder whether they are even ‘part of this scene or not’ (Interview Linz 14.9.21) Describing the situation in Graz, the leading curator of an art space discloses that cultural initiatives and artists have to rent outdoor spaces from the City to present their work in public, despite their non-commercial programming (Interview Graz 8.6.21).

Eventually, the COVID-19 pandemic caused a severe loss of cultural space(s). Independent theater producers, for example, who need longer-term spaces to experiment and develop ideas were hit hard by the pandemic. When rehearsal spaces were forced to close, it was almost impossible to practice, as a theatre director and cultural political activist declares (Interview Vienna 22.12.21). Other interviewees also point to cultural spaces as indispensable arenas of more implicit political assembly and discussion. Referring to the pandemic, a member of Graz’s local Cultural Council observes: ‘We knew then [in the pandemic] that something is really lost, and that is very risky, when political spaces get lost’ (Interview Graz 22.6.21). Despite severe disappearance of established cultural venues, other cultural institutions were able to maintain political attention, and thus create visibility for their spatial struggles. Whilst, in the course of Kulturjahr Graz, the guiding question ‘How do we want to live?’ supported projects on urban cohabitation, social inclusion, and diversity, according to the head of a local art association and gallery, the pandemic was used as a reason to displace small-scale, backyard meeting rooms of ethnic and religious cultural groups (Interview Graz 8.6.21). The same person states that such decisions for shutdowns were rationalized by the ruling right-wing party as technocratic insufficiencies of these cultural spaces, or ‘concerns over hygiene and security’. To conclude, the pandemic-stricken management of cultural space uncovers the ruling logic of ‘politics’, in this case, appearing with an exclusionary face. In short, ‘politics’ prevail to reinstate order instead of giving space to the manifold practices and expressions of ‘the political’. At last, the co-existence of different forms of cultural expression and practice was constricted in the name of safety, security, and cleanliness (see Landau-Donnelly and Fridrik forthcoming).

Summary and cross-case discussion

In this paper, we have nuanced existing analytical frameworks for cultural policies by drawing on theories of political difference and agonism. Via empirical case study research, and situational and interpretative analysis, we have unpacked the agential, symbolic, procedural, and spatial dimensions of local cultural policy-related and political conflicts. These conflictual constellations can be summarized as follows: Agential conflicts appear via different capacities of cultural political actors. Within the three selected cities, we have identified an agglomeration of power not only in the functions of cultural administrators, politicians, and funders – summarized as enablers of cultural policies – but also as inhibitors of cultural policies, both explicitly and implicitly. Notably, civic actors such as artists, curators, and cultural activists, too, can shape the advancement of cultural policies or stall these processes by refusing to collaborate – albeit with less institutionalized power and leverage. Altogether, it becomes apparent that agency in cultural political settings influences the scope of possibility for locally specific cultural policies. Within multi-actor policy arenas, competitive and interdependent cultural political alliances can set the tone to dictate economically-driven policy agendas, or make room for more equity-oriented measures (i.e. explicit cultural policies) and mindsets (i.e. implicit cultural policies).

Symbolic conflicts come to the fore when cultural programming and implicit cultural policy-making are subverted, for example, by economically-geared agendas such as (tourism-centric) marketing and eventification. Symbolic frictions also arise when cultural political struggles become co-opted by superficial, appropriating gestures or mere cosmetic changes in response to more structural concerns. Power dynamics are mediated through explicit cultural policies of festivalization, over-curating and cooptation, and implicitly, through narrow priorities on which culture gets funded (and which culture does not). Symbolic policy action can thus be deployed to reinforce, delay, dismiss, or even suppress civil society demands (e.g. fair pay or cultural and ecological sustainability of public events). In return, attempts to divert antagonization for the sake of ‘conflictual consensus’ might diffuse artists’ individual critiques, or their collectivized articulations against exclusionary funding.

Procedural conflicts are permeated by unequal conditions of transparency and access to cultural political decision-making, making it difficult to assess differing perceptions of whether a decision is perceived as conflict (or not). Funding can function both as a pacifier and driver of conflict, but is also used in political bargaining to justify formalized procedures of the ‘politics’ of cultural policy (e.g. jury recommendations) by appealing to more implicit cultural political values (e.g. references to the public good, safety, security, cleanliness and civility). While procedural conflicts can intensify logics of competition and clientelism among cultural practitioners, leading to individualization and an increasing internalization of service-orientation in cultural production and funding, COVID-19 has also spurred agonistic emergency collaborations under the shared conception of crisis.

Spatial conflicts play out in confrontations between strategies of maintaining, enabling, and protecting spaces for artistic and cultural activities vis-à-vis the looming loss or disappearance of independent cultural spaces. We have outlined various practices of city governments to instrumentalize artists’ and cultural producers’ self-organized spatial advocacy for the former’s agenda to animate public space, and upscale private development in (post)industrial areas.

In cross-case comparison, agential, procedural, and spatial conflicts appear in both implicit and explicit policies in cultural political arenas. Explicitly, cultural policies around political decision-making capacity and leadership, and concomitant conflicts, can be attributed to concrete actors (i.e. elected, or appointed city officials or curators), publicly available information or processes/procedures (i.e. jury compositions, open call or funding criteria, etc.), and tangible spaces/locations of cultural initiatives and events (i.e. buildings, maps, and social media indicating locations of culture). In other words, conflicts about actors, processes, and spaces can become materially tangible. With this, the contested origins of where and how cultural policies are implemented come to the fore. While procedural conflicts can be explicit – barring the co-design of ‘conflictual consensus’ – such conflicts might also be more difficult to grasp, thus invoking what Ahearne refers to as ‘unintended cultural side effects’ of implicit cultural policies. For example, such implicit procedural conflicts linger when rationales for decision-making are not communicated publicly. In contrast, symbolic conflicts are most often, and most persistently, implicit, as they can both antagonize and de-antagonize or smoothen profound conflicts regarding cultural value, funding priorities, equity, and fairness. Whilst conflicts are always prone to transform – becoming more prominent, explicit, or antagonistic, but also vanishing, retreating, or disappearing – the different types of conflict are variously related to cycles of political power. Concrete actors, procedures, and spaces of cultural policy can adapt more easily than deeper-rooted symbolic or ideological assumptions or beliefs about the value of arts and culture. In sum, some conflicts remain ever-latent, hidden, or implicit, but they can be foregrounded by both explicit cultural policies that protect these mindsets, but they can also be implicitly safeguarded by continuing to do ‘business as usual’. Yet, exactly these symbolic conflicts warrant analytical attention to shed light on how their effects or ‘unintended side effects’ shape the formation of explicit policies, ‘politics’, and maybe even ‘the political’.

Outlook: towards a conflict-oriented understanding of cultural policy

By qualifying Ahearne’s (2009) differentiation of implicit and explicit cultural policy with the notion of political difference, we have nuanced the co-constitutive role of policies both to enforce the logic of ‘politics’ (i.e. creating order, predictability, measurability, control) and that of ‘the political’ (i.e. pleading for a myriad of forms revolving around cultural political expression, agency, identity, and practice). As policies co-constitute both hegemonic and counter-hegemonic dynamics of power, cultural policies simultaneously determine and demarcate who and what is deemed legitimate, permissible, politically desirable, or worthy of funding and attention – and who and what is not. As policies can assist to constrict or circumcise ‘the political’, reducing the latter to mere ‘politics’ (Swyngedouw 2009), bureaucratic mindsets of cultural administrations – which sometimes prioritize technocratic decision-making – seek to substitute the generally conflictual logic of political negotiation with more legitimate constellations of shared power (and responsibility). Against this background, concepts such as ‘conflictual consensus’ can empirically and conceptually developed further by specifically looking at moments of rupture and antagonization (Landau-Donnelly et al. 2023). Urgent questions for further cultural policy-related research are as follows: When and why is it legitimate to work together while pursuing different strategic goals? When is it time to refuse further collaboration? When, why, and where can new conflictual governance relations be forged?

In sum, the frameworks of political difference and agonism underline the constitutive conflictuality of democratic life, attuned to messiness and contingency of political coalitions and power. While the contextual fabric of conflict differs across geopolitical, cultural and historical settings, we have emphasized the various degrees and public perceptions of manifest and latent conflicts. Thus, we have unsettled (implicit) assumptions that there are no conflicts in cultural political settings in predominantly peaceful and Western urban contexts such as Austria. Instead, we have sought to push debates about cultural funding inequities, and unequal cultural politics of access, representation, and sustainability towards a more encompassing sensitivity towards conflict. In line with thinking political contention through political difference, the paper has resisted subscribing to exclusively consensus-centric framings of the examined cultural events, and instead unpacked implicit and explicit conflicts that permeate and condition these very events, and the respective local cultural and political futures.

In conclusion, we echo Belfiore’s (2020, 394) appeal to work ‘against de-politicising trends in cultural policy’ and thus call for a more differentiated analysis of urban cultural governance settings, including dynamics of policy-making, and working of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. In other words, while we agree with concerns about the constricting and depoliticizing effects of neoliberal and entrepreneurial styles of cultural political decision-making and planning, we encourage interdisciplinary cultural policy researchers and practitioners to reconsider policy-making as striated by conflict and contingency. With such openness towards the potentially generative effects of conflict, parameters of political efficiency, (cultural) sustainability, democratic equity, and diversity will become radically re-negotiable. Ultimately, bringing conflict to the fore helps to gain more analytical depth to grasp where and how ‘the political’ takes place in cultural political arenas that are not only constituted by the logic of ‘politics’.

1. This research was supported by the Österreichische Nationalbank under Grant 18453. Empirical data were collected via the 18-month research project AGONART from October 2020 until September 2022. The non-alphabetical order of co-authors has been chosen consciously, but it shall be emphasized that all co-authors have significantly contributed to the conceptual and empirical scoping of the paper.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank interviewees and background informants for their support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Österreichische Nationalbank OENB [18453].

Notes on contributors

Friederike Landau-Donnelly

Friederike Landau-Donnelly is a political theorist and urban sociologist and Assistant Professor of Cultural Geography, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen. Her dissertation focused on the political organization and representational practices of freelance artists in Berlin and local cultural policy collaborations. She designed the research project 'Agonistic Cultural Politics (AGONART)' and has been accompanying its practical implementation.

Anke Schad-Spindler

Anke Schad-Spindler is a post-doc researcher on the 'AGONART' project at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna. Her dissertation (2013–2017) dealt with cultural governance. She has been researching cultural policy, cultural management, and cultural education since 2006. Since 2017, she has also worked as an independent researcher, evaluator, and process facilitator.

Stefanie Fridrik

Stefanie Fridrik is a research assistant (Prae Doc) in the project 'AGONART' and a doctoral student at HFBK Hamburg, Department for Art Education. She studied art history and comparative literature at the Leopold-Franzens-University Innsbruck and the University of Vienna. In her dissertation project, she investigates mediation and exhibition formats of graffiti and street art in Austrian and German cities.

Oliver Marchart

Oliver Marchart leads the project 'AGONART'. He is Professor of Political Theory at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna.