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While the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the live music industry have received much attention, little consideration has been given to regional music production clusters more broadly. Evaluating the impacts of the pandemic on the music economy of North West England, this paper identifies key areas of support required as music businesses transition into a digitally-orientated post-COVID period. Findings demonstrate the ways in which the pandemic encouraged or forced music businesses to innovate with new digital ways of showcasing, promoting and distributing music. Yet, while digitalisation offers many opportunities, these are often difficult for businesses to capitalise upon. The paper argues the need to place business support at the heart of local cultural policy. More specifically, the paper makes the case for a soft institutionalist approach whereby local policymakers, the market and civil society work together to generate and distribute crucial resources of human, financial and social capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on data from qualitative interviews and participant observation with those involved in artistic production in New Orleans, this paper considers the effect of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic on cities and artists. It investigates the supports available to artists before and during the pandemic and the relationship between cultural workers and tourism in New Orleans. This relationship creates a paradox: New Orleans is unique because it is the site of enduring local cultural traditions and emerging creative production, and yet the city must sell its culture to tourists to remain economically solvent. Left to fend for themselves by larger institutions, arts communities and nonprofit organizations came together to mutually support each other. The paper concludes that what we can learn from this case is how people 'make do' and survive during an extended period of crisis – especially when the lessons of survival have been taught and tested through preceding crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decolonising the curriculum is a global imperative that takes different forms and urgency depending on the context. Developments across the globe such as BlackLivesMatter and student responses to the pandemic and online learning have raised new questions about the curriculum – critically questioning higher education institutions' plans about not only providing access to resources but about the (cultural) authority of curricula, pedagogical and research practices that are still dominated by Western discourses. This paper examines three experiences of curriculum decolonisation in cultural policy and management, an applied subject that has culture as its object, in three different contexts, Serbia, Puerto Rico and South Africa: namely how the pursuit of a pluriversal knowledge ecology found expression in the curriculum, content and pedagogical practices deployed to deliver locally relevant education; and how educators resolved the ontological and epistemic discontinuities between the standard disciplinary canon and local realities to embed and contextualise the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The independent performing arts are establishing themselves as an independent organizational field operating across Europe. The focus is not on artistic form or aesthetics, but on structural and organizational features that define the field institutionally in many countries of Northern, Eastern, Southern and Western Europe alike. The presented consideration of these features is specified in an analysis of the socio-economic situation in the field, especially in light of the new challenges of the Coronavirus pandemic. Subsequently, the actions taken by different advocacy groups to improve the precarious situation across countries and their effectiveness in governance are described to illustrate international coalition patterns, the development of mutual awareness and isomorphic alignment in the structuring of the field beyond nation-state borders. The research is based on 1031 survey responses from artists and cultural professionals as well as expert interviews with the management staff of the interest groups of independent performing arts from 12 European countries (This paper is an elaboration of the following work published in French: Eder, Thomas Fabian. 2022. "Rapport Intermédiaire : Les Arts Du Spectacle Indépendants Entre Consolidation Institutionnelle et Précarité – Une Perspective Comparative Européenne." D'Allemagne d'Aujourd'hui (No 241)). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent did the Covid-19 pandemic affect the tools, priorities and organisation of cultural policies? And did the pandemic enhance the digital aspect of these policies? This paper compares pandemic cultural policy measures in seven European countries to answer these questions. The countries all installed a plurality of mitigating measures, combining grants and subsidies, compensation of lost income, income support and financial flexibility, creating a tendency towards cultural policy turning into economic policy, fiscal policy, and labour market policy. Cultural policies have not been fundamentally challenged by the pandemic, in the sense that it has affected the essential political tools, divisions of labour, or core goals. The responses have confirmed an existing policy structure or enhanced existing developments. The importance of a state-centred or a federalist cultural policy system has not been challenged in a substantial way. Secondly there is little evidence to show a general acceleration of national digital cultural policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, mass tourism was the main driver for the unusual growth of tourist accommodations in World Heritage Cities (WHC). This paper investigates how the mass tourism pause due to the pandemic can be considered an opportunity for resetting cultural heritage policy and management practice in WHC. Selecting the Historic Centers of Siena and Florence as the case studies, we explain how the two cities experienced an unusual increase in tourist accommodation before the pandemic. By reviewing scenarios for the COVID-19 virus outbreak in Italy, we argue insights for a new cultural heritage policy and management framework that can effectively moderate mass tourism in WHC. Our findings suggest the new policies should be initiated based on a multi-sectoral and multi-level approaches in planning practice. By creating a dynamic tourism map on the macro level, international cultural heritage and tourism organisations may agree on policies that mitigate tourist flows in vulnerable WHC. On the micro-level, there is a demand for regional directives that monitor the growth of tourist accommodations in WHC. Furthermore, local communities' engagement in decision-making may open new opportunities to work more collaboratively on the social or environmental challenges that exist in WHC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reflects on how cultural policies in South Korea, Japan and China respond to the Covid-19 crisis. It conceptualises the current period as a historically significant moment by exploring the notion of 'critical juncture'. Then, it presents an empirical analysis of what has actually happened in cultural policies in the three countries by investigating key events, debates, actors and decisions made in 2020. In Korea, the pandemic functions as a force of 'policy acceleration' by legitimising and furthering the existing development in cultural policy. In Japan, it triggered 'policy movement', where artists emerged as institutional entrepreneurs who fundamentally contest Japan's non-interventionist cultural policy and ask for policy reform. In China, cultural policy is 'locked-in' as the party-state appropriated the crisis in its ideological terms. Despite the lack of visible transformative changes (yet), the consequences of the pandemic are critical enough to determine the future direction of cultural policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws policy insights from the first comparative analysis of multiple hotspots of regional cultural and creative activity across Australia. Focussing on the state of Queensland, it provides three interlinked findings relevant to international cultural policy debates. The first – municipal agency – goes to the crux of the value of studying small regions. We examine the degree to which Cairns, an isolated, small regional city, can exercise effective cultural agency in a tripartite system of government, demonstrating that policy ambition and asset management at the local level can deliver outsized cultural infrastructure benefits through a focus on demand from the local community. The second further illuminates the question of demand for cultural infrastructure as a critical enabler, in conjunction with allied infrastructure, in a very remote, distressed community–the Central West region. Cultural tourism's surprising prominence as support for mainstream tourism on the Gold Coast, an international mecca for surf, sand and sun, is the third example, deepening the significance of allied industry connectivity. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in 2019, the trend data and analysis offered here will be significantly impacted by the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to reposition freelance creative and cultural workers (CCWs) and conditions of creative work as the foundations of cultural policy making. Using a case study of Dundee, Scotland, in the immediate aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, the article draws on focus groups and interviews with creative freelancers, representatives of cultural organisations and members of a cultural strategy development group in Dundee. It presents how freelancers were not only missing from policy (national and local), their precarity was also exacerbated by cultural organisations in their response to pandemic-induced uncertainty. The potential for more caring modes of engagement with freelance CCWs are identified. Crucially, the article argues that this support work must also be resourced to be effective and sustainable. The article presents opportunities for rethinking the position of freelancers in cultural policy and sector leadership, and reflects on the capacity for academic research to support such work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Motivation: In recent years, the impact of cultural factors on the economic development has been analysed. This research concerns the impact of culture on the labour market, the growth of innovation and creativity, participation in creating added value of GDP, stimulating exports, although the cultural sector also affects the development of tourism, entertainment and improvement in the quality of life of residents. Currently, the cultural sector is treated as a long-term economic investment affecting the development of the country. Aim: The goal of the article is to evaluate the functioning of the cultural sector in Poland. This assessment has been made on a regional basis. Results: To achieve the purpose, data of the GUS (Central Statistical Office in Poland) were analysed. The data concerned expenses allocated to culture and national heritage -- they included individual types of cultural institutions and number of cultural sector entities in 2018-2021. The results of the analysis of the cultural sector have been presented in tables and diagrams. Using an agglomeration method, the Polish provinces were grouped according to values of the analysed categories of expenses allocated to culture and national heritage in the provinces in year 2021. It was noticed that the development of the cultural sector in Poland is uneven, concentrated in the country's capital, which is typical for less developed countries. Therefore, main barriers to the development of the cultural sector in Poland were identified. The most important obstacles were: underfunding, lack of systemic solutions to support the demand for cultural goods, unfavourable legal and financial conditions for creators of culture, lack of support for cooperation between public and private cultural sector, dependence of the development of the cultural sector on politics, as well as lack of social acceptance of the cultural policy. Culture is also negatively affected by the processes of globalization, commercialization and recently the Covid 19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hollywood will encounter some cultural policies when its films are imported to the Chinese film market on a revenue-sharing basis. These include a quota system, a censorship system and an uncertain release schedule. However, China has been the fastest growing film market since 2008 and the second largest film market in the world since 2012 (yet the current film industries worldwide are recovering from the impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic). Despite the restrictive cultural policies, Hollywood, attracted by the promising profitability, have incorporated more Chinese roles and more plots about China to please the Chinese film regulators and audiences in order to gain access to the lucrative Chinese film market. Furthermore, the depiction of China has become more positive and diverse in recent Hollywood blockbusters compared with the Orientalist stereotypical images in the past. The author intends to examine the reasons behind the phenomenon through analysing the positively changing images of China from early Hollywood films to the recent Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, the positively changing depiction of China illustrates China and the US negotiating the dynamic process of cross-cultural exchange in economic and political terms through compromise, competition and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• The Covid-19 pandemic spurred an ad hoc digital turn in the live performing arts sector. • The pandemic digital turn has accentuated the value of the analogue. • Digital concerts and performances represent a temporary digital disruption. • The pandemic has highlighted the structural divide between the institutional and non-institutional part of the cultural sector. This paper 1 1 I thank my colleagues Mari Torvik Heian, Heidi Stavrum and Bård Kleppe for valuable comments to different drafts of this text. The two reviewers also contributed with insightful and helpful comments. describes and analyses how the live performing arts sector in Norway adapted to the abrupt change that affected most European countries in mid-March 2020. Based on a mid-pandemic empirical analysis, it argues that the sudden lockdown due to Covid-19 created a real-time laboratory for digital adaptation within the culture sector. In light of this digital adaptation, I ask whether this rapid digital turn represented a disruption in the cultural sector, and whether the sudden digitalization challenged the structures of cultural production. The paper argues that the digital adaptations to Covid-19 in central parts of the cultural sector have represented a temporary disruption. Rather than fast-forwarding a digital development, the pandemic digital turn has even more than illuminated the innovative and transformative potential of the digital, accentuated the value of the analogue. Still, it will be a continuing task for research in the years to come to assess the potential lasting implications of Covid-related digitalizations in the cultural sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The scope, unevenness, and severity of the COVID-19 pandemic's impact on cultural work has been widely acknowledged. This article turns to how sections of the cultural industries responded to the onset of this crisis. Our account is based on document research completed during the first wave of the pandemic. We gathered news reports, impact survey results, policy recommendations, open letters, event announcements, and other grey literature generated by a range of organizations in the cultural sector, including trade unions, professional associations, and activist groups, among others. Framed by the concepts 'labouring of culture' and 'policy from below', our thematic analysis of this material reveals that cultural workers responded to the pandemic by surfacing the idea of cultural production as work; by enacting practices of care and mutual aid; and by proposing policy changes. These collective responses are marked by multiple tensions, particularly between rehabilitating the status quo in the cultural sector and radically reimagining it for a post-COVID-19 world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines performance and theater artists' reactions to and attitudes toward the decisive measures taken by the government to curb the spread of the coronavirus in Poland. It traces the transformation of these attitudes over the different stages of the pandemic, from the initial complete lockdown (spring 2020) to the temporary relaxation of the restrictions and up to the second lockdown (fall 2020). Our research is based on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with Polish performance artists between November 2020 and January 2021 as part of the larger research project on the pandemic in social sciences and humanities. In this article we place our discussion of the interviews within the conceptual framework of liminality, precarity, vulnerability, and resilience, in order to examine human activities in the face of unplanned and profound structural and functional changes caused by the pandemic, affecting cultural and social hierarchies and reflecting cultural policies before and during the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on possible effects on income and earning capacity of creative workers of three measures that were recently introduced or that are being discussed to combat the vulnerability of non-standard working conditions in the cultural and creative sector in the Netherlands: the Balanced Labor Market Act, the Fair Practice Code for Culture, and a call for certain unified agreements, for instance in the form of minimum tariffs for self-employed workers. Each of these measures separately has its merits and the intention to improve working conditions. Therefore, the power lies in their joint introduction, which combines general legislation with a moral benchmark and subsector-specific solutions. However, in this combination several unintended consequences loom, such as the possible separation between professional and amateur creative workers, a higher threshold for talent to enter the sector, threats to artistic and aesthetic innovation, and the prioritization of fairness over equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: The objective of the article is to describe the public policy in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic towards the auditorium culture sector in the Republic of Poland. This policy was stretched between the anti-pandemic policy and the anti-crisis policy, and it appeared in the end as the policy for the hibernation of the auditorium culture sector. Research Design & Methods: The methods used to prepare the article involved juridical exegesis, desk research, as well as legal, sociological, and economic analyses. Findings: Public authorities in Poland wanted the institutions, enterprises, and creators in the auditorium culture sector to survive the period of the pandemic. Implications / Recommendations: The article denotes what the auditorium culture sector is according to the authors. It shows the importance of operation of theatres, cinemas, museums, art galleries, historical places, cultural centres, libraries, archives, and creators for the Polish society and economy. It presents the tools of policy against the COVID-19 pandemic and seven phases of the anti-pandemic policy, with the consequences for the auditorium culture sector. It describes the scale of the disturbance in the activity of the auditorium culture sector, and mechanisms of anti-crisis and hibernating intervention towards this sector. The support intervention for the sector is described in detail; the article presents programmes and numbers. The aid for the institutions and creators in the auditorium culture sector in Poland during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic was provided by the central government, local governments, non-governmental organisations (sectoral NGOs), public cultural institutions, and artistic schools. Contribution / Value Added: The article based on the “lesson learnt” method brings knowledge to public policy and for decision-makers in the face of future threats of a similar type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study entails an analysis of the early measures and policies developed by five smaller and medium-sized European countries (the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovenia, Switzerland) in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. In order to enable such a comparison, data was collected and categorised on government measures that could affect cultural and creative organizations and workers, issued by departments as diverse as economy and business, social affairs, education, and culture. By using interpretative argumentative techniques, and consideration of selected context factors, possible explanatory patterns of how and why countries have implemented which types of measures are discussed. The findings highlight that early policy measures have been developed against the backdrop of a complex interplay of public policy priorities over the last years. In these priorities the intensity of state involvement, the economic situation before the pandemic and the propensity of self-employment in society are key to understanding the adoption of specific policy measures across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]