13 May 2019

Cultural Leadership

“A practice, not a position”

The Global Cultural Leadership Programme (GCLP) is the most important activity from the Cultural Diplomacy Platform, gathering each year 40 cultural professionals from 20 countries to exchange, network and learn new cultural leadership skills.

But what is Cultural Leadership?

Everybody is talking about Cultural Leadership. Yet there is no common understanding on the concept and it looks to vary geographically. But is this diversity of meaning necessarily a bad thing?

Under the supervision of Dirk Schütz and Kristin Oswald, this study presents individual and personal approaches by practitioners and researchers that are characterized by concrete working realities, professional biographies and regional contexts, on the issue of Cultural Leadership worldwide.

The goal is not explicitly to present an all-encompassing definition of the Cultural Leadership. However, all contributions independently point in a similar direction: the centre of attention turns away from the visionary leader and towards a community-oriented understanding of shared leadership that does not have to be neutral or universal, but is aware of its subjectivity and dependence on group identities and values. Cultural Leadership always is about relations (between people, departments within institutions, institutions and society, etc.).

The focus “Mapping the meanings of the cultural leadership – the use of the terms in the field of art management” was written by Johan Kolsteeg and Martin Zierold, one of the facilitators from the GCLP

  • Read the full report here: “Cultural Leadership”, Arts Management Quarterly, No 130, January 2019.