Prof. Max Sparreboom, Dean Faculty of History and Arts: State of the Art(s)
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I hope you will agree with me, that this is the appropriate occasion for a Faculty to give a brief presentation to a wider academic audience of the work that is being done here, at the Faculty of History and Arts. I am speaking of a Faculty, which, in case you were not aware, is one of the smaller and younger Faculties of our very old University. The occasion is particularly apposite for a summary state of the art, because we are celebrating both the award of the honorary doctorate to Howard Becker, and the fifteenth anniversary of our Department of Art and Culture Studies. It is therefore with pleasure that I shall first speak of some recent developments in our Faculty as a whole. I shall then dwell a little longer on our 15 years old Department of Art and Culture Studies; after all it is their anniversary and it is this Department, which has organised the Dies this year.
Our Faculty presently offers five initial degree courses, one bachelors in history and one in art and culture studies. It further offers three masters degree courses: one in history, one in art and culture studies and – a recent off-shoot of our existing programmes - a masters programme in media and journalism. We all have been rather busy this year in preparing self-evaluation reports of all our degree courses, with the aim to get these accredited for a next period. This exercise, cumbersome and bureaucratic as it is, has at the same time also proved useful, as it forces us to keep examining our teaching methods and better our results, and develop a system in which a quality assessment is systematically incorporated. In this process the entire Faculty has played a role, including students, staff and office, and even the dean. We are prepared to let other faculties profit from our rich and varied experiences. That is to say: for a reasonable tariff. It will save them the time and effort that is needed for the interpretation of the 55 pages of protocol alone.
I will not speak about all our activities here, but I should like to refer to at least three recent developments in our degree courses. One is the introduction, last year, of a new master programme on media and journalism, a programme that forms a good complement to the other two master courses, namely the one in history and the one in art and culture studies, and which sits conveniently besides the post-academic course on journalism, that Henri Beunders is running since years. Whatever has been said in derogatory terms about the study of the media: I mean: a fashionable buzz-word or a craze, media is a crucial factor in present-day society and its importance for culture, economy and society at large is ever increasing. In our master course, students study the role and effects of the media, but also the conventions, the commercial and technological changes that effect the media and the journalists. We are proud that this master already appears to be a success, with more than twenty students in the first year, and over seventy this year. A second interesting development is that we are cautiously exploring, in collaboration with other Woudestein Faculties, the possibility of setting up a broad interfaculty bachelors degree course on media and communication.
The third initiative in education I should like to mention is the application for a research masters in Behavioral and Social Sciences. This is a joint initiative of the Departments of Psychology and Sociology in the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Department of Art and Culture Studies in our own Faculty. The programme aims to give a solid training in scientific research to the most able and motivated students with a bachelor’s degree in behavioral science, in social science, or culture studies.
When it should come to setting up further research master degrees, it will be inevitable that we seek partners outside our Faculty, and perhaps even outside Rotterdam. The size of the Faculty and the available number of research-motivated students within a faculty like this, are limiting factors that drive us to look outside, at other universities, for partnerships. In the light of this, it is a pity that among the larger humanities faculties at other universities there appears to be a gradually decreasing interest in the system of National Research Schools, or Onderzoeksscholen. It looks as if short term faculty interests are going to prevail over the broader, general research interests. Research Schools were not only designed as institutions for PhD training, but also for creating critical mass in research programmes. If research in the Netherlands is to compete at a European or global level, we need to join forces - and the Research Schools are one way to achieve this - or we will be marginalized in the long term.
So let us now turn to research and to research related issues.If my last remarks sound a little pessimistic, then let me tell you now that what is happening in research at our faculty is all but small, pessimistic and marginal. Most, but not all of our research is concentrated in two core research programmes: The one of the history department is entitled: ‘Social Status and Cultural Encounters: The Making and Unmaking of Identities’. This programme investigates the development and interaction of social status and cultural encounters in late medieval to modern history. Both Europeanists and students of non-Western history work together, so that cultural encounters, social status and identity issues can be investigated both in a European and a World-historical context.
I mention just three examples of historical research projects which are incorporated in this programme:
Ego-documents and History (Rudolf Dekker and Arianne Baggerman);
Anchors in Time: Collective Memories and Cultural Differences (Siep Stuurman and Maria Grever)
Also incorporated in the programme, but extending beyond our own Faculty, to include the Faculties of Philosophy, Law and Social Sciences, is the research project entitled: Individual, Community and State in the Early Modern Period: Ethics, Politics and Administration from Erasmus to Bayle. This is the research project of the Erasmus Center for Early Modern Studies in which scholars such as Jan van Herwaarden, Robert von Friedeburg, Wiep van Bunge, Laurens Winkel, and Hans Blom are working together. As already mentioned by the rector, this is a fine example of a collaboration of the Erasmus University with the Rotterdam Library. We have high expectations of this joint initiative.
Other research in the Department of History includes media research
by Henri Beunders, among others, that links up with research in the Department of Art and Culture Studies and that of History; furthermore, the History of the First World War is studied by Paul Schulten, Hans Binneveld and Martin Kraaijestein. Interestingly, over the last four years, an annual conference on the First World War is held in Rotterdam, drawing over a hundred of researchers and other interested people.
I now turn to the Department of Art and Culture Studies, whose 15th anniversary we are celebrating today.
In 1989 Art and Culture Studies welcomed its first students. It was something new in the Netherlands, for this study combined an economic and sociological approach to the arts and culture. Rather than focusing attention on the art product or the appreciation of art only, the study programme emphasizes the dynamics and interplay of production, distribution, and reception of specific art forms. It is this combination of elements and perspectives that together make the ‘art world’. This approach to our curriculum is very much inspired by Howard Becker’s concept of ‘art worlds’ and has formed the starting point for the Department’s research and education.
Based on the concept of the ‘art world’, researchers in our Department have developed a research tradition that links up well with current debates on art and society. It clearly distinguishes itself from the other approaches, in which art and cultural products themselves are the primary objects of study. The programme is built on three disciplines: history (the chair held by Marlite Halbertsma), sociology (the chair of Ton Bevers), and economics (the chair held by Arjo Klamer).
The Department’s research is concentrated in a core programme, entitled: Arts and Culture in a Globalising World from a Sociological and Economic Perspective. The programme distinguishes three focal areas: Sector-oriented research, including performing arts, film and photography, architecture, literature, and museums. Further, the cultural or creative industries and the media. And then also general issues, such as cultural policy, cultural criticism, cultural education, and cultural identity.
In the last six years or so, research has changed significantly from a focus on applied research to more fundamental, and more internationally oriented research. In line with this development is an increasing volume of project support from the Netherlands Research Council in recent years. There is an English language variant in the masters course, Cultural Economics and Cultural Entrepreneurship, attracting students from abroad, and individual researchers attract colleagues from a broad range of countries, all of them individuals who bring a stimulating, international flavour to our arts and culture studies.
In a recent newspaper interview, our Minister of Culture, Medy van der Laan, was asked the insinuating question why she considered culture and economy more important than orchestras. She pointed out that a combination of culture and economy formed a key issue of her cultural policy and that there should be much more exchange between the two, because the two have so many ties linking them. This field, I wish to memorize here, is exactly the area of competence of our research group on Cultural Economics. They have worked on this theme well before politicians discovered it.
Cultural economics directs economic research to issues pertaining to the arts and cultural heritage. The field is young, yet has matured during the last twenty years. Researchers have begun to emphasise the role of culture in economic processes (the value of culture), and on processes of valuation and valorisation (that is, the changing of values). Expenditures on the arts may be an indicator of the economic impact of the arts, but the arts may contribute to society in other ways as well. What can we say about these other contributions? Certainly, policy makers need other indicators besides economic ones in order to evaluate cultural policies.
There is a growing scientific interest in the creative industries. These constitute a significant part of the economy, draw a disproportionate amount of attention and confront economists with intriguing issues, such as the role of attention, the character of creative consumption, the valuation and pricing of intellectual property rights, the economic organisation of creative industries, the effects of new technologies, policies towards these industries (think of the support of movie industries, of public versus commercial broadcasting, or the future of newspapers in a digital age).
Our Department happens to have an unusual concentration of researchers in this field that is not matched at any other institution. The presence of like-minded researchers in the Faculty of Business Administration is of course an advantage and holds the promise of further interfaculty collaboration.
I should finally like to single out one particular, large research programme, a project for which Susanne Janssen received the prestigious VICI grant from the Netherlands Research Council. This project is entitled: ‘Cultural Classification Systems in Transition: The Social Valuation of Cultural Goods in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, 1950-2000.’
The comparative study of the ways in which people classify cultural products and develop corresponding rules of behaviour, constitutes a new field of research. It will improve our understanding of the social nature of artistic valuation practices, and can, moreover, shed light on underlying processes of social and cultural change. We expect that the project will generate a lot of new research and provide a further stimulus for international research in our Faculty.
Let me conclude. The 6th international conference of the ESA Research Network for the Sociology of the Arts, organized by Susanne Janssen in Rotterdam last week, has just come to an end. We are glad that Howard Becker has taken an active part in this conference and that participants have had the chance to talk with him. Ladies and gentlemen, we are fortunate that Howard Becker is here, not only to be temporarily part of our art world, but also to work with us.
Thank you.
