PORTUGAL’S ARTS SCENE STRUGGLES TO KEEP THE LIGHTS ON
by Caille Millner
Spiegel Online International
May 31, 2012 Thursday 5:43 PM GMT+1
Germany
HIGHLIGHT: With the euro crisis raging, and public and
private funds gone, Portuguese artists have learned to
be strategic in order to survive. Many have left the
struggling nation, but for those who have stayed behind
the focus is on winning over foreign buyers and investors.;
The financial crisis has made life extremely difficult for many
Portuguese. But when the struggling nation dissolved its Ministry of
Culture in 2011, those working in the arts were left with few places
to turn.
Like many Portuguese, some successful artists simply moved away as a
form of protest — one in 10 Portuguese university graduates leaves
the country, and there are thriving communities of Portuguese artists
in cities like London and Berlin. But for those who chose to stay,
the financial crisis is just the latest obstacle to be overcome in
this small, historically poor country.
“I’ve paid a price to be in Portugal,” said Rodrigo Oliveira, a visual
artist who lives in Lisbon and has had solo shows both at home and
abroad. “It’s much easier for me to sell work at international art
fairs than here, for example. But you also pay a price to go abroad,
in terms of losing touch with your local way of seeing things. It’s
very difficult to be successful here, but it always was.”
For much of the 20th century, Portugal suffered under a right-wing
dictatorship, and the country’s economy has long struggled in the
shadow of its more-powerful neighbor, Spain. These problems, not
to mention Portugal’s small size, have kept the country’s artists
from getting attention, both at home and internationally. And just
as Portugal was developing the infrastructure to support the arts,
the financial crisis wiped it out.
Difficult Conditions
“Portugal has never had a lot of money for the arts,” said Jorge Xavier
Barreto, the former director general of the Ministry of Culture. “We’re
a young democracy and new, in some ways, to culture — more than forty
percent of people here were illiterate when the dictatorship crumbled
in 1974. So, of course, supporting the arts wasn’t a priority here
for decades.”
And it’s not a priority now, when unemployment in Portugal stands at
14 percent. Frustrated voters have passed the reigns of government from
the Socialists to the center-right Social Democrats, but the punishing
austerity packages keep coming. The banks have been battered by rating
agency downgrades and have lost full access to capital markets. And
despite heroic efforts to tame its budget deficit — it fell to 4.2
percent of GDP in 2011 from a whopping 9.8 percent in 2010 — the
country is still on economists’ list of dominoes to fall shortly after
Greece. These aren’t ideal conditions under which to support the arts.
“Unfortunately, most governments see culture as an expense, not an
investment,” said Barreto. Barreto is an exception, believing that art
“and all other forms of culture are crucial to a democratic society.”
When the government decided to cut his ministry’s budget to almost
nothing, Barreto resigned in protest. “It was the first time I couldn’t
uphold my promises to people — the cuts came in the middle of artists’
contracts — so I quit,” he said. He’s currently lecturing at the
Lisbon University Institute.
Few Places to Turn
Barreto’s exit has left local artists with few places to turn.
Portugal does not have a strong tradition of private cultural
philanthropy, and there are few private foundations dedicated to
supporting the arts.
“If you are an artist or a curator, you have only two places to ask for
help,” said Leonor Nazare, an adviser and curator for the Modern Art
Center in Lisbon. “The first was the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation,
which has been cutting back on much of its arts support.
And the second is the government — or was the government.”
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, named for its Armenian oil baron
founder, “was one of the only things Portugal had for contemporary
culture during the 1960s and 1970s,” Nazare said. It has offered
support to most of Portugal’s leading artists and, as one of the
biggest private foundations in Europe, it has a long reach. It
founded the Modern Art Center, for instance, which has 9,000 pieces
of contemporary art.
But the arts is only one of its four areas of support, and in some
years — like these — it’s less of a priority. “We’re buying less
and less now,” said Nazare. “The artists are obliged to do other
things for themselves — they manage, I don’t know how.”
Foreign Investment
They manage through exports. From new artists to established
gallerists, everyone in the Portuguese art industry is thinking about
how to get foreign buyers for their work. Whether it’s by attending
international art fairs or trying to represent more foreign artists,
they seek to avoid dependence on the Portuguese market.
“We’re no different than any other industry in Portugal — to survive
we’re going to have to attract foreign investment,” said Caroline
Pagès, who opened her contemporary art gallery two years ago. “Right
now about a third of my buyers are foreign. In the near future I’d
say it’s going to be half.”
In order to attract those new buyers, Pagès said she has had to
“develop a strategic geovision.” Art fairs, she said, “have become
crucial,” even for smaller galleries like hers.
Because she can’t afford art at the largest, highest-profile fairs,
she focuses on smaller fairs in Spain and the Mediterranean region
that attract international Latin American buyers. “Portuguese artists
have a way of looking at their history that can be very interesting to
people in other regions,” she said. “And it helps that their history
is in regions that are growing economically at the moment, whether
it’s the Maghreb or the former colonies. Those ties are what’s going
to save Portugal from this crisis.”
Cristina Guerra, who runs Lisbon’s most prominent contemporary art
gallery, agrees. Years ago she began representing artists from former
Portuguese colonies — especially Brazil and Angola — and she now
has many collectors from those countries as well.
“It was both an economic and an artistic strategy, because my original
idea was to try and put Portuguese artists in North America and
Europe,” Guerra said. “But when I would go to the fairs, I started
meeting artists from Brazil and Angola, and fell in love with what
they were doing. That has worked as a crisis strategy, too, because
we don’t have many Portuguese collectors now.”
Being Strategic
Even the smallest art spaces are looking for ways to branch out. When
João Mourao and Luis Silva opened their art space, Kunsthalle Lissabon,
in 2009, they intended it to operate as a small-scale local public
production and presentation institution.
During their first year of operation — with some funding from the
now-defunct Portuguese Ministry of Culture — they produced mainly
local artists. That has changed. Their most recent show featured a
Dutch artist, Melvin Moti, for which the space received funding from
the Dutch embassy. Their next show includes work by an artist from
Cyprus and one from Germany — with funding from the Cypriot embassy
and Germany’s Goethe Institut.
“We’re starting to define our program in terms of funding
opportunities, and in some ways, that’s a problem for us,” said Silva.
“This is not to take anything away from the artists we’ve shown,
all of whom have merit. But we are a local institution and we want
to serve the needs of the people of this community. But you’re seeing
this in small-scale institutions all throughout crisis countries. It’s
not about what kind of art we want to show, it’s about how we keep
the lights on.”
All of which adds up to fewer opportunities for local artists —
at least if they want to show or sell their work in Portugal. That,
too, can be difficult — but it can also come with an unusual payoff.
“There’s no such things as the bohemian artist anymore. We have to be
extremely focused and strategic about building our careers and our
international reputations,” said the artist Roberto Oliveira. “But
the good thing is that Portuguese artists have not been great about
developing our international reputations, and now we have to do so. In
the long run that will be good for Portuguese art.”
From: Baghdasarian
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/portuguese-artists-suffer-during-euro-crisis-a-836288.html