An unsuccessful application to an online discussion-publication titled Cultural Leadership.
The Leader of the 21st Century. Certified
By Efi Koukoutsi and Kostas Beveratos*
Cultural Leadership! Would this be the new trend in a world that replaces human relations by monetary values and divides people into successful and failing ones?
Would this be the new title for authorities perfumed by the refined essence of art that any authority seeks to attach to its glory?
Who should be the ones to carry such a bombastic entitlement? Academics and artisans? Poets, street fiddlers and clochards? Marketeers, entrepreneurs and accountants?
Let’s view separately these contradicting terms to review the diversity of meanings they have carried historically.
To the “Greeks” the word culture (πολιτισμός), defined more the kind of human relations inside Πόλις (city), rather than the level of any other achievement.
To the “Germans” the word Kultur referred to a wider range of creativity, based on an intimate connection between state and society expressed in a dynamic technological advantage.
To the “US Americans”, culture and civilization had been a major bet when constructing their federal republic.
Nowadays, by scrambling together technical achievements and human relations, we have ended up conforming internationally to a simplistic “west side story” which teaches, if not imposes, the trend we call “cultural leadership”; somehow though an ideal environment for developing finance at the expense of people.
We will put our efforts to exclude ourselves from this conformation.
Culture, for many anthropologists, has its origin at the first totemic-egalitarian rules. To many, leadership, even for hundreds of thousands of years, had been constrained to a symbolic context in order to achieve and maintain the totemic equality.
Sociologists approach culture within the dynamic context of social relations, production systems and collective representations of knowledge forms. Leadership, from this point of view, provides an indicative conceptual framework for reflecting power transformations and hegemonic values at given times and places.
Cultural studies imagined an emerging field of academic research as a whole new “science of singularity”.
What we will start with, is by reviewing once more some ancient teachings (like the Homeric and First-Christian), in a way that exposes an ongoing war. An occasionally real war, however a war constantly taking place through the conflicts of cultural values, needs and desires, collective and personal aspirations.
While focusing on artistic achievements, we will still approach culture as an alive system identified by the quality of human relations, instead of looking for artistic indicators to measure and classify creativity.
Furthermore, we will choose to consider art as a way for every person to achieve self and social awareness.
We will choose to consider the need for creativity, as important as the need for fresh air and food.
Meanwhile, we could take a look at how the field of arts, the cultural field if you prefer the term, is in need of leadership or how leaderships are in need of the arts.
* Efi Koukoutsi, is an employee in a multinational company in the construction sector. She has studied Sociology and holds master’s degrees in political sociology, social exclusion and minorities, Panteion University of Athens, Greece.
Kostas Beveratos makes his living as a graphic designer. He practices performances, music and blogging (https://konstmp.blogspot.com).
