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Editor's note
Editor’s note
Recently I had a chance to be a witness of one discussion at the conference. A highly respected sociologist tried to damp conference participants’ ardour on the issue of the day that is financing of culture according to its final result. What does your agony about the standards and special programme figures mean, who of the powers that be are interested in the polemics about “result in culture” meaning? – he asked. The informal culture exists and it will exist without any reforms. And the official sphere of culture has got the state order to organize leisure of the population. And you didn’t receive a commission to develop environment, territory, and spirit and so on for development is a threat to any stable system.
And indeed, otherwise how can we understand this nonsense that is happening around? In addition to knowledge in present-day life it is necessary to have spatial ability, project imagination, and creativity, in other words ability to orientate in open problematic situations and to find non-typical decisions. And with all this going on the state authorities take care of the “leisure and entertainment” of its citizens.
Culture generally, and local and organizational culture in particular, specifies conditions necessary for development of these abilities in each of us.
But suppose the government decides to declare culture to be the fifth “national project”. Then the nation will receive an endless amount of money for preservation of heritage and support of professional art and, of course, cultural workers will get a raise. No changes in culture activated from above will come to pass. But may be some changes could come from below?
It seems that things are moving. Little by little people and organizations learn to communicate and they learn to be interesting not only for themselves but for each other as well. They feel more liberated and free. Even some municipalities started taking into consideration the humanitarian resource for they made sure that the creative capital has a great power no less than oil or coal-fields have. They say that in Chinese, one and the same hieroglyph stands for the notion “crisis” and for the notion “development”. If it is really true it can be used as an optimistic symbol that will remind us that we can try to take up any problem from the point of view of self-development.
I was happy to collect the evidences of it to this issue of the journal. But I could not include them all in one number because I found too many of them. The operating programme “The 60th parallel” and decision to appropriate the grant to support this issue devoted to “The Creative City” topic are the evidences of Surgut City Government creativeness. And we are very grateful for that. So let us live having faith in ourselves, in our values and our strength.
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