Are there Foreigners in Art?

"I do not want my house to be walled in on sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all the lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any."

Dear friends,

This famous quote by M. Gandhi captures perhaps the essence of our new cultural diversity. Today, there are 191 nationalities living in Norway. Virtually all nations of the world have paid our small country a visit. Many have come to stay. This gives us more freedom and more choices with regard to shaping our identities and our futures.

It is a great pleasure to welcome you to our Norwegian Year of Cultural Diversity and to this conference. With their song, Haddy N’jie’s trio sets the perfect tune. More than words, their music demonstrates that diversity is an asset to our society. And many thanks to the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design for hosting this conference together with the DSV Network, as part of their diversity programme in 2008.

Bringing society a step forward can sometimes be a matter of raising the right question at the right time; questions that may provoke or inspire us to new action. Our key question here today - “Are there Foreigners in Art?”- is perhaps an adequate question at this moment of time, though I’d like to remind you that last year, one of the Venice Biennale's catch phrases was "There are no foreigners in art!"

A foreigner can also be interpreted as someone who is not included, an outsider to the arts community - a conceptual approach consistent with Leonardo da Vinci’s statement five hundred years ago that “there are three classes of people in relation to art: Those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see.” We could, perhaps, add one more class: those who, for various reasons, are not seen. Many of our new citizens have been brought up in a tradition of cultural engagement and participation, and there are large numbers of artists of different ethnic origins in Norway. 2008 is the first year where this cultural diversity is seen, thus we are celebrating the year of diversity. 

I have a former British colleague, David Lammy, now Minister for Skills, who grew up as a black minority kid in difficult circumstances in the inner city of London. With great credibility he advocates the importance of investing in people's souls, as well as their skills.  From his own life and experience he learnt the magnificent power of the arts and music to excite, to lift the spirit, and inspire his dreams for a better future.

Culture is a key component in a young person's development, helping increase self-confidence and creativity, and teaching communication and teamwork. Dynamism in arts and culture creates dynamism in a nation. By ensuring access to arts and cultural activities and encouraging cultural participation, we invest in a future with higher cultural capital and a creative and competent population.

Norway has long democratic traditions. To sustain our democracy, we need all citizens to engage and contribute in society. Sometimes special, targeted measures are needed to ensure social inclusion. We have to break the invisible glass ceiling that shut people out from important arenas.  Our cultural diversity policy is closely linked to the issues of access and availability. Our challenge is to bring everybody onboard. Still our cultural life does not mirror our new multi-cultural reality. My aim is that the stories we are told should represent a wider range of realities.  This is a democracy issue. Our new diversity should be reflected in the main cultural activities, in public exhibitions, galleries, art performances, etc. And it should be reflected among art professionals, curators, directors, critics, media and other decision makers within the arts.

Since one generation back, our country has undergone a major transition. Who would have imagined the scope of impact of new information technology or modern migration? Our country now has a greater variety of skin colours, languages, religions and ways of life than ever before in history. Norms are changing. New perceptions and attitudes are emerging. Culturally speaking, and politically, Norway is now tuning in to the wavelength of the world. The transition from conformity to diversity creates a need for reinventing our cultural approach and form new policies.

Information technology ensures that all cultural expressions can now speak to a larger and more complex audience than it did only few years ago. Also, a new generation of artists is emerging, with impulses of both traditions and our new global reality embedded in their work. Their work is shaping Norway’s new cultural identities. In this respect, every artist matters.

There is also a second, important aspect of culture in a globalised world. When people look at the websites of our arts museums from abroad, we are almost inadvertently conducting a form of new diplomacy. The way we present ourselves to the outside world is increasingly becoming more important to our self-image and our relations with other countries. Artists are our best communicators and perhaps the greatest innovators of our time. This makes our cultural institutions more important as promoters of culture and arts, and as arenas for cultural encounters. Museums and art institutions must take a proactive attitude to our new reality as society develops. To make a difference, it is vital that they are developing and renewing in order to attract the public at large. The message is: Look around, think anew, redefine, and innovate.

One of the important objectives of our Year of Cultural Diversity is to integrate multicultural aspects of arts and culture in institutions and activities that receive public funding. Our aim is to put in place a new state of mind, a curious, innovative, open-minded new attitude in a population who welcomes the challenges of an open world. Our “grand project” is to bring people together - especially people who have never shared experiences before - and to build lasting and trusting relationships for the future. Hopefully the Year of Diversity will bring people of our country to discover new exciting elements of our cultural diversity and to look at our culture from a different perspective.

Social and cultural policies are closely allied. Arts and culture could constitute the incident room that we need for dealing with social challenges. John F. Kennedy said that: “If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity”. Today more than ever, we need arts as a means of communicating, as a basis for dialogue. Not necessarily to agree, but to understand. Arts can provide a common basis for understanding across social and cultural divides.

Our present actions are forming the society for the next decades, thus shaping the future for the next generation. Assuming we can strike a balance between individual freedom and personal responsibility, diversity may generate and nurture spiritual as well as material values for our society.

A vision of the good society means that we should invest in people’s souls as well as their skills. And never has there been a better opportunity to make this a reality. Together, we shall break the invisible glass ceiling that stops groups or individuals from taking part in ordinary cultural life. I am confident that quality and aesthetics will prevail. We need good quality art: to provoke and reconcile, to create contrasts and bring clarity, to challenge and to confront - and to create bonds between people. We have an excellent starting position. We have a platform to build on.

I hope that, by the end of this year, we will be able to congratulate our institutions on their remarkable achievements in making the multicultural aspects of our society a more visible and more integrated part of their activities. Norwegians will not become any less Norwegian if, in Mahatma Gandhi’s metaphor, we open the doors and windows and let foreign winds blow through our house. The strength of our culture lies in its ability to absorb foreign influences and to transform them into something that enriches our cultural legacy for the future.

Dear friends, for the purpose of future challenges, allow me to rephrase the initial key question: Are there outsiders to arts – and if so, how can they be included? Answering the questions ensuing from this will take us a big leap forward towards achieving our aims.

I wish you good luck in your deliberations!

Thank you!