Karen van den Berg

Today, art and culture no longer source their self-understanding in mere traditions but in notions such as difference, criticism and self-questioning. Thus the legitimization patterns of cultural institutions are changing to the extent that institutions are them-selves compelled to continually provide answers to the question of why we need them.

This need to legitimize themselves may seem laborious but it also carries potential in pluralistic societies. It is therefore important to transcend the grumbling rhetoric heard in the discussions surrounding the upholding or transformation of cultural institutions. The great danger of polemical debate – including the one concerning the Künstlerhaus Bethanien – lies in construing artificial antagonists, thus preventing all genuine exchange on potential futures to take place.

My proposal is therefore to use a (re-)definition of the brand Künstlerhaus Bethanien as a point of departure for a series of strategic decisions – despite the fact that “branding” is a concept from the realm of economics and thus belongs to a particularly well-defined “enemy” since Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment, meaning that using the word “branding” in relation to artistic and cultural institutions immediately exposes you to the suspicion of defending a neo-liberal position, i.e. of championing the colonization of cultural work by economics. Asking the question of the public is equally suspicious, supposedly testifying of a corrupt consumer ideology geared towards demand. This conception is obviously mistaken, since cultural work in pluralistic societies is always a way of searching and a form of defining one’s position as well, and always refers to a potential public. The notion of participation may well have become one of the main principles of artistic practice in the past decades, but as soon as it is applied to institutions we witness the various actors defending their territories instead of clarifying ideas and expectations or arguing limits and restrictions.

It goes without saying that the way it is used in the consumer goods industry, the idea of branding cannot be indistinctly applied to cultural institutions. The idea of the brand did not emerge in economics properly speaking; it is rather a technique of generating attributions and identities so as to achieve a specific form of public perception. I would like to render this idea plausible as a scenic, performative and communicative technique which may be used in the contextualization of contemporary artistic practice and which consequently also carries potential as far as the Künstlerhaus Bethanien is concerned.