Slash and burn

“The monuments have no voice. They must have yours,” implores an advertisement campaign released by the Association of Greek Archaeologists this summer, as the country embarks on yet another round of austerity in what the Greeks are calling their Great Depression.

It seems churlish to worry about things like culture when the human cost of the European debt crisis has been so high – thousands in poverty, record suicide rates, a generation lost to unemployment – but the value of art and heritage to society, as well as its vital contribution to the tourist economy, needs no explaining to anyone working in the sector.

Under the strict austerity conditions imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Union (EU), particularly on those countries that have sought bailouts, culture has become a soft target for cuts.

In the country where democracy was born and archaeologists are feted as heroes, the budget for excavations has been slashed by 35%, state-funded museums have received cuts of up to 20% and civil servants had seen their salaries fall by up to 35%, with many now being paid weekly rather than monthly.

“We get so little money now and have to cover for staff that left and will not be replaced,” says one employee of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture, who asked to remain anonymous.

“We work much longer hours and with much more tension. It’s very stressful – there’s an atmosphere of dismay because we see no future. It worsens day by day.”

The ministry has already laid off 10% of its workforce. Because it is difficult to terminate civil sector positions, redundancies are, for now, largely comprised of those nearing retirement – senior staff, such as museum directors, who have worked in the sector for over 30 years. “Their entire experience and expertise is gone with them,” says the ministry employee.

The effects are trickling down to the country’s innumerable cultural and heritage sites. While collections themselves are protected, public access isn’t. “A large number of museums suffer from sporadic closings,” says the ministry employee. Others have had to cancel exhibitions after sponsors pulled out.

And some objects are at risk. On the island of Kythira, a riverbank collapsed earlier this year, exposing hundreds of pieces of Minoan pottery. In more prosperous times, archaeologists would have launched an emergency excavation to salvage the artefacts, but there is no money now to do so. Many items have already been washed out to sea.

Last February armed robbers stole dozens of rare antiquities from the Ancient Olympia Museum. A month before that, the overnight theft of paintings by Picasso and Mondrian from the National Art Gallery in Athens attracted worldwide headlines.

Those thefts were more likely due to poor management than budget cuts, says the ministry employee, but even so, funding for museum security is about to be cut by 20%, making existing security weaknesses difficult to rectify.

Desperate measures

This reshaping of the cultural landscape is not confined to just one European nation. The wave of austerity and economic gloom sweeping across the continent has already claimed several high-profile casualties.

Spain’s economic freefall has left a legacy of white elephants dotted around the country – abandoned architectural wonders conceived in what seems like another age, when optimism was high and the construction industry was booming.

Some were earmarked to be art galleries or museums, like the Centro Niemeyer in Avilés, which was intended to emulate the success of Bilbao’s Guggenheim but closed last December after just nine months.

Spain’s most famous museum, the Prado in Madrid, has had to deal with a €6m cut in its annual budget of €42m, according to a report by Reuters earlier this year. The museum has responded by opening seven days a week in order to increase revenues. The museum charges €12 for entry and it received 2.9 million visitors in 2011.

Elsewhere, Rome’s Maxxi Museum, a national gallery for 21st-century art designed by renowned architect Zaha Hadid, only opened two years ago but has been taken under government control because of a £650,000 hole in its finances; its future remains uncertain. Florence has lost its only contemporary art museum, EX3.

Even before the Eurozone crisis, Italy’s vast cultural sector had long been drained of funding by the now-ousted Berlusconi government, which shrank the sector’s share of the national budget to just 0.2%.

Serious concerns have been expressed by bodies such as Unesco about the condition of one of the world’s most important heritage sites, the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, after the House of the Gladiators collapsed in 2010.

Like the Greek thefts, the problem may owe more to longstanding neglect and mismanagement rather than current budget reductions, but ongoing cuts will do little to halt the decline.

With the country’s new technocratic government looking to find savings of €59.8bn, austerity measures are beginning to take effect. In the museum sector, these have hit activities more than staff numbers, says Margherita Sani, a project manager at the Institute for Cultural Heritage in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region.

“Generally speaking, permanent employees have kept their jobs,” says Sani. “The cuts have been on activities like exhibitions, educational programmes – some of these have been cut by up to 80%. One thing that particularly strikes you is that museums are closing early or only opening on certain days of the week.”

In April this year, Antonio Manfredi, director of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples, found an eye-catching way to protest against the cuts – publicly burning two artworks from the museum’s collection with the blessing of the artist, Severine Bourguignon, who watched her works go up in flames live online.

Private revenue

“The survival of the museum is such an important cause that it justifies the despicable, and painful, act of destroying a work of art,” said Bourguignon afterwards.

Like the UK, private sponsorship is being touted as a replacement for public funding in Italy. Some sites, including Rome’s most famous attraction, the Colosseum, and the Rialto Bridge in Venice, have started allowing private companies to use them for fashion shows, parties and visual advertising.

Not all institutions are able to boost their finances in this way, says Sani.

“[Statefunded] museums are not autonomous in the way they are managed and the crisis has worsened this. Many have to give back their profits at the end of the year. There are no counter measures to say, ‘Yes you have less funds but more freedom to cooperate with other organisations.’

“Being made up of technocrats, we thought this new government could do something, but a year has gone by and nothing has been done. It has been a big disappointment.”

North of the continent, visitors to the James Joyce Tower and Museum in Dublin – popular with tourists as it features in the first chapter of the author’s Ulysses – found the venue shut temporarily this summer. Staff had been let go and the museum is now being run by volunteers.

Irreversible damage warnings

Nearby, the Irish capital’s Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, is one of a number of institutions forced to close galleries during the busy summer season because of staff cuts. Publicly funded institutions and salaries have been cut by around 10% since 2007.

In the fifth year of a deep recession, Ireland has been praised by its EU/IMF paymasters for the efficiency with which it has reduced public sector spending – but unsurprisingly the government’s measures have received a far less warm welcome at home.

The Republic’s national cultural institutions, including the National Museum and National Library, were made independent of the government in 1997, but the culture minister is now planning to bring them back under departmental control.

Rather than saving money, it is a cosmetic attempt by the government to be seen to be abolishing anything that resembles a quango, says Pat Cooke, professor of museum studies at University College Dublin and former director of the Kilmainham Gaol museum.

“All of this ‘reverse engineering’ is in the interest of some opaque savings for which no cost-benefit analysis has yet been provided,” says Cooke. “The national institutions languished in total neglect under the department of education for 70 years and now they want to put them back there.

“The government feel that they can take liberties with culture as the lobbies are more powerful in other sectors,” he adds.

Further afield, Bosnia Herzegovina’s seven national institutions are in a critical situation because government funding has almost dried up. Several have closed.

“The situation [in Europe] right now is very serious,” says Julien Anfruns, the director of the International Council of Museums (Icom). “A lot of governments are just reshaping the programme of heritage, and private sponsorship won’t be willing to take over.

“We need governments to have a strong look and only make necessary cuts, not blind cuts. We have to be extremely careful about irreversible damage.”

Anfruns said Icom was calling on the EU to establish a clear cultural agenda and appealed to individual governments to ensure the protection of heritage.

Back in Athens, one new institution is thriving – the Money Museum, which opened two years ago and tells the history of currency, commerce and economics.

Residents and schools have been flocking to the museum to gain an insight into how their country’s debt crisis came about, and how it might be prevented in future.

Geraldine Kendall is a freelance arts journalist

Although the situation in northern European nations is generally seen as more stable, the government of the Netherlands has imposed an “astonishing” 20% cut to the country’s culture budget, according to Siebe Weide, director of the Netherlands Museums Association.

As well as resulting in several cases of financially motivated disposal, the cuts have forced four institutions with collections of national significance to close to the public.

 “There will be a budget to care for the collections but not enough to open for the public, so everyone is paying for them but nobody can see them,” says Weide.

Museums that have shut include Huis Doorn, the house Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany fled to after world war one. “Germans cannot imagine that such a significant heritage site could be closed to the public,” adds Weide.

The GeldMuseum in Utrecht has had to deal with big cuts in its budget and a loss of staff.

In addition, the renowned ethnological Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam was almost closed down in response to cuts. It was only saved after a public outcry and earlier this year had to close its library because of government cutbacks.

“Years ago we would not have expected a move like that,” says Weide. “Nothing is sacred and secure anymore.”

Weide says that for the government, “short-term budget discipline is of a higher importance than long-term philosophy”.

“That’s what you get when cultural policy is brought back to accountancy.”