As long as there is art, there is hope

Written by Natalie Giorgadze, General Director of Culture Action Europe. Excerpt from her keynote at the Open Eyes Economy Summit in Kraków, Poland, in November 2025.

Across the EU, 7.7 million people work in culture and the creative sectors—3.8% of total employment.  The cultural and creative ecosystem generates around 4% of EU value added, with significant spillovers into innovation across the wider economy.  Yet we invest ~0.5% of GDP in cultural services across the EU. That’s a striking mismatch… 

Culture contributes directly to the economy, but also indirectly. A mapping of 275 European regions shows that cultural and creative activity is positively associated with labour productivity—culture helps other sectors do better.  At EU level, analyses suggest each euro invested in common actions supporting culture can generate up to €11 of GDP; European Capitals of Culture often deliver €8–10 for every €1 invested. These returns are impressive. But—this is not what I came to tell you. 

 From cave drawings to folk dances and living traditions, to contemporary arts—culture has always been a language and a practice for making sense of the human and more-than-human world around us, a way to hold the past, the present, and the future together. 

 Culture – profit-driven or not – is rooted in creativity and values. Precisely for that reason, it resists full integration into extractive economic logic. Creativity and values don’t scale like capital. As Justin O’Connor says, culture is not an industry. Treat it only as such, and we miss its real nature: a common public good—part of the social infrastructure that underpins rights and values, democratic trust, and an ethical society. 

 If we say culture is a public good, we are saying it belongs with our foundational infrastructures—not an optional extra, but part of what keeps a society liveable and democratic. Culture works best when it is treated as infrastructure that delivers collective benefits and is governed openly and democratically—because its importance grows the more people use it and shape it together. 

 That’s the heart of cultural democracy. Beyond access to and participation in culture, it’s about capability and authorship—people’s real power to make, share, and decide on culture in everyday settings. You can see this approach in current advocacy of Culture Action Europe and other cultural advocates across Europe and beyond: framing culture as a universal human right and a universal public good, and calling for participatory, decentralised governance, stronger cultural infrastructures, and fair conditions for cultural workers—so that the cultural ecosystem itself becomes regenerative, not extractive. As Culture Action Europe’s State of Culture in Europe 2024 report puts it: “culture can contribute to democracy, only if it is democratic itself”. 

 Let me make this concrete with two stories of such cultural infrastructure for democracy—one in a theatre, one in a museum. 

 Let’s travel to Brussels, to Kaaitheater. When a duo of CEOs, Agnes Quackels and Barbara Van Lindt took over at Kaaitheater in Brussels, they posed a deceptively simple question: How to be many? They didn’t answer it with a slogan; they changed how the house works. They opened the doors wider and moved across the city, building participation and mediation strategies that bring in different neighbourhoods, languages, and life stories. The program became a platform, not just a season: more many-voiced artists, more formats for meeting and making, more ways for first-time audiences to feel the theatre is theirs.   

 The lesson learned is not only artistic, it is civic: change the room, and you change who can enter; change the process, and you change who can shape the story.  

 In Sarajevo, an ordinary object from a wartime childhood—a pencil, a scarf, a toy—stands beside a first-person testimony. That’s the War Childhood Museum. Since 2017 it has built one of the world’s key archives of growing up in war: thousands of objects and voices from Bosnia and far beyond. Each item is small but together they re-stitch the civic fabric based on empathy, memory, and the permission to recognise one another without dehumanising. This is public good in action: a place where “others” stop being abstract, and a city practises remembering as a democratic skill. 

 Indeed, we are not one thing; we are many—and becoming many is the work: listening as well as leading, moving from representation to real participation, from access to authorship, from consuming to co-creating. 

 But public goods can come with public bads if we neglect them. By public bads, I mean the harms that spread when culture isn’t cared for: silence where voices should be, gatekeeping that shuts people out, nostalgia weaponised into retrotopia, and extraction – creativity used without fair pay or care. Regeneration means designing for goods and against those bads. 

 Across Europe, cultural funding is tightening—sometimes sharply—as budgets pivot to other urgencies. We cannot defend openness when support is shrinking. So here is what it takes—politically, in policy, and in finance—to keep cultural infrastructures open, porous, and fair. 

•  Recognise culture as a right & a public good, adopt cultural rights frameworks and budget it accordingly. Because culture contributes to democracy, cohesion, health and well-being.  
•  Resource culture –  at scale 
  • Increase AgoraEU (successor of Creative Europe program) budget and aim for at least 2% of cultural investment in the next EU Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF).  
  • Fund the infrastructure, not just events. Shift from project-based funding to multiyear core funding for: Spaces, Processes and People  
• Make fair work nonnegotiable 
  • Implement the sectors’ calls (backed by the European Parliament) for an EU framework that improves the social and professional situation of artists.  
• Adopt Culture Action Europe’s three concepts – Ask Pay Trust 
  • Ask artists—bring them into policy and decisionmaking early, not as decoration at the end. 
  • Pay fairly for their work 
  • Trust the process—experimentation doesn’t always fit a spreadsheet; Embrace unpredictability of art, fund learning loops, not just deliverables.  

When we invest like this, we don’t just buy “shows”; we create public value. We have already seen it in health: the WHO’s evidence synthesis across 3,000+ studies shows arts engagement contributes to prevention, treatment and better health outcomes across the life course.  

 People sometimes say art is powerless. I think it’s the opposite. Art gives us the possibility to remain powerful especially when the ground starts shifting. 

Uncertainty is something we usually fear. Policymakers and funders, in particular, dislike uncertainty—today’s multiple crises and rapid changes push political strategies toward pragmatism, short-term fixes, and cautious choices. Everything but uncertainty, please!  

 But for artists, uncertainty is not an obstacle — it is often a starting point. They thrive in ambiguity, in the unknown, in the space between what is and what could be. Arts and culture have a remarkable ability to hold ambiguity without collapsing into confusion; to make space for contradiction, to welcome paradox.   

 In moments of uncertainty, when panic could close us down, the arts can open us up. Artists create the narratives and the images that allow us to imagine futures that do not yet exist. Arts and culture can show us not only what is wrong with the present, but what else could be possible. They teach us to rehearse alternatives, to see the cracks where new possibilities can come through.  

 And just one last thing about hope. Across Europe, people are reclaiming hope not as a mood but as a method—a way to navigate uncertainty and imagine better futures together. Not just hope but an actionable hope. The kind that resists, the kind that imagines, dares and does. Hope that chooses to act again and again for justice, for joy and for each other. 

 When panic narrows the horizon, art keeps it open. It redistributes voice, enlarges who belongs, and widens what is thinkable in a democracy. Art is political, not because it serves a party, but because it expands democratic agency. Art keeps alive our shared capacity to imagine—and to practice—the not-yet. 

 As long as there is art, there is hope.