Power to the people, for Culture

Berlin has just done something the culture world has been begging for, for decades. It put a number on us.

The new IKTf study on culture as a location factor in Berlin, supported by the Senate’s own culture administration, calculates that every euro of public cultural funding returns more than 3.50 euros to the city. For museums and memorials, up to seven. Berlin spends around 528 million euros a year on its funded institutions and receives about 1.88 billion euros back. A surplus of more than 1.35 billion euros, every single year.

And it goes further. Berliners who attend four or more cultural events a year gain as much in well-being and health as a pay rise of up to 2,700 euros would. Ninety per cent of Berlin companies say the city’s cultural offer matters when they recruit. Of the 12.7 million visitors who came in 2024, six in ten cited art and culture as a reason for coming, placing Berlin alongside Paris and London. The cultural and creative economy creates more value here than pharma or mechanical engineering.

The proof is on the table

There is something almost absurd about a civilisation that needs a study to justify keeping its own culture alive. But fine. We produced the study. The proof is on the table, with the Senate’s name on it.

So the argument is over, no? Culture is not a subsidy. It is one of the best investments a city can make.

And yet the budgets are still being cut.

Sit with that sentence for a moment, because everything I want to say lives inside it. If numbers could save culture, they would have saved it by now. This is not the first study of its kind, and it will not be the last, because we have been producing this evidence for twenty years, in every language a finance committee understands.

The numbers are necessary. They are not enough. Nobody has ever wept over a spreadsheet, and nobody has ever defended one in the street.

What the spreadsheet cannot hold

The deepest argument for culture is not the return on investment, the unsexy ROI artists and directors of cultural institutions hate hearing. It is the silence in the hall after the last note, before the applause. It is the stranger next to you in the cinema wiping her eyes at the same moment as you. It is the teenager who walks out of a dance performance holding herself differently. None of this appears in the 1.88 billion, and all of it is why the 1.88 billion exists.

The study quietly admits as much, almost in passing: 63 per cent of everything that flows back to Berlin comes from the audience’s own spending. People book the trip, buy the ticket, stay the night, come back next year, because of what they felt the last time. The feeling is the engine of the entire economy the study describes. We keep measuring the exhaust and calling it the argument.

Success is measured only with tickets

The whole apparatus of cultural success stands on tickets sold, and a ticket is bought before the experience. A ticket measures the poster, the trailer, the reach of a marketing campaign. It measures the promise, never what was kept. We know, to the last seat, how many people walked into the hall. We know nothing about how they walked out. Everything culture actually does to a person happens between those two doors, and nobody is measuring it. We need to know how culture moves people.

Which is the strangest thing about this study, and every study like it. It is entirely about the audience and never from the audience. Economists calculated what we spend. Researchers calculated what our well-being is worth. Nobody asked us what an evening of theatre did to us. Nobody ever asks the audience.

Enter the audience

Because more is at stake than a pleasant evening out. What culture gives people is emotional nourishment, and that is not a soft word: it is what makes a person able to think. A film that moves you forces you to hold your life against another one. A play unsettles a certainty you did not know you were carrying. This is where critical judgement is fed, and critical judgement is a pillar of democracy.

And here is the part I have stopped being polite about. The cities that cut us are not confused about the numbers. They commission the study, they read the 3.50, and they cut anyway, which means the cut was never really about the money. Watch what gets starved alongside us. Public broadcasting, the free press, the funded stage: the same budget lines, reached for in the same season, by the same hands. Two operations, one purpose. Starve culture and you shrink what a person is free to feel and to think together with others. Starve public media and you shrink what a person is free to hear. A population that has been made deaf and dumb is not a failure of the policy. It is the policy.

So here is what I want, and yes, it is political. I want the audience to enter the fight. Not the institutions speaking for you. You. Do not wait to be asked. Nobody is going to ask you, we have established that. Speak anyway. If a film carried you through a hard year, say it out loud. If a concert gave you back something you had lost, write it, post it, tell your representative that this is what their budget line actually buys. Ask every candidate who wants your vote one simple question: what will you do for culture? Then demand the other half of the measurement: count not only how many of us walked in, count how we walked out. The theatres, museums, cinemas and concert halls of this city have millions of shareholders. They have simply never been called to vote.

Power to the people, John Lennon sang. Half a century later, I would settle for a smaller revolution. Or perhaps it is not smaller at all. Power to the people for culture and to keep our democracy strong and alive.

Berlin has proved that a euro given to culture comes back as 3.50. Good. Keep the study, quote it, wave it in every committee room; I certainly will. But the real return was never in euros, and you knew that before any study did, the last time a work of art left you changed. It is time that every goose bump is counted too and entirely part of the ROI.

Source: https://www.iktf.berlin/publications/studie-standortfaktor-kultur-berlin/
Photo: Erick McLean on Unsplash