Creating critical mass in cultural management education: Learning from an arts and cultural management programme in Turkey

Abstract

If today the departments of “cultural management” (in its broadest term) have been in existence for almost four decades, it is in part because of the existence of the “cultural industries”. If this concept’s founder and critical theorist, Theodore Adorno, indeed stigmatised cultural industries as “predominance of profit … over culture”, how can the rise and importance of this academic field be accounted for? This article proposes to reconstruct, analytically, a narrative of the rise of arts and cultural management departments, established almost two decades ago in Istanbul and which has been producing graduates in Turkey since that time. This article argues that, as a micro-case, the knowledge that this experience affords us is worth discussing and taking into consideration while trying to address the question of “cultural industries” as a pedagogic field.