News
| 31.03.2025

The Conversation: Art for art’s sake? How NZ’s cultural organisations can maintain integrity and still make money

Cultural organisations have to navigate a complex landscape where financial pressures and cultural missions intersect and create tensions, writes Doctoral Researcher Ksenia Kosheleva and Professor Kaj Storbacka from Hanken School of Economics and Associate Professor Julia Fehrer from University of Auckland in an article for the Conversation.

“When Auckland mayor Wayne Brown said in 2022 that the Auckland Art Gallery had the foot traffic of a corner dairy and cast the institution as an ‘uneconomic’ entity, he conceded he was at risk of ‘being seen as something of a philistine’.

But the mayor’s comments also highlighted a very real challenge. How can New Zealand cultural organisations secure their future when the value of art and culture is seen through the economic lens of profit? And does an overemphasis on profit make cultural groups wary of market and strategy, hampering innovation in the art and culture sector?

Our research proposes a concept we call ‘generative coexistence’. We suggest that when market approaches are integrated thoughtfully, market forces and cultural missions can work together and enable each other.”

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Art for art’s sake? How NZ’s cultural organisations can maintain integrity and still make money