The Status of the Artist, Cultural Rights and the 2005 Convention

A tribute to Professor Milena Dragićević Šešić’

Abstract

This article is written in the spirit of a festschrift, in honour of recently retired Professor Milena Dragićević Šešić. Once Rector of the University of Arts, Belgrade, and the UNESCO Chair in Cultural Policy and Management, Professor Milena’s work and personal charisma have made a European-wide impact on both students and scholars, artists and activists. Her example is one of a university academic who is socially-engaged, politically astute, and who possseses the communication skills that have enabled her to participate in cultural politics at the highest level. Her contribution towards cultural thought and freedom of expression in her own country of Serbia (Yugoslavia until the early 1990s) will offer an important intellectual legacy. The aim of this article is to contribute to the emergence of this legacy by discussing our current policy understanding of artistic freedom in a way that amplifies its intellectual complexity as well as its policy necessity. I argue that cultural policy has struggled to defend, artistic freedom, despite many relevant intellectual resources provided by UNESCO; however, there remains hope in the form of a critical attention to the terms of the 2005 Convention and the historical discourse of culture and development from which it emerged.