Culture in danger: 620 artists protest against ORF savings!

Culture in danger: 620 artists protest against ORF savings!

In the Austrian cultural landscape, planned savings at ORF ensures great concern among cultural workers. 620 personalities and 90 art and cultural institutions have signed an official appeal in which they call for the retention of the "Topos" cultural platform. This decision of the ORF to stop the platform at the end of the year was made on the basis of cost reasons and strategic considerations, as reports.

The initiative comes from Gerhard Ruiss, the managing director of the IG authors, and among the signatories there are renowned personalities such as Maria Bill, Elfriede Jelinek and Michael Köhlmeier. Supporting institutions, including the old smithy and the umbrella organization of the Austrian filmmakers, also show their concern about this development.

attitude of "topos"

"Topos" was launched in 2022 and was designed as a platform for cultural, social and scientific topics. It combined long texts with pictures and videos to create new narrative forms. The closure is regarded by critical voices as a loss for cultural reporting, while the ORF confirmed that parts of the content should be integrated into other offers, in accordance with The press .

It remains unclear how many employees will be affected by the closure. Publisher had previously criticized the "newspaper similarity" of the platform, which may have contributed to the decision of the ORF.

cultural infrastructure in Austria

The background of these developments is the financial situation of cultural funding in Austria, which, according to a study by the KDZ, is diverse on behalf of the city of Innsbruck. In 2022, federal funding for the cultural sector was 510 million euros, with 75% going to national institutions such as the Bundestheater and Bundesmuseen. This shows the importance of the federal government for the country's cultural infrastructure. For Vienna, 58 million euros and 18 million euros were spent on Salzburg, as KDZ reported.

Public cultural expenditure in Austria was around 2.1 billion euros, with the country budgets to wear most. The per capita editions differ greatly between the federal states, whereby Vienna, Salzburg and Vorarlberg have the highest amounts. The current discussion about the distribution of funds and savings in the cultural sector shows the fragile structures that are dependent on solid financial support.

The cultural workers urgently demand that they do not use funds from the art and cultural sector for other projects, such as the song contest, to secure the cultural diversity and quality in Austria in the long term.