The network of state cultural institutions in Lithuania has changed very little over the past 30 years. Some museums were merged, combining several smaller museums into a single administrative unit with branches, while some museums gained new departments after being entrusted with the operation of newly restored heritage buildings. For example, in 2012, the National Museum of Art was given a newly restored building that became the Vytautas Kasiulis Art Museum and houses the collection of the artist’s works and personal archive donated to Lithuania in 2010 by the painter’s widow, Bronė Kasiulienė, and transferred to the Lithuanian Art Museum by their son, Vytautas Kasiulis. Some private theatres, born out of purely private artistic initiatives, eventually began receiving stable support from municipalities. For example, the independent dance group “Aura,” founded in 1980 by choreographer Birutė Letukaitė, became a municipal theatre of the city of Kaunas in 1995. Founded in 2006, the theatre troupe “Bohemians” became the public institution Vilnius City Opera in 2012, with the Vilnius Municipality as one of its stakeholders.
The efficiency and relevance of the state cultural institutions network in providing the population with the necessary cultural services were examined and evaluated several times by the National Audit Office of Lithuania and by experts who conducted special studies. Many of these studies revealed that there is no clear difference between the national and state institutions, their activities and their performance evaluation. For example, the purpose of national theatres, defined by the Law on Professional Performing Art, is to present the most outstanding national and foreign achievements of opera, ballet, drama and music art; represent the creation of high artistic value; form the image of Lithuanian culture; develop international creative partnership; and ensure access to professional performing arts for all societal groups of the country. The purpose of state theatres is to develop a distinctive trend of professional performing arts; present classical and contemporary professional performing arts works of high artistic value in Lithuania and abroad; develop public demand for professional performing arts; and ensure access to professional performing arts for all societal groups of the country. The evaluation of the achievement of these purposes, however, lacks clear methods and is mostly based on quantitative indicators that do not necessarily show the artistic quality of the performances and of the overall creative programme of the institution.
The lack of a unified, clear and comprehensive system of evaluation is one of the basic problems of the Ministry of Culture’s management of the state cultural institutions system. Quantitative data is collected only on state institutions, mainly museums and theatres; the municipal and private sectors are not reflected in this data, and qualitative data, even about state institutions, is collected in a very sporadic way. Without the qualitative evaluation criteria of the performance of institutions, the evaluation is incomplete, since the quantitative criteria do not reflect changes in public attitudes, results of expert evaluations, etc. As a result, the Ministry of Culture does not have the data needed to measure the quality of the institutions’ performance and cannot tie the funding of institutions with the quality of their performance.
The other problem of the state cultural institutions network, stated in the Lithuanian Cultural Policy Strategy 2030 and reiterated in the Culture and Creativity development programme 2021 –2030, is its unevenness in terms of accessibility. The main professional cultural institutions are concentrated in the major cities, and the services they provide are not evenly accessible throughout the territory of Lithuania. The accessibility of high artistic value cultural services reached only 28 per cent in 2019, and the goal stated in the Culture and Creativity development programme is to improve this indicator to 50 per cent by 2030. Culture is the least accessible in villages and small towns. To address this strategic issue, the Ministry of Culture has undertaken or plans to finance various cultural mobility activities, such as travelling museum exhibitions, free exchange of books and other documents between the country’s libraries, upgrading cultural institutions’ infrastructure and adapting it for people with disabilities, as well as adapting various services (media, book reading, museum exhibitions) for people with disabilities, taking performing arts productions of national and state theatres to the country’s regions, and so on.
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