The trends of change in public cultural institutions can be summarised as follows:
– The share of state spending on culture is particularly high, partly due to the construction of representative cultural institutions. One of these is the museum district being built in Budapest’s City Park: House of Music Hungary (2021), Museum of Ethnography (2022) and the planned new National Gallery. The other major cultural project in Budapest is the restoration of the lost architectural heritage of the Castle District: the Royal Palace, the Palace of Joseph the Prince, the Royal Riding Hall. The government also aims to restore historic buildings across the country through the National Castle Programme. However, this programme also involves privatisation, as it is not profitable for the state to maintain more castles.
– Another trend affecting public cultural institutions is centralisation: the Museum of Applied Arts, the National Museum, the National Széchényi Library, the Petőfi Literary Museum, the Museum of Trade and Hospitality, and the Museum of Natural History have been merged into a Hungarian National Museum Public Collection Centre. (See 3.1.) There was also a plan to centralise local cultural institutions (theatre, library, local museum). In this plan, the local institutions would have been placed under a national umbrella body (National Theatre, National Museum) with administrative / financial accountability. The proposal of the Minister of Culture, which was met with great protest from the cultural community, was not implemented.
– The government is placing a strong focus on the development of a unified cultural strategy, as indicated by the 2019 law on the so called priority cultural strategic institutions. These are 17 items that range from the National Theatre to the Film Institute. Besides 11 budgetary institutions, these include 4 nonprofit limited companies and 2 nonprofit shareholding companies. Next to 16 customary cultural institutions the Institute for Hungarian Studies (Magyarságkutató Intézet, in fact a research centre) belongs to the group of 17. They are financed by the national budget based on five-year agreements with the government. The same Act established the National Cultural Council chaired by a minister and comprising the heads of the cultural strategy institutions plus the chairman of the Hungarian Arts Academy – MMA.
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