Austria

Last update: November, 2020

The aim of the involvement and participation of as many citizens as possible in art and culture is shared on many sides; political declarations of intent, laws, strategies and mission statements affirm this across all the bodies responsible for cultural policy. In order to reach more and broader strata of the population, different provisions and formats for audience development and art and cultural mediation have been initiated by cultural policy. Individual institutions also developed provisions and formats to open up new target groups and to lower barriers and enable participation for all.

The event Long Night of Museums was created in 2000, as an initiative of ORF (Austrian Broadcasting) and has been very successful in increasing the number of museum visits. Every year there are more than 400 000 visitors in about 800 museums, galleries and cultural institutions. Since 2000, a total of almost 5 million people have visited the Long Nights of the Museums. Visitors only need one ticket and there are buses to hop from museum to museum. Similarly successful is the Long Night of Music, also initiated by the ORF in 2001. Like so many others, these events could unfortunately not take place in 2020. Instead, an action week “ORF Museumszeit” in cooperation with a lot of museums and a broad media coverage was brought into being. 

A particularly significant measure for the promotion of access to art and culture is the free admission to all federal museums for people up to the age of 19 as from 2009. This led to a rise in visitors of 15% in this age group.

Since 2018, there has been a joint annual ticket (Bundesmuseen-Card) for seven Austrian federal museums and the National Library. The annual season ticket for one admission to every federal museum and the National Library costs EUR 59.

The initiative Hungry for Art and Culture (see chapter 2.6), which includes more than 500 art and cultural institutions, is an important tool in promoting participation in culture, in particular the socially more disadvantaged sections of society.

The City of Vienna has launched the Cultural City Laboratories, an initiative in the field of decentralised culture, in order to revitalise the suburbs. The cultural city laboratories build on an existing network of cultural initiatives and cultural actors and focus on cooperation and synergies. In the coming years, cooperation projects between people, districts, artists and cultural institutions are to be realised. The city laboratories use art to deal with the individual districts and their population and are intended to create social spaces and invite involvement and participation. The pilot project started in 2019 in the twelve outer districts of Vienna with a total budget of EUR 700 000.

In Vienna and other federal provinces, on the Orchestra for All action day (June 5^th, 2019) railway stations were the venues for small concerts and participatory actions. These were organised for the second time by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Musikvermittlung österreichischer Berufsorchester (AMÖB), a professional orchestras’ group for music education. The aim is to create public enthusiasm for classical music outside of the concert hall. In Salzburg, Klagenfurt, Graz and Innsbruck, the orchestras invited people to their respective main railway stations, in Linz and Bregenz to the city centre. The Vienna Symphony Orchestra is on a similar mission when they give family concerts at unusual venues on the outskirts of Vienna. A special highlight in 2019 was an open-air concert on May 19^th on the occasion of the 100^th anniversary of Viennese council housing.

Last update: October, 2019

Data concerning cultural participation are not collected on a regular basis in Austria. It is therefore not possible to provide the share of population in cultural activities, but merely the absolute visitor numbers provided by STATISTIK AUSTRIA.

The last time-use survey by STATISTIK AUSTRIA was carried out in 2008/2009. This source does not provide the share of population but shows how much time is averagely spent on various cultural activities. It shows that people over the age of ten have on average 3 hours and 19 minutes of leisure time in an average day (5 hours at weekends). In this leisure time, men spend about 1.4% on cultural activities, women somewhat less, although women spend more time than men reading books (2.7% against 1.9%). Watching television consumes most of the leisure time: 79.4% (weekdays) and 82.6% (weekend), with an average of 2 hours and 20 minutes (weekdays) and 2 hours and 54 minutes (weekend). Listening to the radio or to music is less popular: only 4.7% (weekdays) and 5.2% (weekend) of the population spend approximately one hour of their leisure time on this.

The last Eurobarometer survey on cultural access and participation in the EU-28 from 2013 shows a 3 percent decline of participation in cultural activities since 2007. Only 11% of Austrians declared to be highly or very highly engaged in cultural activities (compared to 18% in the EU average). However, they obtain better results in specific activities: 73% declared they had read at least one book in the previous 12 months (a 6 percent decrease since the last survey in 2007, but still higher than the EU average of 68%); 59% of Austrians had gone to the cinema (+3%; EU average 52%); 57% had visited a historical monument or site (+7%; EU average 52%); 42% a museum or gallery (+3%; EU average 37%); 52% a concert (+9%; EU average 35%); and 40% a theatre (-2%; EU average 28%). Visits to the opera were rarer, as well as visits to public libraries and the consumption of a cultural programme on TV or on the radio. 44% of Austrians were involved in cultural activities themselves: 16% dance (EU average 13%), 14% take photographs (EU average 12%) and 12% sing (EU average 11%) or play an instrument (EU average 8%).

Data on income and living conditions of people in private households (EU-SILC/European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions 2015) are available on visits to cultural events by people aged 16 and over. These show that 53% of the population visited live events such as concerts, theatres and operas. 48% went to the cinema, 44% visited cultural sites such as monuments, museums and art galleries, and 36% went to sports events. With the exception of sports events, cultural activities are highly dependent on the highest level of education completed: while about two-thirds of the population with compulsory schooling have never attended such events, the proportion drops to 31% and below for people with a university degree. Going to the cinema was particularly attractive for the younger age groups. There also was a marked influence of household income on cultural participation.

Women were slightly more likely to go to live events such as concerts, theatres and operas. (7 percentage points difference to men). With regard to visits to cultural sites such as monuments, museums, art galleries and cinemas, there were hardly any differences according to gender (2 and 1 percentage points respectively), while sporting events were more a male domain (18 percentage points difference).

In 2015, a Study on Cultural Participation was commissioned by the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna (MA 7) for the first time. It provided an overview of the use of cultural offerings and an analysis of group-specific differences in cultural participation. The study shows that the vast majority of the population attend cultural events and are satisfied with the cultural offerings. It becomes clear that younger people participate more actively in cultural life than older people. Furthermore, it can be seen that more highly educated people use the cultural offerings more often than people with lower education. However, it cannot be confirmed that people with only compulsory-level schooling or apprenticeship qualifications are completely ‘remote from culture’: 89 percent of people with only compulsory-level schooling attended at least one cultural programme last year. For people who have completed an apprenticeship, the figure is as high as 93 percent.

The study also shows that second-generation immigrants are significantly more culturally active than the first generation. It is striking that second-generation immigrants are even more culturally active than people without an immigrant background. Other forms of participation and opportunities for (informal) further education play an important role. Visiting cultural events such as exhibitions or theatre evenings is utilised as an opportunity to get to know new things, broaden their own horizons and participate in Austrian culture.

Table 3: People who participated in or attended a certain cultural activity during the last 12 months in Austria (over three years, absolute visitor numbers)

Source(s):
Statistik Austria, Kulturstatistik (several years), Zeitverwendungserhebung 2008/09.

Notes:  
na: not available

1 Represents a lower limit, because data is not available for all stages. 2 2014 3 2015 4 2016 5 2017

Last update: October, 2019

Table 4: Household cultural expenditure by expenditure purpose, 2009/10 and 2014/15

Source:  STATISTIK AUSTRIA, Kulturstatistik 2018, Table KP4 p. 193, KP5 p. 194

Last update: November, 2020

Cultural initiatives are an important part of Austria’s art and cultural landscape. As cultural providers are also active outside of the urban centres, their programmes enable numerous people to participate in art and culture. Within the framework of their events, they offer opportunities for artists to perform and present their work, but they also form creative stimuli through their own art and cultural projects and thus form a popular experimental field for new young trends. In this way, they contribute to a lively and diverse image of Austria as a cultural country. Above all, innovative, time-related and experimental cultural forms and socio-cultural initiatives, in particular art and cultural activities, which develop new themes in the field of contemporary art and culture while taking regional, cultural and social conditions into account, are publicly promoted. IG Kultur, which represents the interests of freelance cultural initiatives and associations, currently has 823 members, some three hundred of them have been annually funded by a special department in the Arts and Culture Division of the BMKOES, and there are also regional and local funding opportunities. Many people work on a voluntary basis, as the nationwide survey 3^rd Volunteering Report (see also chapter 1.2.5) shows: 6% of the Austrian population over 15 years are working voluntary in differing forms in the area of art and culture, especially in cultural initiatives. However, the shift from basic funding to project-oriented funding has made continuous work more difficult for small-scale cultural associations.

Amateur arts also play a major role in everyday life in Austria: there are numerous adult education courses in the field of ‘creativity’, provided by the 270 adult education centres. The music school’s system facilitates a nationwide education programme in the field of music. Moreover, there are over 14 500 cultural associations active in the fields of amateur music, theatre and singing in Austria. Although all these establishments promote activities in the sphere of amateur arts, above all in the rural areas, these are neither an object of public debate and discussion, nor have they been surveyed and assessed by academic research.