Denmark

Last update: March, 2012

Public culture expenditure per capita, in 2010, was DKK 2 190. This corresponds to 0.7% of the GDP per capita (these numbers are for cultural services only). Other numbers on culture (leisure, culture and religion) are not differentiated in the data provided by Danish Statistics.

Last update: March, 2012

Table 2:    Public cultural expenditure: by level of government, in million DKK, 2006, 2009 and 2011

Source:    The Danish Ministry of Culture / Danish Statistics.
*              Including TV / radio licenses (DKK 4 140 million in 2011) and receipts from the state lottery pools (tipsmidler – DKK 238.3 million in 2011). Receipts from the state sports pools are not included in the numbers (DKK 840.9 million in 2011). Contrary to numbers from 2000, 2003 and 2006, the 2009 and 2011 numbers do not include expenditure from the Ministry of Traffic for press distribution support and money transferred to regions for cultural agreements.
**            The amount added from the Palaces and Properties Agency budget of 2000 cannot be compared directly with the amounts from 2003 and 2006. In 2000, the Agency was not yet divided into two sections and the amount included in the Table above consists only of expenditure for certain large renovation projects for historic buildings (The numbers from The Palaces and Properties Agency included in the Table above are: 33.3 in 2000, 226.8 in 2003 and 253.6 in 2006).
***          Numbers for 2011 are extracted from Denmark's Statistics (Offentlige kulturbevillinger efter tid, kulturemne og finansieringskilde -table BEVIL02). The categories are cultural heritage, media, libraries and literature, stage and music, visual art and design, and other cultural activities. Sports and leisure are not included.

In 2003 and 2006, an additional level of government appears in the budgets of the Ministry of Culture, namely The Greater Copenhagen Authority (HUR), which is a politically-governed regional organisation covering the Greater Copenhagen Region. In the above Table, the culture expenditures of HUR are added to the regional level, although the municipalities in the capital region supply part of the funding for HUR.

By 2007, both HUR and the existing regional governments (amter) were abolished. Instead, five new regional governments have come into existence. These only have limited influence on cultural policies. The prime amount of expenditure of HUR and the regional level (amterne) was transferred to the state in 2007 (see chapter 1.2.2). This is why the 2009 and 2011 figures only include numbers from the state and municipalities.

The expenditures for sports have been subtracted from the budget figures in the above Table. Sports, however, are a considerable part of Danish cultural policy and the municipalities mainly provide the expenditure. If sport would be included, the figures for 2011 would be 53.6% for the state and 46.4% for the municipalities.

Last update: March, 2012

Table 3:    State cultural expenditure: by sector, in million DKK, 2011 (budget figures)

Source:    Danish Statistics. Decimals can differ. As the official report for cultural allocations 2011 (Kulturpenge 2011) was not yet available, these numbers are extracted from Tables provided by Danish Statistics. This means that the actual dissemination of numbers is not as specific as it could have been (see Table 2).
¹                   Including receipts from the state lottery pools (tipsmidler) – not including receipts for the state sports pools.
²                   Since 1999, groups of municipalities had the possibility of establishing a cultural agreement with the Minister of Culture for the period 2004-2007. By such an agreement, the groups of municipalities took over a part of the state's tasks and obligations – and therefore also a yearly cultural framework budget for allocation. These are the only cultural amounts that were transferred from the state to other levels of government. In consequence of the local government reform, all cultural agreements were renegotiated before the end of 2006 and again in 2007.
³                   Preserved buildings and ancient monuments are in this context considered historical monuments.
⁴                   Computer games are included in the figure for films. This is however not a considerable amount, as it is 1.2 million DKK from the state and 0 DKK from municipalities.
⁵                   Radio and television are almost exclusively supported by license funding. The division between radio and television cannot be calculated. Some municipalities support or run local TV and radio-stations, but there is no information available on the total amount of these expenses.
⁶                   Cultural relations abroad and educational activities were not available in the figures from Denmark's Statistics. The interdisciplinary category is therefore composed of administration and what is termed other / interdisciplinary culture – which we chose to place in the socio-cultural column.

Sports are a part of the expenditure of the Danish Ministry of Culture. However, in this Table - as well as in the previous one - the expenditure for sports has been subtracted from the total budget.

Starved institutions

The past year has been hard for national cultural flagships like The Royal Theatre, the National Museum of Denmark, the Royal Library etc. which in recent years have been through downsizing and redundancies (see chapter 2.1). This has led experts to warn that Danish heritage will eventually be threatened because there are insufficient resources to maintain books and museum objects. National Museum guards have warned that security around the museum's 900 000 artefacts is alarmingly poor.

The cuts were a consequence of VKO administration's so-called recovery package, presented on 19 May 2010. The recovery package was a plan for how the government would carry out the necessary rehabilitation of public finances towards 2013 in the wake of the international crisis. There were high expectations that the new government would bring more money to the starving cultural institutions as this was promised by the parties. However, with the presentation of the new governmental programme A Denmark That Stands Together, amended in October 2011 - it was stated that the cultural budget would not to be increased (see chapter 2.1).

The financial disputes over the "bricks"

According to the Royal Theatre's own calculations, the theatre has, since 2000, been continuously subjected to savings. In 2011, 66.5 million DKK must be saved. According to the theatre's own calculations, the savings in 2015 will amount to 100 million DKK annually. Thus, the calculated savings in fact counterbalance the extra appropriation of 100 million DKK annually allocated by the government for artistic operations at the opening of the new Opera House in 2005.

Meanwhile, the additional cost of the buildings increased from 45 million DKK in 2000 to 125 million DKK in 2011 and administrative costs from 45 million DKK in 2000 to 111 million DKK in 2011.

Of the total revenue for the Royal Theatre of about 690 billion DKK approximately, 235 DKK were spent on buildings and administration or approximately 1/3 of the budget spent on art production. In 2000 it was 1/4 to buildings and administration, and 3/4 to content production of drama, ballet and opera.

The Ministry of Culture disagrees with these calculations. But there is consensus that the opera was an expensive gift for the Royal Theatre.

Regardless of what is right or wrong in these calculations, it is difficult to explain away that the relative share of total income to art production dropped from 3/4 to 2/3 between 2001 and 2010 (http://www.politiken.dk, February 5 2008.

Other economic experts advocate the view that the economic crisis and the quality and artistic effects cannot be reduced to a matter of state budget cuts in public or additional public expenses caused by the private donation from the AP. Møller Foundation to build the opera house in 2005.The economic reality should long since have been anticipated and incorporated into realistic plans for the Royal Theatre’s continued operation and artistic activities.

Although the new opera and the new theatre take up a lot of the Royal Theatre's budget, it is not just the buildings that eat the money. In contrast, labour costs have rocketed. In a review of the past 10 years of accounting, Stig Jarl - associate professor in the Department of Arts and Culture at the University of Copenhagen, found that the Royal Theatre spent 260 million DKK on salaries in 2000, while this has risen to 490 million DKK in 2010.

Although the theatre has received two new houses, the Opera in 2005 and the New Theatre House, financed by public means in 2008, the cost of salaries is nowhere near as great as the increase in public support. With the two houses, the cost of buildings increased by 90 million USD annually to 136 million kroner in 2010. But public funding from the state and Copenhagen Municipality during the period grew by 154 million.

So more than 90 million DKK has been publicly allocated extra to the Theatre over and above the cost to manage the buildings of the new Opera House and the New Theatre House. So when accounts are settled, the theatre had 64 million more public DKK to spend on content productions in 2010 than it had in 2000.

The theatre has announced that it is forced to cut operations down to the same level as when the theatre only played on the old stage. In January 2012, 81 staff positions were lost, of which 33 were actors, dancers and opera singers and 18 were stage technicians.

"The Royal Theatre has told a story about the buildings eroding the budget. There is simply no evidence for this. Just as there is no evidence that politicians have been cutting down the public budget to the Royal Theatre, as we have been informed”, argued Stig Jarl.

First, the activity increased dramatically with the two houses, not just in the productions, but also outside of the productions, such as in the restaurant in the playhouse and events such as Ofelia Beach, replied theatre manager Erik Jacobsen to the debate in January 2012. "We have increased the level of activity each year until 2010 and therefore we had to hire more employees. Now we have to cut down on activity and have fired employees. It will reduce our labour costs. But Erik Jacobsen agrees that the theatre overall had 64 million more public funding available for art production in 2010 compared with the beginning of the millennium"(further information on the crisis, see chapter 2.1).

Last update: March, 2012

The main strategies to support artists and other creative practitioners in Danish cultural policy are distributed on 3 levels:

• Direct support granted by the Danish Arts Foundation, founded in 1964 via the arms-length principle "Support not steer"; different art councils in literature, theatre, music, etc.; library support to artists as compensation for library loans (see  chapter 1.1,  chapter 1.2.2,  chapter 1.4.3,  chapter 4.1.2,  chapter 4.2.1,  chapter 4.2.4,  chapter 4.2.3,  chapter 4.2.5,  chapter 4.2.6, chapter 7.2.2 and  chapter 7.2.3);
• Indirect Support through tax legislation allowing private actors and firms to support the arts via tax-reducible sponsorship and private arts foundations; VAT exemption on e.g. first-time selling of art works; the Nordic copyright model that regulates the artists' economic and moral obligations; support to artist organisations (see  chapter 1.4.3,  chapter 4.1.4,  chapter 4.1.6 and  chapter 7.2.4);
• A mix of direct and indirect support through fees for tasks and engagements in the public financed cultural institutions, media and architecture and new buildings (see  chapter 1.4.3,  chapter 4.2.2,  chapter 4.2.6 and chapter 4.2.7).

Last update: March, 2012

Denmark has separate state support systems for individual creative and practising artists, just as in the other Nordic countries (Finland, Norway, Sweden and Iceland). This is an exceptional dimension in the so-called Nordic Cultural Model.

The role of The Danish Arts Foundation (Statens Kunstfond) is to promote Danish creative artists. By use of the arms-length principle, the Danish Arts Foundation distributes funding and grants to individual artists in the form of scholarships, bursaries, commission honoraria and prizes, purchases of works of visual art, crafts and design for depositing in state institutions and providing visual artworks in public buildings and facilities. The Danish Arts Foundation was established by the Danish government in 1964. The Foundation's sphere of activity is defined by the Arts Foundation Act passed by the Parliament in 1964. The Foundation's appropriation is determined by the annual government budget.

Since 2003, the secretariat of The Danish Arts Foundation has been administered by The Danish Arts Agency (now the Danish Cultural Agency).

The role of the Danish Arts Council (Kunstrådet) is to promote the development of art in Denmark and Danish art abroad. The Council has two principal tasks:

• to provide support for artistic endeavours within the fields of literature, performing arts, visual arts and music; and
• to counsel public authorities regarding matters within the Council's sphere of activity.

The Danish Arts Council may take independent initiatives and express itself on matters that fall within its area of competence. The Council's sphere of activity and tasks are defined by the Arts Council Act (Law on the Danish Arts Council, No 230 of 2 April 2003. The scope of the Council's grants is determined by the annual Finance Act. The Danish Arts Council was established on 1 July 2003 to replace a list of independent councils on individual cultural areas.

The Danish Arts Agency, which from 1 January 2012 is called the Danish Agency for Culture, is an administrative unit under the Danish Ministry of Culture. The agency administers the financial support provided for artists and artistic activities by the Danish state, which is mainly granted by the two arms-length bodies: the Danish Arts Council and the Danish Arts Foundation. The Danish Arts Agency is also responsible for the international cultural exchange programmes of the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and facilitates continuous cultural exchange between Denmark and foreign countries in the fields of literature, music, the performing arts and the visual arts.

See also chapter 4.2.1 on legislation for culture and chapter 4.1.6 on copyright.

Last update: March, 2012

It is a characteristic element in The Nordic Cultural Model that the award landscape since the 1960s has been dominated by grants, scholarships for training, travel bursaries, work grants etc. organised by public institutions like the Danish Arts Foundation, the Danish Arts Council and the Danish Arts Agency (see chapter 1.2.2).

In recent years individual artists as well as public cultural institutions have increasingly also received grants, awards and scholarships by some private Danish foundations (see chapter 4.1.4).

Last update: March, 2012

Public support for the activities of artists associations or unions is not regulated by law in Denmark. According to the basic elements in the Nordic Cultural Model it is up to the artists themselves to organise and finance their associations or unions through tax-free subscriptions. As collective bodies for the artists, the unions can apply for support for special projects etc. through the Ministry of Culture. The individual members can also, as non-organised artists, apply for grants from the different councils, committees and other public bodies established to support the individual artists, i.e. the Danish Arts Foundation (see chapter 1.2.2).

According to Danish and Nordic tradition, copyright laws must primarily protect the rights of the creator.

The Danish (and Nordic) copyright legislation provides a legal framework for organisations made up of copyright holders entering into collective agreements with users and producers regarding compensation for individual works and performances, the size of royalties, etc. Rights holders under the Copyright Act have thus established collecting societies, which administer the copyright on behalf of the holder. Collective agreement license is a special Danish / Nordic construction, which involves users entering into an agreement with a representative organisation, granting users the right to use all of the copyright holders' works of the type in question, including works that do not fall under the auspices of the organisation. In other words, agreement licenses are based on voluntary agreements entered into between the parties, but also involve an element similar to compulsory licenses in relation to outside copyright holders (see also chapter 4.1.6).