Field Notes from Rio: Takeaways from the International Conference for Arts & Cultural Management

by Simon Mallett, Executive Director of Rozsa Foundation 

Highlights from the conference: The IAG business school at PUC-Rio,site of the conference, Simon presenting on the Rozsa Foundation's work and the opening plenary with greetings from local politicians and dignitaries. 

In June of 2024, I attended the International Conference for Arts & Cultural Management for the first time in Lisbon, Portugal and shared some takeaways. Though I admittedly went without much of a fixed expectation, I came away convinced that attending the next iteration in 2026 was a must. This year the conference moved to Rio de Janeiro, where the three-day conference drew 268 delegates from 31 countries.

The case for attending an international conference in arts management is clear; arts and cultural organizations everywhere are working on variations of the same problems, including how audiences find value in what we make, how boards function (or don’t), how public money gets allocated and, increasingly, how it gets defended. The beauty of this conference is hearing those problems described from divergent vantage points, grounded in current research rather than anecdote.

Some of what emerges is directly transferable. A finding from London or Melbourne can apply more or less intact in Calgary. But the more valuable material is often that which doesn't transfer cleanly, where a session reframes a question in a new way that challenges the answer we perhaps settled on long ago. Sitting in a room where the assumptions are different is one of the few reliable ways to notice your own.

This year I was joined by Rozsa Foundation Board Member Brittany Harker Martin, and together we shared the work of the Rozsa Foundation with an international audience. We presented on our Future Focus Funding program and the thinking behind an approach that puts resources toward organizational adaptation rather than project delivery. We then presented key takeaways from the Spotlight on Arts Audiences research and what six waves of data have told us about how Albertans actually make decisions about arts attendance. Both drew good questions, and there is real value in having work of this kind tested by people with no particular investment in the Alberta context.

I loved the 30-minute presentation format; it allowed me to sit in on two dozen presentations amid the other conference activities. As I did in 2024, I’ll share a few of the highlights that have stayed with me.

Reputation is co-produced

A session from a practitioner in France on the Louvre following the jewel heist traced what happened after the initial reputational damage. The immediate hit was significant, and the institutional instinct in that situation is almost always to control the narrative and wait for attention to move elsewhere. The Louvre did something closer to the opposite. It allowed the public to run with the story and create parodies, short films, and fiction built on the incident, much of it filmed on site. Attendance rose. The institution came out the other side seen as an exciting place to be rather than a compromised one.

The takeaway isn't about heists, nor is it a recommendation to court crisis. It's that reputation is not something an institution issues; it is produced jointly with the people who care about it. Attempts to hold it tightly tend to produce less of it rather than more. Participatory culture is one of the more interesting levers available to arts organizations, but one we rarely reach for.

Highlights from exploring Rio: Descending down the Pedra da Gávea, a view of the Rochina favela, the Theatro Municipal in downtown Rio and a visit to the Christ the Redeemer statue. 

Participation generates economic value

Research out of Finland found that when audiences participate rather than simply attend, they perceive a stronger return on the effort and money they have invested, with behavioural engagement (versus cognitive engagement) identified as the key mechanism. The value isn't added on top of the experience; it comes from the audience's own activity within it. That doesn’t mean arts experiences all need to become interactive, but it does mean there’s an opportunity to think more broadly about the role of the audience.

This lines up closely with what Spotlight on Arts Audiences has been telling us about where value actually sits in an arts experience, and where the gap opens up between what organizations think they are offering and what audiences are seeking and receiving. It also suggests a question worth putting to almost any programming decision: what authority does the audience hold here? Answering that honestly tends to open up more than it closes down.

Initiators offer latent opportunities

A presentation from HEC in Montreal on the typology of performing arts "initiators" examined the audience members who organize a group and bring them along. These are not influencers, and they are not being paid. They skew toward older adults with flexible schedules, they plan well in advance, and their motivations are primarily social.

The research sorted them into four profiles:

• Family/friend facilitator - the organizing impulse comes from the social occasion itself

• Institutional - driven by loyalty to a specific organization and a desire to share it

• Experiential - the whole evening matters, not only what happens on stage

• Passionate - the artistic work is the point

Again, this is a useful complement to the Spotlight research work, which has tended to treat the attendance decision as an individual one when it is frequently made on behalf of a group. Any organization that can identify its initiators, match them to a profile, and make their job easier stands to benefit, and so do they.

Arts & Culture highlights: Costume and set pieces for Carnival from the tour of the Mangueira samba school, a gallery at the Museu de Arte do Rio, and a visit to the beautiful Real Gabinete Português de Leitura library.  

Layered barriers to cultural circulation

A Brazilian study examined why some territories succeed in circulating their cultural and creative expressions while others do not, identifying the Layered Barriers Model - a stack of compounding barriers: economic, institutional, structural, digital, and symbolic. The argument is that these layers cumulatively reinforce one another, so addressing any single barrier in isolation produces disappointing results. Underlying this is the structuralist view that unequal outcomes do not reflect unequal capabilities but historical and structural asymmetries, which in turn shape future opportunities.

The parallels to the prairie experience were hard to miss. The gap between what gets made here and what circulates nationally and internationally is not explained by any one obstacle, and while continued advocacy has made gains in some of these areas, the symbolic layer - whose work is assumed in advance to be of national significance - may be the least discussed and the most consequential of the five.

Elsewhere in the program

Among the other sessions: research on what happens to board performance when a physical or social modality is built into governance practice; recent cultural policy shifts in Italy, where heritage is now framed as "the nation's oil"; an accounting of the cost of anti-Black racism in the United States, which calculates annual foregone revenue in Hollywood at roughly $10 billion according to McKinsey; and evidence from France of a correlation between board diversity and financial acuity in arts organizations.

In an effort to save this article from becoming a novella, I’ll simply share that the scholarship was matched by the Brazilian cultural tours, music, and food, and I left with plenty to ruminate on.

If any of this is something you'd like to talk about further, I'd welcome it, please reach out to me at simon@rozsafoundation.com. And in case I’ve piqued your interest, the 2028 conference will be held in Milan, Italy.