How to make the white elephant work: findings from ethnographic research into Polish new cultural institutions

Since the accession of Poland to the European Union in 2004, many new cultural institutions (NCIs) have been established. Our multisited ethnography investigates their potential as urban catalysts of social, cultural and economic life, and finds that NCIs fail to function as expected. They resemble the notorious ‘white elephants’, because they are so expensive to maintain that they sometimes fail to fulfil their primary functions. The emergence of these ‘white elephants’ has resulted from: (1) a policy based on a simplified and dogmatised version of cultural economics, especially an assumption that investment in cultural infrastructure can stimulate social and economic development; and (2) local authorities’ inclination to use the spectacular NCIs as ‘monuments’ symbolising their success. We show, however, that NCIs are not in all respects expensive burdens, since it was possible to transform some of them into active contributors, sometimes by forced adaptation, sometimes by preserving continuity with the ethos of culture work at the grass-roots level. Our results shed new light on the white elephant category.