The Development of the Cultural Policy Lab
The Cultural Policy Lab emerged from an effort to connect research in the humanities and arts more systematically with cultural policy, public administration and practice. What began in a university context gradually developed into a lab for transfer, publication and institutional innovation.
The Challenge
The starting point was a simple but consequential observation: there were hardly any durable formats connecting research in the humanities and arts with cultural policy, public administration and the cultural sector. Questions of aesthetic judgement, institutional legitimacy and public funding were widely discussed, but rarely in ways that produced shared work, new instruments or concrete political learning processes. In a time of cultural policy conflicts and institutional change, it became clear that spaces were missing in which analysis, practice and public decision-making could be brought together systematically.
Our Approach
The Cultural Policy Lab emerged directly from this gap. It began with Christian Steinau's academic work at LMU Munich, initially in literary studies and around the question of how judgements about art are formed - and who ultimately decides what becomes relevant, fundable or institutionally visible. Through early research, collaborations and debates in the cultural policy field, this developed into the idea of building a structure at the university that would not merely produce research, but translate it into cultural and political contexts. A decisive step was the seminar on institutional aesthetics, developed together with Prof. Christopher Balme in the winter semester of 2019/20. What emerged from it was not a conventional research project, but an open lab: a space in which teaching, research, publication and exchange with actors outside the university could be thought together. The key was not to understand the university as a closed knowledge space, but as a starting point for new alliances, new concepts and new forms of knowledge work.
The Solution
The Cultural Policy Lab developed a format that understands the university as a starting point for transfer and innovation. Early on, it explored how perspectives from cultural research could be translated into concrete debates about institutions, funding logics, organisational forms and the public role of culture. An important moment came in 2020 with the event at the Munich Kammerspiele, where the Cultural Policy Lab became visible as a public space for thinking and working. In 2021, the launch of the website and digital publications created an independent platform. "Staging the Lab" became the lab's first publication; "Everything is live now. Das Kunstsystem im Ausnahmezustand," edited by Birte Kleine-Benne, offered an early editorial engagement with the effects of the pandemic on art and culture. In this way, the lab developed into a structure that does not treat research, teaching, publication and public intervention separately, but as one connected practice.
Impact & Transfer
Much more than a side project within the university emerged from this founding phase. The Cultural Policy Lab became an independent context for research, strategy, transfer and communication. In 2025, it was spun out of LMU Munich in order to accelerate innovation more deliberately and to actively shape the profound transformation of knowledge work, particularly through AI technologies. Since 2025, the lab has worked on projects with ministries, universities, major cities and other organisations. It designs conferences, develops pioneering studies and shapes processes at the intersection of cultural policy, academia, public administration and digital change. What has remained constant is its original ambition: not merely to comment on cultural policy, but to develop new forms in which knowledge becomes effective, connectable and capable of shaping institutions.