For a country that within living memory queued for everything except bad news, this is an extraordinary moment. We are, quite literally, richer than we have ever been. The question is, what we plan to do with that wealth, other than count it.
Economists and politicians will tell us we need infrastructure, energy security, digital transformation, defence.
We need to stringently plan for a future whose chief feature will be a decline in population numbers, and associated demographic issues.
They are right, of course. We do need motorways, power lines, and railway stations that make people's jaws drop. We need hospitals and fibre-optic cables. We also need high-grade means of defence against an increasingly aggressive, psychotic neighbour.
There is another kind of infrastructure that almost never appears in budget speeches: the infrastructure of meaning - the stories we tell about who we are and, more importantly, who we want to become.
And that infrastructure can be very helpful in addressing all of the questions above, and more.
We need feats of imagination to let us think beyond the next quarter, the next pay rise, or the next election. We need the ability, as a society, to ask “what for?” and not just “how much?”
This is where culture, and the people who create it, move from “nice to have” to “strategic resource.”
When we say “culture,” it is easy to picture museums, festivals, and the odd gala concert. The trouble with this picture is that it is badly incomplete, as there is a lot more to celebrate and to draw from.
If we strip the word “culture” of its sentimentality, what remains is something very practical - an exchange through which we decide what matters, whom we trust, what kind of future we are willing to work for.
That conversation has been running for centuries. Medieval hymns now lie under layers of Enlightenment pamphlets, 19th-century romans à clef under post-war cinema, folk songs are covered up by graphic novels and video essays.
Each generation adds new layers, sometimes in harmony, often in argument, with what came before. Writers, composers, choreographers, designers, filmmakers, game creators, photographers and many others work directly on all those layers, as they lay down their own.
Take that away, or neglect it for long enough, and the result is not just fewer exhibitions or an endless flow of junk from the radio. The result is a society that struggles to recognise itself, to talk about hard things without immediately coming to blows, or to imagine a future that is anything other than just like the present, but a bit shinier.
For a country like Poland there is a real risk - getting stuck at a somewhat self-satisfied sigh of relief that comes from having gone through the effort of the last quarter-century.
We have tripled our R&D investment over a decade or so, though we are still far behind South Korea, Israel or the Nordics. How about we start to consciously and seriously tie culture and science together, to the benefit of both?
Such an engagement with artists is not philanthropy, though at a first glance it may seem like it. It is actually R&D for our collective imagination. If we are serious about becoming not just a richer Poland but a wiser one, we need people whose job it is to ask the questions that do not fit neatly into spreadsheets.
Smart power
Across the European Union, people have started to use a new phrase for this kind of engagement: smart power.
We already know about soft power – the attractive side of a country and its way of life, admired by others. You feel it when reading a French novel makes you want to drink café au lait on Champs Elysées, or when a Scandinavian crime series somehow makes drizzle seem glamorous enough to want to travel to Malmö, in winter.
Smart power goes further. It is what happens when that cultural strength is connected to how we run our economies, our cities and diplomacy. It happens when artists and other creative professionals are not just producing beautiful, thoughtful things, but also helping us think through climate transition, digital sovereignty, social cohesion, and the way we design public services.
Not because they are necessarily experts in any of those fields, but because they bring in new ways of thinking about them. For the country, it is practical strategy writ large. For each company that wants to still be around in fife or 10 years, this is, I dare say, essential.
Strategy consultant Filiberto Amati has called Warsaw home for some 15 years. He is Italian, and can see precise, actionable inspiration to be taken from the Italian experience.
"If you look at Italy over the last few decades, you can see a whole set of tools and approaches Polish companies can borrow tomorrow. The textile manufacturer Bonotto showed, very early on, that inviting artists inside a textile mill doesn’t just produce quirky designs. It permanently changes how people in the factory think about their work and their materials.
"Mutina, a ceramics manufacturer, and Durst, maker of high-end imaging equipment, run artist-in-residence programmes that demonstrate how businesses can use art to create a continuous, intelligent dialogue between employees, technology and brand – not a one-off sponsorship, not just a commission of new designs, but an ongoing conversation that shapes strategy."
A recent white paper by the industry body CreativeFED (The European Federation of Creative Economy) puts the strategic value of art and artists in clear terms.
It describes culture workers and creative professionals as “foresight agents” and “narrative builders,” and argues that they should be treated as part of Europe’s strategic toolkit, not just as the backbone of its arts and entertainment industry.
Titled “Empowering Creative Sectors for Innovation, Sustainability, and Global Influence,” the white paper is, in many ways, a polite but firm wake-up call to countries like Poland.
Its core message is that if Europe wants to stay resilient, competitive and democratic, it has to treat culture and the creative industries as meaty, hefty smart power – not as a thing that comes along when everything else has been taken care of. It sketches out the idea of cultural strategic imagination – the capacity to imagine and prototype different futures, and to link that imagination to real decisions about investment and policy.
This means recognising creative skills as “transversal enablers of innovation,” building a European framework to recognise those skills formally, and investing in hybrid competences that combine arts, technology and ethics.
To put it in simpler terms, it means admitting that the people who write, design, compose, choreograph and code are just as important to the green and digital transitions, for example, as the people who build the wind farms and install the servers; and then adjusting education, labour law and funding to match that realisation.
For Poland, such recommendations land at a very specific crossroads.
As a fast-growing, increasingly affluent EU economy, we have the chance to become one of the laboratories where this agenda is tested in practice.
The white paper calls for European and regional foresight hubs, a Creative Innovation Fund for “creative R&D,” and long-term ecosystems that link cultural actors with business and technology, especially outside the big capitals.
Amati is clear about the long-term value of such thinking. "For Polish firms, especially in rapidly growing industrial regions, the message is very simple: you don’t have to copy the Italian style, but you can copy the mechanism. Start by giving artists a real badge, a desk and a time-limited brief inside your company, link their work to your innovation or transformation projects, and treat the residency as a strategic experiment.
"The cost is tiny compared to a new machine or IT system, but the potential return, in fresh ideas, cultural capital and long-term positioning, is exactly the kind of ‘smart power’ Europe is now looking to business to help build.”
The question is whether we are willing to go this next step and treat artists and other creative professionals as part of our strategic infrastructure - by recognising their skills in our education and labour systems, and opening up public and corporate procurement to their services as thinkers and advisors, not just as providers of creative work. It means insisting that debates on AI safety, industrial policy and regional development always include a cultural voice. If we can do that, we will be helping to shape the European smart-power toolbox from a distinctly Polish vantage point. Worth thinking about, no?
Artists are experts at figuring out the new, at starting with a blank canvas or an empty studio space, and building from there. So, if we want a Polish green transition that people can live with, someone has to help us picture new ways of living, not just new regulations. If we care about digital sovereignty, we cannot talk only about data centres; we have to ask whose stories and symbols fill the screens at which our children stare for hours every day. That is not a side issue. It needs to be central to our strategy as a country, and needs to come deep down - into strategy for regions, municipalities, and of course for businesses.
This is a chance that previous generations never had: to invest calmly, with a long view, in what kind of country we want to be in twenty or thirty years. It is also a chance to get things wrong. If we do not deliberately cultivate imagination, trust, and a sense of shared story, all those motorways and power lines will simply move our frustrations faster from place to place.
If we pour everything into the “hardware” – concrete, steel, silicon – and assume that the “software” of society will look after itself, this challenge to our collective imagination will not be adequately addressed. The good news is that this “software” is cheap compared to the hardware, very cheap.
Massive wave of payoff
Investing in artists – in their time, presence and curiosity – is orders of magnitude cheaper than investing in infrastructure. Yet over the long term it can pay back in exactly the currency that matters most in a world of overlapping crises: resilience, imagination and the ability to act together. It is one of the cheapest, most powerful ways to ensure that Poland’s new economic strength comes with a corresponding strength of imagination.
For a fraction of the cost of, say, a single stretch of motorway, we could fund many artist residencies in factories, hospitals, schools and city offices across the country. We could pay theatre-makers and writers to work with local governments on how to talk about change without turning every meeting into a shouting match. We could support musicians, designers and puppeteers working alongside engineers so that new technologies feel human, not hostile.
At the end of the year, the accounting office would barely notice the difference on the spreadsheet, but in terms of human-centred value, a massive wave of payoff would be starting to build.
The encouraging thing is that some of this is already happening, quietly.
The government-backed Creative Industries Institute was created precisely to sit at the intersection of culture, business and technology. It runs programmes that help creators and companies collaborate on design, music, games and other projects that do not fit neatly into the old boxes of “art” over here and “industry” across the way.
There is a growing island chain of quieter progress: insurers co-creating campaigns with artists, hotels turning guest rooms into temporary studios.
None of this is yet a revolution, but it shows that Polish business is not afraid of art. If anything, it is curious. The next step is to move from "branding with art" to working with artists.
So what might that look like? Imagine a medium-sized manufacturing company outside Lublin. Morning shift. The line is running, the machines are humming, and the usual queue is forming at the coffee machine.
Now imagine that for the next month or two, among the engineers and managers and logistics specialists, there is also a choreographer, or a composer, or a visual artist. They come in most days and just do their work. They listen, ask odd questions, and are happy to answer odd questions back. They spend time on the shop floor and in the canteen. Share time over a coffee and a smoke. They watch how people move, how they talk about the product, how they joke about management. They sketch, film, write, rehearse in their own quiet, dedicated, corner.
At the end, there might be a performance in the loading bay, a series of photographs, a sound piece built from the rhythms of the machines, or a small book of drawings and conversations. Those are the "deliverables" but the real result is less visible, though more important.
People will have seen their own workplace differently. Someone from accounting may have realised that what they do connects to the long story of the town. Someone from production has found new words for talking about safety or waste, or pride in doing the job at world-class level. Management has heard things that no consultant’s report could capture.
Nothing in the production process has changed, but something in the company’s culture has thickened, become more reflective, more imaginative, a little more capable of handling ambiguity.
For the company, this is not a substitute for innovation budgets or HR policies, of course. It is a way of upgrading its cultural operating system. For the artist, it is a chance to work with new materials: people, processes, machines, constraints.
For Poland as a whole, it is one small piece of that smart power the CreativeFED white paper talks about: culture moving into spaces that once seemed “non-cultural," and quietly changing how those spaces think.
Monika Król, Deputy Director for Entrepreneurship, Creative Industries and International Projects at Lublin City’s Culture Department, sees the connections clearly: “As a city, we sit on a solid foundation: quickly growing entrepreneurship, well developed creative industries and international cooperation all run through the same streets. Our task is to stop treating them as three separate categories and see them as pointing in one strategic direction.
"When we talk to founders in Lublin, whether they’re running a software start-up, a logistics firm or a family manufacturing business, the same themes keep coming up: they need talent who can think beyond the obvious, they need a distinctive story in order to compete globally, and they want connections that lift them out of a purely local horizon.
"This is exactly where artists and the wider creative sector come in. If we see them only as providers of posters and logos, we are wasting one of the city’s most important resources for innovation and differentiation.”
Incidentally, “Deputy Director for Entrepreneurship, Creative Industries and International Projects”? Think about the value of such concentration of focus and attention in one job, and then lobby your own city to create such as position. Every municipality over 100,000 inhabitants ought to have such a person.
One project that tries to tie together all those seemingly disparate but very much related threads this is Art in a Place of Work - known in Poland as kultura w pracy - a business outreach programme of an arts organisation that places artists inside companies, starting in and around Lublin, which happens to have been awarded the title of European Capital of Culture 2029.
The point is not to beautify the workplace, but to thicken its cultural layer - to make visible the stories, habits and assumptions that are already there, and to add new ones. To start new conversations and open up different possibilities. These types of multi-year artist placements have been carried out in various places for a while. It is the first time such a project is being run in Poland.
In the language of the CreativeFED white paper, this is cultural strategic imagination at the level of the firm: the ability of an organisation to ask “what else could we be?” and “what futures do we really want to serve?”
A few recommendations jump off the pages. First, we should stop treating creative skills as an optional extra and fold them directly into how we educate and classify work. That means, for instance, recognising creative competences - through micro-credentials, life-long learning modules and proper entries in labour classifications, so that a choreographer working with a factory or a writer working with a city hall is not a curiosity but a recognised professional.
In parallel, Poland ought to champion the idea of creative innovation hubs in regions and cities like Lublin, Silesia or Łódź, where artists, universities and manufacturing firms work together on practical projects: circular use of materials, human-centred automation, new services for ageing populations.
A modest national “creative R&D” line, aligned with the proposed European Creative R&D Fund, would send a clear signal that artistic experimentation linked to digital and green transformation is part of our development model.
By the way, a lot of facilities where such activity could be plugged in already exist, and they are often world-class, with dozens of science and technology parks having been built around the country in the last not-too-many years.
Amati points to a high-profile example from Italy. "Kilometro Rosso, an innovation district near Bergamo, goes a step further than just engaging artists in residencies. There, they are treated as partners in research and development, embedded in the science park alongside engineers and biologists to co-imagine new products and services."
European Capital of Culture
Paweł Potoroczyn, director of the Lublin European Capital of Culture 2029 programme, believes that, as Poland joins the circle of the world’s largest economies, learning how to combine the country’s industrial intelligence with the imaginative intelligence of artists will add substantial strategic value.
“As Lublin revs up its European Capital of Culture 2029 activities, we have a responsibility to think beyond the festival of events and ask a harder question: what kind of city do we want to be in 2040, when the banners are long gone? Art in a Place of Work is one of the key answers we are testing. For decades, Polish growth has been driven by the strength of our industry, logistics and services. We see AiPoW as strategic infrastructure, not a side project.
"From the ECOC 2029 perspective, this matters enormously. A city’s cultural life cannot be limited to its old town and its concert halls; it has to reach the factory floor, the warehouse, the office park on the ring road. By building long-term relationships between artists and Lublin’s businesses, we are creating exactly the kind of creative ecosystem where culture is a source of resilience, competitiveness and democratic confidence. If we get this right, Lublin 2029 will be remembered for four years of great programming, as well as the place where a new model of artist–business collaboration was quietly put to work, and then copied elsewhere in Poland and across Europe.”
Artists’ thinking has much to offer the public sector, not just private business. To that end we can, and must, move faster on the very unglamorous but powerful tool of public procurement: giving cities, regions and state-owned companies guidance and incentives to embed creative solutions into tenders, to run open calls, and to invite artists into public-service co-creation instead of calling them at the end to paint a mural. OK, as well as calling them to paint a mural.
Murals are cool, we agree on that, right? Around all this, we should back long-term creative ecosystems in under-served regions, with stable support for networks, hubs and policy labs that connect culture with business and local government.
We have spent the last three decades proving that Poland can do the hard work of catching up. The next challenge is to show that we can also do the slower, quieter work of imagining what comes after we have done that. If we get that right, our next superpower will not just be our GDP figures.
It will be the stories, images and ideas that Poland sends into the world – beginning with quiet, everyday engagement with working artists and creatives in our offices, factories, and warehouses.
Ralph Talmont
The author is a Warsaw-based author, entrepreneur, multimedia producer and communications consultant.
© Ralph Talmont 2025; thecreativefarm.substack.com