Transcript Dr Eleonora Belfiore - University of Winchester

University of Winchester, 25th January 2012
The 'transformative powers'
of the arts: The policy
perspective
Dr Eleonora Belfiore
Associate Professor
Centre for Cultural Policy Studies, University of
Warwick, UK
([email protected])
Content of my presentation:
 What have the ‘transformative powers of
the arts’ have to do with cultural policy?
 The social impact of the arts and the
problem of evaluation
 New Labour and ‘defensive
instrumentalism’
 The cultural value challenge
 What role for the Humanities in policysensitive research?
Justifying public arts funding in
the 21st century
The Challenge
 Welfare state under pressure
 Crisis of legitimacy of traditional
cultural values (postmodern theory)
 Shift towards evidence-based
policy
Justifying public arts funding in
the 21st century
The response
The arts’ sector “attachment” to
social and economic agendas:
 arts as an engine for economic
development
 arts as a tool to promote social
inclusion
Instrumentalism for advocacy
purposes…
Estelle Morris, then Minister for the Arts, 2003:
“I know that Arts and Culture make a
contribution to health, to education, to crime
reduction, to strong communities, to the
economy and to the nation’s well-being, but I
don’t always know how to evaluate it or
describe it. We have to find a language and
a way of describing its worth. It’s the only way
we’ll secure the greater support we need”.
‘Great expectations’- the range of
social impact claimed for the arts
 Arts and crime prevention
 Arts to promote civic participation
 Arts to promote social inclusion and counteract the
symptoms of poverty and disadvantage
 Arts and tolerance in diverse communities, social
cohesion
 Arts and improved educational attainment (e.g. Creative
Partnerships)
 Arts and health (arts ‘in’ health initiatives, especially
mental health)
 Arts and empowerment, source of personal confidence
 Arts and employment (skills, confidence)
Have strategies of ‘policy attachment’
worked?
Yes, because…

Role of arts and culture in urban
regeneration now acknowledged
 Arts now have a greater role in public debate
 Arts budget increased in the early 2000s
 Arts now have access to large sums through
non-artistic budgets
 A rationale for public ‘investment’ (at least
for a while...)
Have strategies of ‘policy
attachment’ worked?
No because...
 Lack of evidence
 An excessive instrumentalisation of the
arts and culture?
 The problem of providing a solid
rationale for funding has not been solved
 A false and sterile dichotomy between
‘intrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’ value of the
arts
Reformulating the arts impact
assessment debate
 A theoretically informed approach and a
rejection of a position of advocacy.
 A critical historical perspective: review of
claims made over time for the transformative
powers of the arts.
 An exploration of what we know about the
aesthetic experience and the mechanisms
that govern responses to the arts as a view to
grasp what ‘impact’ may mean
 A Humanities contribution
A taxonomy of individual and social
impacts of the arts
The negative tradition:
 Corruption and distraction
The positive tradition:
 Catharsis (e.g. arts therapy)
 Personal well-being
 Education and self-development (bildung)
 Moral improvement and civilization
 Political instrument
 Social stratification and identity construction
The autonomy tradition:
 Autonomy of the arts and rejection of
instrumentality (art for art’s sake)
Is instrumentalism really a recent
phenomenon?
 First coherent theorisation of an
instrumental cultural policy in Plato’s
Republic (IV century BC)
 Most theories of art in the Western
intellectual history are ‘pragmatic’: art has
a function, and the extent to which it is
successful in fulfilling it contributes to
determine its value
Social impact and cultural policy:
Problematic aspects
 The idea of the arts having an impact has been with
us for a very long time. The problem is with evaluation!
 Measurement of social impact is complex, difficult, and
there is no agreed or shared protocol for evaluation
 Why?
Whilst progress has been made, we still actually
know very little about what happens to people
when they engage in cultural activities (whether
as audiences or participants) – We don’t know
enough about people’s aesthetic responses to
generalise about the effects of the arts
What is ‘new’ about
contemporary instrumentalism?
 The instrumental element in the rhetoric of
public arts funding has become more central and
explicit than ever before;
 Public ‘investment’ in the arts is advocated on
the basis of what are expected to be concrete
and measurable economic and social impacts;
 Such beneficial impacts must be assessed and
measured before the arts’ demands on the
public purse can be considered fully legitimate…
 Its defensive character
The problems with the emphasis on
impact and its measurement
 Socio-economic impact = value
 Development of a ‘toolkit mentality’
 Questions of value, quality, excellence absent
from policy debates(or muddled up with notions of
desirable impacts)
 What can’t be measured doesn’t get considered
 A certain dishonesty in the way the ‘case for the
arts’ has been made and in the way data and
statistics have been presented: Evidence-based
policy-making or policy-based evidence-making?
Lack of honesty in the official
cultural policy rhetoric?
Chris Smith, ex Secretary of State for Culture,
2003:
“… I acknowledge unashamedly that when I was
Secretary of State, going into what always seemed like
a battle with the Treasury, I would try and touch the
buttons that would work”.
“So, use the measurements and figures and labels that
you can, when you need to, in order to convince the
rest of the governmental system of the value and
importance of what you’re seeking to do. But recognise
at the same time that this is not the whole story, that it
is not enough as an understanding of cultural value”.
So, what about values?
 Evidence-based policy in the arts
sector expected to provide
justification for arts funding per se
 Devoting public resources to the
arts and culture is not a matter of
evidence… it is a matter of politics
and values…
The missing element in
cultural policy discourse
 Is evidence of impact really the main
driver of policy?
 No, otherwise arts funding ought to
have been cut due to the ‘evidence
problem’
Instrumentalist arguments operate at
the rhetorical level as a legitimating
tool
Evidence is and always will be
value-based and value-laden
Greenhalgh and Russell (2006) propose to
reconceptualise policymaking as a social drama
centred on argumentation:
“a real, enacted story in which all concerned, whether
they want to or not, become actors” (p. 37).
Evidence is “rhetorically constructed on the social stage
so as to achieve particular ends for particular people”,
and its production, selection and employment in public
debates should be considered as “moves in a rhetorical
argumentation game and not as the harvesting of
objective facts to be fed into a logical decision-making
sequence” (p. 34).
From instrumentalism to cultural
value
Tessa Jowell ‘Government and the value of culture’
(2004)
“Too often politicians have been forced to debate
culture in terms only of its instrumental benefits to
other agendas – education, the reduction of crime,
improvements in wellbeing – explaining – or in some
instances almost apologising for – our investment in
culture only in terms of something else”.
“How, in going beyond targets, can we best
capture the value of culture?”
How do we avoid ‘defensive instrumentalism’?
‘Defensive instrumentalism’
(or instrumentalism the New Labour’s way)
 Older forms of instrumentalism aimed at
paving the way for a constructive articulation of
cultural value and the social and political function
of the arts
 In New Labour’s version, instrumentalism has
retained in its protective dimension, but the
defensive moment leads to nothing beyond itself
 The ‘cultural value’ debate (and the unhelpful
intrinsic/instrumental dichotomy)
The long reach of Defensive
instrumentalism
A 1980s revival:
Economic impact is back in fashion:
 Cultural Capital: A Manifesto for the
Future/You can bank on culture
Campaign - March 2010
 The Save the Arts campaign/ David
Shrigley’s video (http://savethearts-uk.blogspot.com/)
 Wolfang Tillmans’ answer when asked “What’s the best
argument you can put forward for not cutting the arts?:
It makes sense on an economic level. Britain doesn’t
have much to export but the creative industries are a
huge export industry. I don’t want to sound too
economical but that is the only language this
government seems to understand.
New Labour’s cultural policies:
The legacy
 Paradox of crisis of confidence alongside increased
funding levels
 A sector that is more comfortable with talking about
‘value for money’ than money for values
 A rhetorically weak position and the unresolved issue of
making a ‘rational’ argument for the sector
 A vulnerable status in a time of recession and cuts
 A new stage in the commodification process? (Gray 2000)
 When market logic is transformed into “a universal
common sense” (Bourdieu & Wacquant 2001), is there any
space in public policy for values beyond economic value?
Making cultural value explicit
 Bringing the debate into the public sphere (and
engage the public in debate) and accept controversy
 Reformulating the narrow debate on impact as a
broader discussion of the functions of the arts and
culture in contemporary society
 Reconnecting such a discussion to a long-standing
intellectual tradition in Western culture
 cultural value is latent in current cultural policy –
how can we make it explicit?
 There is power in history!
 Cultural value debate perfect arena for the
Humanities