Transcript Document

Cultural Value:
Developing the research agenda
‘Addressing the cultural value
challenge: the research
perspective’.
Why cultural value?
A
topical issue that is here to stay – possibly the
defining debate for the years to come?
 From a research perspective, allows agenda to
move beyond the obsession with technical
problems (e.g. toolkit mania)
 A way out of the instrumental/intrinsic value?
 A way to re-inject cultural politics into cultural
policy research (cultural authority)
Potential areas for discussion
Three main areas:
1) What is the ‘cultural value’ we are proposing to
research? (or, rather, whose cultural value should
we be looking at?)
2) Interdisciplinarity: How to move beyond the
predominance of an economics-based frame in
discussions of value?
3) A ‘culturally intelligent’ agenda – after Ien Ang
(2011)?
Cultural value: one possible
approach
 Cultural value as a point of debate within cultural policy
discourse in Britain
 Link with justification for funding of arts and culture
(‘making the case’)
 The funding system itself an interesting case of
cultural value in operation
 Key publicly funded organisations’ cultural authority is
rooted in their perceived/unchallenged cultural value
 Merit of a historical perspective
A few questions:
 What other concepts/definitions of cultural value
would it be useful to explore/adopt/consider/research?
 A focus on institutions (and how they articulate and
promote their own understanding of cultural value)?
 But what about individuals? How about artists? How
about what ‘the public’ values? How best to incorporate
these perspectives in research?
The radical potential of a questioning of
‘institutionalised’ value (e.g. “cold spots”)
Reclaiming value from the hegemony of
economics…
An epistemological problem:
 ‘a modern form of “economic imperialism” in the
realm of the intellect’ (Rothbard 1989)
 It foments the current ‘measurement fetishism’
An important moral and political dimension
that has been so far overlooked (the moral
limits of markets and the shift from a market
economy to a market society – e.g. Michael
Sandel)
The de-politicization of the
value debate
The idea that ‘what matters is what works’,
and that cost-benefit analysis is an effective
way to guide decision making becomes a way
to bypass the problem of the articulation of the
values and ideologies at the root of policies
 Political questions (making the case for the
arts) are reformulated as technical problems
(e.g. focus on problems of impact assessment)
Articulating value: In an artist’s
own words
- 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”.
- David Shrigley’s video for the Save the Arts
campaign
A new stage in the
commodification process?
 A sector that is more comfortable with talking about ‘value
for money’ than money for values
 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?
 Reframing the value debate and reclaiming from the
econocrats
Acknowledge that devoting public resources to the arts and
culture is not a matter of evidence/measurement… it is a
matter of politics and values!
What do we hope a new research
agenda might achieve?
 Moving beyond old ‘useful’ vs. ‘critical’ dychotomies
 How to broaden the debate to those cultural policy is meant to
benefit (artists and the public)?
 Are academics caught in what Russell Jacoby (2008) calls ‘cult of
complication’ (e.g. critique for the sake of critique)
Ien Ang (2011) on the ‘cult of
complication’
“Our inclination to problematize, contextualize, relativize,
particularize, in short complexify; to denounce everything
that seems reductionist or essentialist; to reject all binary
oppositions in favour of the blurring of boundaries; to
replace unitary identities with multiplicities; to be
suspicious of notions of coherence and homogeneity; to
pluralize everything which used to be talked about in the
singular (e.g. truth, culture, reality and of course
complexity itself) – the routinized use of all these
discursive proclivities suggests that the pursuit of
complexity has become an end in itself in much cultural
research today”.
Ang’s antidote: ‘cultural
intelligence’
A theoretically informed, empirically grounded
account of the messy complexities of cultural policy…
“Finding a language to understand these complexities – that
is, to describe the specific ways in which things are ‘complex
and contradictory’, as cultural studies generally insists – is a
necessary step to generate the cultural intelligence with
which to formulate ‘solutions’ in terms of strategic, flexible,
emergent, non-simplistic simplifications, rather than the
reductionist and mechanistic thinking (informed by positivism)
which still dominates much policy-making and problemsolving”.
Cultural Intelligence – an
agenda for engagement?
“I propose to conceptualize cultural intelligence as an
orientation to knowledge and understanding which goes
beyond cultural critique through a practical engagement
with complexity […]
[C]ultural intelligence involves the recognition that
navigating complexity can never be a question of definitive
or one size-size-fits-all ‘solutions’; a complex problem can
only be addressed partially, through an ongoing and
painstaking negotiation with its multiple aspects, the
different ways in which it is perceived, and the divergent
interests and perspectives involved”.
Conclusions
Three items for the discussion list:
 Definitional
matters: cultural value? Cultural
values? Value of culture? Is it just semantics?
 Dethroning economics: an
interdisciplinary/post-disciplinary approach
 Why research cultural value? Reaching
beyond academia/ a collaborative agenda?