By John Holden (Demos, 2006, ISBN 1841801577)
This highly intelligent but readable booklet should be required reading for all arts professionals. Set in a broad contemporary context, the argument seeks to elucidate and understand the different kinds of value created by culture down three particular lines. These concern the political, the public and the arts professionals. Sharp analysis illuminates the damaging misunderstandings and crossed-wires of closed conversations (often in jargon inaccessible to the public) between professionals and politicians. The analysis challenges current policy and practice, and makes some recommendations for change.
John Holden takes it as read that accountability ultimately lies in the realm of politics. Traditional approaches to setting arts policy goals and dealing with public funding no longer offer sufficient legitimacy, yet this has to be a precondition for a more central and secure place for culture within public life. Gone are the days when Prime Ministers simply appointed a good chap to chair the Arts Council, or even when an Arts Minister (in 1975) was howled down for merely suggesting an element of democratic representation on the Council! The post-modern condition of cultural relativism, a less rigid divide between public and private spheres, significant peoples Lottery funding and an overall DCMS policy framework have swept all that away.
Until these dysfunctional relationships are put right, there is no chance of culture achieving the kind of accepted public good status enjoyed by health and education. Politics struggles to understand culture or find ways to value it beyond the purely instrumental while the media play a largely destructive role between politics and the public so far as art is concerned. Cultural value may be intrinsic, instrumental or institutional, with differing but perfectly valid degrees of acceptance and identification from the three main constituencies. The problems are systemic, but the primary responsibility for finding new ways to build greater legitimacy directly with citizens must lie with the professionals.
Has policy lost sight of the real meaning of culture in peoples lives and identity formation? Despite its rhetoric, the DCMS view is conditioned by definitions from administrative convenience, not from peoples lives and experiences. The legitimate demand for more evidence (the sector is notorious for its lack of longitudinal research) threatens yet more irrelevant box ticking. Culture creates potential rather than producing predictable effects or outputs. But to change the climate in which government funding is always open to ideologically-inspired lurches, professionals and institutions need to reconnect themselves to the polity as creators of value, rather than merely as repositories of heritage, art or sites of experience.
Review by Christopher Gordon, consultant in cultural policy.