As the public plays an ever-more important role in shaping cultural policy, the demands on cultural professionals increase. Sam Jones looks at the ways in which arts practitioners can develop their practice and build for themselves a role that helps people to navigate and engage with the world around us in ways that can re-invigorate society.
We the public are placing new demands on the professionals whose services we use. We exercise greater individuality in what we choose to eat and wear; we demand more personalised services from our public organisations and institutions; and we are much more willing to complain when we do not get the service we expect. The same is true of our cultural choices. Our iPods are our personal orchestras, and at exhibitions we expect to be able to interact with and comment on displays. Far from threatening the cultural sector, after years of meeting economic targets and fulfilling social criteria (in other words, answering to instrumental demands) such developments offer cultural professionals a new opportunity.
We have the chance to reshape culture as a new medium of engagement. While only 61.3% of the population voted in the 2005 General Election, 80% engage in cultural activities annually. Culture Minister, David Lammy, has spoken of a cultural democracy, defined by the quality of the relationship between cultural professionals and the public. John Holden1 presents a new democratic mandate for culture, based on how people engage in our culture, and how cultural institutions work to encourage and build that engagement. Cultural professionals, he argues, have a legitimate role in shaping public opinion and encouraging and validating public debate.
However, this role is not without tension: demands for accessibility and the instrumental demands of politicians and funders put cultural expertise at the service of other agendas, framing the cultural professionals role as being responsive rather than creative.
Creating value
David Lammys suggestion that cultural engagement must be given democratic meaning presents cultural professionals with new challenges. In attempting to meet them, cultural professionals need to evaluate their practice to ensure they are engaging adequately with the public. Cultural professionals need to:
" extend the ways in which they use their expertise to collaborate with and engage with their publics
" use their own creativity to work together to create cultural value
" create a more widespread and equal understanding of culture as something that is born of public engagement, rather than given or delivered.
Cultural consumption and engagement is productive. As an idea, culture is not like education or the NHS; rather, it is like learning and health: not delivered by a single service, but emergent from a complex set of interactions. Cultural professionals do not deliver culture; they build the encounters in which culture is created. They provide opportunities to bring our opinion to bear on the world. We must work to create a shift in the way that cultural professionals are seen, by funders, by the public and on occasion by themselves. They must be considered and funded, not as deliverers of a product, but as creators of value.
At the heart of the new cultural democracy is diversity: we have at our disposal a mass of vibrant and diverse opinion, technologies, artforms and inheritances. Cultural professionals must equate this multitude of public voices and give them expression: because culture is a means of accessing and understanding others opinions, different cultural forms must be given the same voice that is given to different opinions in our society. Widening engagement is not simply about introducing people to so-called high culture. It is about ensuring that people across society have the opportunity to experience and create their own cultural forms.
Cultural professionals can use their skills to identify meaning in a range of cultural forms and relate this to a range of audiences from the public, through to politicians. In policy, especially, where culture is gaining centrality and credibility, cultural professionals must use their expertise to draw out the values of all forms of culture, giving them an equal voice and representation in our cultural decisions.
Supportive structures
If we recognise the valuable engagement that cultural professionals provide to the public, then we have to support them by implementing structures of support and funding more attuned to this goal. Broadly speaking, and for several reasons, existing structures are inadequate. Instrumental demands often leave the public out of the equation; funding models often assume that cultural professionals operate at the behest of the government and in response to agendas external to the sector; and culture is often seen as something that is delivered rather than created. As a result, there is a gap between the inherent and unique values that we all associate with culture and the ways in which cultural professionals are forced to articulate their role.
By understanding culture as a form of creative expression we can take steps towards cultural democracy. Cultural professionals must be recognised as the people who can help us to achieve this. Only when this is more generally understood and given credibility in policy and government circles will our cultural professionals be able to realise their full potential.
To do this, they should be more assertive of their role in democratic contexts and terms. Their work can bring forth the values they identify in the cultural form, the values that the public place on it, and the existing instrumental aims of funders. For their part, funders and policy makers should view culture as a means of expression and a good that should be enabled in its own right and not trammelled by instrumental agendas.
Assessing value
At the same time, for cultural democracy to be more representative, cultural offers must be developed with a view to creating new meaning rather than attracting greater numbers, and that meaning should be recorded in ways that can be fed back to subsequent visitors and audiences. In the same way, funding models should be restructured to support the creation of potential. By taking responsibility for instrumental functionality, funding bodies can help the professionals they support in providing opportunities of this kind. Cultural funders and agencies should more consistently fulfil the role of mediating between policy requirements and the concerns of the public and cultural and creative professionals: by doing so, they can ensure that cultural activity is based on the relationship between expert and public.
This requires that we cement the cultural professionals role in a more democratic and generative conception of culture. We need to give more responsibility and attention to cultural professionals in decisions in areas that range from health to local government a cultural voice should be heard on every public board and, equally, a public voice should be heard on every cultural board, bringing the public into decision-making processes in the cultural realm.
Overall, public cultural policy should engage with culture in the widest, democratic sense and not be limited to institutionalised categories. For this to happen, the expertise that cultural professionals have in understanding cultural forms must be used more effectively to understand different forms of cultural expression.
Culture is neither a force for good nor for bad: it is an expression of many opinions and attitudes, diverse in nature. If we are to understand them fully, and make the most of all the cultural interactions across our society, then cultural professionals are essential to our future.
Sam Jones is a researcher at the think-tank Demos. e: samuel.jones@demos.co.uk
This article is based on an essay from the recent Demos pamphlet, Production values, published in partnership with Careers Scotland, w: http://www.demos.co.uk
1 Holden, J. (2006) Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy, Demos