The ACE research report that found the impact of the arts unproven has misjudged the existing evidence base, leading to “a poorly founded and lugubrious conclusion”, writes Mike White.
An Arts Council’s publication which appeared on 14 March 2014, The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society, presents a rapid review of instrumental impacts of arts engagement, leading to a poorly founded and lugubrious conclusion that there is little evidence of causal links between arts engagement and individual/social benefit. It is an assessment drawn from around 90 research reports identified through web search without expert recommendation, but to be used as a basis for making ‘the holistic case’ for arts and culture. Although the reports selected are arbitrarily restricted to publication post-2009, thereby overlooking some key studies of the last decade, this is still the Arts Council’s first serious review of socially engaged arts since 2007, attempting yet again to reconcile the excellence versus utility rationales that have dogged it since its formation. The pendulum swing back to examining a social agenda for the arts was not necessarily where the Arts Council was heading with its 2013 strategy Great Art and Culture for Everyone – a title that unfortunately suggests culture is something to be provided rather than supported to evolve. It may be a sign of the Arts Council’s newly extended responsibilities for museums and libraries that it needs to maintain a cumbersome reference throughout the review to ‘arts and culture’, and one can sense the burden of added responsibility in austere times in which more is less – it must be rather like having wished for a train set for Xmas and getting the National Railway Museum.
Putting evidence-based cultural value perspectives into the strategy is a big belated task and the review’s methodology is hampered at the outset by removing the intrinsic value arguments to the back burner in order to focus on instrumental impacts as potboilers that have no meaningful connection with the age-old value of the arts in shaping people’s world view and principles. This overlooks some of the strongest evidence of arts-fuelled change. The arts intervention that, for example, persuades a troubled teen to focus on a career in the arts is not just an instrumental impact; it is potentially a life-changing event. Maybe we need an evidence review that adds another category beyond the intrinsic and the instrumental – the life-changing... Keep reading on Centre for Medical Humanities
An Arts Council’s publication which appeared on 14 March 2014, The Value of Arts and Culture to People and Society, presents a rapid review of instrumental impacts of arts engagement, leading to a poorly founded and lugubrious conclusion that there is little evidence of causal links between arts engagement and individual/social benefit. It is an assessment drawn from around 90 research reports identified through web search without expert recommendation, but to be used as a basis for making ‘the holistic case’ for arts and culture. Although the reports selected are arbitrarily restricted to publication post-2009, thereby overlooking some key studies of the last decade, this is still the Arts Council’s first serious review of socially engaged arts since 2007, attempting yet again to reconcile the excellence versus utility rationales that have dogged it since its formation. The pendulum swing back to examining a social agenda for the arts was not necessarily where the Arts Council was heading with its 2013 strategy Great Art and Culture for Everyone – a title that unfortunately suggests culture is something to be provided rather than supported to evolve. It may be a sign of the Arts Council’s newly extended responsibilities for museums and libraries that it needs to maintain a cumbersome reference throughout the review to ‘arts and culture’, and one can sense the burden of added responsibility in austere times in which more is less – it must be rather like having wished for a train set for Xmas and getting the National Railway Museum.
Putting evidence-based cultural value perspectives into the strategy is a big belated task and the review’s methodology is hampered at the outset by removing the intrinsic value arguments to the back burner in order to focus on instrumental impacts as potboilers that have no meaningful connection with the age-old value of the arts in shaping people’s world view and principles. This overlooks some of the strongest evidence of arts-fuelled change. The arts intervention that, for example, persuades a troubled teen to focus on a career in the arts is not just an instrumental impact; it is potentially a life-changing event. Maybe we need an evidence review that adds another category beyond the intrinsic and the instrumental – the life-changing... Keep reading on Centre for Medical Humanities