News
Understanding Cultural Value
22 February 2006
| Byline: | John Holden |
|---|---|
| Source: | Humanities Research Network |
A public lecture given to mark the launch of the Te Whainga Aronui, The Council for the Humanities, November 2005.
I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk to you this evening, and I would like to say a very big thank you to Te Whainga Aranoui/ The Humanities society of New Zealand for making it possible for me to be here. I am grateful to all the society members, but I want to say an especially big thanks to Brian Opie who has handled all the nightmare logistics of my visit, including getting me to Whangerei to see some family members that I haven't seen for 25 years, so thank you Brian.
I would just like to preface what I have to say by making two things clear: the first is that, as is obvious, I am from the UK, so most of my thinking, and the examples that I quote will reflect that, although as you are doubtless aware, many of the questions and issues that I will discuss - principally, why should governments fund culture? - are by no means confined to the UK - they are evident here, in Australia, in the US, in Europe and in Japan.
The second thing is that my working environment is in a think tank, not a university, so I and my colleagues are most interested in practical ways to make things better, and we try to change practice not only through politics and talking to government, but by influencing the way that organisations work as well.
For those of you who don't know Demos, let me just explain a few things about it. Demos was founded in 1993, at a time when our domestic politics was at a low ebb - the conservative administration had run out of steam, run into the quagmire of sleaze, and run short of ideas. The electorate was cynical, disengaged and despairing. Demos came onto the scene with big ambitions.
The first was to reinvigorate the democratic process - which if you look at the raw numbers of voters we have clearly failed to do. The second was to offer radical long-term ideas to politicians to try to find some answers that were not tied either to departmental and ministerial silos, and that were not reactions to short-term media-driven panics. Here we had a bit more success.
Our first Director, Geoff Mulgan, was tempted away from Demos to run Prime Minister Blair's strategy unit in 1997, and a number of other Demos people, including Charlie Leadbeater, Tom Bentley, and Jake Chapman, influenced policy in education, industrial development, and in the machinery of government.
Our output tends to be a bit different from that of other think tanks. Although we are often associated in the public mind with the current Labour government, we are in fact politically and financially independent. We are not focussed on economics or foreign policy, but use a wide variety of social science and humanities disciplines.
Among the staff there are people with degrees in anthropology, theology, law, art history, and philosophy for example. Perhaps because of this our publications address all sorts of issues and cut across departmental boundaries - to pick a random selection we have published work on gaia theory, sleep deprivation and social life, public engagement in science, the importance of parks, and the night-time music economy.
But that's enough about Demos, let's get on to the subject that I want to talk about - the value of publicly funded culture.The cultural theorist Raymond Williams described culture, in his famous book Keywords as "one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language". The UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport certainly thinks so; it';s given up trying. On its website it says that "there is no official government definition of culture."
But although Culture may be hard to define, we do seem to be living at a moment when the value of culture, the justification for public support for culture, and its role in our communal life are pretty hot topics of discussion. And that's true not only among policy wonks, academics and people who work in the cultural world.
A few weeks ago, the caption accompanying a picture of a half naked page three model in the UK edition of the Sun said this: 'Stunning Keely, 19, from Kent, was disgusted to learn that nearly £9million had been blown on art in hospitals. She said, "It should be spent on medical equipment and doctors, not on pointless sculptures."
I think there are two reasons why these questions, what culture is for, and what value it generates, have risen up the agenda. One is that, in the UK at least, and judging from this year's Rand Report Gifts of the Muse, in the US as well, people working in the cultural sphere had grown pretty fed up with the way that they are having to justify the public funding that they receive. In the 1980s in Britain, the Thatcher government saw culture as the handmaiden of the economy, and culture had to defend itself by saying how it served business interests and generated tourist revenue. In order to do that, a report, actually a very good report by John Myerscough, came out in 1988 called the Economic Importance of the Arts and that showed how much the arts contributed to the economy.
The next step was Francois Mattarasso's report Use or Ornament in 1997. This argued that culture could help deliver a broad range of social goods, ranging from crime reduction to social inclusion to health to literacy. The report was seized on by the then Culture Secretary Chris Smith, who used it as an argument to get more funds for the arts and culture from the UK Treasury. It worked - funding increased by 70%, but the downside was that culture was increasingly required to produce evidence that the social goods were being produced.Let me introduce a personal story here.
I Chair the Board of a regional arts organisation in my home town, and about four years ago we were offered a grant from a local authority. We had been trying to get money from them for years, so we were delighted, but there were conditions attached. The grant would have to be used for education work. Well, fair enough, and as we do quite of work with local schools that wouldn't cause too many problems. But not just education work, we would have to show that we were addressing a current council priority: road safety. Now, we run a concert hall, and our business is to put great live music on stage, so why were we being asked to help with road safety? I'm pretty sure that local hospitals were not being asked to stage performances of contemporary dance. Nor were the local police being asked to give piano lessons.
As a Board, we decided to turn down the grant, but the whole experience set alarm bells ringing in my head. First, the idea that a funder should dictate the minutiae of what we did seemed wrong - it was an attempt to change our cultural mission and purpose. Worse than that, unless we could have found an artist who already had a burning desire to use music to help with road safety, it would have perverted the work of an artist.
Second, there was a dangerous level of dishonesty in the conversation. The council officer offering the grant knew that we wouldn't use the money in the way specified - he just had to cover his back by asking us to provide evidence that we had addressed a council priority.
And finally, we were being asked to justify our use of public money not in terms of a language that we understood - the language of culture and the quality of artistic production, but in terms of an instrumental social output that, however worthy and desirable, was an add-on, or a beneficial side-effect of what we were about.
So the alarm bells went off in my head, and I went to have a look at what the official policy line on all this was. I was horrified to discover that the Arts Council of England had reached an agreement with the Local government association that said they would together pursue four priorities. These are, for this document is still in force:
- The creative economy
- Healthy communities
- Vital neighbourhoods (which means regeneration)and
- Engaging Young people (which means learning and the curriculum)
Did you hear the words culture or art in there? No you did not, and I find that extraordinary. How can we have reached a situation where the arts council no longer feels confident enough to talk about art?
It seemed that quite a few other people were having the same thoughts as me at around the same time. Nicholas Hytner, the Director of the National Theatre, wrote an article in a Sunday newspaper saying effectively that his job was to put on good plays, and not to worry about who was in the audience watching them. The article was titled 'To hell with targets'.
In June of 2003 Demos organised a conference, with the national theatre and the national gallery, called Valuing Culture, where the current Secretary of State for Culture Tessa Jowell acknowledged that there was more to culture than its use as an economic and social tool. She later wrote a personal essay called Government and the Value of Culture, that reinforced her argument and said this: "How, in going beyond targets, do we best capture the value of culture?" I very much admire her courage in saying that, because essentially it's saying that government itself has got something wrong, but it's interesting that it had to come out in the form of a personal essay, a personal statement, because that, it seems to me, again illustrates how difficult it is to talk about art and culture within the system.
Let me recap for a second - one reason why this debate about the value of culture is happening is because of dissatisfaction, on the part of politicians like Tessa Jowell as much as cultural professionals like Nic Hytner, with a public funding system that seems to be boxed into thinking only about what culture can achieve for other economic and social agendas.
But there may be another, bigger issue that helps explain the current preoccupation with culture. It could be that we are entering a time when the role of culture in society is undergoing a fundamental shift. Throughout the twentieth century we were defined by two things - our nationality and our work. In these circumstances culture was both a reassurance and an ornament. It was a reassurance because we lived in relatively homogenous societies with clear identities. The markers of being an Antipodean or of Britishness were pretty obvious and widely accepted. And it was an ornament because it was offered as compensation for work, a leisure pursuit: something to take our minds off who we really were, but not to challenge who we really were.
In the twenty first century all that has changed. Our nation states are far from homogenous; every individual citizen is now part of a minority. And we no longer define ourselves by our work - most of us will have different jobs, take career breaks, get re-educated, redefine our roles when children come along, and so on. Instead our identity, who we are, gets defined by our cultural activity - our cultural production as members of different groups, and our cultural consumption - and I'm talking here about broad cultural consumption: what we wear, what we listen to and what we watch.And that means that the stakes are higher. Going to listen to a bad concert, or reading the wrong book isn't just a waste of money: these days it can threaten your sense of self.
But let's get back to Tessa Jowell, and down to business. You will recall that she asked the question 'how do we best capture the value of culture?', and I have been trying to answer that in a book published last year called Capturing Cultural Value. It has two virtues: it's short, so it doesn't take long to read, and it's free: you can download it, in fact you can download everything Demos has ever produced, from our website. I am currently writing a sequel, and it's the thinking in that that I would like to outline to you today.
It seems to me that we can look at three types of value that adhere to culture: intrinsic, instrumental and institutional: Let's start with Intrinsic Values. These are the set of values that relate to the subjective experience of culture intellectually, emotionally and spiritually.
It is these values that people refer to when they say "I like this. It makes me feel good", or "If this was taken away from me I would lose part of my soul". Intrinsic values are sometimes difficult to articulate and are experienced at the level of the individual. Consequently they present problems: how are they to be measured? How do we develop a consistent language to express intrinsic value? How do personal experiences translate into social phenomena? Are there standards of quality that can be shared? What is the role of expert opinion?
In Capturing Cultural Value I noted that in a world of postmodern relativism it had become difficult to use words like 'truth and beauty', but I voiced the opinion that it was vital to re-establish a convincing and serious language to talk about the way in which culture moves us. And I think a start has been made. The categorisations of historic, social, symbolic, aesthetic and spiritual value as articulated by the distinguished Australian economist Professor David Throsby seem to me to offer a way to talk about these values without falling into the mysticism of old-fashioned connoisseurship.
But in addition, there are all sorts of other places beyond the cultural world where we might find something useful, because many people in other sectors are grappling with the same issue: how to find a way of expressing the value of things that they know are important but are difficult to quantify. Environmentalists have developed a vocabulary to talk about the value of nature, of biodiversity, and of landscape that contains some useful concepts that are directly translatable into the cultural world, such as the need for cultural diversity in order to sustain a robust cultural ecology, the need to apply the precautionary principle to assets (like museum objects and historic buildings) that are both endangered and rare, and the idea of intergenerational equity - not 'cheating on our children'.
In a different, and perhaps surprising, part of the wood, there are other lessons to be learned. In the corporate world, the question is how to value intangibles like knowledge, morale, brands and financial instruments such as options. This is not an academic matter. When Enron went bust it had total assets of US$65 billion, of which billion were intangibles - and how very intangible they have proved to be.
Yet even though the corporate world may be very far from getting it right, accountants there have at least come up with two useful principles: consistency and disclosure, which are lacking in our cultural discourse. For example, we don't have in culture, it seems to me, any shared understanding of words like risk and innovation, though we use them all the time.
Religion is another place we might look for useful models; because there you discover people combining moral purpose and ethical teaching with very practical instrumental activities that flow from the intrinsic value of their beliefs. Finding a language is one issue we face with intrinsic values, but another allied problem that flows from that is creating a public conversation that is more open, honest and assertive in recognising these values.
The politics of the last thirty years, with its insistence on evidence based policy, new public management and an assumption that you can measure everything and then predict and provide through some logical linear process, has driven out any consideration of the human values and emotional responses that lie at the heart of culture.
Let's turn now to the second set of values that we can find in culture: Instrumental Values.Instrumental values relate to the 'knock-on' effects of culture. That is to say that the benefits are not unique to culture.
These are often, but not always, expressed in figures. This kind of value tends to be captured in 'output', 'outcome' and 'impact' studies that document the economic and social significance of investing in the arts. They might, for example, be reflected in the amount of local employment created by a newly constructed cinema, the difference in truancy rates of pupils participating in an educational project, or the recovery times of patients who sing together.
The problems of 'capturing' these outcomes have been well documented by people of varying backgrounds, including the cultural statistician Professor Sara Selwood, the consultant Adrian Ellis, and the Professor of English at Oxford University John Carey among others. Briefly stated, the main problems are that: it is often difficult to prove cause and effect between a cultural intervention and a particular outcome. How can you show that participating in a theatre workshop led to better exam results? You can't because there are too many other variables at workthere is little in the way of longitudinal evidence to support correlation.
Because policy priorities change, and artistic practice changes, and because of constant contextual changes, it's very rare to find a consistent picture of evidence built up over a long period of time. 'evidence' is often confused with advocacy. Feedback to funders confirms that 78% of projects are successful, which often leads to a successful application for further funding.
Finally, it is virtually impossible to prove that, even if a cultural intervention works, it is the most direct and cost effective way of achieving a particular aim. In a school for example, why invest in actors when you could invest in teachers?That is not to say that culture does not produce instrumental benefits - anyone who has witnessed the work of the arts in schools and hospitals can see that culture can have profound effects.
What I am saying is that we have to be more honest in our use of evidence and recognise the weaknesses of some methodologies. We have to be sure we are not confusing objective data gathering with generating ammunition with which to make a case. We also have to get better - and I think we are starting to get better - about producing evidence from which we can learn. One thing we might do is be more confident, and start calling our anecdotes case studies, like they do at Harvard business school. Another thing we might do is to trust our cultural professionals more: let them decide what evidence they need to gather in order to improve what they do.
The third set of values I want to talk about is Institutional Values. Institutional value relates to the processes and techniques that organisations adopt in how they work, rather than in what they produce. Institutional value is created (or destroyed) by how organisations engage with their public; it flows from their working practices and attitudes, and is rooted in their moral values.
The idea of institutional value differs from the business concept of customer care, because although both may share some of the same visible results (such as courteous staff, the provision of information, and hot coffee in the cafeteria), business will be directed solely at maximising profit whereas a cultural institution will look both for cost-effectiveness and the creation of public goods. Through its concern for the public an institution can achieve such public goods as creating trust and respect among citizens, enhancing the public realm, improving the quality of public space, and providing a context for conviviality and sociability.
Again with Institutional value we face difficulties with measurement. Institutional value is evidenced in feedback from the public, partners and people working closely with the organisation, but although the idea of 'public value' has come to the attention of policymakers, ways of measuring and talking about how institutions add value have not yet been fully articulated or brought into everyday practice.
These three types of value, intrinsic, instrumental and institutional, play out in the context of another triangle, which shows the relationships between, first, cultural professionals, second, politicians and policymakers, and third, the public. The settlement about funded culture between the public, politicians, and cultural professionals, pared to its essentials, operates in theory like this: The public vote for politicians; The politicians decide the legal and policy framework that culture operates within, and, crucially, decide the financial resources that they are prepared to commit; The professionals do their work, and offer it to the public for consumption, and the public then chooses to engage or to stay at home.
But this model no longer provides an adequate explanation of reality. Instead we need to look at the changing attitudes and roles of public, politicians, and professionals, and at the changed relationships between them. When looking at culture, each pairing of that triangular relationship is marked by a dialogue that is either absent or dysfunctional.
Let's start with The Public. The term 'the public' is useful in that it embraces all of us: we are all citizens and we all have an interest in public life and its expression through culture. But 'the public' is obviously not a unified field. Everyone is now in a minority group, so we need to understand that the public has many voices, not just one.The nature of 'the public' is also changing rapidly and in ways that are profoundly significant for politicians and professionals: Demographic trends are altering patterns of cultural consumption.
Education and the 'cultural socialisation' of young people at school (i.e. their increasing familiarity with publicly funded culture through such things as museum visits and theatre workshops) will, I believe, mean greater participation in all forms of culture.The public will become more sophisticated consumers of culture, and are likely to be more demanding, and less forgiving of dowdy cultural infrastructure and poor service.New technology and new means of communication and dissemination will increase public participation. The public will be producers as well as consumers, and will be co-producers of culture with professionals. The distinction between amateur and professional starts to crumble as 'amateurs' attain 'professional' standards.
The public can no longer be thought of a simply 'consumers' or 'non-consumers' of culture, nor should they/we be considered as 'audiences' or 'potential audiences'. Even at their most passive, the public are involved in creative engagements with culture.Culture will become more important to the public.
As I have already argued, we need culture more and more to provide us with an individual and collective identity and thus to make sense of our lives. What does the public value? The public primarily values two things about culture:The first is all those wonderful, beautiful, uplifting, stimulating, thought-provoking, terrifying, disturbing, spiritual, witty, transcendental, enjoyable experiences that shape and reflect their sense of self and their place in the world.The second is being treated well, and honestly, by the cultural organisations that they choose to engage with. They like hot coffee in the interval, and hate over-inflated claims about performances. On the whole they don't directly care much, (although indirectly they may care very much), about the things that politicians worry about: economic regeneration, social inclusion, healthy communities and the rest, and they certainly don't think about culture in those terms, and do not use that language.
So if you look at it in terms of the 'value triangle' that I have outlined, the public cares most about intrinsic values - at its simplest a good night out, at its best a spiritually moving experience - and to a degree about institutional value, but they, we, do not care much about instrumental value.
Now, what about the professionals? This category comprises all those people working in the cultural sphere; that is, within cultural organisations or involved individually in cultural endeavour. As with the public, this is far from being a unified field since professionals vary in their organisational contexts, backgrounds and motivations - and I think the issue of motivation is crucial both in understanding where professionals think that they add value, and in interpreting their actions.
One point to note about the professionals is that, in common with experts in most other fields, their role has been undermined by a combination of factors: the decline of deference in society, the introduction of cultural relativism in postmodern thought, and the attack on professionalism undertaken by conservative governments around the world.
Another thing to recognise is that we are witnessing the narrowing of the traditional divide between the public sector and the private sector in the lives of professionals: But what do professionals value? With all their diversity we should expect professionals to care about all three aspects of the value triangle, but not all professionals care about all three equally. All are, (or should be, for why otherwise would they be doing the jobs that they do) motivated by intrinsic values, and the quality of their work. Some are primarily motivated by peer esteem for their creative endeavours, and thus care more about intrinsic values than anything else. They see the artistic quality of their work as paramount, with other considerations as secondary or even non-existent.Others, such as artists or organisations working in health or prisons or with particular social groups will work towards explicitly instrumental ends, (which is not to deny the intrinsic power of what they do - indeed I would argue that it is difficult to achieve the desired instrumental ends in the absence of intrinsic value).Yet other professionals, due to their organisational roles, will be motivated by institutional values. CEO's and Directors of our cultural institutions certainly should be. All of these positions are valid, whether the focus is on intrinsic, instrumental or institutional value, but understanding these motivations is important, for they prescribe the relationships of the professionals with both the public and with politics and policy.
What about the third group, Politicians and Policymakers? Judging by the references to the word culture in the discourse of politics, culture enjoys a lowly status across political parties. Judging by the amount of money that they allocate to culture, it seems politicians don't take it anything like as seriously as they do other areas of the welfare state.
Let me offer two examples: Spending on Culture accounts for 0.04% of the European Union budget, and the amount of Arts Council England's budget of £410 million for 2005/06 is just 14% of the cost OVERRUNS at the Ministry of Defence. In spite of recent increases in cultural expenditure by central government in the UK, it is still less than 0.5% of government expenditure.If we ask the question What do politicians and policymakers value about culture? all the evidence shows that for the last twenty five years, political attention and public policy have been focussed overwhelmingly on the instrumental benefits of culture. Culture is valued for what it can achieve in terms of other, economic and social, agendas.
This should not surprise us. Politics is about mass social outcomes, about simplification, and politics operates on the large-scale. Art by contrast is about the individual, about complexity and subtelty. Philip Roth, writing about literature puts it this way: 'Politics is the great generaliser and literature the great particulariser, and not only are they in an inverse relationship to each other, they are in an antagonistic relationship' and he asks the question 'How can you be an artist and renounce the nuance? How can you be a politician and allow the nuance?'.
There's another reason why politics and art don't always mix. Lenin famously said that he was afraid to listen to Beethoven because it made him want to caress people heads when it was necessary to beat them. And finally a third reason: for all that politicians like to trumpet the beneficial social effects of culture: it's capacity to generate tourist income, to reduce crime, to improve health outcomes and so on, they are reluctant to acknowledge that art and culture can be oppositional and disruptive and that it can have negative effects on an individual.
So, using these two triangles to look at what is going on enables us to see that each of the groups involved has a different set of concerns in relation to the value of culture: the public cares about intrinsic and to some degree institutional values, the politicians care about instrumental values, the professionals on the whole care most about intrinsic values, but have to pretend that they care about instrumental values in order to get money from the politicians. The politicians talk to the public in terms of the instrumental benefits that they, as politicians, have delivered, whereas the public can't be told what they value: that comes from their own perceptions and assessments.
This is a very important point and extends well beyond culture: one of the great failures of contemporary politics is the disconnect between politicians thinking that they impress the public with statistics about 'so many more nurses' and ';so much more spent on police' with the public's own perception of the value that is created at a personal level. People perceive value subjectively, it is not objectively delivered to them.
But back to culture:The mismatch of value goals, and the consequent misunderstanding between politicians and professionals in particular has had the following results:the level of direction from government and thereon through the funding chain has increased considerably, suggesting lower levels of trust in professionals on the part of politicians. There has been more political equivocation, resulting in stop/go funding Professionals have had to make their case with depressing frequency, in terms that sometimes do not match their own value concerns (and thus appear to them to be empty bureaucratic exercises)This is turn has undermined professional autonomy and respectAll of these things have sapped professional morale. Putting the two triangles together then, helps illuminate where and why we have a dysfunctional relationship between politics and culture.
But there is another complication. Standing between the points of the triangle we have the media.It seems to me that the print media in particular, and to some extent the broadcast media have a paradoxical relationship with culture. On the one hand there is extensive daily, and particularly weekend, coverage of cultural issues. Much of it is of very high quality, and, it must be assumed, reflects a deep interest in culture on the part large numbers of readers, listeners and viewers.At the same time, culture is attacked and ridiculed in the news pages.
We can see this not just in downmarket newspapers like the Sun, but for example in the coverage in serious newspapers of the Momart fire in London, when the destruction of the work of Young British Artists was greeted with glee. I could go on to talk about the relationships of each of the P's with the media but I don't have time. Suffice to say, first, that the politicians are terrified of being portrayed in the media as having any interest in culture, and second, that the press, I think, have failed to understand the growing sophistication of their reader's relationship with culture - and I will give you an example in a minute.
So, if you accept this analysis, that we have developed a pretty messy and dishonest set of conversations around culture, what might we do about it? I want to finish with an example of where I think the conversation has been improved, and where a more open honest and adult approach to public culture has worked.
This statue was recently unveiled on a very rainy day in Trafalgar Square. It is a statue called Alison Lapper Pregnant and Alison is in fact about 8 months pregnant, is naked, and has no arms or legs. It was conceived by her friend, the artist Marc Quinn, and carved from white Italian Marble and it stands on what is known as 'the fourth plinth' in Trafalgar Square, right at the heart of London's and indeed the nation's cultural and political heartland. This plinth has stood empty for more than a century, and it's a blank space calling out for a new kind of public art: all the other statues in the square are of either lions or white military men.
The process that preceded the unveiling of Alison Lapper pregnant is an interesting one: 6 artists were chosen by an expert commission to put forward proposals. The maquettes of their ideas were then shown in the National Gallery (which is just behind the fourth plinth) and on a website, and the public were invited to comment. Not, you will note, to vote. The expert commission then made a recommendation to the Mayor of London, whose final decision it was to pay for and erect this particular sculpture. When the decision was announced the press and politicians were divided: the Sun and some other papers initially condemned it, as did a spokesperson for the Conservative Party.
The Sun's headline was 'Travulgar Square', but within 24 hours it became apparent that public opinion was very strongly, though not universally, in favour: the Sun quickly changed its tune and ran an article entitled 'Brave Alison'. Since its erection the statue has done what a public artwork should do: excited debate, raised all sorts of questions about the place of art in our lives, the nature of public space, and issues of taste.
This example, it seems to me, shows a much more mature approach to public art than would have been the case ten years ago. Then, a sculpture would have been, and in fact was, erected without public consultation, and so the public was largely indifferent. There wasn't much press attention, and London's taxi drivers didn't have an opinion.By contrast, in the case of Alison Lapper Pregnant the public was given a voice, but not a vote - instead there was a legitimate exercise of professional expertise by the commissioning group. We don't expect the public to vote on what drugs the health service purchases, so why should they vote on what art gets commissioned? But the final decision was made by a politician - which is right and proper where public money is being spent, because democratic accountability ultimately lies in the realm of politics.This example, it seems to me, points a way forward, and offers a way to finding a better relationship between the public, professionals, politicians, and indeed the media.
I have a feeling that, partly because of the process that was followed, the public doesn't just value Alison Lapper, they treasure her. When the public do that, the nervousness shown by politicians, the lack of confidence on the part of cultural professionals, and the negativity of the media all disappear. In that situation, the value of culture will flourish. Thank you.
