Cultural Policy Observatory Ireland Winter Seminar presentation

1. Cultural policy and the
‘enlightenment’ function
of humanities research
Prof. Eleonora Belfiore
Centre for Resesarch in Communication and Culture
Department of Social Sciences
Loughborough University
e.belfiore@lboro.ac.uk
@elebelfiore
Cultural Policy Observatory of Ireland
Irish World Academy of Music and Dance,
University of Limerick, 16th November 2016

2. ‘Value’ from a cultural policy
perspective
An interest in the politics of cultural policy making
through the analysis of the discursive formation
around justifications of public funding for the arts and
culture
The question of ‘making the case’ for the arts is
fundamentally one of cultural value:
“There will never be enough money”.
“Choices will always have to be made, judgments-
between”
(Richard Hoggart)

3. The problem of ‘justification’…
TomNightingale on the BBC Newsnight comment
web page in 2008:
“There are strong cases for publicly funding
street lighting, hospitals, schools and many
other goods and services. What is the value
of arts beyond private enjoyment. I, and
many others, enjoy fish and chips. Should
chippies be subsidised? A bag of fish and
chips beats the pants off anything either
Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst ever produced”.

4. The roots of ‘justification
anxiety’
Welfare state under pressure
Crisis of legitimacy of traditional cultural
values (postmodern theory)
Shift towards evidence-based policy and the
audit society
More recently, the fall-out of the 2008 crisis
The difficulty of making a political case that
can stand up to scrutiny and convince the
public

5. The arts’ sector “attachment” to
social and economic agendas:
arts as an engine for local and
national economic development
(the creative economy)
arts as a tool to promote social
inclusion, health & well-being
Justifying public arts funding in
the 21st century

6. The latest cultural industries
headlines…
Creative Industries worth £8million an hour to UK
economy (DCMS 2014)
DCMS’s January 2016 Economic Estimates reveal
that the UK’s creative economy is now worth £133.3bn
– 8.2% of UK economy.
DCMS’ Official employment statistics published June
2016: Growth of 25% since 2011at a rate faster than
the whole of the UK economy (12.1%).
Accounted for 1.9 million jobs in 2015, up 3.2%
between 2014 and 2015

7. The impact measurement
‘fetish’
According to the LGA’s report Driving Growth Through
Local Government Investment in the Arts (2013):
York Museum Trust “represents a ‘return on
investment’ of around £10 of impact for every
£1 invested by City of York Council”.
Socio-economic impact = An external form
of validation and legitimacy.
But also a diversionary tactic

8. From AHRC’s Leading the World: The economic
impact of UK arts and humanities research (2009):
… for every £1 spent on research by the AHRC,
the nation may derive as much as £10 of
immediate benefit and another £15-£20 of long-
term benefit. Thus in 2006-7, the AHRC invested
£60.3 million in new research, which implies
immediate returns of over £616.9 million and a
possible additional return over 25 years of around
£1 billion.
The magic of the ‘put £1 in and
get £10 back’ rhetoric

9. Impact, policy and ‘toolkit
mania’
Political and controversial issues have been
reformulated in technical terms
Promotion of a linear model of the research/policy
nexus
Audit, evaluation and performance measurement =
“rituals of verification” (Power 1997)
The cult of the measurable as a strategy of
legitimation and as a way to bypass the problem of the
articulation of the ‘case for the arts’
A sector that is uncomfortable about articulating its
own value
What could humanities scholarship possibly have to
contribute to the justification crusade?

10. The fundamental question
(that remains undealt with):
‘… isn't the real challenge for cultural policy
analysts and practitioners to identify the ways in
which cultures can be funded, supported or
created using the public purse in ways that are
democratic and accountable? To support one
person's or groups' culture is also to make a
decision not to support another's; on what
bases do we make these decisions?’
(Gibson 2008)

11. Arts policy: inherently
political
Cultural value is socially constructed,
negotiated and contested
“Understanding art as socially produced
necessarily involves illuminating some of the
ways in which various forms, genres, styles,
etc. come to have value ascribed to them by
certain groups in particular contexts” (Wolff
1981, 7).
This is where the Humanities
(should) step in

12. The ‘enlightenment model’ of
the research/policy/practice
nexus
Public policy scholar Carol Weiss and research
utilization scholarship – 1970s
“government officials use research less to arrive
at solutions than to orient themselves to
problems”
non-academic professional communities use
research “to help them think about issues and
define the problematics of a situation, to gain new
ideas and new perspectives”
that “much of this use is not deliberate, direct,
and targeted, but a result of long-term percolation
of social science concepts, theories, and findings
into the climate of informed opinion”.

13. Examples of (potential)
Enlightenment
Socially constructed nature of what we consider
valuable culture – rooted in history, embedded in
curricula and institutions.
Power, culture and the politics of representation:
how are we to assess the value of the creative
industries (bringing ‘meaning’ into cultural policy
debates)
Reconfiguring key notions in cultural policy
debates, e.g. ‘cultural participation’ through the
UEP project, ‘community development’ through
collaboration with Fun Palaces

14. Developing a ‘critical-historical approach’
to illuminate contemporary political &
policy issues
Problematizing ‘impact’
Identification of three main
strands within a complex
intellectual history:
the positive intellectual tradition
the negative intellectual
tradition
the autonomy of art tradition
Is the dichotomy between
intrinsic/instrumental value
helpful or part of the problem?
‘Instrumentalism’ is in fact 2500
years old and always had a

15. Cultural value: in the eye of the beholder
My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding – Channel 4 2011-3
Voted ‘Most
Groundbreaking
Programme’ at the
Cultural Diversity
Awards 2010
Series 1 was
nominated for a
BAFTA in the
YouTube Audience
Vote category

16. The ‘value’ of MBFGW
2012
Audience figures for Episode 1 series 2 of Big
Fat Gypsy Weddings reached 9.2 million
Firecracker also won ‘Best International Sale
Award’ – a key industry accolade:
The judges said the show had “made a
significant mark on the international market, with
some staggering deals”.
By then, BFGW had generated sales revenue
of £3.5m from deals in 81 territories

17. The flipside…

18. ‘stigmatization operates as a form of governance
which legitimizes the reproduction and
entrenchment of inequalities and injustices.’
Imogen Tyler (2013:8)

19. What can be done?
‘…to de-istitutionalize patterns of cultural value
that impede parity of participation and to replace
them with patterns that foster it. Redressing
misrecognition now means changing the
interaction-regulating values that impede parity of
participation at all relevant institutional sites’
(Fraser 2000:115)
Should (cultural) policy play a
part in trying to achieve this?

20. FS Michaels (2011) Monoculture: How one story is
changing everything
“In these early decades of the twenty-first century,
the master story is economic; economic beliefs,
values and assumptions are shaping how we feel,
think, and act. The beliefs, values and assumptions
that make up the economic story aren’t inherently
right or wrong; they’re just a single perspective on
the nature of reality. In a monoculture though, that
single perspective becomes so engrained as the
only reasonable reality that we begin to forget our
other stories, and fail to see the monoculture in its
totality, never mind question it”.
Articulating value in the
‘monoculture’

21. The challenge:
How to resist the equivalence of cultural value
and economic value in the economic
monoculture?
The ‘rhetoric of no alternative’ and the neoliberal doxa
Bourdieu (1998) neo-liberalism = an ‘uncrossable horizon of
thought’ = all-pervading form of economic fatalism, which is
‘becoming a sort of universal belief, a new ecumenical
gospel’.
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?
The Humanities should play a key role in this

22. Beyond advocacy: what role
for academia?
The Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural
Value
 Challenging the myth of the neutrality of policy and the
linear research-policy nexus it presupposes
 Pushing the debate beyond the obsession with funding
(simile of the ecosystem)
 Feeding critical perspectives into policy debates + asking
the awkward questions
 We are all implicated in the socially stratified way in
which cultural value works, so this can only be a
collaborative effort!