Cultural Value: Developing the research agenda ‘Addressing the cultural value challenge: the research perspective’.

Why cultural value?  A topical issue that is here to stay – possibly the defining debate for the years to come?  From a research perspective, allows agenda to move beyond the obsession with technical problems (e.g. toolkit mania)  A way out of the instrumental/intrinsic value?  A way to re-inject cultural politics into cultural policy research (cultural authority)

Potential areas for discussion Three main areas: 1)What is the ‘cultural value’ we are proposing to research? (or, rather, whose cultural value should we be looking at?) 2)Interdisciplinarity: How to move beyond the predominance of an economics-based frame in discussions of value? 3) A ‘culturally intelligent’ agenda – after Ien Ang (2011)?

Cultural value: one possible approach  Cultural value as a point of debate within cultural policy discourse in Britain  Link with justification for funding of arts and culture (‘making the case’)  The funding system itself an interesting case of cultural value in operation  Key publicly funded organisations’ cultural authority is rooted in their perceived/unchallenged cultural value  Merit of a historical perspective

A few questions:  What other concepts/definitions of cultural value would it be useful to explore/adopt/consider/research?  A focus on institutions (and how they articulate and promote their own understanding of cultural value)?  But what about individuals? How about artists? How about what ‘the public’ values? How best to incorporate these perspectives in research?  The radical potential of a questioning of ‘institutionalised’ value (e.g. “cold spots”)

Reclaiming value from the hegemony of economics… An epistemological problem:  ‘a modern form of “economic imperialism” in the realm of the intellect’ (Rothbard 1989)  It foments the current ‘measurement fetishism’  An important moral and political dimension that has been so far overlooked (the moral limits of markets and the shift from a market economy to a market society – e.g. Michael Sandel)

 The idea that ‘what matters is what works’, and that cost-benefit analysis is an effective way to guide decision making becomes a way to bypass the problem of the articulation of the values and ideologies at the root of policies  Political questions (making the case for the arts) are reformulated as technical problems (e.g. focus on problems of impact assessment) The de-politicization of the value debate

- Wolfang Tillmans’ answer when asked “What’s the best argument you can put forward for not cutting the arts?”: “It makes sense on an economic level. Britain doesn’t have much to export but the creative industries are a huge export industry. I don’t want to sound too economical but that is the only language this government seems to understand”. - David Shrigley’s video for the Save the Arts campaign Articulating value: In an artist’s own words

A new stage in the commodification process?  A sector that is more comfortable with talking about ‘value for money’ than money for values  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?  Reframing the value debate and reclaiming from the econocrats  Acknowledge that devoting public resources to the arts and culture is not a matter of evidence/measurement… it is a matter of politics and values!

What do we hope a new research agenda might achieve?  Moving beyond old ‘useful’ vs. ‘critical’ dychotomies  How to broaden the debate to those cultural policy is meant to benefit (artists and the public)?  Are academics caught in what Russell Jacoby (2008) calls ‘cult of complication’ (e.g. critique for the sake of critique)

Ien Ang (2011) on the ‘cult of complication’ “ Our inclination to problematize, contextualize, relativize, particularize, in short complexify; to denounce everything that seems reductionist or essentialist; to reject all binary oppositions in favour of the blurring of boundaries; to replace unitary identities with multiplicities; to be suspicious of notions of coherence and homogeneity; to pluralize everything which used to be talked about in the singular (e.g. truth, culture, reality and of course complexity itself) – the routinized use of all these discursive proclivities suggests that the pursuit of complexity has become an end in itself in much cultural research today”.

Ang’s antidote: ‘cultural intelligence’ A theoretically informed, empirically grounded account of the messy complexities of cultural policy… “Finding a language to understand these complexities – that is, to describe the specific ways in which things are ‘complex and contradictory’, as cultural studies generally insists – is a necessary step to generate the cultural intelligence with which to formulate ‘solutions’ in terms of strategic, flexible, emergent, non-simplistic simplifications, rather than the reductionist and mechanistic thinking (informed by positivism) which still dominates much policy-making and problem- solving”.

Cultural Intelligence – an agenda for engagement? “I propose to conceptualize cultural intelligence as an orientation to knowledge and understanding which goes beyond cultural critique through a practical engagement with complexity […] [C]ultural intelligence involves the recognition that navigating complexity can never be a question of definitive or one size-size-fits-all ‘solutions’; a complex problem can only be addressed partially, through an ongoing and painstaking negotiation with its multiple aspects, the different ways in which it is perceived, and the divergent interests and perspectives involved”.

Conclusions Three items for the discussion list:  Definitional matters: cultural value? Cultural values? Value of culture? Is it just semantics?  Dethroning economics: an interdisciplinary/post-disciplinary approach  Why research cultural value? Reaching beyond academia/ a collaborative agenda?