This past week I’ve been sent different, interesting takes on the state of cultural policy research. My friend James Doeser, who is very smart about these things, has a short post “The crisis of cultural policy in the 21st century” that is well worth your time (update: here is James’s second post). Friends and former colleagues Joanna Woronkowicz and Doug Noonan have a piece on whether we need more (unbiased, useful) evidence-based research on cultural policy. And the good people at the journal Cultural Trends recorded a session for podcast on whether we actually have lots of evidence-based work, but what is actually needed is a rethinking of theory about cultural policy – here is the Spotify link.
It would be hard to summarize all this, so I’ll just go ahead with my own take.
I am focusing on the policy of the government’s giving grants to artists and museums and festivals and performing arts organizations. There are lots of other important cultural policy issues, around copyright, AI, international exchange, treatment of workers, and so on, but since I managed to write a book about public funding, with readership now reaching into the tens, I’ll stick to that.
Traditionally, in the US, grants have been given on the basis of applications by artists and organizations who say they will do something good with the money – an artist can complete a project they are working on, an orchestra can commission a new work, a festival will bring art to the community. But it has surfaced (it was always lurking there) that people don’t agree on what, if anything, is worthy of support. Fresh, new artists? Popular, fill-the-hall productions? Excellence as determined by those well-educated in the genre? Art that glorifies America?
What we don’t know about cultural policy is: what do we hope it will accomplish? The end point of not being able to answer this question is, to my mind, the new enthusiasm for guaranteed-income-for-artists programs, which essentially say “the point of policy is to give away money – we don’t care what you plan to do with it, and afterwards we won’t ask what art came out of it.” I’ve yet to see a convincing case for why this makes any sense at all.
There is no “evidence-based” research that will solve the problem of what we want arts policy to do. You need to know your goals first, and then you can ask: what does the evidence say about effective and ineffective ways to achieve that goal? But there are no numbers, whether regarding arts participation, or social impacts, or what cities are “arts vibrant”, that will answer the question of what we ought to be doing.
There is no “theory” that will answer this question either. There are theories about cultural policy, sure, but none that are universally held, or that give direction on what we ought to be doing (the one exception here is maybe Bourdieu; if we take seriously his claim that all the high arts do is preserve social hierarchies, then the only cultural policy that makes sense is to burn the arts council to the ground).
Cultural policy research is stuck in the mud because there is no consensus on the goals of policy. No analysis, empirical or theoretical, is going to resolve the matter.
Cross-posted at: https://michaelrushton.substack.com/
Why don’t arts policy creators/consultants look to what artists intend when considering their own goals? Or do they? Artists of course are thinking of their own work, not the overall arts sphere of activity, but almost 100% want to get what they make seen/heard/read and to make more. Arts policies should imho focus on helping artists be productive and reach audiences, Is that too basic for comment?
It’s not too basic at all. But it still leaves a lot to the details: must audiences be expansive, or is producing art that will be highly valued by a niche audience immersed in that genre suffice? All artists, anyone claiming to be an artist, or artists with a body of work and, in the eyes of their peers, great potential? Is art to be judged as art, or whether it contains advocacy for some particular social and political values? My point was that these are all important questions, but that data-based research will not help us to find the answers to them. These are questions of values, which cannot be solved through empiricism.