1. Dr. Dave O’Brien,
City University, London
Governing the value of
culture

2. General problems of cultural policy
 Data collection, statistics and evidence are a
longstanding issue in the cultural sector
 Reflects the problems of defining culture (e.g.
Gray 2006, Miles and Sullivan 2012)
 And defining what cultural policy is for
 In the context of peripheral Whitehall
department
 End of the ‘impact’ era and the question of
‘value’

3. ‘the sector is hindered by its failure to clearly
articulate its value in a cohesive and meaningful
way, as well as by its neglect of the compelling
need to establish a system for collecting evidence
around a set of agreed indicators that
substantiate value claims’ Scott (2009:198)

4. ‘Art for Art’s sake’ Luxford
(2010:87)
‘art is separate from other spheres of human experience
and that this autonomy conveys privilege, with the
corollary, not advanced by all writers on the subject, that
such privilege extends to those who make art. These
ideas have proven sufficiently useful and provocative to
give art for art’s sake a prominent place in over two
centuries of aesthetic discourse, and to lodge the term,
with a wisp of its underlying ideology, in the popular
consciousness’
 Range of associated ideas since 1804

5. Culture’s distance from bureaucracy
 State is formed by as ‘routinisation of charisma’ via
techniques of standardisation e.g. writing, time, maps.
language Joyce 2008:8
 Bureaucracy as concentration of various capitals that
create mechanisms for domination (Bourdieu 1994)
 And the bureau is governed by instrumental rationality
Bauman (2004)
 Culture is a representation of the particular against
homogenisation and it is critical towards the status quo
and its institutions (Adorno cited in Bauman 2004)

6. Culture and the market (1)
 Markets only produce short term popularism
 Managerialism founded on the market will give empty
cultural forms, unlike previous relationship with
management that strengthened culture
 ‘to subordinate cultural creativity to the criteria of the
consumer market means to demand of cultural creations
that they accept the prerequisite of all would be consumer
products: that they legitimise themselves in terms of
market value (and their current market value, to be sure) or
perish’ (Bauman 2004:68)

7. Culture and the market (2)
 ‘Hostile worlds’ of art and commerce (Coslor 2010)
 interdependence of markets and art world (Velthuis
2005)
 ‘They said they would never allow their artistic priorities
to be compromised by commercial objectives and that
they did not let financial matters interfere with the way
they conducted relationships with artists and collectors.
At the same time, however, when they were casually
describing their daily life world, including social
interactions, prices surfaced prominently in their
discourse’ (2005:2)

8. Culture, management and
bureaucracy
 Culture inextricably linked to management and the birth
of bureaucratic state (Bauman 2004)
 ‘culture’ metaphorically applied to humans was the
vision of the social world as viewed through the eyes of
the ‘farmers of the human-growing fields’- the managers.
The postulate or presumption of management was not a
later addition and external intrusion: it has been from the
beginning and throughout its history endemic to the
concept’ (Bauman 2004:64)
 Culture impossible to separate from the state and the
attendant bureaucratic technologies which make the
state possible (Bourdieu 1994)

9. The promise of bureaucracy
 Bureaucracy is seen as ‘neutral, indifferent and
unresponsive’ DuGay 2005:50.
 ‘reason is the only morally justifiable basis for
achieving socially justified and co-ordinated action. It is
preferable to all other means, such as force, tradition
and charisma’ Townley et al 2003:1048

10.  ‘the very uniqueness of the public administration as a form of
governmental institution lies in the extent of bureaucratic
constraints permeating it. These constraints are intrinsic to
the practice of liberal state administration. They are not by
products that can be removed...values of formal equality of
treatment for citizens and due process considerations means
that the public administration is constrained in its ability to
act ‘fast and loose’. It cannot drop the nuisance client (or
marginal customer) for the sake of administrative
convenience’ (DuGay 2005:54)

11.  ‘numbers have an unmistakable power in modern
culture... [they] achieve a privileged status in political
decisions, [yet] they simultaneously promise a
depoliticisation of politics... By purporting to act as
automatic technical mechanisms for making
judgement, prioritising problems and allocating scarce
resources’ (Rose 1991:673 cited in Townley et al
2003:1047)
 Sorka et al (2002) problem of getting accurate
numbers even for public expenditure!

12. Conclusion: What is value?
 Value as price
 Value as ethics
 Value as expression/identity

13.  @drdaveobrien
 Dave.obrien.1@city.ac.uk