Presentation by Dave O'Brien of City University to the Cultural Intermediation Project Continuity Day, 27 September 2013

1. Dr. Dave O’Brien,
City University, London

2. Core themes
 Modernity, Government and Governmentality
 Cultural Consumption
 Cultural Work
 Cultural Regeneration
 Cultural Value

3. Reflexivity and the social life of
methods
 Reflexive turn in social science and the constitutive
role of methods
 Law and Urry (2004) Social science methods make
worlds
 Political Science constructions of public opinion
(Espeland 2001)
 Economic constructions of GDP, population, value
(Law and Urry 2004)
 So what cultural policy will methods make possible?

4. 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 forthcoming)
 And defining what cultural policy is for

5. ‘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)

6. What is the aim of government
policy?
‘The fundamental reason for national and local government
action is based on the economic principle of market failure.
Market failure can occur for several reasons, but when it does
occur it means the market will under value the benefits of
engagement leading to an under supply of culture and sport.
Therefore the market alone cannot be relied on to produce a
socially optimum level of supply………. It is not sufficient,
however, just to identify in principle that a market failure
may exist: evidence is required (DCMS 2010:6)’

7. Four phases in UK(?) cultural policy
 Ars gratia Artis 1940s-1970s
 Breakdown of consensus 1970s
 Making an economic and social impact 1980s-
2000s
 The decline of impact and the rise of value mid
2000s-present

8. But are these ‘impacts’ the real
value of culture?
'Mozart is Mozart because of his music and not because he
created a tourist industry in Salzburg or gave his name to
decadent chocolate and marzipan Saltzburger kugel. Picasso is
important because he taught a century new ways of looking
at objects and not because his painting in the Bilbao
Guggenheim Museum are regenerating an otherwise derelict
northern Spanish port. Van Gogh is valued because of the
pain or intensity of his images and colours, and not because
he made sunflowers and wooden chairs popular. Absolute
quality is paramount in attempting a valuation of the arts; all
other factors are interesting, useful but secondary. ‘ (Tusa
1999, cited Reeves 2002:36)

9. Is there a ‘Liverpool Model’
 Yes
 Creating a narrative of the city
 The catalytic effect on partnerships and leveraging further projects
 Creating a shared policy aim across public and private sectors and their
communities
 Creatively productive, even (especially?) the opposition!
 However....
 Not £753.8m of impact
 Or £1billion of regeneration projects
 And the place specific nature of Liverpool’s ECoC
 Role of Impacts08
 Narratives of multiple impacts have stayed in the minds of public and
policy-makers: the holy grail?

10. The £800m case….
‘The statistics surrounding the outputs and outcomes are included
elsewhere and as impressive as they are the two key measures are the
almost 8:1 return on public investment and the improved confidence of its
people. The latter being any city’s most valuable raw material. For every
pound spent there appears to have been a measureable eight fold impact
on the local economy. The confidence of the people has improved not just
because it had a fantastic year long festival of world class cultural events,
but because they realised that great things could be done in their city.
That great things had been done in their city and that great things could
be done again in their city. And they could do them.’
http://www.culture.gov.uk/images/publications/PhilRedmond-
VisionStatement.pdf

11. ...and the influence on policy
 ‘What is also clear is that the concept of
“multiple impacts” has moved from the research
arena—introduced to Liverpool initially through
the Impacts 08 study — into a promise for the
policy arena. This dislocation of narrative from
evidence is all the more problematic because it
appropriates the language and approach of
evaluation and science, validating itself in the
public policy sphere by doing so.’ Cox and O’Brien
(2011:6)

12. Policy and participation
 ‘Deficit’ model within arts and cultural policy
 Linked to narratives of social exclusion and
transformative power of the arts
 ‘the deficit model of participation, which views non-
participants in legitimate culture as an isolated and
excluded minority is misplaced’ (Miles and Sullivan
2009:19)
 And non-consumption is common (Chan and
Goldthorpe 2007)
 Suggests policy has a misguided assumption and needs
new aims!

13. The dispositions of the creative
class
 Attitudes of openness and diversity (linked to
their omnivorousness)
 Individualistic
 Meritocratic
 Elite visions of themselves as new forms of
distinction
 Actually reflective of the closure of professional
society and stasis of social mobility

14. What does this mean for cultural
intermediation?
 The problem of evidence
 Tensions between government and communities
 Questions of power relationships
 Who gets to intermediate what?
 What does it mean to be modern?

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