Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid

Abstract

In March 2013, after six years of consultation, an Australian Labor government launched the national cultural policy document, Creative Australia. In July 2013, a Coalition government was elected, Senator George Brandis became Minister for the Arts, and the policy was dumped. With it went cross-party consensus about funding rationales and measurement strategies, with disastrous consequences for the cultural sector. This cautionary tale of gaffes, pay-back and abrupt changes of direction, highlights the fragility of policy memory that condemns artists and arts managers to a never-ending reinvention of the evidentiary wheel. Our paper examines the problem of collective understanding ("world") in cultural policy-making in Australia, exacerbated not only by the short-term electoral cycles which undermine long-term cultural outcome timescales, but by a fixation on what Hannah Arendt calls "the peculiar and ingenious replacement of common sense with strict logicality". Evidence of value is only meaningful when it occurs in a policy memory that can fully avow it and respond in appropriate ways. Measurement methods are over-determined by epistemology and by experience. We argue that the balance between these determinants of effective cultural policy-making has been lost. An emphasis on numerical dataespecially economic datahas forced arguments for culture into a decontextualised register of quantitative proof. Recent events in Australia suggest that different, more direct ways of engaging with cultural policy-making are required for the problem of collective understanding to be successfully assayed.

From public good to public value: arts and culture in a time of crisis

“…In this article, it is our contention that a state of crisis exists, in embryonic form, in arts and culture, in Australia and elsewhere. The word "crisis" has been much used to describe decades of government (mis)management of the Australian cultural sector (Eltham, 2016;Meyrick & Barnett, 2017), capturing the tension between its self-projection as, on the one hand, a public service and on the other a cutting-edge "industry". But what is happening right now gives the term new force, as the sector faces the cumulative effects of a decade of adversities (see O'Connor and Banks this issue).…”

“…We explore what this means for one problem that has been a key focus for cultural researchers over the last forty yearsthe problem of value. In this period, the dominant ("normal science") understanding of value has been largely instrumental (Meyrick & Barnett, 2017;O'Brien, 2015;Walmsley, 2018), and often economic (Belfiore, 2015;O'Connor, 2020b). While the current change in conceptual consciousness is hard to succinctly summarise, some nascent features can be identified:…”

Sustaining dancer wellbeing through independent professional dance careers

“…Despite the challenges and sacrifices overcome by aspiring dancers in training, a dancer's greatest challenge can be faced when attempting to develop a professional career in a casualised sector of intermittent, low paid contracts (Bennett and Bridgstock 2015;Ashton and Ashton 2016;Hennekam and Bennett 2017). The professional contemporary dance sector in Australia is poorly funded (Meyrick and Barnett 2017) and dancers experience extended periods of unemployment (Zawadzki 2016). Small companies and independent works operate under highly casualised working conditions and rely on the independent entrepreneurialism of 'Bohemian' (Comunian et al 2010) dancers to 'migrate' (Comunian and Jewell 2018) and establish themselves as professional performing artists (Comunian et al 2011).…”

The conferral of value: the role of reporting processes in the assessment of culture

“…Over this time, the rationale for determining culture's value shifted significantly (Throsby, 2010). The last 35 years have seen a 'quantitative turn' in assessment approach, seeking to measure the contribution that culture makes to a range of external areas, especially the economy (Klamer, 2016;Meyrick and Barnett, 2017;O'Brien, 2010O'Brien, , 2014O'Connor, 2012O'Connor, , 2016. Thus, while earlier debate focused on culture's qualitative characteristics (Fiske, 1989;Rowse, 1985;Turner, 1993), researchers today are more likely to focus on the quantification of culture's effects (Bailey and Richardson, 2010;Ferres et al, 2010;Johanson et al, 2014).…”

“…The 'quantitative turn' has not gone unchallenged (Belfiore, 2004;Klamer, 1996), but three decades later, it has created considerable tension between what cultural practitioners believe they are doing artistically and how governments measure what they are doing numerically (Meyrick, 2014b;Meyrick and Barnett, 2017). This has parallels in other fields where value is also hard to measure in precise ways, notably higher education (Collini, 2012(Collini, , 2017.…”