The Oikonomic Value of Culture

At the end of April 2013, Maria Miller gave her first speech after 7 months in the role as Minister for Culture. In this, she was adamant that the Cultural sector should focus on generating wealth for the nation. This has yielded a flurry of responses, basically saying ‘we’ve been telling you the arts make money for the UK for years’, including this from ACE enumerating how arts and culture does indeed make a contribution to the economy.

Soon after, DCMS published A Holistic Approach to Valuing our Culture, by Dr Claire Donovan, who was on a 6 month fellowship exploring this topic very openly with a broad community of stakeholders. It’s a really good collation and reflection on a variety of economic and non-economic methods of valuing culture. However, I want to ask some awkward questions of it: Is it really holistic? Is it possible to have a non-economic method of valuation?

I can’t help asking awkward questions so I like this response to the issue by Eleonora Belfiore on her Cultural Value platform, in which she stresses the importance of asking awkward questions. However, after reading it, I still ask the awkward question: how exactly can we articulate value (or practice economics) outside the narrow, financial and  monocultural ways of valuing culture?

Why does this topic of Cultural Value rumble on so contentiously and unsatisfyingly? I believe it’s because we never get to the ground of the debate. We argue between either intrinsic or instrumental forms of value. We push either financial or social value. We become ever more sophisticated in our differentiations or mergings of these, but we’re dancing round a chasm in our understanding.

I argue it makes no sense to distinguish between economic and non-economic valuation approaches. Culture is an entirely productive activity (if you see product in the broadest terms) and valuation is an entirely economic process. There is another, more meaningful, distinction to be made and that is between two ways of doing economics.

The underlying reasons why so many people in the Cultural sector (and Environmental sectors) object to the financial valuation of our heritage ‘assets’ and creative ‘outputs’ are to do with the growing extremity of the Neo-liberal Capitalist framework within which economics operates. In the UK, this framework has become alarmingly extreme.

Economics is, broadly, a system for understanding and controlling the values that feed and arise from any activity to ensure maximum efficiency and generation of goods from it. However, economics is not as it should be. We understand and carry it out wrongly, and we even spell it wrongly. Economics comes from oikonomics, from oikeios.  This is short for oikeios topos, or ‘favourable place’.  Oikeios is home, kith, place, belonging, where we are fed, where we are not lonely and where we make meaning of the world. It’s not just our houses and streets, but the Earth, our only favourable place. Species of life thrive in favourable places and connect together to form ecosytems. So, economics is semantically and rightly to do with the dynamic relationship between species (mainly humans) and their environments (other species and materials). A new oikonomics would be about applying rational methods to ensure an abundant and healthy relationship between humans and the oikeios.

I agree with Belfiore and F.S. Michaels, the source she cites, that we’ve been overwhelmed by a financially-driven monoculture. However, as an escape from this monoculture, we hear talk about ‘embracing other ways of valuing’ or ‘getting beyond the economic’, without defining clearly what this other is. Models that attempt to be more holistic perform an addition sum: they simply tell stories or provide data about both money and people, or about money and proxies for it.

When clear water is drawn between, for example, Financial and Cultural value, these distinctions arise from different world-views that prioritise certain interventions or outcomes. Maria Miller privileges Financial value, or actions involving investment of funds, exploitation of assets and generation of (quick) profit. A community health worker might privilege Social value, or actions that diagnose and serve needs of certain groups of people. And, it’s similar for people who prioritise Environmental or Cultural value. Each type of advocate believes that their domain has the greatest powers to disseminate benefits more widely. So, for the Financial value advocate, the best work is in generating profit (exploiting Social, Cultural and Environmental assets), assuming it will trickle down to benefit all people and public services. Social value people will advocate for the wider impacts of skilling people and eliminating injustice, that this reduces the cost of public services and increases active citizenship.

Advocates for either Cultural or Environmental capital have a much harder time being understood, partly because both Culture and Environment are more complex and harder to engineer and quantify than Financial or Social capital. It may also be that they have more fundamental and widespread benefits than Finance or Social capital, but are slower to yield benefits. Mainly, these advocates struggle because Cultural and Environmental values are subordinate to the generation of Financial Value, which in turn is seen to yield Social value.

The problem with quantifying the value of the environment is that it is not separable from anything at all. The natural environment is the life-world for humans but also for millions of other species. Efforts to quantify the Financial value of ecosystem services might seem useful but are only really meaningful if we multiply their value to humans by the number of all other species sharing it as a habitat. (Result = priceless.) Moreover, the more strongly that Financial value is prioritised the more we are likely to destroy the environment while we transfer it as quickly as possible into this rapid exchange tool.

The problems with quantifying the value of Culture are similar to those in quantifying Environmental services. One problem is that culture is the same as diversity. (Culture is the myriad ways that humans construct meaning from their connection to, and create novelty and change amidst, the natural world.) The main problem is that human culture is actually enfolded within nature. Jason Moore in his essay ‘From Object to Oikeios Environment-Making in the Capitalist World-Ecology’ says “Nature-as-oikeios is…not offered as an additional factor, to be placed alongside culture or society or economy; it is, rather, the matrix within which human activity unfolds.”

What I’m trying to work out here is a truly ecological system of valuing culture, rather than one in which we use terms such as ‘ecosystem of cultural funding’ in only metaphorical ways. Capitalist market economics are an abstract confection, ignoring the realities of planetary boundaries. Therefore, I don’t think it is unrealistic to expose the possibilities of a more oikonomic way of valuing Culture.

In a more oikonomic system, time becomes a significant factor but one where we don’t privilege speed. We see that fast action for maximum accumulation of capital or value may be superficially efficient but it is not sustainably efficient. It could be possible to give a monetary or numerical/proxy valuation to every activity, eventually. The fastest yields occur when money acts upon itself, in the money markets (but while speculating on commodities from ecocidal landgrabbing or deforestation, and which causes hunger). The very slowest yields are when we regenerate natural environments that might take 1000 years to recover from human destruction. Somewhere between the two are yields from Social and Cultural interventions. Social interventions are more rapid because they can involve providing material human needs in a timely way. Cultural interventions can similarly see quick results in terms of joy or conversation, but these may take some more time to translate into Financial or Social value. They may translate through a very long ‘food chain’, which gives rise to subsidiary benefits that weren’t originally planned.

I believe that Cultural interventions are the most valuable (and therefore, the most economical) of all possible interventions. At their most excellent, to use ACE’s language, Cultural interventions have everything to do with oikeios:

• Cultural activity helps people cope with the loss of oikeios (whether this is displaced, enslaved or migrant peoples, or in fact all of us now facing the collapse of our global ecosystem).
• Cultural activity helps oikeios-making or placemaking: arts and heritage can help places thrive and help people gain a ‘sense of place’.
• Cultural organisations and expertise help to protect and conserve artefacts (or knowledge) that has become separated from its oikeios, for example the language, plant knowledge or material skills of indigenous peoples.
• Cultural activity can involve the virtual creation of oikeios, for example, digital learning communities, or the digital cultural commons, or literary/imagined places or reconstructions of lost places in the past.
• Cultural activity can enhance our own natural assets, in the form of our brains and bodies, through play, sport, dance and outdoor exploration.
• Cultural activity, such as sustainable craft or design, or arts-in-the-landscape, can contribute to the regeneration of oikeios, or the conservation or rewilding of places.
• Cultural activity can help change attitudes to our fellow beings, to be more generous and less materialist, to shift our society to more sustainable ways of living.
• Cultural activity can inspire some of the most advanced and imaginative visions of how we might live in a radically changed oikeios.

There may be other oikonomic ways to value culture but these will do for now. I’d love to know what you think. Are there better ways I can articulate this idea?

Reclaiming economics for cultural commons

Image: The Room for London on top of the South Bank Centre. Ironic because it is an elite space for invited performers and paying guests, yet also connotes a future time of sea level rises and a flooded city that will affect everyone. 

I like the timely mission of the Cultural Value Network in reclaiming cultural value from the ‘econocrats’. I agree with Ben Walmsley and also with Fiona Hutchison that attempts to give financial proxies to cultural activity can be ridiculous. I’ve been one of the voices calling for time and space for cultural work to take root and have unpredictable and untraceable effects. I can get frustrated when contracted to do evaluations of cultural projects that, to fulfil funding requirements, we must pre-ordain outcomes and measure impacts before the ripples have even spread.

Our debates get stuck in an endless to-and-fro between prioritising either the harder economic or the softer spiritual or relational outcomes. Those of us who share common distaste at hard economic measures can also be caught up in other dichotomous debates between the importance of measuring instrumental social outcomes and a wish to place culture otherwise, outside mechanistic and measurable realms. The claim of otherness evades description, causing difficulties in making the case for culture. We get frustrated because we are chafing at the bind we are in, which is global capitalism. This is both bind in the sense of tie and bind as quandary. The capitalisation of the commons provides us (the lucky ones, temporarily) with incomes and cheap goods. How do we break out of that without collapsing?

To move the debate on, I suggest that our main challenge is reclaiming economics from the capitalist ‘econocrats’. Economics is a way of analysing values of goods so that their accumulation and exchange can be efficient, fair and sustainable. However, the current global system of accumulation and exchange is so inefficient (or utterly wasteful), unfair (or socially unjust) and unsustainable (or ecocidal) it is destroying both the natural commons and cultural commons. (Culture of course is not distinct from nature, but an integrated part of it.) We can blame particular Economic schools for promoting this destruction, but not Economics itself. Economics can be a valid tool in a circular restorative system. Indeed, the discipline of economics and structures for accountability may even be vital in shifting us towards a circular economy.

The key principles of a circular economy are:

• measure the quality of systems rather than components
• create industrial systems that mimic ecological systems
• waste is energy (or food)
• diversity creates resilience
• regenerating the biosphere should be the primary reason for any activity.

All of these principles are very fitting with philosophies around the arts and heritage: complexity, flow, reinvention, creativity, diversity and conservation of past knowledge. Cultural organisations and practitioners have much to offer in supporting this. I don’t mean this in the simplistic sense that art can communicate messages, as critiqued here by Jeppe Graugaard writing about Cape Farewell. I mean that cultural organisations can change the way we design our world, can open our eyes to its diversity and soften antagonisms, and a great deal more. You might ask – how can I measure and prove this? You only have to imagine your world without songs, jokes, metaphor, games, stories, tools, designed shelter, gardens, cookery, clothing etc etc to know why they matter, and that these are all as they are now because of the contributions of creative people. It makes sense too that we need cultural infrastructure, whether it is informal community or formal institutions, to give us the most inclusive and excellent access to these things.

I don’t believe the cultural sector should retreat from political realities in wanting to evade financial or instrumental measurement. It should bring the powers of culture to change our lived and political reality. There are risks of course, especially that organisations may risk losing funding if they are seen to be against Government policy. But, it doesn’t have to go that way. The Happy Museum project is an encouraging example. It funds small action research projects into how museums can promote a high wellbeing, low carbon society. At first the stream was funded by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation but now it has £146,000 support from ACE. Moreover, the long term risks of not shifting our political and industrial model towards a circular economy are very great. Even if we cease emitting CO2 today, the sea will still rise 3 metres. If we don’t stop emitting CO2 within a few years, it is highly unlikely that human civilisation will survive through the next century.

I’m aiming to shift my work from short term evaluations and projects, to supporting cultural organisations to travel into this unstable future while helping stabilise it. As a resource for this, I’m developing a ‘value ecosystem’ model for the cultural sector. (You can see an initial sketch in this post. In short, it aims to describe the value of work that feeds planetary, collective, institutional and individual wellbeing nested one within the other. It also suggests that we flip our meanings of hard and soft, so that ‘hard’ becomes the essential work of sustaining culture and ‘soft’ becomes lazy abstraction from the real world.)

In doing this I’ve wondered about the difference between ‘evaluation’ and ‘valuation’ as both a difference of scale and purpose. Evaluation is gathering evidence to describe the value of any project to participants and stakeholders. Valuation is usually the evidenced quantification of the value of investments or assets in a comparative (aka competitive) marketplace. Put like this, valuation sounds very harsh. However, it could be reframed as the valuation of assets and acts of stewardship within a commons. If the context changes to commons, its meaning changes from a market value to common values. Perhaps because valuation happens when an organisation or service is under question or threat, we are more wary of it. It’s like when a marital home and assets are valued at divorce. Perhaps we try to shield cultural services from this brutal treatment because we feel they are somehow like children who can’t be valued as if to be packaged up, only loved. We know the difference between pricing something and loving it.

Culture (as the creative flowering of the demos) is not loved by the powerful, because it benefits power to weaken the public spirit of resistance which might protect local places, traditions, freedoms or diversity. We hear the powerful say ‘if people value culture, or health, or education, people will pay for them’ so in turn cultural organisations scramble to mobilise public support for what they offer. As part of this we’re seeing a flowering of participation in cultural organisations, inviting public to comment on, co-create and contribute to services. This is to be applauded, but it is important for participation projects to be critically engaged. I’ll end on a little exchange on Twitter from today’s Museum Ideas conference. The new Director of the Museum of London, Sharon Ament, spoke admirably about how museums need to tackle problems like climate change and was enthusiastic about the moves by museums and libraries to be more participatory. She was quoted to say ‘At no time has an individual had such a chance to be heard’. Quick as a whip, Tony Butler, who leads the Happy Museum Project mentioned above, responded ‘At no time have the powerful been more unwilling to listen’.

We need to aim for a circular economy to reclaim economics for a commons culture. In doing so, we need to set up circular systems within and beyond our cultural organsiations so that people can have more than just a chance to be heard, but have political agency to make a difference.

Making the case for heritage learning

Photo from hoardings around development of new Tate Modern building.

“We are made wise not by recollection of our past but by the responsibility for our future” George Bernard Shaw

I’ve just been to the beautiful green campus of University of Exeter for the conference of the Group for Education in Museums. The conference enquiry was: how do we make the case for heritage education, in a time of austerity? What are the benefits to the wide range of audiences with which heritage educators interact? And so, what is the value to society? Can you put a monetary value against its benefits and does this help make the case?

Fiona Hutchison addressed the topic in most depth, as this is the focus of her PhD, with RAMM in Exeter as her case study. (Note, RAMM is winner of Museum of the Year 2012, quite deservedly.)

Her thesis is that we should seek alternative non-financial methods to value cultural engagement. I fully sympathise with her view and I’m very glad she’s doing this work. DCMS has been considering questions of valuing culture in general but I don’t think this goes into depth to explore the impact of qualities of public engagement with culture. So, it’s important.

I do think she was too dismissive of the Social Return on Investment method of evaluating impact. She described it as placing financial value on cultural/social work, which might imply only looking for economic revenue from culture, rather than what SROI attempts to do. This is to use proxies to identify the likely cost of delivering the same benefits via other services such as health, education or welfare. It is true that SROI is difficult to do well and maybe impossible to do well enough in our current situation, but the idea of proxy value can’t be so easily dismissed. I think it does enable the arts and heritage sectors to identify their cultural and social impacts, rather than resist the notion that they should have any transferable impact on anything at all. You could use proxies such as Timebank hours or alternative currencies, alongside money, if you wanted to use the SROI system without being too money-oriented. [Note, since writing this Fiona has commented below, helpfully.]

I’m wary of the culture sector habit of saying: Culture can’t be measured in hard or material ways because it has ‘other’ benefits, less measurable outcomes. The other remains undefined, in a vague and soft antithetical space. In general, I challenge the ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ dichotomy. Maths and science versus ‘soft subjects’ or ‘soft skills’. Military/industrial power versus ‘soft power’. Soft always gets the raw deal. Its name defeats it already. What about if we flip it?  We could imagine:

Hard = capacities and work that are essential and difficult, such as:

• Nurturing people
• Stewardship of heritage, protecting against loss
• Overcoming conflict through dialogue
• Imagining multiple possibilities
• Creating original ideas
• Slow but agile activity with long term outcomes
• Paying attention to ecosystem services, for sustainability

Soft = capacities and work that are abstracted, overfed, lazy and short-term, such as:

• Subjugating and damaging people
• Extraction and exploitation of environments, precipitating loss
• Failing to address conflict by supporting agonistic politics and social inequalities
• Extrapolating only from ideologies to imagine only one solution
• Exploiting and/or constraining original ideas
• Fast but repetitive/imitative activity to achieve short term outcomes
• Ignoring ecosystem services, risking a hard fall.

You get the picture as I’m drumming it home. Fiona wasn’t unaware of the need to define the alternative to financial value. She does propose to work on definitions and produce a new impact assessment model, based on the following 10 impact factors: Economic: Tangible impacts for individuals: Impact for museum: Community outcomes: Identity pride and tolerance: Cultural aspects (aesthetic, spiritual etc): Wellbeing: Learning and knowledge: Personal capacity: Museum as a facility.

Seeing this list, I wonder if we’re hitting such difficulties in defining the value of culture because we struggle to organize these kinds of factors into a value ecosystem? I’m thinking about this in relation to a conversation with Pat Kane, who asked me with my business partner Mark Stevenson to work on a project about how cultural institutions (in the broadest sense) might need to be reformed by 2050. So, in fact, rather than bedding down more firmly for longevity might institutions need to continually reform themselves, reconstituting fluidly to respond to contextual problems, looking outwards or ‘bigger than self’ towards the common good? These organisations might be called ‘constitutes’. Thinking like this is difficult for museums and heritage bodies constituted to preserve assets for perpetuity. But it might become essential part of resilience, as long as enduring trusts of some kind are able to protect what it is their duty to conserve.

So, if we saw impact factors organized in a value eco-system, what might this look like? Imagine nesting circles (until I find time to draw them):

Planetary wellbeing: An organisation’s contribution to biosphere stability, through local and global action.

Inside which is…

Collective wellbeing: Its contribution to thriving neighbourhoods and partner organisations, promoting peace, collaboration and well-distributed resources.

Inside which is…

Constitutional wellbeing: The extent to which the heritage body is attaining more symbiotic relationships with its members and visitors to achieve its mission, including specialist communities of interest (such as subject experts).

Inside which is…

Individual wellbeing: The wide variety of ways that an organisation impacts differently on a wide variety of individuals. (This could be described as a ‘long tail’ of atomised impacts, but they might together contribute to the constitutional, collective and planetary impacts.)

Is this a more useful framework on which to map particular outcomes of heritage and cultural activity? I’d really welcome comments.

Anyway, the reason I was at the conference was to do some sessions on planning digital learning and participation with popular culture collections. We used the case study of the Bill Douglas Centre, which is a museum and archive on campus about the history of cinema and popular culture. We’re helping develop their digital strategy so I reflected on that, and the curator Phil Wickham gave us a tour of the galleries. My slides can be found here. I argued that more learning staff should be involved in digital planning across organisations, to refocus digital outputs on world-changing or place-making missions, that they need to employ their skills in promoting dialogue in online projects, as well as their skills in storytelling and addressing diverse audiences in accessible ways. If we want to make the case for heritage, we have to do the best quality work we can, focus on our responsibility for the future, make use of future technologies and engage with young people.

We ran out of time to discuss creative ways of interpreting popular culture collections online. Any participants itching to do that, or anyone else, is welcome to share ideas on the Bill Douglas Centre digital ideas blog. 

The Happy Museum from a distance

By Paul Clarke

Personal circumstances conspired to stop me attending the Happy Museum symposium. One thing keeping me at home was a visit from the Home Education Inspector, which was unmissable really. (We passed the inspection.) But, too interested, I couldn’t keep away from the Twitter stream and the photos coming from Paul Clarke, who I was delighted to see had been employed to document the symposium.

Tony Butler has just written a great post reflecting on the event, and listed some fascinating questions that he wants to pursue. Although each one is worth a thesis and I’m foolishly starting this at midnight, I’m paraphrasing each one and responding with some half-formed thoughts.

1) Why are museums good at ‘high well-being’ but less good at addressing good stewardship of our environment? Some tentative thoughts:

Maybe, because good environmental stewardship is not integrated into our ways of thinking or talking, not just in museums but in the wider culture? We don’t have an ecological epistemology. You might see campaigns about litter or tree-planting or counting birds. But these campaigns don’t reinforce how human wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of ecosystems and biodiversity. Museums endorse and reflect a traditional taxonomy, whereby Natural History and Earth Science are always in different museums or departments from Art, Design, Anthropology etc. Even the question which holds ‘high wellbeing’ and ‘environmental stewardship’ as distinct activities or concerns, reflects this separation (which isn’t to criticise the question or questioner).

2) Why has the dominant radical social justice paradigm in museums been so poor in linking social justice with resource equity and climate change? Some very tentative thoughts indeed:

Funding sources setting the agenda have required museums to focus closely on social agendas. 13+ years of Blairism: Museums & schools have been expected to overcome social inequality, while the Government’s policies on taxation and the liberalisation of capital worsened inequality. The more we saw inequality worsen the harder some of us in the sector tried to tackle it.

Wider society, including the elites of politicians and media commentators, are almost entirely blind to the connections between social injustice and the resource iniquities resulting from agribusiness, food shortages due to climate change, conflict fuelled by fighting over resources and so on. They are, however, starting to wake up to the connections between resource inequity and corporate greed.

Because reports like this (review of 2011 from an environmental perspective) don’t get extrapolated and mapped onto other projections or interpretations of what is happening in the world.

3) Why is it we have to revisit examining the relationship between culture and wellbeing when we have years of experience and analysis? Some rather simplistic thoughts:

From a positive perspective, because we do now need a radical fresh understanding of culture and wellbeing. Cultural research hitherto has been carried out in a vacuum, in which an understanding of wellbeing has a limited frame of reference, one which is not informed by an ecological epistemology. Conventional discourses skew the public debate because culture is generally represented as a decoration above brutish life, a form of escape rather than a return. When culture is not recognised as the fundamental means by which we spread and grow knowledge and thereby develop the means to thrive (not just between our own species but with others) we can only measure its value in ways that devalue it.

To be more critical, it is because we now have a Government which is blundering through a radical reform agenda with a questioning naivety, asking for simple restatements to inform their policies but without maintaining contracts of enough experts (e.g. DCMS civil servants) who have prior experience.

4) It is possible for small amounts of investment to make effective change. Why does larger scale funding often miss the mark?

I’m not sure about this one. I’d need to see a bit more evidence to prove this assertion. Not that I’m sceptical, just that it doesn’t fully accord with my experience. If there is an answer, it’s because large scale funding is usually for buildings and infrastructure, which gets spent up on project managers and concrete. Smaller education, or staff training or community projects which might have more impact on how museums deliver wellbeing are too often tied up by predetermined outcomes, often servicing those big infrastructure projects. These small projects often have conflicting outcomes, by both serving the corporate goals of growing visitors or income and serving social or learning outcomes. So, I’m not sure how common it is for small amounts of investment to make effective change, though I do concede it’s possible.

5) Is risk-taking more likely through funding of ideas and individuals or organisations and projects? Good question, one which I’ve not thought about much:

I guess this question arises from a comparison of funding of museums, where the only individuals funded are a few PhDs or researchers, compared to the arts, which is a more individualistic domain. I’d like to see more funding in the museums and heritage sector for creative enquiry, for individuals or loosely constituted teams. I’d very much like to benefit from such funding myself. However, I don’t know how much impact such individual enquiry would have on museum organisations (if that’s the way to make effective change). How much would museums have to change to allow an individual or a radical action research project to make a real difference? As I write this I’m remembering that there have been a number of individual creative research projects in museums in the field of cultural diversity, which have been exciting and have maybe helped to radicalise the profession if not the organisations themselves.

Ultimately I think this isn’t so much about individuals vs organisations, but open-ended outcomes for research vs closed outcomes that serve the most corporate aspects of an organisation’s agenda.

6) Could the ancient notion of the Commons provide a framework to deliver this change, gathering virtual and real-time communities around a desire to share and steward heritage?

Yes! And yes again. For me the Commons isn’t just an ancient notion but a current and highly relevant notion. Fundamentally, the commons are goods that are all shared (universally) and are all gifts (so, impossible to measure economically, or commodified, but important to value).  The idea of the commons sits well with taking a long view: they exist to be preserved and passed down the generations. Just right for the museum sector. The beneficiaries or owners of the commons are not just humans but all species. The commons is a principle that should be applied to both our biosphere and our digitally-powered knowledge sphere, and both need preserving as heritage and nurturing as new growth. Our knowledge sphere should be applied to preserving the biosphere as commons. Museums must start seeing their digital strategy as much more than marketing through a web presence but exposing their collections to the hive mind for this purpose. It’s much more than just a technical or legal challenge of digitisation. It’s a philosophical and educational challenge too.

7. This change can only happen if embedded within highly participatory organisations, right?

Well, yes. Participation and the commons go hand in hand. But I’ve run out of steam now. Let someone else have a go.

Digital culture, monetisation and value

Originally posted December 2010

This post is a response to a lively thread on the Museums Computer Group e-list about the Cost of Sales, which was sparked by a Twitter chat about whether museums should fully assess the cost of running an image sales operation. When it transferred to an email discussion it became much more philosophical and political, especially after Nick Poole raised a challenge from an international financier about the lack of clear monetary value  in digitising cultural heritage. Now, my thoughts on the discussion may seem so philosophical and political that I’m not even posting it on the MCG list but on my blog.

I agree with Nick on the need to talk with financiers, to appreciate their perspective and learn from business. This may seem very unlike me, but I have partly been stirred to say this by his rousing keynote at the UK Museums and the Web conference last Friday. My take is that we need to proceed towards a more business-like mode in a way that is profoundly ethical and ecological, to the extent that we need to lead bankers and business to see value very differently, and that by doing so we can help change the world.

I’m not an economist or a business specialist, but an educationalist above all, so I maybe have no right to contribute to a debate about monetisation but I want to raise the issue of rapidly changing relevances and the importance of shifting our frames of reference. The key to advocating and generating value is establishing, and stretching, contextual relevance. I think digital culture & heritage people must shift from being technologists who are servicing the dominant modes of value, into leaders capable of transforming their organisations. As a sector we can then join the vanguard alongside the Commons and Social Enterprise movements, where technology enables an opening of access to  culture, for widespread change. (I say ‘vanguard’ but it’s worth remembering that the earliest dated printed book, the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, was marked as for free universal distribution nearly 1200 years ago.)

The least significant aspect of our context is the economic crunch. You could even argue there isn’t a money problem, but that there’s just a money flow problem. There are great reserves of money, for example the top European companies are sitting on around 500 billion euros, not to mention the wealth of other internationals and the high net worth individuals. Public money isn’t flowing to UK culture so much now because the response to the deficit is ideological, and there is an entrenchment of values that favour financial growth for the sake of corporates over the wellbeing of the commons. This entrenchment is allowing a backlash of philistinism, allowing the multivalence of culture to be overlooked, only valued when it is a valuable commodity due to rarity or celebrity or market demand. The few public cultural organisations that have managed to work that system of commodity, brand or celebrity have been more successful at tapping those reserves. The Tate is one of those few, having just announced a £45 million revamp alongside their £215 million extension at Tate Modern. This magnetism is partly related to the oiling (in two senses) of the worldclass value of the British market for modern and contemporary art. None of this critique is meant criticise the Tate, especially as it plays a great role in education and in showcasing radical and participatory art such as Ai WeiWei’s Sunflower Seeds. (Incidentally, to monetise this artwork, have they considered selling 10 seeds for £1 after the show? I’d pay that, especially if some of the profits went to charity.)

So, if smaller organisations in the MLA & arts sectors want to tap that corporate source too, they may want to emulate the operations that attract money, by using digital media to build brand, a sense of glamour around a place, a sense of aura around the originators or cultural objects, and to present the artefacts themselves as totems of power. That approach can certainly make a great visitor experience, and can stimulate support and even learning. But it can also be very superficial. I want to propose that they should look elsewhere for their relevance.

I’m not just talking about looking beyond the financial value of culture to alternative ways of defining capital that are ‘softer’ and, well, indefinable. So many reports or pleas about the value of culture, though they may say much that is heartening and useful, are either circular (‘people want that soft indefinable something and they’ll pay for it, so, look it yields money) or self-defeating (‘you can’t tarnish the softer indefinable stuff with money, you just have to accept its otherness’). The problem is that our dualistic model holds hard economic value in opposition to soft cultural value (cultural = ethical, aesthetic and spiritual). If we synthesised the two, with money and culture not in opposition, we would see something I call ‘biosphere capital’. This is about resources for survival, and that is as hard-headed and sensible as you can be, harder in some ways than money, which is pretty abstract. It’s also about drawing on all the resources of the human spirit and memory to achieve it.

If the sector wants to embrace relevance, this is what matters: The scientific consensus that the planet is heading, at current trends, to a temperature increase which may not sustain mass human life before the end of this century. Also, wrapped up with the causes and effects of global warming are resource scarcity, biodiversity loss and chemical pollution. As these take effect, there will be a major increase in conflict (ranging from low level crime to the threat of nuclear war) unless we can counter dominant values that separate humans into civilisational clusters, to foster a spirit of collaboration and tolerance.

The time may come soon when we start to say that if cultural & heritage organisations aren’t pulling out all the stops to tackle this overarching ‘wicked problem’ then they don’t deserve public funding. Also, given that corporate wealth is really commonwealth (in private hands), we might argue that they don’t deserve corporate funding either.

So, what are all the stops you can pull out to make an almighty noise, and how (in the brackets) might you afford it?

You can work with financiers and corporations to change what business is, to change the way they work, to enable the success of a knowledge economy that does not harm the environment. (That’s why I think digital people in the cultural sector are important, because knowledge is the key, and also because knowledge & technology companies tend to be more keen to forge a sustainable future. Can you make a case for their investment? Can you innovate together?)

You can work with educationalists to help people be more creative, resilient, tolerant and better able to access knowledge to apply it to action.(The education business is set to grow massively in countries like India and China. Can you package and sell expertise and assets internationally?)

You can work with Governments and civil society organisations to promote cultural democracy and diplomacy. (If gentle respect for human craft and natural diversity becomes the norm, it can help counteract aggressive and destructive attitudes, and you can generate income by developing trade in craft, ideas and knowledge.)

You can work with scientists and academics, and wider communities of enquiry, to unlock the knowledge that is in archives, biodiversity banks, and in living cultures, and also to help protect and preserve that knowledge. (Can you work as partners with Knowledge Transfer teams in Universities to seek financial investment?)

You can work with contemporary creative and cultural practitioners to develop metaphorical and participatory outcomes that can accelerate public understanding and ethics. (In UK, if the MLA sector is drawn under the Arts Council, there will be more opportunities for arts & museum joint programmes.)

They can work with social and health services to ensure that cultural resources and spaces aid wellbeing. (NHS reforms mean a greater localisation of services, with needy individuals given personal budgets for their care.)

What has this got to do with the Cost of Sales debate? Maybe not a lot. Or maybe everything. It’s a plea not to think too small, not to regress to past practices of business in being more business-like. If being business-like is like being a farmer, it’s about making a shift from vast agri-business (monocrops, forced fertility, asking for public subsidy, ultimately unsustainable), to permaculture (where you mix and match, experiment, always have something to eat, and you swap seeds & glut with others). It’s a plea to think as broadly as possible in mapping all the assets that can generate value (not just your digitised collections, but ideas, venues, brand, supporters etc), and all the ways they can generate value (especially ecological value or Biosphere capital). It’s a plea to invest in digitising a collection not because it’s immediately clear how it will make money but because it’s immediately clear why that knowledge helps sustain life. It’s a plea to remember that knowledge only wants to be free.

The value of culture in environmental crisis

This was originally posted in February 2010. Since then we’ve seen major cuts to the cultural sector, reducing the capacity of many arts organisations supporting environmental sustainability. In response to that situation, I wrote this on Shared Horizons and New Stories in May 2011.

Original post follows:

I’m reading this review of research published by ACE in preparation for their major policy consultation. It opens with a situation analysis that concludes with a small section on climate change. Also, I’ve just written a ‘situation analysis’ for digital heritage, covering both cultural and environmental heritage, using the PESTLE model. The Environmental dimension of the PESTLE model comes at the end. I believe we need to reorganise the way we review the big context, by putting environment first.

I do applaud ACE for acknowledging climate in its review, as it is so often ignored, and for including sustainability in one of its five goals. In particular, I’m pleased that they don’t just fixate on making cultural buildings carbon neutral but also show they’re thinking about how we can be resilient in facing an uncertain future. However, I think they still overplay the first and downplay the latter. I’m also intrigued by this statement:

“The arts may be well-placed to engage with and shape this debate [about facing an uncertain future] and there are opportunities for artists to lead and influence society on environmental issues. However, this review found little evidence of the impact of such activity to date.”

I’m very interested to know more about that evidence. Is it just that there are at least 100 events or reports each year entitled something like ‘Will the arts get us out of this mess we’re in?’ which fail to conclude in a bullish way with bullet-pointed facts that show the planet would be a bit more saved because of artists? There are so many ways in which the work of arts, science and heritage organisations (not just artists, who are only one part of the picture) use creative means to develop the capacities of people to think critically and imaginatively, to develop skills in design, to bring about well-being and so on. It is proven that cultural and creative learning nurture the qualities that make people resilient and more aware of complexity.

I’m hoping that it’s possible to provide more evidence of the value of culture in this situation. Climate disruption is at best ‘game-changing’ for civilisation, and at worst it is ‘game over’. We can only plan for the more positive scenario (that it’s ‘game-changing’) so we need to respond by changing the game of culture and heritage. Amongst the many change agents, I believe the most important are:

• a drive towards contextualisation, so that artefacts and heritage knowledge are more dynamically placed into an ecology of landscape, biodiversity and human economics
• a greater equality between people with disciplinary and demotic knowledge
• a shift from a transactional to a participatory model with audiences
• an embrace of digital technologies to be used primarily for open knowledge generation

Culture and creativity

Originally posted 2006: Several more recent posts have extended my thinking on this topic, in particular thinking about use of terms ‘arts’, ‘culture’, ‘heritage’ and ‘creative industries’ in the cultural sector.

I’ve been thinking about the relative validity of creativity and culture in education, what they mean together and how they interact. In many ways, perhaps as a reaction to the overemphasis on bodies of knowledge in the National Curriculum, culture has come to be seen to represent the status quo (continuity, knowledge, authority, heritage, national identity) whereas creativity represents something far cooler and acceptable (innovation, joy, productivity, challenge, individuality, style). They seem to operate in the following pairs of concepts, with the number 1′s more about creativity or activity and the number 2′s more about culture or education:

1) Cultural Studies (‘them’, other cultures, diversity)
2) Cultural Heritage (‘us’, our history and values)

1) Skills (virtuosity, doing, showing)
2) Entertainment (consuming, seeing, interpreting)

1) Creativity (imagining, inventing, making new culture)
2) Critique (questioning, researching, analysing)

1) Aesthetics (form, design, quality)
2) Values (meaning, ethics)

I have a hunch, supported by observation of a lot of creative learning initiatives, that creativity is meaningless without culture and vice versa. Projects that focus on creativity often suffer by not exploring specific themes (except ‘what is creativity?’), not developing critical enquiry with cultural artefacts and not doing research.

I’m not at all opposed to creativity. I just feel that without application to knowledge, history or values there is no effect and no dialogue. Creative activity remains superficial, a kind of marketing of itself as a concept.