All entries for May 2012

City of Culture

Last week I attended (as a contributor) the AHRC Cultural Cities research network meeting. The event was called ‘It’s not the winning… Reconsidering the Cultural City’ and was held at the Merseyside Maritime Museum: (Tuesday 22nd April)

It was an interesting experience, not least as it had tasked me with thinking about the Government’s new City of Culture 2013 project (which I hadn’t given too much thought to). The ‘City of Culture’ concept is simply a ‘title’ -- an official government designation for the city who wins in a competitive bidding process. It comes with not a penny of funding, and despite being a New Labour innovation, the project still has the support of the Coalition government. The title was largely inspired by the success of Liverpool as European Capital of Culture in 2008 (and, in policy language, a way of ‘leveraging’ the strategic capabilities generated by that year long event).

On the face of it, the concept of a ‘UK City of Culture’ seems odd, but also in tune with the growing popularity for ‘event driven culture’ with both British punters, tourists and policy-makers alike. The concept is odd inasmuch as it seems to be a step back from a ‘European’ framework into a national British one (whatever that might be). And come to think of it, Liverpool ’08 didn’t have the big European theme that I thought it would have – given, that is, the way the European Commission normally demand. The second oddity is that the ‘city of culture’ concept suggests that culture in cities only substantially emerges by virtue of official commission or sponsorship. Publicly subsidised arts is still the model of what ‘culture’ is. On one level of course this is inevitable, but on another it effaces the actual social, urban, youth and sub-cultures that animate a city. Does a substantive city ‘culture’ only emerge with the investment-funding-driven objects of arts management? Why do people flock to visit cities like Marrakesh, Asian or African cities with no well funded arts programmes...?

However, whatever doubts I had were for the most part dissolved on reading the winning bid from Derry-Londonderry, which is very imaginative and impressive on several fronts. Its approach to the bid was itself ‘creative’ – policy-making as a creative act: imagine! Moreover, it refuses simply to import global cultural celebrity but instead finds ways of making the city active in cultural production, thinking of the city itself as a ‘cultural product’. This is a step forward. Here are the key documents for reference:

Derry City Council (2009) Derry-Londonderry Candidate City UK City of Culture 2013: Our Bid, Derry-Londonderry.
Redmond, P. (June 2009) UK City of Culture Vision Statement, London: DCMS.
UK City of Culture 2013 (2009) Bidding Guidance, London: Regeneris Consulting/DCMS.

Jonathan Vickery : 30 May 2012 16:22 |  Tags: Cities Cultural |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Prof. Ien Ang's talk: Navigating Complexity

After having two glasses of wine, I feel like sharing some thoughts on today's event, Prof. Ien Ang's talk about the idea of "cultural intelligence", organised by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies. Since I've found some of her writings inspiring, I was eager to listen to what she had to say.

Her talk started with quoting Zaki Laidi who says that "the complexification of the real creates the need for a simplification of its enunciation". The gist of her talk was about we, humanities and social science scholars, can simplify the complexity of the real world without simplistically ignoring the complexity. As the world has become more complex, scholarship inevitably attempts to dig deep into the complexity of the world. In so doing, she argues, we often end up with pursuing complexity for complexity's sake. I bet this reminds you of many writings which conclude by emphasising the complexity of the objects of research or of analysis itself (puzzling us at worst or providing a vague and broad lesson at best that the world is complex!). Thus, in order to go beyond critiquing simplistic solutions which fall short of solving complex problems, she suggests, we should recognise the need for simplification while actively responding to the complexity of the world. And she kept on saying that as "highly selective and contextualised, contingent knowledge", "cultural intelligence" makes simplifications in order to "act in complex and precarious contexts". So after all, putting it simply, it's all about "engagement" rather than "critique".

I think this type of approach is much needed particularly considering the increasing pressure on academia to prove its real world value in absurdly technocratic, limited terms. Perhaps, to effectively counteract such a tendency of restricting academia into (a certain type of) impacts-making business, academia needs to transform itself to produce knowledge which is indeed capable of acting on impending problems of the real world.

Though I totally agree on the need for "engagement" (that's what I aim to do as a researcher myself), I also got to wonder whether such an approach has been taken by many scholars who deeply engage with the complex realities of their time not because they attempted to achieve their theoretical ambitions in a self-indulgent manner but because they tended to act in the gutter of the real world using their pen. A similar question was raised by someone in the audience. Taking Raymond Williams as an example, the questioner said that Ang did not seem to acknowledge the activist tradition in the scholarship. Some researchers (though they might have been small in number) have been influencing the real world while delving into the complex nature of the phenomenon they are dealing with. In fact, this point does not contradict Ang's argument. But I was struck by the question of why "now" we feel the need to conceptualise this type of approach. Is it because the scholarship has gone too far playing with complex languages in its complacent position? Or is it because the entire system of producing knowledge itself has been too institutionalised putting us in a defensive position to reclaim what we have been doing or at least what we were supposed to do?

Furthermore, my free-floating thoughts brought me to the question of what kind of effect this claim for simplification would have in my home country, Korea. Though, I would say, social reality in Korea is much more complex compared to those of the Western world in general (as many other non-Western parts of the world are), such complexity has often been ignored by the scholarship in Korea. Mainly due to the impending tasks of catching up to the developed Western world (largely in the sense of economic development), the production of knowledge has been oriented towards solving problems and generating impacts for "practically" important national goals. Thus, critical voices have been extremely marginalised; for example, Marxist books were illegal till the late 1980s, and even today, the Ministry of Defence still publishes a list of seditious books. What I'd like to pinpoint is that because of such suppression of critical voices, the Korean scholarship has not had the chance to sufficiently engage in the complexity of its social reality from diverse perspectives. Even critical voices have had a compulsive need to make them be heard by simplifying things. What I'd like to acknowledge is that the abovementioned tendency of scholarship (which pursues complexity as an end itself) might not appear to a similar extent in other regions.

Joowon Yuk : 23 May 2012 12:14 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Happenstance

We're currently working on Happenstance, a NESTA-funded experiment to find out what happens when creative technologists are 'embedded' in arts organisations. We're now half way through the project and starting to make some initial observations about some of the differences between arts organisations and technologists - differences in process (technologists being more process-oriented, arts organisations being more output driven), different attitudes to risk (arts organisations being more accountable than the freelance resident technologists). You can view a short video of Chris Bilton talking about the project, and find out more about the latest developments on the Happenstance blog.

Christopher Bilton : 16 May 2012 13:19 |  Tags: Arts Organisations Happenstance; Technology; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Creativity and Government

From New Labour's 'thinking the unthinkable' to Cameron's 'blue-sky thinking', successive UK governments have sought to apply 'creative thinking' to policy. Should the global financial crisis take us back to basics, or encourage us to 'think outside the box'? And what happens when governments apply 'creative thinking' to the public sector? Clickhere to see Chris Bilton talking about creativity and government policy - and tell us what you think.

Christopher Bilton : 16 May 2012 12:56 |  Tags: Creativity Government Policy |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Scribbles in the margin of A Singer’s Notebook

A couple of weeks ago Mike Savage, one of the co-authors of Culture, Class, Distinction drew my attention to an interesting engagement with our work. The singer Ian Bostridge’s collection of journalism, reviews and essays, A Singer’s Notebook, includes some thoughts on our findings about tastes for music in the contemporary UK, discovered by listening to my colleagues Tony Bennett and Elizabeth Silva’s appearance on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed. A good advert for the value of public engagement this, because Bostridge has read and reflected on our efforts in a more gratifying way than that immediately provided by the citation metrics which are the usual thin gruel of recognition for academic research. I thought I’d write a brief, personal, response to his observations.

Firstly, whilst praising our empirical detail, Bostridge is critical of our findings in the light of his perception of a field of musical taste in which rock/pop is central and the classical music which is his stock-in-trade is marginal. In contemporary culture, he argues, commodified rock music exists as an illusory ‘bad conscience of a triumphant Western bourgeoisie’ in which, for example, politicians fall over themselves to declare their musical tastes (e.g. Gordon Brown and the Arctic Monkeys, David Cameron and The Smiths) as a badge of their democratic credentials. Classic music commands less authority and so there is less need to either get to know about it or pretend to like it. In relation to our study, he re-iterates this by quoting our assertion that classical music does not generate ‘excitement but, especially for elite groups, it provides repertoires and an arena for socializing’. He characterizes this analysis as manifestly inadequate. I personally plead guilty to his accusation of knowing very little about classical music – but here he mistakes the lack of excitement evident in our qualitative sample -where classical music was only really talked about by highly educated and elite professionals and in not especially animated ways– as some judgment by us, as analysts, of the characteristics of the genre itself. It is true, as he also points out, that classical music was the single most popular genre we asked about on our survey and that forms of popular music (electronic dance music, heavy metal) generated more dislikes than likes. It is also true that Vivaldi’s Four Seasons was amongst the most popular items we asked about – though for at least one interview participant, far from being emblematic of a complex classical piece, it was dismissed as ‘chocolate box music’ and is itself, as Pryer implies, as ‘commodified’ as music comes. From a Bourdieusian perspective the meaning of genres or pieces of music only really makes sense in relation to other genres or pieces – and what people say about them or do with them is more significant in this positioning, I think, than any characteristics inherent in the texts themselves.

Secondly – and more interestingly perhaps - is Bostridge’s own position in the field, as someone with a career trajectory that has gone from professional historian to professional musician. A Singer’s Notebookbegins with a transcript of the Edinburgh festival lecture Bostridge gave in 2000 in which he outlines the relationship between his own career in classical music and his preceding professional scholarly interest in the decline of witchcraft. Western classical music, he argues, exists in the present day as a kind of religion through which ‘extraordinary effects and visions are summoned up by techniques that still seem impervious to rational analysis.’ The genre, as it is currently understood, emerges at around the same historical period as what he describes as the ‘high-point of magical thinking’ in the 16th and 17th centuries. He contends that music ‘remains one of our few approved routes into exercising a magical sensibility, a sense of the supernatural, the transcendent, the ineffable’. This connects up nicely with what I’ve always thought as the most interesting element of Bourdieu’s intellectual project – the relationships between 'the artist' and his/her 'followers'. In The Rules of Art Bourdieu refers to the artist as analagous to the magician in the work of Marcel Mauss. A magician doesn't need to know magic, he contends - that is clearly impossible in a rational, secular universe. He/she does need an audience which believes in magic, though. Revealing the social patterns of cultural preferences and practices is only one step in pulling back the curtain on ‘the cult of culture’. Bourdieu suggests we should be suspicious of things which claim to escape rational analysis - even if we accept that such things can be complex and beautiful - because without such analysis we are left with people who know their secret codes and people who don’t.

It is nice to see our work feeding into these kinds of discussion – so it seems good manners to leave the last word to Bostridge himself.

David Wright : 14 May 2012 15:23 |  Tags: Bourdieu Music Taste Video |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

'Cultura y Patrimonio: Un Nuevo Ministerio para Chile'

I have recently been to Chile to present a paper at an international seminar hosted by Libertad y Desarrollo to discuss some of the issues that have been raised by the development of a new Ministry of Culture within the country. Apart from the chance to meet a number of interesting people - not least the new Minister of Culture, Luciano Cruz-Coke (who I suspect is the first actor in soap operas to achieve Ministerial rank anywhere in the world), Magdalena Krebs, the Director of Libraries, Archives and Museums in Chile, and Barbara Negron, the Director General of the Observatorio Politicas Culturales in Santiago - there was also the opportunity of learning more about the development of cultural policy and its management in a continent that I knew relatively little about.

What was most intriguing was that many of the issues concerning these subjects were still at a relatively early stage of discussion within Chile, and that many of the ideas and references that are often taken for granted in Western Europe, Australia and northern America are not part of this discussion. Some of this is clearly a result of the different intellectual and academic traditions that exist in Chile (I must admit that I have never heard quite so strange a pronunciation of 'Bourdieu' as I did during the seminar) which have led the debate in directions that are not the usual in current Western arguments. On the other hand this also meant that there are lines of argument being developed that are new in Western terms, even if they are concerned with issues that have been argued in mind-numbing detail in the West. The issues concerned in this ranged from: cultural policy, is it about cultural preservation or development?; cultural democracy or the democratisation of culture? (I was hoping that I would not have to revisit the sterility of this argument but it is clearly an important matter within the Chilean context); which cultural policy model should be pursued? The last of these was discussed largely in terms of a division between an 'anglo-saxon model' of arm's-length organisation and a 'French' model of centralised ministerial control. Given the organisational complexities of state involvement with cultural policy in Chile - multiple central government divisions with seemingly every Ministry having its own cultural policy unit, relatively weak local government units and limited resources for cultural affairs, and a developing world of national quangos with responsibility for cultural affairs - the development of an effective means of policy co-ordination and co-operation is almost an essential prerequisite for the creation of any sort of national policy at all.

At this level Western nations have proved to be not particularly good models - the continuing arguments about the over-centralisation of cultural affairs in both the United Kingdom (a common part of the debate in England, Scotland and Wales) and France testifies to the difficulties that there are in both the 'anglo-saxon' and 'French' models of developing a coherent policy when policy responsibilities are divided both horizontally between central organisations and vertically between levels of government. Some of this difficulty is a direct consequence of the divisions of power that exist within all governments giving rise to various forms of inter- and intra-organisational politics (and this is just as true of the private as it is of the public sector). Some of it is also a consequence of the questions of legitimacy that are associated with attempts to intervene in the cultural field: what should governments be doing in this area? how should they be doing it (directly, through quangos, through the private sector?) Until this combination of organisational and legitimation issues are resolved it is unlikely that any government would be capable of producing an effective policy or set of policies that can be implemented without causing large-scale conflicts about what it is that they are doing and how they are intending to do it.

In this line of argument cultural policy is not simply a set of technical decisions that can be determined through bureaucratic or professional means alone. Instead cultural policy is an inherently political thing that is subject to multiple sets of decision processes ranging from deciding on the underlying ideological principles upon which decisions rest, to the organisational allocation of responsibilities between competing claims for policy leadership, to the more practical decisions about the division of limited budgets between competing policy sectors and the co-ordination of policy activity between multiple providers. These demand different sets of policy responses from those who hold power, some of which might be best served by some top-down imposition and some of which may be more suitably undertaken through bottom-up forms of public involvement. The expression of political preferences through the choices that are made about these issues are an inevitable consequence of organising cultural affairs: to see this as an apolitical sphere this not really an option. The Chilean case is already grappling with these matters and, if the case of those countries that have got a somewhat longer experiences with them is anything to go by, it is unlikely that there will be a simple resolution to them. The complexities of the essentially contested nature of the concept of 'culture' is sufficient in itself to create continuing political conflicts even without the host of ideological, party political, organisational and factional divisions that exist in this field. At least in Chile there is the chance for the serious arguments about what governments could and should be doing in the cultural field to be heard, and for the Chilean people to be able to contribute to this debate. For many (if not most) countries in the West it would probably be useful to have these same foundational arguments if only because they have largely been unheard in the past or because they have been colonised by the supporters of what Sigrid Royseng has termed a 'ritual' cultural policy rationality royseng_sigrid.doc.

The Chilean case raises a large number of cultural policy issues for which there are no simple solutions. The essential response to these in Western countries has produced no more than a series of local preferences on the behalf of governments. In future postings I intend to return to some of the points that I have raised here to question the effectiveness of these for the creation and implementation of cultural policies that actually mean something more than grand words.

Clive Gray (left) with Luciano Cruz-Coke the Chilean Minister for Culture

Clive Gray : 02 May 2012 14:58 |  Tags: And Chile; Government Policy Seminar; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem