The First Cultural Economy International Summer School

This is a view of Shanghai Pudong from a bar we liked to frequent after a hard days study ! The First Cultural Economy International Summer School -- one of the activities of the newly established Shanghai City Lab -- has just been held at the Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU). It is organized as part of a broader venture called the Shanghai City Lab, just funded as a Warwick-Monash Alliance project (but with supplementary funds from Monash and SJTU). It was a success, and enjoyed by the eight faculty and the 37 students enrolled. See: www.shanghaicitylab.com

The students at this first summer school came from all over China and from Melbourne Australia – masters, PhD students and cultural sector professionals. The school was held on the hospitable old campus of the university, situated on the southern edge of the old French concession. It began on Monday morning with a group photo against the monument in the central park of the campus. It continued with ten days of lectures, talks, field trips and student group work, punctuated by a weekend break. Until the official photo of the whole group arrives – here are some informal ones….(some weird distortion make Justin and Shane on the left look shorter, when they are far taller!).

SJTU translated cultural 'economy' as cultural 'industry', which for them made more sense -- for us, of course, the meaning is a little more specific. Professor Shan Shilian and Prof. Li Kang Hua of SJTU delivered detailed lectures on cultural policy and creative industries in China, and specifically in Shanghai -- policy insights hard to obtain outside China. The Chinese government has massively invested in both the creative industries and creative cities policy trends, both of which oscillate between an urban development agenda and hard-nose small business incubation.

The growth of Shanghai is something we witness every time we return – huge new art museums, shopping malls and apartment blocks. In our field trips we visited (among other places) the M50 cluster and 1933 cluster, where at the latter (in the Centre for the Creative Industries) we held a short seminar. We further explored the contemporary art scene and creative urbanism of the old EXPO site, the Long Museum (Pudong), Rock Bund Art Museum, and The Power Station of Art. In the evenings we walked, ate and drank in the French concession, the Bund, Xintiandi and Tianzifang, among other places.

We also got highly stimulating talks on contemporary Shanghai by resident American Lisa Movius (director of the MAO Livehouse contemporary music centre) and from Ireland, Connor Roche (the lead in BOP cultural consultancy Shanghai office) and David Lee – pioneer in the growing ‘maker and hacker’ subcultures of China. The summer school ended on Friday 18^th with the three student research groups presenting the results of their projects – on urban culture, cultural quarters and the independent music scene in Shanghai. I must say, we threw the students in at the deep end with urban research in the vast urban complex of Shanghai city. And we were taken aback by how well they did – and the summer school ended with the presentation of the certificates – by Professor Shan Shilian, Distinguished Professor of SJTU and a national authority on cultural policy and economy in China.

What’s going to happen next year? This is the first summer school, and from our experiences and student feedback will develop an exciting, invigorating new program. The Shanghai City Lab, which runs the summer school, is developing an international research profile – but I’ll leave that for another blog. As for this last photo -- Sean is taking a group 'selfie' on his new extendible hand-held selfie pod.

Jonathan Vickery : 22 Jul 2014 12:37 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

CATALYSE – European Centre for Creative Economy

Another late blog entry – I put it up here as this event generated a publication, which will appear in the next few months. Between 13 to 15 February, 2014, a group of Centre MA students accompanied me to a special seminar, hosted by the ‘ecce’ – the European Centre for Creative Economy (based within the complex of the well-known and new contemporary cultural centre, the Dortmund U). The seminar – called Strengthening Culture in Urban Developments in Europe – is one of a short series funded by a EU project called CATALYSE, and part of the new venture called ‘Forum D’Avignon Ruhe’ (along with a third parter, Bilbao Metropoli-30). The Forum D’Avignon (based in Paris) is a leading European cultural policy think tank, and has joined forces with ecce to develop policies for Europe’s leading landscape of innovation and creative industries – the German Ruhr. Ecce are become a leading think tank themselves and have produced many excellent publications (see their LabKULTUR TV website, which I have written for in the past).

Our host was Dr Bernd Fesel, and Bernd and I did the lectures and convened the seminars over three days. The participants were Amina Isa-Maina, Elizabeth Alexandra Hewitt, Federico Maria Di Benedetto, Selina Thea Yasmine S. Welter, Agnesa Topuzyan, Tomi Oladepo. What was the subject? The CATALYSE seminars are designed to produce ideas, concepts and analytical frameworks for evaluating ‘spillover’ – the impacts, influences, and functions of culture in urban economies. This is a big subject, and the backdrop is the growing EU policymakers interest in measuring and evaluating the cultural sector and creative industries.

In the EU culture is becoming a major driver for urban development and the daily quality of life. From the EU structural funds 2007 – 2013 more than 6 Billion Euros was spent on culture. Still, investments in culture are viewed by policymakers in the EU with some scepticism, despite a lot of empirical evidence to the contrary. This perception gap was the motivation for CATALYSE, in part a way of preparing the ground for a larger project, providing more robust evidence and new evidence models for EU policy circles.

The seminar was held in the ‘U_raum’ of the spacious ecce offices. It began with general questions, like ‘how do we talk about culture and creativity outside the usual established historical discourses, or even outside new discourses of innovation management or the cultural studies of creative industries? How can we articulate the ways in which culture and creativity breach the boundaries of specialist practices within the arts, cultural sector or creative industry sub-fields, and impact or are used in other areas of social or industrial activity?’ The seminar gradually made its way to more specific problems on ‘How do we define the factors involved in ‘impact’ or the uses of ‘culture’ in the generation of non-cultural value? How can these factors – soft or hard – be measured? Which tools are necessary to raise awareness for the hitherto little-discussed effects of culture and urban change and how do you fill these ‘perception gaps’?’

The Aims of the CATALYSE workshop were defined in advance in terms of informing current research on the spillover effects of culture and creative industries, (especially in urbanism), and extending the debates on qualitative and quantitative indicators of spillover effects. The method of workshop organisation was semi-structured, open ended, mixed-method approach, albeit class-based. There was one excursion around the adjacent Dortmunder U cultural centre, which informed our discussion on the arts sector. The seminar space was a multi-purpose room with all the usual resources. Students usually worked in two groups, on two tables, with moderators (four) moving in and between the groups. The structure of each day was focused around theoretical viewpoints, case studies and specific questions directed at the group by both Dr Fesel and myself. The structure of the investigation was intentionally dialogic and open ended – development through an informed dialogue between moderators and student participants – and cumulative, where specific instruction style lecture, then case study discussion, punctuated the day’s schedule.

Of course, the issues were difficult and so we were not expecting students to come up with straight solutions. They did, however, come up with a lot of interesting new criteria for thinking about the nebulous contextual realms of culture – the paper will be published by the ecce, as I said above, in the next few months. The CATALYSE seminars, however, were a preface to a larger project, discussed among a room of 20 leading young cultural policy researchers at the April 2014 meeting of the Forum D’Avignon Ruhr in Essen. I moderated the meeting, and for three hours we prepared the basis for a major EU-wide research project on ‘creative spillover’. The leaders are ecce’s Bernd Fesel, and Arts Council England’s Head of Policy and Research, Richard Russell. They both have an excellent grasp of the kind of project needed to spearhead some cultural policy advocacy in Brussels. Constructing this project is ongoing, but with seed funding we hope to start this autumn.

Jonathan Vickery : 22 Jul 2014 12:33 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Midwest to Midville: Repositioning the visual arts in the Midlands

This was a blog I wrote after participating as a co-Chair of a seminar at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham on the 3^rd February. Belated, I know, but the seminar centred around a report that has generated a growing debate – on London’s domination of the UK arts sector and national funding regimes, along with the new national policy emphasis on the role of culture in local economy. The report was written by Peter Stark, Christopher Gordon and David Powell, and called ‘Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital: A contribution to the debate on national policy for the arts and culture in England’ (October 2013, see: www.theroccreport.co.uk). David Powell was the opening speaker of the day.

The event featured talks and panel debates, including acclaimed curator Matthew Higgs (New York), Birmingham art sector leaders (Jonathan Watkins, Debbie Kermode, Gavin Wade, and others), Birmingham city councilor Steve Trow, British contemporary art veteran Lynda Morris, and of course humble passengers like myself. It was one of those events that in the run up seemed like just another public seminar. Half way through the day I looked around and realized that this upper ‘loft’ gallery of the Ikon contained most of the central figures in the West Midland’s cultural scene, and turned out to be a gathering of some regional significance.

I’ll keep my remarks to the report, as my job was to chair David Powell. My favourite bit (p.38) is the report’s demand, phrased in terms of …what they spent on the Millennium Dome they give back to English regions [i.e. £600m]. Yet, the report is polemical without being polemic, and deliberately not written as protest or an invective animated by cries for justice. It is written as a sober series of observations on the economics of national arts funding as it has evolved since the post-war period, clearly pointing out the contradiction between national policy aims (for distribution and national impact) and a funding system irrationally skewed towards London. For ‘….the ‘centre’ in England makes decisions on 75% of the public’s funds available for the arts – a far higher proportion than in comparator countries’ (p.8: ES). That the capital needs a greater proportion of the funding is not in question, nor denied are the national and regional benefits of a strong capital centre for culture. What is in question is the basic policy rationales and the seemingly irrational assumption that the regions maintain a proportionately small and locally limited cultural infrastructure.

Personally, I like the report – it flags up some basic issues in relation to transparency and the lack of public information on national strategy-making, as well as frustrations that have been echoed since the 1950s. In fact, it is instructive to see how many of these issues emerged in the landmark 1965 White Paper (the only one!) ‘A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps’. Perhaps – at least this is my reading of recent history – the UK government’s wholesale rejection of the European regionalism movement in the 1980s (in part to form a front against the nascent Scottish independence lobby) has meant that the ‘strong city regions’ trend on the European continent did not emerge in Britain, to our detriment. A necessary devolution of the regions was botched in the New Labour period with the attempt to install city mayors, largely rejected by the city electorate themselves, and the quashed Scots independence movement has latterly come back to bite the London political establishment on the bum. Altogether national arts funding strategy is a skewed botch because the political settlement between London and its regions is a botch. One fact masking this reality is that the funding trend since the 1970s has seen Local Authorities fund culture (often via non-cultural budget heads) up to four times the amount of national arts funding itself. As the report is right to point out, as far as culture is concerned, the concepts of equality and equitable distribution of resources is ignored by the 2010 ACE strategy Achieving Great Art for Everyone (most major document since the 1965 White Paper], and was so ignored too by the Treasury Green Book guidance.

For Stark, Gordon and Powell – all of whom are cultural policy critics with a huge wealth of experience – the solution is actually modest. It takes the form of an adjustment to National Lottery funding, in a way that ‘London’s overall share of public funds for the arts would reduce from 65% …to 55% – still seven times the level of funding per head of population in the rest of England.’ This would take the form of a National investment Programme of £600m over the five years of the next parliament. The new fund would create ‘….additional 33% of arts funding per annum over five years: ‘….our proposition would locate new ‘strategic’ resources at regional and sub-regional level in partnership with collective local authority, business and civil society agencies charged with overall regional development. [See their published response to ACE response: p. 5].

With the RDAs gone, the attenuation of already small local public cultural sectors (look at the size of Birmingham’s culture sector in its regional demographic context), and a lack of a critical mass of culturally competent ‘civil society’ operators, I am not sure how far the ‘local’ (let alone regional – what is that?) is able to handle a sudden capacity-building exercise. Like New Labour’s ‘lost billions’, even huge levels of funding has a way of dissolving into the morass of local authority budgetary shortfalls.

If you haven’t done already – read the report (along with ACE’s response, which makes some good points, if predictably avoids the political heart of the problem). See also Stark, Gordon and Powell's follow-up report, published in April.

http://www.theroccreport.co.uk/

http://www.theplacereport.co.uk/

Jonathan Vickery : 22 Jul 2014 11:09 |  Tags: Ace Arts Policy; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The IPPEA Conference: A treat in Utrecht

Just home from an enjoyable couple of days in Utrecht at a conference, International Perspectives on Participation and Engagement in the Arts, organized by the networkbrought together by Leila Jancovich and her team at Leeds Metropolitan University. The two day conference explored the issues of meaning, measurement, method and values which continue to animate debates about the arts and culture and their relationship with their broader publics. An impressive range of papers and presentations, began with reflections from the playwright America Vera-Zawala on her work in community-based theatre, one example of which concerned the impact of the closure of a mill on the Swedish town of Norrsundet. A play was written and produced with the local community at the precise time of this trauma and, amongst the many fascinating aspects of this process, what stuck with me was the relationship between the artist and the community and the vexed question of who had the responsibility for creative decision making. Participants expressed considerable anxiety about taking control over the direction of the project in deference to the accredited expertise of the theatre professionals. They in turn, for reasons relating to their commitment to the integrity of the process they had initiated, were equally reluctant to impose the right way to proceed. It was an impasse resolved by nothing more complicated than time and dialogue, through which participants took eventual ownership of the narratives of their own experiences.

This story had a perhaps surprising echo in a plenary from Andrea Bandelli about processes of participation in the management of science museums. Science, Andrea reminded us, is not a democracy, although this does not mean that scientific processes, and priorities should not reflect democratically established priorities, or that scientists are not required to communicate with the publics who fund them. There was a degree of fear, expressed by the boards of science museums in Andrea’s study, in managing this balance, especially as science is so regularly deliberately or accidentally, misrepresented in public discourse, as either saviour or villain. There was a telling piece of evidence, though that perhaps this fear was partially misplaced. When asked, attenders of science museums wanted there to be public representation of some form on museum boards. At the same time, when asked if these lay board members should have an executive role in decision making, attenders seemed happy to defer to the experts. Both these stories might be interpreted as evidence of an impulse to be involved with decision-making that gives a lie to one of the more abiding narratives in this field, that of the ‘deficit model’. So much of the official discourse relating to participation starts from a working assumption that people lack some capacity which prevents it. Too often that serves to cement the position of the institution or individual accredited with the means to fill the deficit, who are all too ready to pay lip service to the notion of participation but are also reluctant to embrace the accompanying challenge to their own authority that it brings. It was gratifying to hear some critical voices on this topic in many of the presentations.

CCPS was well represented by both me and Maria Barrett, who presented some initial findings from her research project into the theatre audience of Liverpool. I was presenting some further 'work-in-some-kind-of-progress’ thoughts about participatory arts work as work, which I first blogged about here. It was really useful to think and talk this through in this forum, which included artists who had lived through the processes I was examining. It was especially exciting to meet up with the Artworks team which has been engaged in an extensive sector analysis and important empirical inquiry into this topic. Hopefully these conversations can be productive and ongoing.

In keeping with the mission of the network, the event brought together academic researchers with policy makers and arts practitioners. This sounds blindingly obvious but is difficult to do, and especially difficult to do well and there are inevitably some grumbles in the process. These might be, depending on which camp you’re in, about ‘rigour’ of research, about the use of theoretical ‘jargon’or abstraction, about the fetishisation of anecdote or personal experience or the search for ‘practical’ applicability or the critical examination of assumptions. Such debates can be uncomfortable – exemplified by the intense looking at the floor of some academic colleagues when it came to actually participating in composer Merlijn Twaalfhoven’s Saturday lunchtime interactive music performance. More seriously, such discomfort might stem from public forums like this also being places where professional identities in all these areas are performed, and where stakes in the territory are marked out and defended. That might be inevitable - but the organizers are to be commended for creating a comfortably uncomfortable space for people in these different fields to talk to, rather than past, one another. It was certainly a thought-provoking couple of days in developing my own research. Utrecht was a lovely place to visit and my thanks go to our hosts and organizers for their hospitality.

David Wright : 26 Jun 2014 16:34 |  Tags: Conferences; Cultural Policy Studies; Cultural Work; Participation; Research |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What is Luxury in a Globally Mediated World?

Researching the concept of luxury in action

Our industry tutors Sara Lattey and Sandy Bradley are currently working with MA Global Media and Communications students on a specific luxury travel-related Applied Communication Project brief this Summer Term 2014 and this has given us all a great opportunity to study the concept of luxury as background research: what it is; the people who seek luxury and aspire to embrace luxury in their lives; and those for whom luxury is the norm. Below they reflect upon what they have discovered so far and their visit with some MA Global Media and Communications students to the Four Seasons Hotel in Hampshire.

The study has involved comparisons of luxury brands, immersive research into how some of those brands position themselves and how they reach out to, and cater for the people who buy into them.

One of the several definitions of luxury is ‘A pleasure obtained only rarely’, whereas others include ‘An inessential, desirable item which is expensive or difficult to obtain’ or ‘A state of great comfort or elegance, especially when involving great expense’.

For us, this raised a number a questions.

If luxury is defined as a rare treat, then how do the uber-wealthy who live their lives in a state of permanent luxury define the word? What lengths do they go to in order to create a state of ‘beyond luxury’ where it is still a ‘pleasure obtained rarely’ but still way, way beyond the reach of most of us?

And how do luxury brands go the extra mile for those who seek them out?

A global luxury brand that particularly interested us was the Toronto-based hotel management group Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts and a field trip was arranged to conduct observational research at Four Seasons Hampshire UK.

Four Seasons’ current brand mantra is Extraordinary Experiences, a promise that they keep in all their establishments, worldwide – offering authentic, local experiences for the wealthy traveller wherever they may be…..seeing how the locals live, but with the safety net and brand reassurance of Four Seasons. The sky is the limit (literally), with their latest offering being a round-the-world tour in a private jet stopping at Four Seasons hotels wherever they land – at a cost of £75,000 pp.

Four Seasons’ Hampshire did not disappoint and provided fascinating insight into their approach and how they interpret the Extraordinary Experiences brand ethic in the heart of the Hampshire countryside. In an idyllic location surrounded by small villages and thatched cottages, they have the perfect opportunity to offer the ‘typical English country house experience’ – with as many associated bells and whistles as their guests are prepared to pay for: an impressive state-of-the-art equestrian centre, huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ within the massive estate housing the original, now-extended Georgian residence, a canal boat on their own stretch of canal, their own ducks and chickens, sheep and goats, with a finger-on-the-button concierge service that can arrange just about anything a guest requires; from men’s final Wimbledon tickets to ‘hitherto full-house’ London West End theatre tickets. An extensive spa and fitness centre offers a mouth-watering array of treatments – including facials at £500. They even have their own perfectly-trained pet Labrador called Oliver….who roams freely in designated areas of the hotel…. to the delight of guests.

With suites costing between £1,000 and £3,000 per night (not including breakfast), their guests rarely have to worry about the cost of anything they need…..this is luxury.

Members of staff are rigorously trained in absolute discretion, but interestingly – not deference. Famous names are never revealed….but everyone is treated politely and in a friendly manner but with top quality service. They have a simple philosophy for interaction with guests: 'Treating guests as peers - neither subservient nor aloof'. It seems to work. Guests come here to relax – and retreat from the stresses that come from managing their wealth. They return time and time again….trust is paramount.

For our research visit (humble students from the University of Warwick!) they went to as much trouble as if we had been royalty. A guided tour, meeting key members of staff and seeing both ‘front of house’ and ‘heart of house’ ( their wonderful name for the service areas), we were served a fabulous array of cakes and pastries with coffee with a ‘hand-crafted from icing ‘ University of Warwick logo as the centrepiece….all produced by the pastry chef. ‘It’s simply what we do’ shrugged our guide as we gasped at the work involved.

The concept of luxury is not new. It is many centuries old. Wealthy people have always craved the unique, the special, the generally unattainable….and would delight in collecting the work of popular, skilled artisans of the day as a physical expression and demonstration of their wealth and status. (Indeed, as the new world opened and global trade developed, wealthy merchants would increasingly trade objects from distant lands.) Intricate carvings, precious gems and metals and the finest fabrics were all desirable to those who could afford such luxury.

Interestingly, it was the artisans themselves who created such exquisite work who subsequently rose to become a ‘nouveau riche’ in their own right as their popularity spread. Thus began a symbiotic relationship between the creators of original work and the purchasers….each pushing the other acquire to bigger, better and more unique possessions.

Was this the beginning of the luxury brand? The principles remain the same today.

The students’ study continues and some of them attended the Leverhulme Luxury Networkas part of their research.

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 25 Jun 2014 16:13 |  Tags: Communications Four Global Luxury Media Seasons |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Solid Air: Jeremy Deller curates at The Mead

I thought it was worth dusting the blog off to write about the new exhibition in the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre, All That is Solid Melts Into Air. The show connects with a number of the issues I’m engaged with in my research on taste and the politics of cultural participation, as well as touching on some of the broader concerns we think and teach about in the Centre. It is a touring selection of pieces from the Hayward Gallery in London, curated by Jeremy Deller. One of the more intelligent and provocative British artists of his generation, Deller manages to be both of ‘the Art World’ (he won the Turner Prize in 2004) and also at a distance from it, in that his work seems more likely to reflect on ‘big P’ political struggles than that of some of his contemporaries. The items curated here evoke these struggles in depicting the often surprising collisions between the grand ambitions of the industrial revolution and the ways in which that revolution was and continues to be experienced, lived with and even resisted.

The title, as students of Marx will know, is lifted from a famous passage in The Communist Manifesto which extemporises on the creative, transformatory powers of the bourgeoisie to shatter existing orders and usher in new ones. The tensions and ambiguities – or contradictions we should probably say – in this process are evoked in the exhibit through some telling juxtapositions between the past and the near-present. The grand-masterly painting The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin (1852) for example, reveals the anxieties of romantic intellectuals of the 19^th century about the human consequences of the rise of industrial capitalism. Exhibited close by is a two-faced grandfather clock, one face measuring time and the other productivity, which also reminds us of the structures and techniques which underpinned this rise. Time-keeping mechanisms of various kinds, as the historian EP Thompson famously described, emerge as fundamental tools in the industrialists’ armoury, ideal for transforming people into their measurable and commodified labour power. Rather than being condemned to the past, though, this process is perhaps completed by the technologically managed workers depicted in Ben Robert‘s photos of Amazon’s vast warehouses. We can also see up-close the wrist-held device that monitors the rate at which the tasks in this kind of workplace are performed. With a nod to an earlier work, Deller plays with the imagery of a trades-union parade banner decorated with the words ‘You can have day off today’, sent by text to a zero-hours contract worker. Such juxtapositions raise powerful questions about the real labour that underpins our weightless economy – and the extent to which our apparent freedom to have whatever we want, whenever we want it, is worth the cost of the other hard won freedoms – of collective bargaining, security and dignity at work- which can be compromised to provide it.

The show is far from a lament, though. There is also a playful, celebratory air to it, not least in its exploration of the role of various forms of popular culture in British industrial history. The exhibition charts the journey from the ‘solid’ world of the industrial revolution to the ‘air’ of the cultural economy in relation to music. It does so in part by exploring the iconography of heavy metal as a music that emerges from the manufacturing heartlands of the UK and indeed - as visitors to the foyer of the Ramphal building will know -from our very environs in the West Midlands. An album cover from Birmingham’s own Judas Priest echoes a kitsch, exaggerated version of the imagery of Gomorrah. The photo of Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi, minus one of the fingertips he lost in an industrial accident, reminds us that workers were and are always more than the sum of the labour power of their bodies. The short historical distance from ‘solid’ to ‘air’ is also depicted in the family trees of musical icons, displaying the professions of the ancestors of Slade’s Noddy Holder, Shaun Ryder of the Happy Mondays and Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music. That the latter has gone from generation upon generation of blacksmiths, domestic servants and miners located in a distinct and narrow geographical region of the North East to the very archetype of the suave cosmopolitan elite perhaps makes him the embodiment of the journey Deller is charting here.

Finally the iconic Dennis Hutchinson photograph of the South Waleian professional wrestler ‘Exotic’ Adrian Street represents a defiant two-painted-finger-nail salute to the romanticization of working class life. He is depicted returning, in spectacular costume and make-up, to the mining village he ‘escaped’ and, as a glance through the autobiography displayed nearby reveals, the father he despised. There are no comfortable, nostalgic resolutions here, but a hopeful reading might at least recognise the power of performance and creativity to subvert, reconfigure or melt the solid strictures of gender or class. It is timely, in the year of the passing of two giants of the Cultural Studies tradition, Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart, to be reminded that popular culture has been, throughout history, a keen indicator of and resource for revealing the tensions in the political formations of its day (whether through the bawdy folk songs or broadside ballads of the 19^th century, or TV wrestling, or commercial pop music). The exhibition has certainly raised questions for me about where those tensions might be visible in contemporary cultural life. It is on until the 21^st June and it is well worth skiving an hour off work to see it.

You can follow my research via academia.edu, or see my[author page on Warwick’s WRAPrepository.

You can see a webcast of Jeremy Deller talking about the exhibition on an earlier stop of the tour in Nottingham here.

David Wright : 06 May 2014 17:54 |  Tags: ; Cultural Policy Studies Mead Gallery Popular Culture Taste; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Producing Tastes

This week I had that slightly bewildering/fearful experience for an academic of touching the zeitgeist/ having the rug stolen from under me. Preparing a talk which I had tentatively entitled ‘Producing tastes’ for a couple of presentations this month, I heard some of the issues I was thinking about being addressed in Grayson Perry’s first Reith Lecture – Democracy Has Bad Taste. My talk is part of a developing writing project on aspects or dimensions of cultural taste and it tries to outline some of the institutional, ‘industrial’ and social processes through which tastes get formed– processes which, like all the most fundamental parts of infrastructure, seem to be obvious and eternal but actually are the products of various histories and struggles. Grayson Perry had a couple of evocative phrases to describe this process – one of which, ‘the lovely consensus’ of people in various positions of power who validate art - I might well appropriate. He is a lively contributor to these debates in the UK - as demonstrated by his authoritative and thoughtful documentary on taste and class last year. Subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, playful and subversive he revels in what he describes as a teasing insider/outsider status which allows him to critique an academic elite, an artworld establishment, celebrities and political correctness as if, as a cross-dressing, Turner prize-winning, CBE-holding, Royal Academy-exhibiting, Reith lecture-giving, Visiting Professor he doesn’t have at least a trace of himself in all these categories.

The talk was always entertaining – but never, I think quite nailed its object. Grayson began by downplaying the prospect of easy answers – but the question of why democracy might inevitably or always produce bad taste wasn’t addressed as much as the less controversial notion that the value of art does not rest in either monetary exchange or bums on seats. Quality was important but it was located somewhere else. Precisely where, understandably for a question which has vexed thinkers for centuries, wasn’t really clear. In place of an answer, though, there was a familiar ambivalence to the notion of the popular. It was evoked as a kind of safety net against pretension on the one hand but also identified as a dubious source of authoritative aesthetic judgment on the other. Perhaps one might expect that kind of ambivalence from a room at the Tate, full of artworld insiders, enjoying being gently mocked by one of their own. Overall the talk, and the questions that followed had what the anthropologists might call a rather liminal, carnivalesque air – a space in which a (validated) clown or fool can poke fun at power for a bit before the rules kick in again, refreshed and renewed.

For me the best moment was when the writer and journalist Miranda Sawyer asked a question about the anger that people unfamiliar with contemporary art might experience in contemporary art galleries– even those who are comfortable with other forms of culture, such as pop music. Part of this anger stems, she suggests, from the feeling that they are being ‘tricked’. This reminded me of a passage from the influential sociological critique of the foundations of taste, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction in which he describes the ‘exclusion’ felt by what he identified as the working class audience, confronted by modern art. It is admitting they don’t understand it that betrays this exclusion, for Bourdieu. The bourgeois audience might not understand either – and indeed David Halle’s study of New York art collectors indicates that wealthy collectors of abstract art were as likely to buy things because they went with the curtains rather than because of any judgment about what pieces meant. What the art-insider-audience knows, though, through their accumulated family and educational experiences, is that the rules of the game require them to remain reverently silent and move on to the next piece.

Debates within these kinds of institutions and establishments are probably never going to be able to be genuinely radical about the assumptions upon which they rest. I’ll listen with interest to see if Grayson can pull it off over the coming weeks. It might be that an important first step in a move to ‘democratise’ questions of taste is for the ‘artworld’ to stop talking about art as something separate or special from everyday aesthetic practices, which are also infused with tacit judgments of what is good, beautiful or valuable. If the director of the Tate genuinely does, as Grayson intimates, collect Cliff Richard memorabilia, I for one would applaud him. Admitting it might also make the many other people who do that, or its equivalent, feel more welcome in the gallery.

You can follow my research at academia.edu, or through my author page in Warwick’s WRAP repository.

David Wright : 16 Oct 2013 17:23 |  Tags: Cultural Policy Studies; Participation; Popular Culture Taste; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Memes, spam, nodes and moods: Dr Tony D. Sampson on creating super–clusters of attention

The GMC course welcomed visiting researcher – Dr Tony D. Sampson, Reader in Digital Culture at the University of East London, co-editor with Jussi Parikka of The Spam Book: On Viruses, Porn and Other Anomalies from the Dark Side of Digital Culture (2009) and author of a new book Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks (2012). Our postgraduates got to grips with some new and challenging critical thinking around neuro-culture, attentional marketing, global protest and crowds, contagion on and offline, ‘pass on power’ and the vulnerabilities built into robust networks. Sampson was adept at drawing together a wide and inter-disciplinary range of theories and methodological thinking to create a new framework for tackling the ways in which the social is made and assembled in our increasingly attention-capturing economies. From Tarde, Bergson and Baran to Deleuze, Foucault and Stiegler, Sampson took us on a journey through difficult terrain to show us how propositions such as ‘nudge’ theory, geographies of mood, meme marketing and happenstance viralities emerge and gain ground both in terms of business strategies and political discourse. Our postgraduates come from 19 different countries and bring with them a wealth of experience of working and living in communications and media landscapes, ecologies and environments that are increasingly connected to each other. Sampson was able to explore succinctly the centralised, decentralised and distributed networks of communication (Baran) that afford (or not) connectivity, allowing us to reflect upon our local experiences.

Fundamentally, Sampson asked us to understand the social as never given but always being made and this allowed us to reflect upon our roles, agency and activities in that making of the social. At the same time, Sampson highlighted the different ways in which hierarchies of networks are produced: super clusters and super nodes of attention that produce aristocratic networks that may look more like a decentralized network than the distributed vision that cyberculture theory may have promised us in the 1990s. Oprah Winfrey was a good example of a super node! The GMC postgraduates come from a variety of different experiences of communications histories and practices that do not always follow these patterns of development, so it will be interesting to see what they find applicable in their own local contexts.

Sampson’s presentation of his new thinking allowed us the time to unpack his ideas on virality and digital contagion which was useful for engaging in the areas we are studying: spreadability of media, the politics of fear and anxiety around online culture, the attention economies many of our students have been, are, or will be employed within, and our own desire to tackle inequalities through new communication paradigms. Our students were interested in Sampson’s take on web analytics, how the arts and sciences can work together on these issues, and whether we should continue to fight for a distributed network. There were lots of references to Nigel Thrift’s work in the session and the students learned a good deal about the relationship between media, emotion, affect and the biological. We all went away wondering whether we were sleep-walking our way through the spreadability of media content or whether we were awake and alert to what Sampson defined as the ‘mechanisms of capture.’ For more on Dr Tony D. Sampson’s work then visit his blog.

Joanne Garde-Hansen : 15 Oct 2013 20:19 |  Tags: Contagion Culture Digital Global Media Spam Virality |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Global Media and Communication 2.0

The new term started for students on our GMC course with a talk from a visiting researcher - Dr. William Merrin, Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and Cultural Studies at the University of Swansea. William’s talk on Media Studies 2.0 threw our newly arrived students into the deep end of debates they will be wrestling with over the coming weeks and months – about the profound social, political and cultural issues underpinning the ever-changing media and technological landscape and, as interestingly, about the role of Media Studies as an academic discipline which doesn’t just reflect on these issues, but has been, throughout its history, active – and even complicit- in shaping them.

William’s whizz through the history of the development of media technologies emphasised that the contemporary mediaworld had been shaped by the coalescing of two different stories of innovation – one focussed around technologies of broadcasting and one around computing. These developments were not just a consequence of brilliant inventors providing technological solutions to practical problems – they were also bound up with cultural processes and assumptions about the best ways to communicate and the best ways to manage information in complex societies. It is the convergence of these stories in the late 20^th/early 21^st century which marks the distinctiveness of this period, as the computing side of the story squeezes out the broadcasting side. Whilst TV, radio, film and print– the dominant media in Media Studies 1.0 might look and sound like they did before – to audiences (or users as William suggests they might better be called) and to academics in this field - they are now, almost exclusively, produced and circulated through digital code.

This accelerated convergence has a number of paradoxes within it. On the one hand it appears to bring enormous opportunities for more access to the technologies of media production, which escape the traditional relationships between communication, order and power (William showed us a YouTube video made by his 10 year old son, explicitly against his parental wishes). These are means of mental and symbolic production not available to the audiences of recent history. On the other hand, the audience of the past could be anonymous if it wished. The users of the present, by contrast, leave their digital traces for commercial and state interests to feed on –so that even in benign liberal democracies like the UK our Facebook likes become a commercial resource over which we or indeed our elected representatives have limited control and your Twitter feed might land you in jail.

The professional expertise of scholars in Media Studies has been bound up with texts, representation and audiences. In Media Studies 2.0 these might not be where the urgency of debates are, in comparison to knowledge about regulatory frameworks or access to the means to understand and re-work code (to hack, in other words). For those in the arts and humanities more generally, interested in the consequences of the digital, these are important challenges, which raise questions about our focus and priorities and about the kinds of skills students – and indeed teachers – might need to live and work in this emerging media infrastructure in ways which might help shape it for the future.

It was a provocative presentation, and William was good enough to share chapters from his forthcoming book with us. He also shows an enviable commitment to how Media Studies 2.0 might challenge traditional models of gatekeeping and authorial academic authority by blogging them here.

For us in CCPS this year also represents Global Media and Communication 2.0. Our founding director Jonathan Vickery is concentrating on developing a new MA program on Arts, Enterprise and Development and Joanne Garde-Hansen has taken over as our Course Director this year. I’ll record my thanks to Jonathan for his work in setting up and managing the programme for the last two years and look forward to working with Jo. I hope that, on GMC this year, as teachers and students, we can try and rise to William’s challenge.

David Wright : 03 Oct 2013 11:42 |  Tags: Digital Media Media; Research Studies; Technology; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Comparing tastes in the UK and Finland

Two papers published this month, written with colleagues from the University of Helsinki, Semi Purhonen and Riie Heikkilä, and supported by the British Academy, represent the culmination of a project on comparing cultural tastes in UK and Finland.

Why compare tastes? Principally because one criticism of the most influential account of the social patterns of taste, Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction, is that its analysis is tied to a specific time and place and therefore its insights are not transferable to other times and places. Comparison between nations is one way to explore that further.

Why the UK and Finland? Here the answer is partly practical. Many of the comparative studies I’ve read on other topics are prefaced with accounts of their difficulty. Whilst, of course, we had our struggles, our path was eased by the fact that two studies with similar questions, methodologies and a similar relation to Bourdieu had been recently conducted in the UK and in Finland. This made comparison something of a natural next step.

The first of the two papers, written with Semi Purhonen, appears in a special issue of the journal Cultural Sociology on ‘field analysis’, edited by Mike Savage and Elizabeth Silva. Field, along with habitus and the more familiar capital is one of Bourdieu’s conceptual triad, with fields representing the overlapping spheres of human activity in which capitals are struggled over. Field, capital and habitus are always inter-related for Bourdieu – an element of his approach which is often forgotten, at least by some of his critics. In order to be analyzed fields need to be constructed or demarcated somehow – and the special issue shows some great examples of how this can be achieved, in relation to such diverse topics as comedy, fell-running and the digital worlds of musical tastes. For comparison, though – and especially for comparing something as complex and hard to pin down as ‘national taste’ - the fields that are being compared need to be constructed in similar ways. Our studies allowed that to happen, but not without some problems. These problems included how to interpret the different items which are asked about in national surveys of taste and participation, and the different positions of those items in local or national cultural hierarchies – assuming such surveys can’t just be identical (asking about schlagers in the UK would be as meaningless as asking about cricket in Finland). In the paper we explore how Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), the statistical method which underpins Distinction -which produces those infamous diagrams and which Bourdieu describes as ‘thinking’ in terms of relation – allows a partial resolution of these issues by revealing the underlying structure of tastes. Regardless of which items or activities are liked in the two countries, the MCA produced by both projects showdivisions which can be similarly interpreted in both nations, and which relate to class, education and age. The activities themselves are less important, then, than their relation to other activities. We back this up by analyzing the in-depth interviews of people located, through their survey answers, in different bits of our national ‘fields’, so that we can explore how people feel about their likes and dislikes, illustrating how a position in a field is experienced – and importantly reminding us that people are more than an accumulation of their variables. It was an interesting process – and might provide a model for comparative work of this kind in the future.

The second paper, written with Semi and Riie, appears in the journal Comparative Sociology. Here our concern was to use taste to critically explore the notion of ‘cosmopolitanism’, which has emerged as a somewhat hopeful and optimistic form of post-national identity, characterized by tolerance and openness to difference. It is a concept which has been more theorized than empirically explored, though, and taste might be where it is visible. The value of comparison here is that, for all their similarities, the UK and Finland have distinct collective histories shaping their national cultures and are differently positioned in global flows of people and things. We used the interviews and focus groups produced by the two projects to explore how the tensions between the national and the global are played out. We find lots of examples of what the sociologist Ulrich Beck refers to as ‘banal cosmopolitanism’ – i.e. the presence in everyday life of items and people from beyond ‘the nation’, simply by virtue of the globalization of the cultural industries and migration of various forms. Interestingly we find little evidence of rejection or suspicion of ‘global culture’, or at least its US version – which might have been present in studies of this kind in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Age seems to be an important indicator of cosmopolitan attitudes – especially in Finland where learning languages, including English, appears to give ready access to work and travel abroad. In both countries, for younger more educated, professional groups (those with, roughly, more cultural capital), identifiably ‘national’ forms of culture were less attractive than more exotic forms. Older people and those with lower levels of education seemed more attached to the nation (although in Finland, older people who might be identified as elite also seemed to exhibit particular pride in national cuisine). These kinds of findings might indicate some of the ambiguities of cosmopolitanism – it might spread with the cohort effect of younger generations and the inter-connections of global culture, but it is equally likely to be marked by inequalities in cultural capital, although on a global scale.

Producing both papers was a very rewarding process – and hopefully these conversations, about the UK, Finland and elsewhere, will continue.

Warwick staff and students can access the papers via WRAP

You can find links to the articles and follow my research on academia.edu

David Wright : 30 May 2013 15:54 |  Tags: ; Bourdieu; Cultural Policy Studies; Cultural Sociology; Finland; Taste; |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem