John Holden'sCapturing Cultural Value: How Culture has Become a Tool of Government Policy (original) (raw)

There is growing opinion within the cultural sectors on both sides of the Atlantic that new and convincing methods must be found to reaffirm its importance. In the US this was the subject of a recent Rand report, Gifts of the Muse, Reframing the Debate About the Benefits of the Arts (McCarthy, Ondaatje, Zakaras, & Brooks, 2005), which evaluated arguments in favour of the instrumental approach to the benefits of the arts in arguing for support of the arts. It proposed a new approach based on a more comprehensive view of how the arts create private and public value which underscore the importance of the arts' intrinsic benefits. Its publication was followed by a week-long discussion on the Internet run by the daily e-newsletter, Arts Journal. com, 'Is there a Better Case for the Arts'. 1 John Holden's Capturing Cultural Value: How Culture has Become a Tool of Government Policy (2004), published by the think-tank, DEMOS, takes the debate forward in the UK. It too proposes ways of valuing culture other than the instrumental, drawing on disciplines as diverse as brand valuation by accountants and the language of sustainability used by environmentalists. This Introduction and the seven commentaries that follow explore various issues raised by Holden's pamphlet. In England, the issues of identifying and creating cultural value have been at the centre of a debate about justifying subsidy to the cultural sector. New Labour's rhetoric has typically focused on the instrumental educational, economic and social benefits of cultural activities and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's five-year plan, Living Life to the Full (DCMS, 2005) complies with that tradition. However, despite its emphasis on the 'real difference' that the department can make, it has generally failed to provide robust evidence of what difference its funding has been making up to now, and has ignored what is sometimes described as the 'intrinsic' qualities of the arts and culture. Estelle Morris had taken stock of this within a few months after becoming Minister for the Arts: I know that Arts and Culture make a contribution to health, to education, to crime reduction, to strong communities, to the economy and to the nation's well-being, but I don't always know how to evaluate or describe it. (Morris, 2003)