Non-industrial Estate

Culture as everyday infrastructure

Jul 26, 2024

I mentioned last time that I wanted to write some more about Justin O’Connor’s Culture Is Not An Industry.

Read this book

The first thing to say is that if your work involves ‘making the case’ for investment in arts and culture, you should read it. It might make you uncomfortable at times – I know it did me – as you think of the arguments you have made based on economic growth, and on growth that was, in hindsight, if not illusory than mistaking one thing for another. (IT or advertising for poetry, say…) But you should read it.

The second thing to say is you should read it to better inform those cases, and to better shape the necessary arguments for change within arts and culture, and within the partnerships and coalitions (formal and informal) that enable culture at local levels. But you should read it.

The book argues that the broad, highly tactical, but very baggy definition of creative industries laid down in 1997 by Chris Smith to unlock funding from the New Labour Treasury has ultimately been unhelpful and unhealthy for state funding and for arts and culture.

Culture as part of the foundational economy

Using the idea of a Foundational Economy (reframed by new Chancellor Rachel Reeves as the Everyday Economy, echoed in ‘everyday creativity’ perhaps) he urges the sector and its allies to stop seeking support from public policy within industrial economic arguments but to put culture “back into the sphere of public responsibility alongside health, education, social welfare and basic infrastructure.”

There are, of course, actual industries or industrial functions within culture – film, tv, publishing as well as arts sectors – that might make cases for economic return on investment but culture itself O’Connor suggests is not for that, and does not operate as an industry. Or, where it does it has damaging distorting effects, just as seeing care or health or dentistry as an opportunity to build a big business mishapes both personal and social behaviour. (Someone’s ill health is not a profit-making opportunity unless you are some shade of sociopath, I would suggest.) Instead, the book argues persuasively, “culture is not an industry but a collective human need”.

The Foundational Economy is an attempt by a collective of academics to think beyond neoliberal models without envisaging some revolutionary tabla rasa. Instead, they argue for adaptive reuse – “never demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transfer and reuse” to quote the French architects Anne Lacaton and Jean Phillipe Vassal as credited in the book Foundational Economy. I am very drawn to adaptive reuse for its similarities to the De-Certeauian ‘tactics’ my book Tactics for the Tightrope proposes.

The foundational economy is “a large zone producing daily essential goods and services which are critical to citizens flourishing.” It includes “material” and “providential” parts (e.g. energy, water and housing, and education funerals, police respectively) and what they call the ‘overlooked economy’ (barbers, furniture, vets, hospitality etc). O’Connor suggests culture is part of this zone, which sits between the Core Household Economy (those things which are largely ‘untraded’ and hence often gendered such as care and domestic duties) and the Tradeable Economy (those things we might buy with ‘surplus’ income.)

Culture as local, adaptive, experimental infrastructure

This then allows him to develop a strong case for culture as a “local, adaptive, experimental” infrastructure necessary for collective flourishing. The employment arguments which are undermined by lived experience on a daily basis for most cultural workers, and the instrumental arguments which, while often successful, risk undermining cultural methods and practices, must be replaced by new proposals and new evidence. These must set out the role of culture in mainstream - i.e. not specifically cultural - discussions of what enables people to collectively live well. The rationale for support needs to be less solipsistic and self-regarding, and more about access to cultural rights for the whole population, alongside their other human rights.

Culture is part of the social infrastructure households need to be able to access when creativity, heritage or the arts are needed for their flourishing. This might be in school, for the children and young people, or via local events, festivals, programmes, venues and arts centres. This could create a stronger basis for “state funding for culture as part of local development… [a] social investment” as O’Connor puts it.

A change of mindset

This necessitates a change of mindset within the cultural sector that recognises the social and political contexts as well as the artistic, heritage and cultural contexts. We need to move, in a discipled manner, away from simplistic ‘growth economics’. In some ways, O’Connor suggests this will be challenging, so accustomed has the sector grown to dodgy advocacy and reporting overkill: ‘This proliferating apparatus of cultural value accountancy, with its apparatuses of multiple bottom lines, contingent value, and audience evaluation studies, has hollowed out our societal sense of the value of culture, replacing it with the death rattle of statistics.”

As I suggested in my last post, much social policy references culture only implicitly. Programmes such as Big Local’s Creative Civic Change (supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation’s Civic Role work) have built culture into neighbourhood-level development work but in general it is hard to dispute O’Connor’s conclusion that “culture is marginalised in mainstream development discourse”.

Turning to ways out of this impasse, O’Connor stresses the need to avoid individualised, consumer-centre arguments for investment, including those which frame access and participation in terms of individual choice, and focus on the collective, and the effects of collectivity. This applies, I would suggest, in the production and consumption of culture.

What might cultural policy which is not rooted in the idea of the individual artist and the individual audience member but in collective artistry and collective or community creativity and consumption? (The example of Creative People and Places in England may be helpful here.)

From individual to collective

This is not to say individual artists and consumers do not exist. But they emerge from and form part of shared and collective experiences and cultures which it may be more practical to nurture. Apparently, Arts Council England have recently created a senior post responsible for Individuals. I hope they will not be distracted into simply concentrating on how to make better bets on individual talent, and will also give due attention to the collective needs of artists - just as many artists have used funding to work with others, passing on funds from hopelessly oversubscribed schemes. (At the risk of sounding like Alanis Morrisette, isn’t it ironic that ‘individual artist’ is an essentially bureaucratic term for people who’d never use that phrase outside a funding context?)

O’Connor concludes by suggesting three cogent interventions:

An audit of how people can, in practice, access cultural infrastructures so they can effectively exercise their cultural rights, including identifying funding requirements and opportunities for devolution
Developing new forms of citizen consultation and involvement
A social turn for the cultural infrastructure, in a way that respects the specific value of cultural practices rather than seeing them as soft social services, and that values arts spaces as central to small eco-systems of not for profits and micro-businesses beyond the cultural sector

These are challenging suggestions. The first requires thinking about both revenue and capital requirements - the last government have not allowed for much repair and renewal, to put it mildly.

And the last one in particular will require serious leadership, bravery and more honest and explicit sharing of differences of values than the cultural sector has grown used to. (Another unintended consequence of the totalising effect of the economic Creative Industries argument.) And to do that will require spaces, safe spaces for discomfort, for people to come together. The place-based work many are involved in, and the devolution spaces could have potential here for practicing the necessary partnership and collaboration skills, if we can get out of boosterism.

Although I’ve described the argument here to be helpful to the busy reader, let me just remind you of the first thing I said: you should read this.

The State of the Arts

Arguably there is plenty in the Campaign for the Arts’ excellent but chastening new report The State of the Arts to justify Justin O’Connor’s title-as-meme. If this is a snapshot of an industry, it is not thriving in terms of productivity, employment, pay and development.

In terms of public funding, the arguments have been spectacularly unsuccessful since 2008. (The report covers data from 2010, but it’s important to remember the cuts started post Global Financial Crash. This is not all down to the last government. I mean, most of it is, but they’re not uniquely the Bad Guys.) The UK is now near the bottom of the league table for government spending on Culture in Europe. (Oddly, Orbán’s Hungary is the top of the table, which makes me want to know more. What are they funding?)

Funding per capita to the four UK arts councils (not including lottery funding which they have generally used to minimise damage from reductions in grant-in aid, resulting in some rather than tangled structures, and not including new tax relief schemes for parts of the sector) has decreased by 18% in England 22% in Scotland, 25% in Wales and a whopping 66% in Northern Ireland. Having worked in Northern Ireland a fair amount in recent years, and knowing how much harder things are there, that last figure still shocked me. In 2010 Northern Ireland had higher per capita spend on culture than the other nations (£20.39) – now it is the lowest at just £6.99.

The report also tracks declining numbers of events, the declines in arts education mentioned last time, declines in BBC expenditure, and a halving of funding for libraries. There are some shocking earning figures which anyone tempted into creative industries boosterism should have pinned by their desks. All sub-sectors show median earnings below the national average. In North East England, where I live*, the median earning of someone in an employed position is just £15,805. It’s double that the other end of the Transpennine line in the North West. No matter what lies behind that stat, it’s a shocking figure. (And is presumably even worse for freelancers.)

I’d love to hear what the big, funded employers response is.

This report adds realism and solid numbers to lived experience and asset-based arguments and brings a really useful range of evidence together. You should have it in easy reach for the next year.

* I live in the Tees Valley which by some definitions is no longer in North East England, but for official statistics still is. I note this mainly because it bugs me so much.

Tactics Tomato

I recently spent a grand weekend in Ballydehob, West Cork as an adjunct (evaluator) member of the team from The Duncairn arts centre in North Belfast as they took over Levis Cornerhouse. I’ll write more at some point on this Shared Island project, a series of partnership and exchange activities between the two venues and the councils of Belfast City and Cork.

But meanwhile, here’s a 26 minute pomodoro* playlist Tactics Tomato featuring some of the musicians who featured in the weekend or are otherwise connected with the Duncairn or Levis. This includes Bonny Light Horseman who recorded part of their latest album in the pub, as evidenced above. One track in the playlist features landlord Joe and customers.

I’ve also thrown in one anachronism in the shape of a deep cut by Cork’s finest, Microdisney, perhaps the only one of theirs that would not have been out of place in the Ballydehob sessions, because I love Microdisney.

* Work for 25 minutes (or so) then rest for five. Repeat.