tag:theconversation.com,2011:/fr/topics/cultural-economy-7846/articles
Cultural economy – The Conversation
2021-12-06T14:58:50Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/171242
2021-12-06T14:58:50Z
2021-12-06T14:58:50Z
The growth of South Africa’s cultural industries depends on broader state policies
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/435650/original/file-20211203-17-p5lti5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The musical The Lion King - here starring Amanda Kunene - in New Zealand.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Fiona Goodall/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>At many discussion panels about repairing the cultural and creative industries in South Africa, a familiar slogan is echoed: artists should <a href="https://www.facebook.com/iksculture/videos/615285189674077/">solve their own problems</a>. This seems fitting when one considers that this sector has unique problems understood mainly by those who work in it. It is an atypical sector. And to solve a problem one must involve those directly affected by it.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://books.google.co.za/books/about/Culture_and_Liberation_Struggle_in_South.html?id=7TGdzgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">reality</a> is different. The sector cannot solve its stunted growth and the other <a href="https://mg.co.za/friday/2021-08-20-review-culture-and-the-liberation-struggle-in-south-africa-on-the-arts-as-a-catalyst-in-the-quest-for-true-freedom/">complex problems</a> burdening it on its own. It could mobilise itself better so that the problems are acutely identified. But some of its problems – since democracy in 1994 – demand political will. They are often intertwined with different areas of public policy that the sector has no control over.</p>
<p>The creative and cultural industries are a diverse sector that contributes to South Africa’s cultural identity. They have been defined in government policy documents and reports as areas like the performing arts, craft, film, fine art, music, gaming, museums, libraries, architecture, design and advertising. In 2017, the South African Cultural Observatory <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/article/jobs-report-reveals-potential-for-creative-economy">reported</a> the sector accounts for almost 7% of employment in the country. Even so, there have been imperatives from various arms of the state for the sector to generate more employment and to function better. </p>
<p>But many of the problems restricting the growth of the sector are not self-inflicted. They are caused and made worse by an economic, political and historical environment that does not enable the sector to grow.</p>
<h2>Sector ecology</h2>
<p>The creative and cultural sector exists in a complex ecology. Its <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2019.1710070">economic</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/09548963.2017.1380706">environment</a> requires demand for creative and cultural output, be these products or services. For demand to be in place, audiences should be able to afford this output, to access it and to be informed about why it matters to them. </p>
<p>How is demand going to be there if it is not fostered? Demand needs audience development, cultural producers to be encouraged and society to value its cultural material.</p>
<p>And how are potential audiences meant to access culture if they cannot afford its outputs? If the economy is depressed, as it has been for <a href="https://mg.co.za/business/2020-09-08-south-africas-economy-is-in-a-severe-recession/">years</a>, there are fewer employment opportunities. With less employment comes reduced disposable income, meaning less spending on cultural goods when they are not viewed as basic needs to be fulfilled. When cultural goods are not treated as a public good, what’s reinforced is that they are only for those who can afford them. And so, no matter how innovative the cultural products or services, the conditions of demand are not solely dependent on the sector. Instead, they relate to the vibrancy of the economy and government approach to economic policy.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nearly-half-of-south-africas-live-music-workers-may-quit-the-industry-for-good-151484">Nearly half of South Africa’s live music workers may quit the industry for good</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It is also a problem when trade and economic <a href="https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_olink/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=osu1554903391508711">policy</a> <a href="https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_etd/send_file/send?accession=osu1554903391508711&disposition=inline">dictates</a> that, with the exception of film, the small businesses in the sector <a href="https://pmg.org.za/committee-meeting/20453/">are</a> <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/download/comments/729/5751ec3e9a4feab575962e78e006250d/Employment+in+the+Cultural+and+Creative+Industries+in+South+Africa">taxed</a> at the <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2020.1800505">same level</a> as sectors that do not operate with as much precarity. For instance, for tax purposes it is irrelevant that employment opportunities in the sector are seasonal, based mainly on the patronage of those with disposable income and are adversely affected by other infrastructure-related shortfalls. Those operating in this sector do not have incentives to grow their small businesses, or develop the complexity of their offering, when the rare opportunity of well-paid temporary work comes.</p>
<p>With South African economic policy as it stands, those in the sector are in fact encouraged to work informally and deterred from directly paying tax. <a href="https://www.ajhtl.com/uploads/7/1/6/3/7163688/article_38_vol_7_4__2018.pdf">Some</a> <a href="https://repository.nwu.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10394/33009/Jonker%20E.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">studies</a> suggest that those self-employed in the sector do not always perceive contributing to tax as beneficial. For the government this means sector activities that are not captured or measurable, a lost economic and data management opportunity.</p>
<h2>Education policy</h2>
<p>Since democracy, South Africa’s primary, secondary and higher education curricula have marginalised arts and culture subjects. They compete with science, technology, engineering, and maths (STEM) for public investment budgets. Yet culture and the arts play a significant role in social and economic development. This is why the educational frameworks of some countries in fact employ STEAM rather than STEM – the ‘A’ is for Arts. </p>
<p>Outside of private schools and magnet schools that focus on developing specialist skills in low-income areas, arts-culture subjects tend to be taught by teachers without technical training, or sometimes no training at all. Not only does this render arts-culture qualifications redundant, because of the absence of nuance, it also means fewer employment opportunities. Reduced employment opportunities are therefore not caused by the creative and cultural sector but by priorities in education policy.</p>
<p>Education policy prioritisation also impacts demand for cultural products and means that the value of cultural work is not recognised by learners – or realised. These learners are potential future producers and consumers of culture whose toil will shape specific areas of society and the economy.</p>
<p>This situation questions the effectiveness of efforts of arts-culture advocacy groups and political institutions to highlight the developmental role of arts and culture through and in education. The sector is still not in a position where it is perceived as providing a public good that is vital for all members of society. </p>
<h2>Limited access</h2>
<p>Access to arts and culture also means access to physical and virtual spaces. Networking, which drives the sector, happens in both. Limited investment in transport infrastructure means that only those who travel in their own cars, and not on sometimes-unsafe public transport, can reach spaces with cultural goods and services.</p>
<p>And what are the implications for potential audiences in rural and peri-urban areas? Are these audience development challenges not impacted by policies related to limited rural development, safety and investment in public transport infrastructure? These are not policies the sector can control.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africa-should-turn-to-creative-clusters-to-boost-the-arts-96294">South Africa should turn to 'creative clusters' to boost the arts</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Lastly, the commerce of cultural services and related products has been <a href="https://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199603510.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199603510-e-027">taking</a> <a href="https://eprints.qut.edu.au/87046/18/87046.pdf">place</a> on digital platforms for well over a decade in other parts of the world. In South Africa, only those who <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/03057071003607444">can afford</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-sas-data-prices-compare-with-the-rest-of-the-world-2020-5">expensive</a> internet connectivity have been able to work this way. This limited connectivity is not a cultural and creative sector invention. It is due to the lack of political will to invest in accessible digital infrastructure which could have multiplier effects on entrepreneurial ventures. The digital divide is caused by communications <a href="https://repository.nwu.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10394/33009/Jonker%20E.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">policies</a> that have not prioritised broad access to technological advancements.</p>
<p>As such, the growth problems of the creative and cultural sector are <a href="https://repository.nwu.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10394/33009/Jonker%20E.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y">firmly</a> <a href="https://etd.ohiolink.edu/apexprod/rws_olink/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=osu1554903391508711">rooted</a> in South Africa’s development agenda. The sector cannot solve its own problems in isolation from other public policies. Just as personal self-development happens in an enabling environment, sector development is possible in a supportive public policy space. </p>
<p>Enabling growth will need collaboration between government and the sector rather than the sector on its own.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/171242/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Akhona Ndzuta receives funding from The National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences. This work is based on the research supported by the National Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences </span></em></p>
Problems limiting the growth of the sector aren’t self-inflicted. They’re firmly rooted in the country’s development agenda.
Akhona Ndzuta, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of South Africa
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/151400
2020-12-28T06:07:13Z
2020-12-28T06:07:13Z
Here’s the first Africa-wide survey of the economic impact of COVID-19 on cultural industries
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375057/original/file-20201215-19-9ngfic.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Cinemas in Kampala, Uganda, remained poorly attended after reopening in November.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Xinhua/Hajarah Nalwadda via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Arts and culture play an important role in all societies. They contribute not only to the social well-being of people but also to the social and economic development of countries. They generate incomes, as many case studies show, even if the level of informality of the sector in Africa tends to absorb that reality.</p>
<p>According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s <a href="https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ditcted2018d3_en.pdf">report</a> on creative economy (2018), the global market of cultural goods and services doubled from US$208 billion in 2002 to US$509 billion in 2015. An Ernst & Young <a href="https://en.unesco.org/creativity/sites/creativity/files/cultural_times._the_first_global_map_of_cultural_and_creative_industries.pdf">study</a> (2015) indicates that cultural industries in Africa and in the Middle East are worth US$58 billion in revenues, employ 2.4 million people and contribute 1.1% to regional GDP.</p>
<p>Like all economic sectors, cultural and creative industries globally have been negatively affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, specifically by the measures adopted by governments to limit the spread of the virus. </p>
<p>The impact has been well documented in <a href="https://pec.ac.uk/news/how-can-the-creative-industries-come-together-to-share-how-covid-19-is-impacting-the-sector">advanced economies</a>. However, data on the impact of COVID-19 on African cultural and creative industries is patchy.</p>
<p>According to Ernst & Young, the most lucrative of these industries in Africa are music, visual arts and movies. However, the low <a href="https://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm">internet penetration</a> holds back the rise of a promising sector such as online gaming. This in contrast with the high potential of the market. In fact, cultural policies are lacking or are not well implemented in many countries. </p>
<p>Using my experience in conducting an <a href="http://www.adiac-congo.com/content/covid-19-le-secteur-culturel-et-creatif-perdu-plus-de-40-millions-de-dollars-116642">online survey</a> in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I surveyed participants in the cultural and creative industries in six countries across four regions of sub-Saharan Africa.</p>
<p>A matrix of economic impact of COVID-19 included in my <a href="https://www.artsmanagement.net/Articles/COVID-19-and-culture-in-Africa-A-comparative-analysis-of-economic-impact-studies,4184">study</a> reveals there are several factors explaining the harsh impact of the pandemic on the cultural industries in Africa. These range from levels of informality and the size of companies to the types of contracts used and the modes of production and consumption in the industries.</p>
<iframe src="https://e.infogram.com/c74459f8-e092-493e-a95b-45f9252899c3?src=embed" title="COVID-19 impact on culture-Africa Mapping" width="100%" height="842" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none;" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe>
<div style="padding:8px 0;font-family:Arial!important;font-size:13px!important;line-height:15px!important;text-align:center;border-top:1px solid #dadada;margin:0 30px;width: 543px"><a href="https://infogram.com/c74459f8-e092-493e-a95b-45f9252899c3" target="_blank"></a><br><a href="https://infogram.com" target="_blank" rel="nofollow"></a></div>
<h2>The method</h2>
<p>I compared quantitative studies available in four sub-Saharan African economic regional communities in order to map the numbers. These are the <a href="https://www.ecowas.int">Economic Community of West African States</a> (Senegal), the <a href="https://ceeac-eccas.org">Economic Community of Central African States</a> (DR Congo), the <a href="https://www.eac.int">East African Community</a> (Kenya and Uganda) and the <a href="https://www.sadc.int">Southern African Development Community</a> (South Africa and Namibia). Those countries are the only ones that had available data resulting from completed surveys at the time of writing the research.</p>
<p>All of them were based on online surveys conducted during the various lockdowns that occurred between March and May 2020. Even if questionnaires were not the same in all countries, similar and recurrent entries offered a basis for comparison. They are, of course, early assessments as the pandemic continues.</p>
<p>The authorship of those studies is private (associations, firms, academics), except in South Africa with its <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/">South African Cultural Observatory</a>, a public research centre hosted by the Nelson Mandela University. </p>
<p>Our research privileged quantitative data. Nevertheless, the qualitative data available – such as case studies – were mentioned. They have been produced by the <a href="https://csdsafrica.org/the-impact-of-covid-19-on-the-creative-industries-in-ghana/">Center for Strategic and Defense Studies of Ghana</a> and by <a href="http://www.circulador.com.br/eng_sintaxe_de_um_sujeito_composto/">Circulador</a>, a travelling research platform for lusophone countries (Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde). An <a href="https://infogram.com/covid-19-impact-on-culture-africa-mapping-1hnp279v1qyn6gq?live">interactive map</a> allows for visualising data.</p>
<h2>Key findings</h2>
<p>Financial losses (turnover) in the cultural and creative industries in Africa during the second quarter of 2020 vary significantly from one country to another. Figures range between US$134,360 for Uganda and US$1.49 billion for South Africa, respectively 0.002% and 1.7% as contributions to GDP. The combined turnover during the lockdown period of the six countries in which the online surveys were done comes to a total of US$1.5 billion.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375045/original/file-20201215-21-1m7itrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375045/original/file-20201215-21-1m7itrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375045/original/file-20201215-21-1m7itrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375045/original/file-20201215-21-1m7itrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375045/original/file-20201215-21-1m7itrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375045/original/file-20201215-21-1m7itrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375045/original/file-20201215-21-1m7itrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375045/original/file-20201215-21-1m7itrf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=541&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Page 1. The study considers data from four regional economic communities in Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The most affected subsector within the cultural industries in Africa was the performing arts – such as live music, dance, theatre and events. This is explained by the ban on gatherings in these countries due to the pandemic. The content subsector – audio-visuals, cinema, visual arts – came second.</p>
<p>The studies also shed light on the most profitable subsectors during this period. Digital media, online gaming, music and audio-visual content were able to be resilient. Their value chains – from creation to consumption – don’t require a high level of mandatory face-to-face interaction and effective use can be made of online tools. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375049/original/file-20201215-19-nsedsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375049/original/file-20201215-19-nsedsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375049/original/file-20201215-19-nsedsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375049/original/file-20201215-19-nsedsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375049/original/file-20201215-19-nsedsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375049/original/file-20201215-19-nsedsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375049/original/file-20201215-19-nsedsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375049/original/file-20201215-19-nsedsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Page 2. The study considers data from four regional economic communities in Africa.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Vulnerability</h2>
<p>My study reveals that the vulnerability of African creative and cultural industries resulted mainly from five factors:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The predominance of the informal sector (53.3% in Senegal, 51.7% in Namibia, 80% in Kenya, 35% in South Africa).</p></li>
<li><p>The significant number of freelancers whose resources cannot withstand shocks (68% in Kenya). In Uganda, nearly 700 artists are affected out of 3,000 cancelled events. </p></li>
<li><p>The very small size of companies (47% of companies in DRC have between one and five employees; 80% have between one and 10 in Kenya). This is a further handicap because bigger companies are likely more resilient due to better access to financial, human and technological resources. </p></li>
<li><p>The prevalence of part-time jobs and short-term contracts (58% of companies in Kenya have part-time jobs). </p></li>
<li><p>The mode of production and distribution requires a high level of human interaction, especially for the visual arts (such as painting and photography).</p></li>
</ul>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375050/original/file-20201215-15-fitkx2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375050/original/file-20201215-15-fitkx2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/375050/original/file-20201215-15-fitkx2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375050/original/file-20201215-15-fitkx2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375050/original/file-20201215-15-fitkx2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=421&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375050/original/file-20201215-15-fitkx2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375050/original/file-20201215-15-fitkx2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/375050/original/file-20201215-15-fitkx2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=529&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The different creative sectors and their vulnerability.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Beginning of a journey</h2>
<p>The pandemic has not only negatively impacted the creative sector in Africa, but it has also exposed its shortcomings. </p>
<p>To boost the cultural industries’ contribution to national economies, it is important to first conduct regular field studies to map the sector for oriented and efficient public and private interventions to enable the sector to recover from the setback of COVID-19. Governments have an important role to play in this regard.</p>
<p>It is well worth creating safer legal and business frameworks that will enable creative industries to operate more efficiently. Sound cultural policies along with implementation plans are key towards achieving this goal.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151400/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The pandemic has not only negatively impacted the creative sector in Africa, but it has also exposed its shortcomings.
Ribio Nzeza Bunketi Buse, Associate Professor, University of Kinshasa
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/151484
2020-12-08T14:46:09Z
2020-12-08T14:46:09Z
Nearly half of South Africa’s live music workers may quit the industry for good
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373322/original/file-20201207-17-1giqgk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Drummer Jason Moser records a live-streamed performance in a South African theatre during lockdown.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source"> Alet Pretorius/Gallo Images via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>For people working in South Africa’s live music sector, 2020 has been “devastating”. That was the term that researchers read most frequently in responses to the country’s largest-ever live music and COVID-19 <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/article/sa-cultural-observatory-releases-report-on-the-impact-of-covid-19-live-music-sector">survey</a>, published in November. As one respondent put it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have lost everything. All income, accommodation – everything.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The study, called Impact Analysis: Live Music and its Venues and the South African Economy During COVID-19, was undertaken by the <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/about-us">South African Cultural Observatory</a>, a government project hosted at Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth. Its job is to track the socio-economic impact of the arts and creative industries. <a href="https://www.iksafrica.com">IKS Cultural Consulting</a> was commissioned to carry out the survey and Andre le Roux and I were the lead researchers.</p>
<p>We created an online questionnaire that built on the Cultural Observatory’s early <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/article/an-early-assessment-of-the-impact-of-the-covid-19-crisis-on-the-cultural-and-creative-industries-in-south-africa">assessment</a> of the pandemic’s impact on the country’s cultural and creative industries. </p>
<p>The study was both quantitative – to determine larger trends and numbers – and qualitative, including questionnaire items and eight in-depth case studies. We received 697 responses. These provided detailed information about live music workers’ experiences and their sense-making. We found that nearly half our respondents contemplate quitting live music for good.</p>
<h2>A devastated value chain</h2>
<p>The people we surveyed worry about the longer term impact of the pandemic on audiences and society, and about their own ability to operate in the absence of an integrated national recovery plan. Of the musicians surveyed, 41% report selling their instruments and equipment to pay their bills; others are living on loans that will need to be repaid.</p>
<p>Our respondents come from all South Africa’s provinces (with Gauteng, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal dominating). They work along all segments of the music value chain (from musicians, organisers, roadies and sound engineers to key venue workers). They cover all music genres. They include respondents like one, whose “bread and butter activity” is recording choirs and traditional music groups who travel from distant provinces. But all activity stopped and “the entire fraternity is at home wearing a mask”. </p>
<p>Our data presents a highly interconnected value chain, where single venues and other music delivery mechanisms such as cultural tourism operations and music circuit organisers serve as hubs for multiple artists. The loss of one venue has an impact on work and revenue opportunities for musicians as well as related service workers. Work creation (and recovery) depends on a large cohort of small and often informal employers initiating a sustained series of short-term projects.</p>
<p>From March until very recently, most of that stopped and 90% of the live music industry lost income due to COVID-19. Says one musician:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was like skittles going down. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>One in four respondents said they weren’t able to continue with any elements of their business under lockdown. Even with the current easing of lockdown, which post-dates the survey, venues – which often also serve as restaurants and bars – are constrained by <a href="https://www.gov.za/covid-19/resources/regulations-and-guidelines-coronavirus-covid-19">rules</a> on admissions, hours and service.</p>
<p>Most respondents have been in the industry for more than five years, but experience has proved no protection.</p>
<h2>Imperfect new digital strategies</h2>
<p>There’s a stereotype of the music industry as sleepy. We found the opposite. Musicians, promoters and venue owners responded to the crisis fast and flexibly. Like their overseas counterparts, 88% are adopting new online music strategies. One gospel promoter said they would use online platforms to sell and distribute music, “but it will not yield the same amount of revenue we are used to”. Their audience is often rural and elderly, with limited access to digital networks for live streaming music.</p>
<p>Despite this agility, many of those who are employers have had to end short term contracts (23%), retrench employees (13%) or cut salaries (18%). Only 6% say they can continue to pay everybody they work with.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373578/original/file-20201208-22-zh9006.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="In a village square, people sit wearing masks at a distance from one another, their seating area marketed by ropes." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373578/original/file-20201208-22-zh9006.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/373578/original/file-20201208-22-zh9006.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373578/original/file-20201208-22-zh9006.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373578/original/file-20201208-22-zh9006.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373578/original/file-20201208-22-zh9006.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373578/original/file-20201208-22-zh9006.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/373578/original/file-20201208-22-zh9006.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Capetonians attend a socially distanced jazz event in November.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nic Bothma/EPA-EFE</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Government COVID-19 <a href="https://www.gov.za/covid-19/companies-and-employees/support-business">relief support</a> requires formal documentation. But because of the predominantly informal and project-based nature of music-related work, many people were unable or ineligible to apply. Asks one:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>All of my work was confirmed on email with contracts pending … how can I claim any proof? </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Only 7% reported successful applications for the various small to medium enterprise support mechanisms and only 21% for the Department of Sport, Arts and Culture <a href="http://www.dac.gov.za/content/department-sport-arts-and-culture-covid-19-relief-fund-update">relief</a> <a href="https://www.gov.za/speeches/arts-and-culture-extends-applications-submissions-covid-19-relief-fund-9-sep-2020-0000">funding</a>.</p>
<h2>Conditionally hopeful</h2>
<p>Yet close to half of our respondents, perhaps surprisingly, categorise themselves as conditionally hopeful.</p>
<p>What they need, they say, is flexible, integrated support (both financial and in-kind) across administrative boundaries and government portfolios. In contrast to prevailing official practice, weighted towards prestigious mega events, they want decentralisation of programmes, projects and infrastructure. They stress a need to focus on the local – from <a href="https://www.news24.com/citypress/trending/artists-up-in-arms-over-local-content-quota-on-radio-20200503">compliance</a> with local content quotas to funding of local music initiatives and performance spaces. “Restart community initiatives,” pleads one. </p>
<p>National and local governments and parastatals control many spaces – recording studios for live streaming; parks and squares for safer open-air concerts – our respondents point out. Granting bureaucracy-free access to these could kick-start revenue generation, particularly if accompanied by support to access digital equipment and training in using it.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/are-lockdown-live-streams-working-for-south-africas-musicians-144946">Are lockdown live streams working for South Africa's musicians?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>But <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/publications/Report-03-10-19/Report-03-10-192017.pdf">inequality</a>, and especially the country’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/digital-equality-south-africa-still-has-a-long-way-to-go-131864">digital divide</a>, bar many respondents from such innovation, especially those in rural areas. An organiser of live music in township communities says: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Our modus operandi is to bring music to the people. And if you think about where the people are, internet isn’t great there.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>What’s to be done?</h2>
<p>To remedy all this, our respondents say they desperately need an informed, listening ear from government as much as they need financial grants. </p>
<p>Many responses describe perceptions and experiences of inefficiency, ineffectiveness and lack of practical industry understanding among officials at all levels, in all structures, as well as concerns about corruption and bias. </p>
<p>But it’s not only government that needs to be listening.</p>
<p>The plight of live music mapped in the South African Cultural Observatory study should concern anyone looking to the return of South Africa’s diverse live music scene, and the employment, <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/article/sa-s-cultural-goods-exports-growing-faster-than-imports-research">export revenue</a> and joy it creates. </p>
<p>In South Africa’s live music industry, January to Easter is always the dry season. People normally survive by setting aside earnings from the previous three quarters. The unique circumstances of 2020 sabotaged this in two big ways. </p>
<p>Relief funding was designed to cover cancellations in the first quarter – but most musicians hadn’t confirmed all their bookings by then. And from April onwards, during lockdown, there have been minimal earnings. If 2020 was dry, January to Easter 2021 will be the Sahara desert.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/151484/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gwen Ansell consults to IKS Cultural Consulting, which was commissioned by the South African Cultural Observatory to conduct and report on this research. She co-led the IKS research team </span></em></p>
The plight of live music mapped in the new survey should concern anyone looking to the return of the country’s diverse live music scene.
Gwen Ansell, Associate of the Gordon Institute for Business Science, University of Pretoria
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/144946
2020-08-27T14:26:01Z
2020-08-27T14:26:01Z
Are lockdown live streams working for South Africa’s musicians?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355077/original/file-20200827-20-wg0ybx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Sho Madjozi, who performed in a live stream benefit concert during lockdown.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alet Pretorius/Gallo Images via Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Hello,” says trumpeter <a href="http://www.theorbit.co.za/sydney-mavundla/">Sydney Mavundla</a>. “Greetings to you, sitting in your living room there on that red couch!” But Mavundla can’t see his audience. He’s talking through the “fourth wall” – the screen of a digital device – as he live streams a concert by his group from an empty studio out to the online world.</p>
<p>As COVID-19 <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-africas-lockdown-a-great-start-but-then-a-misreading-of-how-society-works-139789">lockdown</a> clamped down in early 2020, musicians everywhere began turning to live streaming as a potential alternative source of connection with audiences and earnings. But how realistic were those hopes? For South Africa, that’s what Digital Futures? – a just-published snapshot <a href="http://www.concertssa.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Digital-Futures-online.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2ce7meSlZ76ByhA8-QpuEZFV1GnI_Dup2tCvDIVonc1L12AdVFnowSBcQ">study</a> of live streaming platforms – explored in July of this year.</p>
<p>The survey was commissioned by <a href="https://www.concertssa.co.za">Concerts SA</a>, a joint South African and Norwegian development project which has, since 2014 and until the disruption of the pandemic, been distributing micro-grants to support hundreds of live music events across South Africa. The project urgently needed practical information about how best to pivot that support in the most useful way. Musicians and venues had <a href="https://www.gov.za/coronavirus/guidelines">abruptly</a> lost all sources of activity and income, leaving many destitute.</p>
<p>Commentators worldwide initially hailed live streaming as a salvation. That view has now been tempered everywhere. Our South African survey data certainly presented a more complex and nuanced picture. Potentials are still universally acknowledged as significant – but, right now, few artists or hosting venues are earning much. </p>
<h2>Who we surveyed</h2>
<p>Live streaming offers significant potential for monetising music performance. Even after lockdowns end, it could extend the life of live-audience shows and their revenue generation, if they are recorded and subsequently streamed. To realise that effectively, though, demands substantial contextual change.</p>
<p>Although live streaming had its early adopters and fast followers in South Africa (the oldest firm we surveyed has existed for ten years), the largest segment of platforms (38%) began business since, and in direct response to, the COVID-19 lockdown. Indeed, we know more initiatives have joined since the survey closed.</p>
<p>Just under 70% of our respondents are small, medium and micro enterprises; the majority have business origins in music management and promotion; others come from all along the music industry value chain. All are genre-agnostic about their offerings. Most adopt a transactional video-on-demand revenue model, where the viewer makes a one-off payment to view a single show.</p>
<p>But because live streaming in South Africa is still an ecosystem very much in formation, ad hoc revenue arrangements for individual events are common. That is even more marked for financing arrangements. There, hybrid models dominate, with a heavy reliance on corporate sponsors, donors and investors. These hybrids account for 54% of artist payments and up to 70% for filming and venue payments. </p>
<h2>Is this sustainable?</h2>
<p>Those figures raise questions about sustainability, underlined when artists’ income is discussed. Even when artists conduct vigorous extra marketing, their own reports describe earnings maxing out at around 30% of what ticket sales for their live-audience shows can earn, and often much less. </p>
<p>Artists’ earnings may be second in line after the initial investment is covered, but even if sponsorship covers this, reaching the right audience remains hard. Skills to reach the right market are still being learned – and the right market may be on the wrong side of South Africa’s yawning digital divide. “Live streaming platforms and artists carry the risk,” explains respondent Bradley Williams of the Untitled Basement music venue. “There is no insurance to cover their losses.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355078/original/file-20200827-14-1557r3s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A sound engineer in an empty auditorium records a band of live musicians on a stage that is bathed in blue light." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355078/original/file-20200827-14-1557r3s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/355078/original/file-20200827-14-1557r3s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355078/original/file-20200827-14-1557r3s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355078/original/file-20200827-14-1557r3s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355078/original/file-20200827-14-1557r3s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355078/original/file-20200827-14-1557r3s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/355078/original/file-20200827-14-1557r3s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Musician Nathan Smith records a live performance for a video-on-demand stream during lockdown.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alet Pretorius/Gallo Images via Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Potential earnings after the initial online broadcast, of course, could be far larger. The internet can expand the global audience for a niched product such as South African music: witness <a href="https://www.sowetanlive.co.za/entertainment/2020-08-27-master-kgs-jerusalema-video-hits-100-million-views/">#Jerusalema</a>, which became an international viral sensation during lockdown. DVDs for sale, licensing fees from broadcasters and music educators and pay-per-view and subscription deals are all possible.</p>
<p>All those are leveraged off the master recording of the original performance, and most of our responding platforms grant 100% of, or share, those rights with the bandleader. (Anecdotally, we know that not all platforms do: some commercial operators pay a one-off performance fee for sole rights to all future uses and musicians get nothing after the fee.)</p>
<p>But attempts at fair dealing mean little, say our respondents, while the South African context remains constraining. There is little understanding at government level, they suggest, of the fluid, project-based nature of music activities, with inflexible, slow and inappropriate official <a href="https://www.groundup.org.za/article/covid-19-only-488-4512-artists-who-applied-relief-were-paid/">provisions</a> for support.</p>
<h2>Digital inequalities</h2>
<p>That need not only mean funding. Government is well placed, they say, to provide in-kind support like skills training and facilities where streamed shows could be recorded or transmitted. Only government can develop legislative frameworks to support more equitable online remuneration. And only government can take the decisive action on <a href="https://www.businessinsider.co.za/how-sas-data-prices-compare-with-the-rest-of-the-world-2020-5">data costs</a> and wifi access that will allow the platforms to access bigger South African, before international, audiences. </p>
<p>“The high cost of internet data and poor internet quality across the country limits our potential audience reach,” notes Dr Sipho Sithole of the Watcha TV platform, a respondent. </p>
<p>Government, though, is not the only significant actor. Our respondents acknowledge that venues and musicians themselves need to become more digitally savvy to better monetise live streaming: “They need to adjust their performances to the virtual world,” says Michael Balkind of the Soda Studio streaming platform. That would be far easier, respondents suggest, if licensing agencies, rights organisations and record labels upgraded member education and improved access to and transparency around procedures and decision-making.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-south-africas-jazz-musicians-are-making-the-digital-leap-136069">How South Africa's jazz musicians are making the digital leap</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The survey also revealed how much we still don’t know. For example, what the most effective marketing strategies for live streaming are, or in what respects different music genres require different staging aesthetics and marketing approaches. </p>
<p>More than a decade ago, the recorded music value chain was transformed by digital technology; today that aspect of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is beginning to transform live music too, literally as we watch. </p>
<p>If South Africa’s digital inequalities persist, the results could be more exclusionary, for both music makers and music consumers. Even a year from now, the South African live streaming scene will have grown and changed considerably, and we hope to revisit this enquiry on a much larger scale.</p>
<p><em>Concerts SA is housed within the SAMRO Foundation and receives support from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, SAMRO, the SAMRO Foundation and Concerts Norway, who helped make possible this research, conducted by Jess White.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/144946/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Gwen Ansell consults for IKS Cultural Consulting whose team conducted the research on behalf of Concerts SA</span></em></p>
The live streaming of music events online is full of potential – but right now few artists or hosting venues are earning much from it.
Gwen Ansell, Associate of the Gordon Institute for Business Science, University of Pretoria
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/135970
2020-05-19T14:29:47Z
2020-05-19T14:29:47Z
Cape Town’s creative firms are business innovators – but they’re vulnerable
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335756/original/file-20200518-83384-c3zmmj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A mural by famed Cape Town artist Faith47.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Frédéric Soltan/Corbis/Getty Images</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1941 Hedy Lamarr, a Hollywood actress, and George Antheil, an experimental composer, patented “frequency hopping”. The technique is still used today for secure radio communications, Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. </p>
<p><a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F0-306-46999-5_11">Frequency hopping</a> employs a spectrum of frequency for radio communications that’s repeatedly changed according to an agreed sequence between sender and receiver. This secures a message against interception. Lamarr hoped the <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/hedy-lamarr-george-antheil-frequency-hopping-2014-7?IR=T">idea</a> would help in the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/electronic-warfare">defence</a> of her adopted country, the US, in the second world war. </p>
<p>Antheil’s experience helped. He composed for multiple players, up to 16 pianos at a time, and had developed a mechanism to help keep them in sync. This also worked to enable frequency hopping technology. It’s one startling example of how combining the creative imagination with the world of technology can lead to new discoveries. </p>
<p>We wanted to find out more about South African firms that are fusing creative skills with digital technologies to produce new products and services. </p>
<p>In November 2019, the <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za">South African Cultural Observatory</a> partnered with a group of UK academics to <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/article/the-overlaps-between-the-digital-and-creative-sectors-innovation-and-technology-in-the-creative-economy">track</a> how these firms – graphic designers, film makers, music producers and the like – are using this fusion to drive growth.</p>
<p>There’s increasing interest in the <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/article/creative-industries-can-drive-economic-growth-job-creation-report">contribution</a> of the creative economy to growth and job creation in South Africa. But innovation research is still mostly focused on STEM sectors – science, technology, engineering and mathematics. </p>
<p>Our research examined the links and connections between digital technologies, innovation, intellectual property, and diversity in the cultural and creative industries. Our findings showed that there is an agile group of mostly small, highly innovative, firms that combine cultural and digital skills to meet market demand. </p>
<h2>Our study</h2>
<p>Cape Town was chosen for a pilot <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/article/the-overlaps-between-the-digital-and-creative-sectors-innovation-and-technology-in-the-creative-economy">study</a> because of its reputation as a creative city. The <a href="https://en.unesco.org/creative-cities/cape-town">concept</a> refers to clusters of creative firms, but also includes events and skills. </p>
<p>A cluster of 349 cultural and creative firms operating in the Cape Town metro area were located and mapped. Through telephone interviews and an online survey 74 responses were received. The research design was partly based on a similar <a href="http://www.brightonfuse.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/The-Brighton-Fuse-Final-Report.pdf">study</a> in the UK’s Brighton cluster, which allowed for interesting international comparisons. </p>
<p>South Africa does not have an officially recognised definition of the cultural and creative industries, but much research and policy makes use of UNESCO’s <a href="https://en.unesco.org/creativity/files/cultural-economy-unescos-framework-cultural-statistics">Framework for Cultural Statistics</a>. This includes more ‘traditional’ cultural sectors – like fine art, heritage, performing arts, music, film and book publishing – and also more commercial ones – like fashion, architecture, video games and advertising. </p>
<p>Forming the largest group responding to our survey were firms related to design (fashion design 19%; graphic design 14%; architecture 1%). This was followed by film, television, video and radio (12%); crafts (12%); music and performing arts (7%); and photography (7%). The sample also had representatives from advertising and marketing (12%); IT, software and computer services (4%); museums, galleries and libraries (3%). </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335760/original/file-20200518-83397-ranl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335760/original/file-20200518-83397-ranl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/335760/original/file-20200518-83397-ranl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335760/original/file-20200518-83397-ranl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335760/original/file-20200518-83397-ranl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335760/original/file-20200518-83397-ranl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335760/original/file-20200518-83397-ranl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/335760/original/file-20200518-83397-ranl0i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The main hall of the new Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in the cultural city of Cape Town.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rodger Bosch/AFP/Getty Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>We found an agile business community</h2>
<p>There is strong evidence of a cluster of firms in Cape Town that are “fused” to combine digital technology with creative inputs to produce goods and services. </p>
<p>They exhibit high levels of innovation in business processes, goods and services, with 82% reporting involvement in some form of innovation over the last three years. Most common was process innovation (the way of running the business), which included things like digitisation (82%), big data usage (21%), and artificial intelligence (18%). Next most frequent were development of new products or services and/or the significant improvement of existing ones (72%), and marketing innovations (50%). Some form of formal research and development was engaged in by 45% of firms. </p>
<p>They’re an interdisciplinary cluster. An average of 51% of employees had a qualification in design; 42% in arts or humanities; 32% in commerce; and 20% had a STEM qualification. </p>
<p>More than a third of firms are start-ups, founded in the past five years. Most are small. The median number of employees was four, and 23% were owner operated with no employees. But they have the ability to draw on a wide range of external skills. A median of five freelancers were employed per firm in the previous financial year. The most commonly sourced skills were graphic, multimedia and web design and software development. Similar to what was found in Brighton, this business model allows them to be agile and productive in the volatile, project-based world of the creative economy.</p>
<p>Our results showed that, for at least some of these small firms, combining a range of skills crossing between the creative or cultural and digital sectors has resulted in faster growth rates than their bigger, older counterparts. </p>
<h2>But it’s a vulnerable time</h2>
<p>Yet it is this project-based way of working that makes many of these firms especially vulnerable during tough economic times. An <a href="https://www.southafricanculturalobservatory.org.za/download/460/98b297950041a42470269d56260243a1/The+Employment+of+Youth+and+Women+in+Cultural+Occupations+in+South+Africa">analysis</a> of the Statistics South Africa Labour Force Survey, using the UNESCO definitions, showed that 50% of people in cultural occupations are employed informally, compared to 32% in other occupations. Freelancers make up 35% of cultural workers, compared to 10% of non-cultural workers. </p>
<p>The cultural and creative sector has also always had a vital, but seldom acknowledged, role to play in innovation. Despite this, only a minority of firms in our study used formal intellectual property protection, or earned revenue from intellectual property.</p>
<p>The exclusion of the cultural and creative sector from South Africa’s Draft White <a href="https://www.gov.za/documents/white-paper-science-technology-and-innovation-draft-14-sep-2018-0000">Paper</a> on Science, Technology and Innovation (2018) may be a mistake. Similar papers by other countries, like the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/culture-white-paper">UK</a>, do acknowledge the link between culture, technology and innovation. </p>
<p>Similarly, cultural <a href="http://www.dac.gov.za/white-papers">policy</a> could profitably include support for various kinds of innovations taking place in the cultural and creative industries, such as by these firms. </p>
<p>Especially in times of change and upheaval, the next marvellous idea may just come from those working at the interface between the creative and the technological.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135970/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The research presented in this article is part of an international collaboration entitled "The roles of IP and diversity in the creative industries: Networking South Africa and the UK" which was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). It was also supported by the South African Cultural Observatory, which is funded by the South African Department of Sport, Arts and Culture.</span></em></p>
There aren’t a lot of studies on South Africa’s cultural economy. A new one finds a cluster of creative firms in Cape Town with high levels of innovation.
Jen Snowball, Professor of Economics and Researcher at the South African Cultural Observatory, Rhodes University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/101459
2018-08-21T04:24:54Z
2018-08-21T04:24:54Z
Beyond bulldust, benchmarks and numbers: what matters in Australian culture
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232610/original/file-20180820-30584-9wbv43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Tourists queue to take a photograph of the Mona Lisa at The Louvre.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.image-perception.com/">© NikkiJohnson, Image Perception</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This is an edited extract from the new book What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture. It is a longer read, at just under 2500 words.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p>The demand for certainty is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice … To endure uncertainty is difficult, but so are most of the other virtues. - Bertrand Russell</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When did culture become a number? When did the books, paintings, poems, plays, songs, films, games, art installations, clothes, and all the myriad objects that fill our lives and which we consider cultural, become a matter of statistical measurement? </p>
<p>When did the value of culture become solely a matter of the quantifiable benefits it provides, and the latter become subject to input–output analysis in what government budgets refer to as “the cultural function”? When did experience become data?</p>
<p>Perhaps a more important question is why did it happen, and why does it keep happening? Also, how does it happen? Culture is innate to being human. Thick books have been written describing culture’s myriad expressions and meanings. Culture has been around for as long as humanity itself. And the question of its value is not new.</p>
<p>But why are we answering it in the way that we are – by turning it into something to be scaled, measured and benchmarked? Who loses and who gains?</p>
<p>These are big questions of more than academic or Australian import. They are, indeed, much broader than arts and culture, as a recent crop of studies describing the unintended effects of the rise of “metric power” suggests.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232612/original/file-20180820-30602-4yz1q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232612/original/file-20180820-30602-4yz1q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232612/original/file-20180820-30602-4yz1q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232612/original/file-20180820-30602-4yz1q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232612/original/file-20180820-30602-4yz1q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232612/original/file-20180820-30602-4yz1q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232612/original/file-20180820-30602-4yz1q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232612/original/file-20180820-30602-4yz1q3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1119&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">How can data help assess the merit of a book?</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our core contention is that datafied modes of analysis are claiming authority over domains of human existence they have limited capacity for understanding. If you are researching an influenza epidemic, more data is better data.</p>
<p>If you are studying Australian film, more data is informative but not definitive because questions of artistic merit can only be judged. If you are assessing Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, massified data is close to useless.</p>
<p>At a time when even accountants are looking for a more compelling understanding of value, it is imperative that the arts – a domain where individual experience is central – resist the evangelical call of quantification and winnow its potential benefits from its real and deleterious risks.</p>
<h2>Alienating language</h2>
<p><a href="https://shop.monash.edu/what-matters-talking-value-in-australian-culture.html">What Matters?</a> hopes to influence public debate about the value of culture, to encourage people to see their cultural experiences in that debate, and not feel some strange urge to speak the “language of government”. This can be extremely alienating. </p>
<p>Consider a 2008 Australian Bureau of Statistics paper, Towards Comparable Statistics for Cultural Heritage Organisations. It proposes “a list of Key Measures … balancing the priority of items across four
cultural heritage domains with the feasibility of producing standard guidelines for collecting data”. The five Key Measures it puts forward – Attendance, Visitor Characteristics, Financial Resources, Human Resources and The Collection – subsume 18 Detailed Measures, with a list of Counting Rules for each.</p>
<p>This is a long way from browsing a library shelf, or walking through an exhibition. A long way from reading a book, contemplating the mystery of ancient artefacts, or librarians helping people navigate online genealogy portals. </p>
<p>Such language generates a detached world of arithmetical marks, and the sums and inferences considered legitimate to those marks. Where does the <em>experience</em> of going to a library or museum fit in? Not in ABS statistics, obviously, and no doubt the bureau would not think itself competent to pronounce on such “qualitative” matters. Who does then? And how do “qualitative” matters sit with quantitative
enumeration?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232614/original/file-20180820-30605-12r74uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232614/original/file-20180820-30605-12r74uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232614/original/file-20180820-30605-12r74uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232614/original/file-20180820-30605-12r74uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232614/original/file-20180820-30605-12r74uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232614/original/file-20180820-30605-12r74uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232614/original/file-20180820-30605-12r74uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232614/original/file-20180820-30605-12r74uc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Where does the experience of visiting a museum fit in? A visitor at the ‘Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters’ exhibition at the National Museum of Australia in February.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Lukas Cooch/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A petri dish</h2>
<p>The datafication of arts and culture is only a few decades old, so it is not an essential or inevitable element of their assessment. What happens when this is the major way we describe their place in our lives? In 2013, we began a university research project of moderate scope seeking to understand how quantitative and qualitative indicators align in government measures of culture. As we were in Adelaide, we made that city our focus. We called the project Laboratory Adelaide because we saw it as a case study with a rich cultural history and an active contemporary arts scene: a petri dish of just the right scale.</p>
<p>To get our research off the ground, we held a lunch for some of Adelaide’s cultural leaders. Over dessert, we asked them what they wanted us to achieve. The answer was instructive: a way to talk truthfully about what they do. They were, they said, unable to incorporate their real motivations and experiences into their reporting. Could we find a new, better way of communicating the actual value of arts and culture?</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232616/original/file-20180820-30581-1j14079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232616/original/file-20180820-30581-1j14079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232616/original/file-20180820-30581-1j14079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232616/original/file-20180820-30581-1j14079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232616/original/file-20180820-30581-1j14079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232616/original/file-20180820-30581-1j14079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232616/original/file-20180820-30581-1j14079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232616/original/file-20180820-30581-1j14079.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Visitors at ‘the obliteration room’, an artwork by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, at GOMA in 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dave Hunt/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>For the first year this seemed a simple enough goal. After all, these people were doing things the public had ready access to. Both state and local government in South Australia had a record of acknowledging the contribution of culture. They supported a range of cultural organisations and events – especially festivals, which are a big part of Adelaide’s civic life. </p>
<p>There was a sense that everyone already knew how important culture was to the state. But when it came to demonstrating its value, the words weren’t there. Our job was to fix that. As humanities scholars, we felt we were in a good position to do so. After all, didn’t we spend our lives talking about culture?</p>
<p>As the second year drew on, a note of uncertainty entered the project. By now we were starting to publish, and articulate in a series of articles, columns, notes, letters and emails, the dimensions of the problem as we saw it – the short time-scales governments deploy to evaluate outcomes, for example, which ignore culture’s longer-term contribution. Or the woolly use of language in policy documents, that makes the precise meaning of terms like “excellence” and “innovation” impossible to pin down.</p>
<p>These issues, and others, have serious assessment implications. But it goes beyond this, highlighting a basic misapprehension of culture by governments, not on a human level – politicians and policy makers, like the rest of us, read books, watch films and listen to music – but on the official level. </p>
<h2>Did the data deliver?</h2>
<p>Meanwhile, political events intervened and the Australian cultural sector exploded like a supernova. In 2015, the then federal Arts Minister, George Brandis, raided the budget of the federal arts agency, the Australia Council of the Arts, to set up his own, personally administered grant body. To say this came as a shock to arts practitioners would be a considerable understatement. The minister’s actions contradicted 30 years of cross-party consensus about how culture in Australia should be federally funded – via independent agencies – and rendered his support of the Council’s 2014–19 Strategic Plan a sham. The sector went into uproar. Where did the years of accumulated data on the demonstrable benefits of arts and culture figure in this fiery clash of ideologies?</p>
<p>The answer is that they didn’t. The numerical proofs of culture’s value (mainly economic value) that have been cascading through government consciousness since the 1970s were nowhere to be seen. For Laboratory Adelaide it confirmed a growing conviction: the problem of the value of culture is not a methodological one. It cannot be addressed by a new metric. Use of measurement indicators assumes a degree of background understanding that too often isn’t there at a policy level. The quantitative demonstrations of value we were trying to improve don’t make sense for culture. They flatten out its history, purpose and meaning.</p>
<p>This realisation put us at odds with expert views about the role of culture in post-industrial societies today. These views are typically upbeat about culture’s economic and urban “vibrancy”. Charles Landry’s “creative cities”, Richard Florida’s “creative class”, John Hartley and Terry Flew’s “creative industries” – the ideas of these authors, and others of similar ilk, are practical and positive (though Florida has recently retreated to a gloomier position).</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232617/original/file-20180820-30605-1rnowxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232617/original/file-20180820-30605-1rnowxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232617/original/file-20180820-30605-1rnowxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232617/original/file-20180820-30605-1rnowxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232617/original/file-20180820-30605-1rnowxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232617/original/file-20180820-30605-1rnowxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232617/original/file-20180820-30605-1rnowxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232617/original/file-20180820-30605-1rnowxq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The problem of the value of culture is not a methodological one.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeremy Ng/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The “creative industries” approach, for example, treats policy-making processes with a benign eye and admits no serious difficulties when it comes to proving the benefits culture provides. This chipper outlook is mirrored by swarms of local efforts around Australia today to develop bespoke systems of “cultural indicators”, each slightly different, yet each beholden to the same underlying assumption: that the value of culture can be numerically demonstrated.</p>
<p>By now we were participating in conferences, and consulting broadly among arts agencies and peak bodies. It sometimes seemed to us that everyone was looking for the perfect metric. We sat through presentation after presentation on quantitative approaches to culture’s value. At the end, hands would invariably go up and people say they were developing a “similar measurement model”.</p>
<p>Yet underneath the relentless optimism, we sensed a current of troubled preoccupation. It went by different names: “the intrinsic value of culture”, “the inherent value of culture”, “(the) cultural value (of culture)”. In this dry form it seems just another dimension of culture’s value, to be arraigned alongside the others: its economic value, its social value, its heritage value, etc. It is not. </p>
<p>It is code for all that is left <em>out</em> of measurement indices, which is to say our whole <em>sense</em> of culture, of what culture <em>means.</em> It seems obvious to say it, but in culture No Meaning = No Value. It may not be true of boots, bread and billiard balls. But it is absolutely true of symbolic goods like paintings, performances and books.</p>
<p>For thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years, culture has been supported through patronage. Whether it came from kings, popes or rich merchants, it came the same way: by someone seeing a particular cultural thing or activity and personally choosing to fund it. We have replaced this simple, if limited, support mechanism with distanced assessment processes of Heath-Robinson complexity.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232611/original/file-20180820-30593-pdcwy5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232611/original/file-20180820-30593-pdcwy5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232611/original/file-20180820-30593-pdcwy5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232611/original/file-20180820-30593-pdcwy5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232611/original/file-20180820-30593-pdcwy5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=644&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232611/original/file-20180820-30593-pdcwy5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232611/original/file-20180820-30593-pdcwy5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232611/original/file-20180820-30593-pdcwy5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=810&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">William Heath Robinson: Cork Mat Method of Crossing Streams.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>These processes – involving submission forms, acquittal procedures, classification systems, priority lists – lose the immediacy of cultural experience. They are generalised and abstract, with cultural experience framed as a matter of personal taste, and opinions in relation to it “subjective”. Numbers then present as “objective”, whether or not they reflect the core elements of culture. Hence the desire to quantify as much of its assessment as possible.</p>
<h2>Where to from here?</h2>
<p>But like mirages of water on a hot road, the pursuit of numbers begets only the pursuit of more numbers. You might count, for example, the number of people going to a music concert (a measure of frequency). But did they have a good time (the value proposition)? </p>
<p>You might question some of them, and rank their answers (on a preference scale of one to five). But were they being truthful (response bias)? You might look for changes in their market choices thereafter (acquisition of consumption skills). But what of less obvious effects – on wellbeing, level of education, social participation, civic cohesion? More indices, more numbers. The search for certainty produces ever-more uncertain measures, each a further step away from the actual experience of culture. As the numbers get more rubbery and elaborate, people’s trust in them diminishes.</p>
<p>And it’s expensive. The statistical habit, like any habit, is one that requires significant investment. Is there a cost-benefit analysis to be done on our obsession with cost-benefit analysis? At what point do we stop trying to measure something and try to understand it better?</p>
<p>And it doesn’t help. The ever more elaborate datafication of culture hasn’t secured more money for arts and culture in Australia, or distributed the extant money better. If it assists an organisation to obtain an increase in public support in one grant round, there is no guarantee it will continue in the next.</p>
<p>This was the problem of culture’s value as it appeared to us in our third year, when we saw the full extent of what we had stumbled into. Beneath the inexorable pursuit of numbers-driven data lay a Dante-esque vortex of hope, despair, panic and bewilderment masked by the neutral patois of quantitative analysis – the bullshit language that Adelaide’s cultural leaders resented so deeply.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232789/original/file-20180821-30587-e6l53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232789/original/file-20180821-30587-e6l53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/232789/original/file-20180821-30587-e6l53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232789/original/file-20180821-30587-e6l53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232789/original/file-20180821-30587-e6l53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232789/original/file-20180821-30587-e6l53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232789/original/file-20180821-30587-e6l53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/232789/original/file-20180821-30587-e6l53b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=531&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Joseph Anton Koch: fresco of Dante’s inferno.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So where to from here? It is a question with profound implications, and not one Laboratory Adelaide can answer conclusively. However, we have identified some of the difficulties in valuing culture that governments and the public must meet head-on. They are not the only problems, but they are important ones:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>The fact that assessment processes claim to measure value but leave out the human experience of culture, and turn it into a set of abstract, categorical traits.</p></li>
<li><p>The fact that assessment processes are preoccupied with short-term effects, ignore the longer-term trajectories of cultural projects, and have a sense of history that is flat and inorganic.</p></li>
<li><p>The fact that assessment processes use language and phrases empty of specific meaning for culture (i.e. bullshit), or valorise words that have no universally agreed definition (e.g. excellence or innovation).</p></li>
<li><p>The fact that people who experience culture are treated as consumers in a marketplace rather than members of a public, so public value (the underlying purpose of public investment) is inadequately addressed.</p></li>
<li><p>The fact that cultural organisations are regarded as scaled-up delivery mechanisms for policy outcomes, rather than as a serious and nuanced ecology worthy of study and support.</p></li>
<li><p>The fact that too often the value of culture is reduced to a dollar value, directly or indirectly.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Objectors might say that culture <em>is</em> considered in assessment processes, by way of peer review and ministerial oversight. They are right to some extent – but it is a declining extent. </p>
<p>Peer assessors and politicians retain an important role in how culture is evaluated in Australia today, both before and after it attracts government funding. But compared to the huge social outlay in gathering statistics and developing metrics, our almost religious faith in quantitative measurement, the place of judgement in valuing culture is a reluctant admission, an ageing relative inclined to embarrassing assertions, to be kept on a tight statistical leash. The human dimension of the problem of value is presumed to take care of itself. Only when it goes wrong, as it did under Senator Brandis, does it become a matter of strong attention. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture by Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian and Tully Barnett <a href="https://shop.monash.edu/what-matters-talking-value-in-australian-culture.html">is published by Monash University Publishing</a> and launched today.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/101459/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Meyrick is a Chief Investigator for the ARC project Laboratory Adelaide: the Value of Culture. He is a co-author of What Matters?</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Phiddian receives funding from the ARC for Laboratory Adelaide: the Value of Culture. He is a co-author of What Matters?. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tully Barnett receives funding from the ARC for Laboratory Adelaide: the Value of Culture. She is a co-author of What Matters?</span></em></p>
At a time when even accountants are looking for a more compelling understanding of value, it is imperative that the arts – where individual experience is central – resist the evangelical call of quantification.
Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University
Robert Phiddian, Professor of English, Flinders University
Tully Barnett, Research Fellow, School of Humanities, Flinders University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/98695
2018-06-28T03:04:57Z
2018-06-28T03:04:57Z
Sydney artists are being priced out of the city – here’s how to bring them back
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/225031/original/file-20180627-112641-pp8x3i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Artists and creatives often work in industrial spaces, which are declining in Sydney. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Sydney artists and cultural practitioners face growing barriers to working in or close to the city, according to <a href="http://doi.org/10.4225/35/5b05edd7b57b6">our new research</a>. This is because of a shortage of creative spaces, due to the disappearance of industrial buildings, and rising rents and property prices. </p>
<p>These developments affect not only individual artists, but also broader <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-4020-9949-6_4">creative clusters</a> that need to be sustained by local networks and communities of artists and residents.</p>
<p>The cost of living, according to Samuel Hodge from creative space Clothing Store, has led to the exodus of a whole stratum of city dweller:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Like the city itself, everyone I know is being forced out. So that’s one thing: people can’t afford to live, especially the artists, and anyone else who doesn’t earn enough money. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>We interviewed artists and cultural practitioners from 18 venues and spaces across the City of Sydney. Most were from Redfern Village (including a creative company and a commercial gallery), and Green Square Village (including a non-profit gallery and a music studio). We also looked at a TV production company in Millers Point, as well as a pottery studio in Botany. </p>
<p>Artists and other creatives often use former industrial buildings and small warehouses. These are usually cheap, close to the city, and operate as creative hubs. However, many are being turned into expensive, often high-rise, residential apartments. The total <a href="http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/learn/research-and-statistics/surveying-our-community/floor-space-and-employment-survey/2012-fes-overview-and-summary-reports">area of industrial space</a> decreased by 65% in Redfern between 2007 and 2012, and by 39% in Green Square. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/with-support-for-arts-funding-declining-australia-must-get-better-at-valuing-culture-95057">With support for arts funding declining, Australia must get better at valuing culture</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Artists are also often compelled to accept short and restrictive leases on places to work and live. Some told us that they were given a lease lasting just a few months because the properties were subject to development or demolition clauses. The result is a great deal of insecurity, making it difficult to plan their work schedules. </p>
<p>Matt Branagan from Work-Shop told us: “We were in George Street … We got kicked out of there because that was going to get turned into a gym – so we were only on a short-term lease”. </p>
<p>We also found that where spaces were available for creative work, they were more likely to be in digitally-oriented and commercial disciplines like architecture and design. The messier, more collectivist forms of experimental and industrial art are finding the inner city far less welcoming than in more bohemian times.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.corelogic.com.au/news/national-dwelling-values-fall-03-december-setting-scene-softer-housing-conditions-2018#.WxeN6UiFOUk">Dwelling values</a> have increased 70% over the past five years in Sydney. This is a major concern for artists, who usually earn only a modest income and cannot afford high rents. Australia-wide, the average income of professional artists in 2015 was <a href="http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/workspace/uploads/files/making-art-work-throsby-report-5a05106d0bb69.pdf">$48,400</a> (including non-artistic sources of income). Taking the significant costs of making art into account, the economics of creativity are clearly unsustainable.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-gender-pay-gap-is-wider-in-the-arts-than-in-other-industries-87080">The gender pay gap is wider in the arts than in other industries</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Many artists are leaving inner city neighbourhoods as a result. As Hugh Ramage, operator of Duckrabbit said, “You know people, they can’t afford to buy or even rent anymore, so lots have moved to Blue Mountains or beyond”.</p>
<p>Non-commercial or not-for-profit cultural operations, especially those supporting emerging artists or non-mainstream cultural forms, are closing. For example, well-known creative spaces in the city, such as <a href="http://lanfranchis.com/about.html">Lanfranchi’s</a> and <a href="http://scanlines.net/group/serial-space">Serial Space</a>, ceased operating because the buildings they occupied were sold. </p>
<p>As Pia van Gelder, former operator of both venues said, “If you can’t sell the work, if you’re not making it for a commercial show … you can’t sustain yourself”. </p>
<p>There is a common assumption that Sydney artists can easily relocate to other parts of the metropolitan region, especially to <a href="https://westernsydney.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/1239999/recalibrating-culture-report.pdf">Western Sydney</a>. This is something of a misconception. There is already a shortage of creative spaces outside the centre, demand is rising from local artists, and inner city artists’ movement to the suburbs is only making the problem worse.</p>
<p>We think it’s time for governments and other interested parties to step in. We propose a “<a href="https://www-sciencedirect-com.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/science/article/pii/S1618866711000732">place keeping</a>” approach to planning cultural venues and infrastructure that embeds key principles of inclusion and care. Partnerships across different sectors in the metropolitan Sydney region would help fill the policy gaps.</p>
<p>The City of Sydney has already developed an <a href="http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0011/213986/11418-Finalisation-of-Cultural-Policy-Document-July-2016.pdf">action plan</a> for its goals in the cultural sector. These include investigating cooperative housing and working with businesses to create more artist workspace. </p>
<p>The NSW government could introduce, like Victoria, <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/planning-controls-to-boost-southbank-s-cultural-credentials-20180306-p4z32q.html">zoning controls</a> to stop the loss of creative space. Or it could introduce a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/guidance/community-infrastructure-levy">Community Infrastructure Levy</a>, as the UK has done, where local authorities provide infrastructure to support development. </p>
<p>We also encourage the formation of new non-government bodies like the UK’s <a href="http://www.spacestudios.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/SPACE-Key-Facts2.pdf">SPACE</a>, which operates artist studios in London. Likewise, there’s a role here for major cultural institutions, universities, and even property developers to provide more creative space for artists. These multi-layered initiatives are essential for dynamic creative clusters to thrive, not just struggle to survive. </p>
<p>If we don’t help our artists find good working environments, the culture of our cities will fall victim to the voracious demand for privately profitable real estate.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98695/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexandra Wong is part of a research team at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University that has produced two independent research reports commissioned by the City of Sydney.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Rowe is part of a research team at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University that has produced two independent research reports commissioned by the City of Sydney. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Teresa Swist is part of a research team at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University that has produced two independent research reports commissioned by the City of Sydney.</span></em></p>
The loss of creative spaces to development is pricing Sydney artists out of the city. But they could be encouraged back with new cultural policies.
Alexandra Wong, Engaged Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
David Rowe, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Teresa Swist, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/97782
2018-06-11T20:36:40Z
2018-06-11T20:36:40Z
To fix gender inequity in arts leadership we need more women in politics and chairing boards
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221894/original/file-20180606-119870-15j3miu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dancers rehearse at a 2016 media call for The Australian Ballet's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Of our 28 major performing arts organisations, only three have female artistic leaders.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dean Lewins/AAP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Women are the major consumers as well as the largest percentage of employees in the arts. Yet their presence as artistic leaders remains low or, in some sectors, non-existent.</p>
<p>Of the 28 organisations presently funded under the Australia Council framework of the major performing arts, only three, Black Swan Theatre Company, Orchestra Victoria and the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, have female artistic leaders. </p>
<p>These 28 organisations include ballet, dance, theatre, opera, orchestras and a circus. In practice this means that almost 90% of the artistic leaders of our major performing organisations are male. These organisations receive the majority (<a href="http://www.australiacouncil.gov.au/about/annual-report-2016-17/">at least 62%</a>) of arts funding allocated by the Australia Council.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://theconversation.com/australias-major-dance-companies-need-to-step-up-on-gender-equality-97464">recent Australian study</a> found the role of women as artistic leaders and choreographers of dance and ballet companies is minimal – despite the fact that they dominate the industry. The findings are consistent with international studies of the role of women in dance and ballet. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australias-major-dance-companies-need-to-step-up-on-gender-equality-97464">Australia's major dance companies need to step up on gender equality</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Another <a href="http://nyti.ms/2egaaaM4">recent international study</a> considered the leadership of the top 12 art museums in the world. At the time of the study, all were led by men. </p>
<p>If we then look at the leadership of the six major state art galleries in Australia as well as our national gallery, a similar picture emerges. Only one state art gallery (the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery) has a female leader, although the Art Gallery of South Australia has a woman in the “co-acting” directorial role while a new leader is being sought.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221888/original/file-20180605-119885-lcswuw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221888/original/file-20180605-119885-lcswuw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/221888/original/file-20180605-119885-lcswuw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221888/original/file-20180605-119885-lcswuw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221888/original/file-20180605-119885-lcswuw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221888/original/file-20180605-119885-lcswuw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221888/original/file-20180605-119885-lcswuw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/221888/original/file-20180605-119885-lcswuw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1081&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The late Betty Churcher: a rare example of a woman running a major cultural institution.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Tsiavis/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Historically, the picture is not much better. A woman has occasionally been the leader of a major Australian cultural institution (for instance, Betty Churcher at the National Gallery from 1990-1997, or Paula Latos-Valier at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from 1990-1997), but examples of women as leaders are the exception, not the rule.</p>
<p>These figures might not be so shocking in traditionally male-dominated fields such as mining or manufacturing. But the arts sector is one where women represent the majority of consumers and participants. Evidence that Australian women in senior roles in the arts earn <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/art-and-design/what-arts-bosses-in-australia-earn-and-how-women-get-less-20160603-gpahfn.html">38% less</a> than male colleagues who occupy similar positions further compounds this inequality.</p>
<p>There are big issues that need to be tackled by agencies involved in leading, supporting, training and funding the arts in this country. It has been noted already in gender research that to change an existing homogeneous model of leadership, attention needs to be paid to ensuring <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37882461-arts-leadership-in-contemporary-contexts">different values and cultures</a> are represented in any selection process. Selection panels are <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/joe.21413">more likely to choose a candidate who reflects the values that they believe in or exemplify</a>, even if a male candidate is less qualified or less experienced than the female equivalent.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-gender-pay-gap-is-wider-in-the-arts-than-in-other-industries-87080">The gender pay gap is wider in the arts than in other industries</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In this country, as in many others, the leadership of art institutions is determined by a board of management or, in the case of government agencies, by the minister concerned. If the chair of the board or the politician is male, then they may be less likely to associate leadership with a woman.</p>
<p>At present across the country, seven ministers are responsible for arts, culture or creative industries in their portfolio. Five of the current ministers are male. </p>
<p>If we look at who chairs the 28 major performing arts organisations, 20 are male. If we look at the chairs of the six state art galleries and the national gallery, five are male. Thus, the decision-makers for senior arts appointments are predominantly male.</p>
<p>If the present demographic of arts leadership is to change, then gender equity at every level needs to be addressed. In a sector where women represent the majority audience as well as the majority of its participants, the low level of female artistic leadership is significantly out of tune with contemporary expectations.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Jo Caust’s book <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37882461-arts-leadership-in-contemporary-contexts">Arts Leadership in Contemporary Contexts</a> has just been released.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/97782/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jo Caust has received funding from the Australia Council. She is a member of the Arts Industry Council in South Australia and the National Association of Visual Artists (NAVA). </span></em></p>
Women make up the majority of arts consumers and employees, but men dominate at every level of arts leadership.
Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/85995
2017-11-07T19:25:40Z
2017-11-07T19:25:40Z
‘Australia has no culture’: changing the mindset of the cringe
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192972/original/file-20171102-26456-zzvgvh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A scene from Bangarra Dance Theatre's Lore: the oldest continuing culture in the world resonates with overseas audiences.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jeff Tan/Newzulu</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“Australia has no culture, so why would anyone overseas be interested in us?” says a young MA student at a University of Melbourne forum as part of a discussion about Australian “culture” being promoted seriously and strategically overseas.</p>
<p>Her peers joined in. “Yes, it’s a cultural cringe”. “Yes, Australia is so young, compared with other countries”. “Yes, Australia has no clear sense of identity”. “Yes, Australia’s film industry is just in its fledgling stage”. All feeling free, in 2017, to utter such statements. The only one to offer any counterpoint said this was to be expected as there is no central Arts policy.</p>
<p>They were saying no-one would or should be interested in us. They added the Canadians were in a similar position. One speaker from the Confucius Institute said it was an issue of money, but he had also just said that the Australian Government paid funds for his Chinese organisation.</p>
<p>I know these students’ sentiments are wrong. I’ve spent my life working with Australian culture overseas, particularly in Asia. I’ve seen how the oldest continuing culture in the world resonates with overseas audiences; I’ve seen how poets and painters have evoked Australian love of space and land and made it real for people elsewhere; and I’ve always felt assured that my fellow Australians would always treat people of all social classes in other lands with grace and fairness.</p>
<p>The (pejorative) comment about being a “young” country (with no time to build “culture”) always gets to me. It’s the old mantra that Europeans and Asian cultures, like China, use: an argument that suits cultures which have remained in one place for a long time. It of course denies (forgets about?) Australian Indigenous culture - which is an issue in itself.</p>
<p>Even accepting this argument as cogent, it also simplifies all cultures with significant migrant populations (like the USA or Singapore or Malaysia for that matter) down to the time those people have spent in the new geographic site, as if none of their histories come with them. They do come with what they have, and often use that in their new environment to make something highly prized: think of Bangarra Dance’s melding of elements of Western ballet with Indigenous forms or Paul Grabowsky’s musical Indonesian inclusions in projects like The Theft of Sita.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192746/original/file-20171031-32619-vhnmb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192746/original/file-20171031-32619-vhnmb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/192746/original/file-20171031-32619-vhnmb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192746/original/file-20171031-32619-vhnmb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192746/original/file-20171031-32619-vhnmb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192746/original/file-20171031-32619-vhnmb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192746/original/file-20171031-32619-vhnmb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/192746/original/file-20171031-32619-vhnmb8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Paul Grabowsky in 2009.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dean Lewins/AAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, why is this group of bright students so quick to bring up these old furphies (a good Australian word of course) about our “lack of culture”? Is it some easy mantra of a long-gone age that never gets challenged and addressed?</p>
<p>Where is the Australia Council in this? After nearly 50 years why has its work of “promoting” Australian culture so spectacularly failed to resonate with these young people? Has the Council been ineffective in telling Australians of its work or has its work been less effective than it could have been? </p>
<p>The Council was founded at the time of Gough Whitlam’s great enthusiasm for and confidence in Australian culture. It had, and has a role in international engagement, but we still have no specialist agency for international cultural engagement that might be strategically focused in this area – unlike Germany and Japan, which have the Goethe Institute (founded in 1951) and the Japan Foundation (founded in 1972).</p>
<p>Is the subtext to little strategic focus on our role internationally (and awareness of the interest of our culture overseas) perhaps that the powerful in Canberra also, like these students, think we have nothing to offer? As a side comment, I never think it is a matter of money: it is belief and focus and strategy that are wanting.</p>
<p>Nearly 30 years ago, when I was envisaging the Asialink Arts program (always supported by Asialink director Jenny McGregor), I pushed for an “export” role, rather than what seemed to me to be an easier “import” focus, based on the idea that we Australians were poor at promoting ourselves. I would always be asking artists we sent to Asia to think about further international projects they could be creating; always asking curators to be looking out for further opportunities. But Asialink Arts has always been a small agency, not in the league of the German or Japanese nationally-supported institutions. </p>
<p>What of our universities? Despite the University of Melbourne having an Australian Centre, decades of teaching Australian literature, visual art, theatre, history, politics and film, and its own practical arts faculty, it still allows a group of students like this to be so blasé. Do these students think so little of the books and art works and films and activities they learn about that they must be of no value or interest to anyone else?</p>
<p>Is there a lack of consciousness at best, or, worse, to use a phrase of these students, still a cringe within the institution? It certainly has been so in the past. <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/3914959">Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Phillip Goad</a> have recorded the relatively passive reception of modernism in Australia rather than any celebration of its transformation here. Co-head of the Australian Centre, Professor Denise Varney’s ARC-supported research discusses the unacknowledged modernist period of the post-war period in Australian theatre studies.</p>
<p>Still today, in mainstream arts subjects, Australian and indeed Asian art can be sidelined for the big names of a single-line, Euro-American history. We can still fail to acknowledge some of our own bright thinkers: Margo Neale, one of our leading experts about Indigenous culture, curator of the current Seven Sisters exhibition in Canberra, has been in Melbourne recently, but was she asked to speak about her work in the tertiary sector? You know the answer. If such is our mindset, how will these students see their own culture as equal to these others, and how will they think of themselves as capable of leading in their field?</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/kfdHqUmFmuc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>We can change our thinking. An example of such “success” is the widespread consciousness of the need to include equal numbers of women as men in our research and teaching practices. We could, for instance, undertake an audit of the level of inclusion of Australian cultural material in our tertiary sector. We could revisit our international strategies and assess how successful they have been.</p>
<p>This isn’t a discussion about what Australian culture is but about the things and ideas we value and how they might be of value to others.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/85995/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison Carroll does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Why do students still describe Australia as a ‘young’ country lacking culture? Are our universities doing enough to to teach Australian films, artwork and books?
Alison Carroll, Founding Director (1990-2010), AsiaLink Arts, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/79650
2017-07-25T20:08:37Z
2017-07-25T20:08:37Z
Not jobs and growth but post-capitalism – and creative industries show the way
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/175132/original/file-20170622-3053-1m2990k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The creative economy is failing to live up to the fast-growing, young entrepreneurial image it promotes. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/14959708488/">Ars Electronica/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/">CC BY-NC-ND</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The term “creative industries” was <a href="https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/42872_Flew.pdf">first applied</a> to the cultural sector by UK New Labour in 1998, and rapidly gained global traction.</p>
<p>It was a kind of Faustian bargain for the cultural sector, which gave up its traditional suspicion of commercial imperatives in return for a seat at the grown-ups’ table where the governmental big bucks were allocated. </p>
<p>Perhaps it was not so Faustian after all. It seemed the “new” economy was all about ideas and experiences, creativity and left-of-field innovation. That’s less a sell-out and more a win-win. As cities shed their dirty industries, the creative sector would provide new, more fulfilling employment, rewriting the rules of the old economy as it did so.</p>
<p>The problems with this narrative are <a href="https://currencyhouse.org.au/node/174">well aired</a>. Software (which had been included precisely to bump up the numbers) and advertising and marketing accounted for most of the <a href="https://www.acola.org.au/PDF/SAF01/6.%20Culture%20creativity%20cultural%20economy.pdf">employment growth</a>. </p>
<p>Outside these sectors (and often within) <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504630.2015.1128800?src=recsys&journalCode=csid20">studies</a> showed persistent low wages, high debt, self-exploitation, precarious employment (the “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/26/will-we-get-by-gig-economy">gig economy</a>”), multiple job-holding (“don’t give up your night job”) and a nepotism that comes with excessive reliance on networking. </p>
<p>The divergence between the shiny narrative and the mundane reality is now blindingly obvious (at least outside the consultancy reports). Few in the cultural sector do more than lip-sync to its hymns. </p>
<p>But is this simply a story of deflation, of promises reneged? Might there be another narrative?</p>
<h2>A new narrative emerges</h2>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178549/original/file-20170718-21774-10k3q7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178549/original/file-20170718-21774-10k3q7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178549/original/file-20170718-21774-10k3q7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178549/original/file-20170718-21774-10k3q7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178549/original/file-20170718-21774-10k3q7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178549/original/file-20170718-21774-10k3q7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178549/original/file-20170718-21774-10k3q7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178549/original/file-20170718-21774-10k3q7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">PostCapitalism: A Guide to our Future, by Paul Mason (Allen Lane, 2015)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostCapitalism:_A_Guide_to_our_Future">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In recent years the notion of “post-capitalism” has become more widespread. <a href="http://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/a-revolution-in-the-making/">Guy Rundle</a> has been talking about this in Australia, and <a href="https://www.bookdepository.com/Postcapitalism-Paul-Mason/9780141975290?redirected=true&utm_medium=Google&utm_campaign=Base1&utm_source=AU&utm_content=Postcapitalism&selectCurrency=AUD&w=AF45AU99ZZC1SZA80C5LAF4S&pdg=kwd-309568335522:cmp-680104063:adg-37898644947:crv-151944074570:pid-9780141975290:dev-c&gclid=CO3Vos2ky9QCFYuUvQodBOUJAg">Paul Mason</a> in the UK. </p>
<p>In part it continues the optimism about the transformative potential of new technologies that formed around the internet in the 1990s, and which gave the early “creative industries” agenda such a powerful charge. </p>
<p>But since 2008 many have felt that capitalism is no longer capable of delivering on that potential. It has been locking it up in monopoly platforms and extracting “rent” from what is essentially free.</p>
<p>Indeed, capitalism is intent on maximising short-term profit from these technologies while allowing the ecological catastrophe of climate change to let rip. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178550/original/file-20170718-21790-vg3gfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178550/original/file-20170718-21790-vg3gfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178550/original/file-20170718-21790-vg3gfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178550/original/file-20170718-21790-vg3gfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178550/original/file-20170718-21790-vg3gfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=933&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178550/original/file-20170718-21790-vg3gfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178550/original/file-20170718-21790-vg3gfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178550/original/file-20170718-21790-vg3gfc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1173&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Revolution In The Making: 3D Printing, Robots and the Future, by Guy Rundle (Affirm Press, 2014)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://affirmpress.com.au/publishing/a-revolution-in-the-making/">Affirm Press</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rundle and Mason evoke the enormous potential of technological innovation, not just in communications but in medicine, materials science, agriculture, transport and the rest, but this potential is stuck in the old relations of capitalism. </p>
<p>Post-capitalism evokes not just the technology but the new kinds of social relations required for it to live up to its full human potential. They argue that these new technologies – distributed, networked, ideas-rich, decreasingly expensive – are giving rise to enclaves within contemporary society that provide a glimpse into a more human future. </p>
<p>Peer-to-peer networks, sharing and gift economies (for real, not Uber), open-source movements, non-monetary labour exchanges – all of these grow out of the essentially public and democratic nature of knowledge-based production and distribution. Capitalism squats on these new democratic forces, wringing profit from a knowledge it does not produce but seeks to own. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178551/original/file-20170718-21752-1e7hfus.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178551/original/file-20170718-21752-1e7hfus.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178551/original/file-20170718-21752-1e7hfus.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178551/original/file-20170718-21752-1e7hfus.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178551/original/file-20170718-21752-1e7hfus.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178551/original/file-20170718-21752-1e7hfus.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178551/original/file-20170718-21752-1e7hfus.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178551/original/file-20170718-21752-1e7hfus.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1154&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Postcapitalist Politics, by J.K. Gibson-Graham (University of Minnesota Press, 2006)</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a-postcapitalist-politics">University of Minnesota Press</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Rundle is the more naive politically, while Mason, re-inventing a Marxist political economy long thought dead and buried, recognises that systems are not given up without a fight. </p>
<p>What stands out, however, is a sense that things are already changing. We need not wait for the big collapse, but can work in the here and now to effect real social transformation. </p>
<p>This connects with <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/a-postcapitalist-politics">the work</a> of <a href="http://www.communityeconomies.org/people/jk-gibson-graham">J.K. Gibson-Graham</a> and others, who see older forms of social activism as working towards a different kind of post-capitalist future right here, right now.</p>
<h2>Creating a more human future</h2>
<p>There are, and will be, many objections to the coherence of the term post-capitalism and the agenda it announces. But perhaps it can help us rethink the creative industries. </p>
<p>Rather than the narrative of the fast-growing, entrepreneurial, start-up economy moving us into the next stage of knowledge capitalism, post-capitalism gives us a different story. </p>
<p>The low-waged, under-employed, precarious creative sector embarrasses the policymakers by not being really serious about growth (“lifestyle”) and failing to live up to the entrepreneurial image promoted at all those glitzy creative industry events. But these low-growth, socially embedded and ethically driven creatives may represent a future far more convincingly than those MBAs in hip clothing setting out to be the next “unicorn”.</p>
<p>The job of the creative sector is not to produce “jobs and growth” but cultural value. Those long hours on low wages and short-term contracts are accepted (mostly) as the price to create something of cultural value, to alter the world a little bit, to make us see it in a different way, to critique and to celebrate ourselves, and to bind us together. </p>
<p>This ecosystem of micro-businesses, freelancers and serial project workers represents the vast majority of <a href="https://ccskills.org.uk/supporters/blog/freelancing-and-the-future-of-creative-jobs">cultural sector employment</a>. They have been systemically sidelined from the grand creative industries narrative, but are, in fact, its main business.</p>
<p>Arguments for culture dressed up as economics no longer convince anyone. <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-brandis-plans-to-insulate-the-arts-sector-from-the-artists-42305">George Brandis</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/reagan-called-america-a-city-on-a-hill-because-taxpayers-funded-the-humanities-74721">Donald Trump</a> and 100 right-wing authoritarian cultural budget cuts across the globe testify to this. </p>
<p>It is time to give up on the fiction of the creative industries delivering post-industrial capitalism. Instead, we should acknowledge the new ways of making and sharing, the commitments to community and place, the social labour involved in creative work as a powerful resource for wider transformation of our common culture.</p>
<p>And, at the moment, the future of that common culture points us toward some kind of post-capitalism – rather than simply more of the same.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/79650/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Justin O'Connor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The notion of the creative sector driving fulfilling work as cities shed old industries has worn thin. But those creatives might be delivering value of a different kind, offering a more human future.
Justin O'Connor, Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy, Monash University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/80954
2017-07-23T20:09:09Z
2017-07-23T20:09:09Z
How can our cities match Europe’s for finding value in their creative vibe?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178940/original/file-20170720-23992-1l9vijb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Edinburgh is one of the European cities that make the most of their creative and cultural assets.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/topaz-mcnumpty/9425861004/in/photolist-fmW15U-fti4HW-2A8KwB-2A8BPF-fv8XzL-71UmQR-ftpCEa-oFPdEt-cNL8s3-fnyJkZ-fvxiQ7-acU4NJ-fQ4mEw-VeZbgB-nfGB2-fqLD6s-fqobox-fvLeCS-fmU94i-oU4ytV-5bXXpQ-5e2qPA-fzWWhp-fqmwUB-fu6Sns-fvyeUw-cMDtMW-xfPNM-ay7HPA-5f66XN-fncGas-9fBRmh-fmZvwT-2yehya-fmZxAD-fu5Jh1-5f1J9p-5fF58g-2ZEXt8-nfGB4-cNFgXL-cNA8rs-Vo1u9A-WqFPZt-fqLEsF-d5fyCs-5f1JnP-ay4ZTx-fmZrEM-fmZwCH">Hamish Irvine/flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/">CC BY-NC</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>European cultural and creative cities have stronger economic output and more jobs than their Australian counterparts. So why is our urban creative vibrancy associated with city size, not economic performance?</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Culture nurtures our souls and binds our communities together, while creativity helps reveal new answers to our challenges and anxieties. Industries that build on creativity and culture are also a source of great economic value and social well-being.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So opens the latest European Union report, <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/publication/eur-scientific-and-technical-research-reports/cultural-and-creative-cities-monitor-2017-edition">The Cultural and Creative Cities Monitor 2017 Edition</a>. The report and supporting data represent an effort to measure something we all know is important – the creative vibe of cities. </p>
<p>Creativity is making its way more and more into policy discussions. Note the European <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/culture/policies/strategic-framework/strategy-international-cultural-relations_en">policy</a> announced last year, Towards an EU Strategy for International Cultural Resolutions, and the European Parliament’s <a href="http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&reference=P8-TA-2016-0486&language=EN">resolution</a> to deliver “coherent EU policy for cultural and creative industries”. </p>
<p>Australia <a href="https://eprints.qut.edu.au/89368/">lacks a current national cultural and creative industries policy</a>. There are clear parallels, though, with the national <a href="https://industry.gov.au/innovation/GlobalInnovationStrategy/index.html">Global Innovation Strategy</a>. Other innovation and creative programs are happening at state level, such as <a href="https://www.business.qld.gov.au/running-business/growing-business/becoming-innovative/innovation-grants-support/innovate-queensland">Innovate Queensland</a>.</p>
<p>The European work shows that having cultural and creative cities can deliver significant economic benefits. The positive associations between cultural and creative cities and annual GDP per capita and jobs per capita are clear and strong.</p>
<p>Overall, they also found city size isn’t everything: smaller cities perform just as well as big cities. </p>
<h2>How do the biggest 36 Australian cities compare?</h2>
<p>We don’t have the data to construct the same metrics as the EU. However, based on the <a href="http://www.regionalaustralia.org.au/Great_small_cities_data_tool">publicly available data</a> from the Regional Australia Institute, we use the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/06/bohemian-index/57658/">Bohemian Index</a> as a proxy indicator for creative economy. </p>
<p>This index, <a href="http://www.creativeclass.com/rfcgdb/articles/6%20Bohemia_and_Economic_Geography.pdf">devised</a> by <a href="https://www.creativeclass.com/rfcgdb/articles/The%20Australian.pdf">Richard Florida</a>, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/06/bohemian-index/57658/">measures</a> “the concentration of working artists, musicians, writers, designers, and entertainers across metropolitan areas”.</p>
<p>Australian findings show no association between creatives and city output, measured as gross value added (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_value_added">GVA</a>) per capita. There is only a slight positive relationship between jobs and creativity, as shown below. In contrast, the European <a href="http://www.politico.eu/blogs/playbook-plus/2017/07/eu-identifies-the-ultimate-european-city/screen-shot-2017-07-06-at-13-39-30/">Creative and Cultural Cities Index</a> is highly and positively correlated to both GDP and jobs per capita.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178376/original/file-20170717-14267-w1hvkb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178376/original/file-20170717-14267-w1hvkb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178376/original/file-20170717-14267-w1hvkb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178376/original/file-20170717-14267-w1hvkb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178376/original/file-20170717-14267-w1hvkb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178376/original/file-20170717-14267-w1hvkb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178376/original/file-20170717-14267-w1hvkb.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 1. Bohemian Index of Australia’s 36 largest cities and output (GVA) per capita and jobs per capita.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As we can see, there is a positive relationship between Australian city size and creative employment. This is the opposite of what the Europeans found. </p>
<p>So what do Australia cities share with European cities in the way of creative economy and economic performance? Basically, there is a positive and strong correlation between a city’s Bohemian Index and new business start-up rate, trademark rate (see Figure 2) and rate of business owners.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178377/original/file-20170717-30889-1v3042m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/178377/original/file-20170717-30889-1v3042m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178377/original/file-20170717-30889-1v3042m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178377/original/file-20170717-30889-1v3042m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=361&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178377/original/file-20170717-30889-1v3042m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178377/original/file-20170717-30889-1v3042m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/178377/original/file-20170717-30889-1v3042m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Figure 2. Bohemian Index of Australia’s 36 largest cities and trademark applications.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Creativity also has significant positive associations with higher rates of bachelor degree qualifications or higher, housing affordability and commute time. </p>
<p>Disturbingly for Australia, creativity is positively associated with income inequality (measured as 80:20 ratio) as well. Does this mean that our cities with more creative jobs also have more rich patrons and poor arts students?</p>
<p>Importantly, not all cities perform the same. Our 31 regional cities show a significant and negative relationship between unemployment rates and Bohemian Index. Maybe the metro “Big 5” can learn from our regional city strengths in delivering stronger creativity and lower unemployment. </p>
<h2>What can Australia learn from Europe?</h2>
<p>Creative and cultural cities are obviously valued as important for global society, but European research clearly shows that these cities are also capable of delivering jobs and strong economic output. </p>
<p>Do we want all Australian cities to resemble Gladstone, with its high jobs and output, or Hobart, with its strong creative occupations? The Europeans have shown us we can have both in the one city – and not just in the big cities.</p>
<p>Importantly, if Australia follows a policy-transfer approach to creative and cultural cities, we should be cautious. These policies are also promoting economic performance in Europe, but what will they do here when we don’t see the same relationships?</p>
<p>While the latest EU work shows you can measure the cultural and creative aspects of a city, it does stipulate that this is not a be-all-and-end-all metric. It’s more the start of the discussion: how can we better measure our cities’ creativity and cultural values?</p>
<p>Europe uses three metrics (combining quantitative and qualitative data) to gauge a city’s cultural vibrancy, creative economy and enabling culture environment. The work is long and involved. Cities are required to provide information on 29 indicators – number of seats in a theatre, for instance. </p>
<p>We have just used one metric here, perhaps highlighting that poor data hinders good decision-making. A better measure of creative and cultural Australian cities could have provided different associations. </p>
<p>Australia is the “lucky country”, so why can’t we have it all – jobs and creativity in all our cities?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/80954/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leonie Pearson works for the Regional Australia Institute (RAI). The RAI is a not-for-profit think tank and receives funding from government and non-government organisations. </span></em></p>
A comparison of 36 Australian cities finds that, unlike Europe, the data on their creativity and culture are not closely linked to their capacity to generate economic value and social well-being.
Leonie Pearson, Adjunct Associate, University of Canberra
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/78594
2017-05-31T20:13:51Z
2017-05-31T20:13:51Z
The best way to support writers is to feed them new ideas
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/171584/original/file-20170531-25664-i4krd4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Writing has never been easy, but sending writers out to find new ideas and people might be one way to help. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Books and writing seem to be <a href="https://theconversation.com/has-the-print-book-trumped-digital-beware-of-glib-conclusions-77174">as popular as ever</a>, but writers are having a hard time making a living from their work. While <a href="https://theconversation.com/scrounging-for-money-how-the-worlds-great-writers-made-a-living-77779">writers may have always struggled</a>, a number of recent ideas have been put forward suggesting ways to help them out. </p>
<p>Writing in <a href="http://103.37.9.18/%7Emeanjinc/?p=4451">Meanjin</a>, Frank Moorhouse proposed, among other measures, renewable ten-year “national contracts” for mid-to-late career writers. And in <a href="http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/balancing-the-books/">the Sydney Review of Books</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/ben-eltham-172467">Ben Eltham</a> describes an initiative that he is working on that would aim to provide literary fellowships for fixed periods of three to four years. </p>
<p>Both writers make the valid point that, as fewer successful writers are able to sustain themselves via book sales and royalties, the role of public support becomes more important. They both argue for the need to radically expand the range of fellowships available to writers.</p>
<p>While more secure fellowships are certainly welcome ideas, there are other ways to support writing that address the current economics. So in the spirit of keeping the conversation going, here are a few thoughts.</p>
<h2>The value of books</h2>
<p>Moorhouse and Eltham both seem to be arguing for fellowships that might provide the long-term security that many working writers currently lack. This suggests a fundamental shift in the purpose of this kind of writing support. </p>
<p>Individual grants and fellowships have typically been provided as a short-term investment in a writer or author, with a duration ranging from a few months to a year. They are there, ideally, to encourage new projects and innovation – offering opportunities for a concentrated period of work, for research, for travel. <a href="http://asialink.unimelb.edu.au/arts/residencies">The University of Melbourne Asialink arts residencies</a> program is a strong example of this. It offers support to a range of Australian writers and artists to live and pursue creative projects in Asia for six weeks to three months.</p>
<p>Longer-term fellowships would certainly have many benefits for established writers. They help compensate them for cultural labour that is not always adequately rewarded in the literary marketplace. As Moorhouse observes, the value of a book often goes beyond its cover price. Books are read and reread, loaned to family members and friends, speculated upon and debated. They inspire insights, arguments and critical and creative forms of engagement. Singular sales and royalty payments cannot reflect this hidden or social value of a book. </p>
<p>However, the criteria that Moorhouse proposes for his ten-year contracts – multiple publications, international distribution, being the subject of academic research – could cluster a lot of funding around a small number of conventionally successful authors. </p>
<h2>A particular kind of writing?</h2>
<p>In his article, Eltham suggests that a lack of individual fellowships has contributed to the rising importance of literary prizes in Australia. According to Eltham, prizes have become “the closest thing to a fellowship most Australian writers can aspire to”. In the same vein as Ivor Indyk’s <a href="http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/4-september-2015-literary-prizes/">2015 Sydney Review of Books article</a>, he argues that “‘prize literature’ is now a discernible genre of its own, taken to represent a certain form of middlebrow that is accessible, appealing and safe.” The implication is that the exclusive pursuit of prizes results in stylistically homogenous literary fiction, and that more individual grants and fellowships would provide writers with more freedom to experiment and take risks.</p>
<p>However, shifting a writer’s focus from winning a literary prize to appeasing a grant committee or funding body will not necessarily result in more adventurous fiction. Writing in 1971 about the Commonwealth Literary Fund (which subsidised Australian writers from 1908 to 1973), <a href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/110683348">Maurice Dunlevy</a> reflected on the value of literary fellowships, observing that “the fund has yet to aid the birth of a genius” or even a “classic Australian novel”. </p>
<p>He went on to claim that “the overwhelming number of fellowships have been awarded to well-known mediocrities who have produced mediocre work.” I won’t pretend to know exactly how fair Dunlevy is being to the fellowship writers of this period. But his critique can easily be compared to some of the contemporary objections to Australian prize culture.</p>
<p>There are a number of questions any new fellowships would need to answer. What kinds of literary work and lives would they encourage writers to work towards? What kinds of writing would be eligible for this kind of support? Would it favour the writer who produces a steady output of moderately successful publications over a powerful single work? Or the traditional print-based author over a writer creating innovative material for digital platforms?</p>
<h2>Meeting the world</h2>
<p>I don’t want to argue against more fellowships for writers (especially since, given the state of arts funding, this would likely be an argument over imaginary money). But we should question whether fellowships of the length that Moorhouse and Eltham are proposing are sustainable or even desirable. </p>
<p>In his 1991 lecture, <a href="http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_documents/a-to-z/d/davies92.pdf">On Writing</a>, the Canadian author Robertson Davies expressed some of his reservations about the culture of writing grants, noting that even as they seem to offer freedom for writers they also potentially isolate them. Davies argues that, for a writer, a job isn’t just a distraction from the serious business of their craft. It is also a valuable opportunity to “meet the world” in their own particular way, and to find a daily task that keeps them from “writing too much” to the point where “their talent has become diseased, hypertrophied because of the continual gross and indecent solicitation of the imagination”.</p>
<p>I can’t pretend to share Davies’s distain for writing grants, having been the grateful beneficiary of a couple myself. But I think that there is a spleeny contrarian wisdom to his critique that is worth considering. </p>
<p>Relatively few successful authors throughout history have lived <a href="https://theconversation.com/scrounging-for-money-how-the-worlds-great-writers-made-a-living-77779">professional lives</a> that were focused solely on writing. For many, the kind of subsidy that Eltham and Moorhouse have proposed might not be particularly useful. Being able to focus solely on writing for three, four or ten years might offer some incredible benefits, but it also presents the possibility of isolation, insularity, and a continued dependence on this kind of funding that might be detrimental for a writer’s work in the long run. As Davies writes: “Nothing - including grants - is for nothing”. The kind of freedom they offer always comes at a cost. </p>
<p>On balance, individual funding might be more suited to providing opportunities for travel (like the brilliantly conceived <a href="http://www.antarctica.gov.au/news/2017/antarctic-arts-fellowship-offers-icy-inspiration">Antarctic Arts Fellowship</a>), cultural exchange, or residencies. These require engagement with the life and rhythms of unfamiliar institutions, offering both emerging and established writers new ways of meeting the world.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/78594/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julian Novitz has received funding from the Australian Postgraduate Award, Creative New Zealand and the Frank Sargeson Trust. </span></em></p>
Writers like Frank Moorhouse and Ben Eltham have proposed new long-term fellowships to support writing. But a better way may be more smaller grants, offering opportunities for travel.
Julian Novitz, Lecturer, Writing, School of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68911
2016-11-20T19:04:16Z
2016-11-20T19:04:16Z
When it comes to books and copyright, the government should leave things as they are
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146477/original/image-20161117-19348-do1gs8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/pustovit/24139911466/">Vladimir Pustovit/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The Australian book industry is in a state of <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-30/publishers-disappointed-by-support-to-lift-import-restrictions/6987476">considerable agitation</a> as it waits to see if the federal government will scrap the parallel import restrictions of the Copyright Act. </p>
<p>Lifting the restrictions has been recommended by the Harper Committee and the Productivity Commission, and a decision could come next week, next month, or never. </p>
<p>These regulations restrict the importation of commercial quantities of books without the permission of the copyright holder. There is a strong sense of déjà vu in the current situation. Every few years since the 1980s a recommendation for repeal of these import restrictions has been put to the government of the day and every time the government, whether Coalition or Labor, has rejected it.</p>
<p>The arguments for doing away with them are based on simple economics. The restrictions provide some protection for authors and publishers in the face of international competition. The overall effect is to raise, at least temporarily, the price of books to Australian consumers, though the directly attributable cost increase is uncertain. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Keep reading: <a href="https://theconversation.com/parallel-importation-and-australian-book-publishing-here-we-go-again-51249">Parallel importation and Australian book publishing: here we go again</a></em></p>
<hr>
<p>Nevertheless, any form of protection is anathema to economists as it distorts markets, creates inefficiencies in the allocation of our national resources, and restricts the access of consumers to cheaper supplies of products from abroad.</p>
<h2>The cultural exception</h2>
<p>So should books be treated differently from anything else? Books are a cultural product, and can be defined as such for the purposes of international trade. Ever since the structure of the world trading system was set up in the 1940s with the establishment of the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/General-Agreement-on-Tariffs-and-Trade">General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade</a>, the forerunner of the present-day World Trade Organisation, a special case for cultural goods and services has been recognised: the so-called “cultural exception”.</p>
<p>The principle behind this concept is the proposition that cultural products are not just commercial merchandise, but embody cultural values that are separate from and additional to their economic value. These cultural values, it is argued, can be shown to be important to society, especially when they represent something about the national culture from which they are derived.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Keep reading: <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-thriving-societies-produce-great-books-can-australia-keep-up-54473">Friday essay: thriving societies produce great books – can Australia keep up?</a></em></p>
<hr>
<p>So the argument concerning <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/20/authors-condemn-book-copyright-and-import-proposal-as-massive-own-goal">Australian books, written by Australian authors about Australian subjects and published by Australian publishers</a> is that they convey such values. Hence, in the context of international trade they should be granted a cultural exception and should not be subject to the same free-trade ideology as other commodities in the global marketplace.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146472/original/image-20161117-19371-ga68f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146472/original/image-20161117-19371-ga68f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/146472/original/image-20161117-19371-ga68f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146472/original/image-20161117-19371-ga68f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146472/original/image-20161117-19371-ga68f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146472/original/image-20161117-19371-ga68f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146472/original/image-20161117-19371-ga68f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/146472/original/image-20161117-19371-ga68f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=899&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tarek Mostafa/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Some hardline economists – including in the Productivity Commission – acknowledge the significance of Australian books to our culture. They’re willing to accept a role for the public sector in ensuring that the cultural contribution of the book industry is maintained, provided that the community agrees that such a role is worth paying for.</p>
<p>The argument here is that if Australian books generate a sufficient level of public-good benefit through their contribution to our collective cultural life – a contribution that cannot be purchased overseas, by the way – this may constitute a case of market failure. Government intervention to correct for it may be justified if the benefits from intervention outweigh the costs.</p>
<p>So far so good, you might think. But it is one thing to agree that some level of support for an industry is justified – and quite another to determine how such support might be provided. </p>
<p>Economists are likely to argue that instead of the blunt instrument of parallel import restrictions, whose beneficiaries may well include many of the “wrong” people, <a href="https://theconversation.com/lets-allow-parallel-book-imports-and-subsidise-australian-publishing-52497">direct fiscal support would be more appropriate</a> because it can be targeted at those who generate the public benefit, such as Australian authors.</p>
<h2>Protection through fiscal channels?</h2>
<p>If we accept this line of argument, and if the existence of public-good benefits from the Australian book industry is assumed, it can be argued that the best policy action in the present circumstances would be to remove the import restrictions, and replace them with an equivalent level of protection provided through fiscal channels, for example by increasing the levels of financial support provided to writers and publishers of Australian books.</p>
<p>Such a recommendation may have merit in principle, but in the realpolitik of the Australian government today it simply doesn’t stand up. Federal funding for the arts and culture sector has been under considerable pressure in recent years. Even more pointedly, the government last year signalled its attitude to supporting the book industry by abolishing the newly-established Book Council before it had even held its first meeting. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Keep reading: <a href="https://theconversation.com/short-shelf-life-the-book-council-of-australia-is-stuffed-back-on-the-rack-52382">Short shelf life: the Book Council of Australia is stuffed back on the rack</a></em></p>
<hr>
<p>The possibility that the Government would approve a new budget allocation of any significance to compensate authors or publishers following removal of the import restrictions must be regarded as very remote indeed.</p>
<p>Some commentators have argued that import restrictions are a relatively minor issue, particularly when set against other more far-reaching copyright proposals such as the <a href="http://bookscreateaustralia.com.au/wp-content/themes/books-create2/images/BooksCreate_Literature.pdf">possible introduction of US-style fair dealing</a> – a prospect that would have much more <a href="https://theconversation.com/its-time-to-future-proof-australias-copyright-laws-for-the-21st-century-58785">serious implications</a> for the book industry. Nevertheless the recommendation is there, and needs a response.</p>
<p>What to do? To avoid a confrontation with an entire industry and to demonstrate a concern for the health of Australian cultural life, the government could either abolish parallel import restrictions and provide compensatory support for the production, distribution and consumption of Australian books, or it could leave things as they are.</p>
<p>As we have noted, successive Australian governments have in previous years accepted the latter as the appropriate practical and principled strategy. In its own interests, the present government would be well advised to do the same.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68911/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>David Throsby was Chair of the Book Industry Collaborative Council (2012-13) and is currently holder of an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (DP 140101479) for a project entitled "The Australian Book Industry: Authors, Publishers and Readers in a Time of Change". </span></em></p>
If the government decides to remove regional trade protections on the book industry, it should compensate Australian authors. But given how unlikely new funding would be, the best option – for everyone – is to leave well enough alone.
David Throsby, Distinguished Professor of Economics, Macquarie University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/58619
2016-08-03T03:08:50Z
2016-08-03T03:08:50Z
Museum economics: how the contemporary art boom is hurting the bottom line
<p>Americans clearly love their museums, particularly in the summer months. In fact, <a href="http://www.aam-us.org/about-museums/museum-facts">museum attendance is estimated at about 850 million visits a year</a>, significantly more than all the major league sporting and theme parks combined (about 483 million in 2011). </p>
<p>That’s in a part because they have a lot of choices. If you include zoos, historical societies, botanical gardens and similar historical or cultural sites, the number of museums in the U.S. <a href="https://www.imls.gov/news-events/news-releases/government-doubles-official-estimate-there-are-35000-active-museums-us">surpassed 35,000 in 2014</a>, more than double the tally in the 1990s. </p>
<p>Art museums, which I would argue make some of the most important contributions to contemporary culture, number about 1,575 and are also very popular. One of the most famous, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (“the Met”), for example, saw a <a href="http://www.museus.gov.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Visitor-Figures-2015-LO.pdf">record 6.5 million visitors</a> in 2015, making it the world’s third most popular museum. </p>
<p>But record attendance doesn’t necessarily translate into record revenue. Just last month, the Met said it is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/arts/design/met-to-cut-100-or-more-jobs-in-push-to-steady-finances.html">laying off more than 100 of its employees</a> as it tries to erase a US$10 million budget deficit, just a few months after it <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/met-museum-to-cut-spending-as-deficit-looms-1461287217">announced a hiring freeze</a> and voluntary buyouts. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, one of its rivals down the street, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), is <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/museum-of-modern-art-announces-100-million-gift-from-david-geffen-1461261600">flush with cash</a> and <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/arts/two-art-worlds-rich-modern-and-struggling-met.html">just received another $100 million</a> for an expansion and renovation. Yet only about <a href="http://www.museus.gov.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Visitor-Figures-2015-LO.pdf">three million people</a> stopped by to see its art in 2015, ranking it 15th in the world. </p>
<p>What explains the different trajectories? Why do some museums flourish while others flounder? </p>
<p>Lately I’ve been exploring the new economics of culture and art markets for a book to be published in 2017 called “The Economics of American Art: Art, Artists and Market Institutions.” <a href="http://www.bobekelund.com">My research</a> leads me to believe there are three reasons why different museums have different fates: fashion, demographics and billionaires. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132861/original/image-20160802-17185-a8adki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/132861/original/image-20160802-17185-a8adki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132861/original/image-20160802-17185-a8adki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132861/original/image-20160802-17185-a8adki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132861/original/image-20160802-17185-a8adki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132861/original/image-20160802-17185-a8adki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/132861/original/image-20160802-17185-a8adki.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is the third most visited museum in the world.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Met via www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Tale of two museums</h2>
<p>MoMA and the Met are two of the top museums in the U.S., making them <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/arts/two-art-worlds-rich-modern-and-struggling-met.html">excellent illustrations</a> of some of the financing problems facing museums today. </p>
<p>The Met, one of the most comprehensive museums in the world except for a dearth of holdings in modern contemporary art, has an annual budget of approximately $300 million. The museum, however, is currently <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/16/arts/design/met-to-cut-100-or-more-jobs-in-push-to-steady-finances.html">facing a deficit</a> of about $10 million that would have ballooned to $40 million if it hadn’t begun laying off personnel. It also put a hold on its expansion of modern contemporary art exhibition space.</p>
<p>The competition for patrons willing to fork over large amounts money has become fierce in the contemporary art field. Besides MoMA, the Met must compete locally with the Whitney (which just opened a new downtown location) and the Guggenheim and with dozens of museums in major cities across the U.S, such as The Broad, a new contemporary museum in downtown Los Angeles. </p>
<p>They also must compete for possession of the masterpieces and other exhibitions that draw the most visitors – and in turn lead to more donations. </p>
<p>Meanwhile, MoMA is experiencing its own unique issues that both illustrate the plus- and downsides of its success. MoMA’s $400 million-plus expansion plan (aided by a $100 million gift from billionaire David Geffen) will mean certain parts of the museum will be closed down during the project, leading to less attendance and revenue. MoMA <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/museum-of-modern-art-to-offer-employee-buyouts-1461975639">has offered voluntary buyout plans</a> for some employees who will not be needed. Still, with an <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/museum-of-modern-art-announces-100-million-gift-from-david-geffen-1461261600">endowment approaching $1 billion</a>, it’s in pretty good shape.</p>
<p>The current challenges of these two great museums will resolve themselves over time, but the fundamental issues raised underscore some critical economic issues facing many art museums in the U.S. today. </p>
<h2>Chasing after changing tastes</h2>
<p>First, underlying the Met’s financial challenges described above is a perennial problem of all museums: acquisitions policy. </p>
<p>Recent directors of the Met amassed a treasure trove, making it truly a museum of enormous and international scope – with an important exception: modern and contemporary art. The late Thomas Hoving <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/art-obituaries/6790157/Tom-Hoving.html">focused on snapping up</a> Renaissance and Old Masters, such as Velázquez’s “Portrait of Juan de Pareja” and the Egyptian Temple of Dendur. He also developed the now-popular concept of the traveling “blockbuster” exhibition that costs museum-goers an extra charge. </p>
<p>His successor, <a href="http://www.metmuseum.org/metmedia/video/conservation-and-scientific-research/sam-pdmcnsrv">Phillipe de Montebello</a>, also did not add much to the museum’s modern collection. The argument, it seems, was that museums such as the MoMA were already providing such works in their collections and that the acquisition of contemporary art by living artists (some at midcareer) was problematic and risky. </p>
<p>While the Met’s contemporary collection has grown somewhat in recent years, it has been unable to quickly adjust to the changing tastes of museum-goers, who <a href="http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21594262-rapid-growth-art-fairs-changing-way-galleries-operate-fairly-popular">increasingly favor modern and contemporary art</a>. This has put it at a competitive disadvantage. </p>
<p>The economic point here is that if a museum like the Met isn’t able to keep up as its customers’ tastes change, revenue will likely fall. And by the time it might recognize this, it’s already too late to do much about it because the costs to acquire the in-demand art is sky-high. </p>
<p>Since museums acquire either as a donation or a purchase, in the absence of a generous gift, the only alternative is to acquire a “distinguished” collection of work from another institution or private collector. </p>
<p>That alternative is open to few museums in the United States. The reason leads to a second critical issue – the changing distribution of U.S. and world income and its effects on museum finance and operation. </p>
<h2>Billionaires’ bubble</h2>
<p>We are living in a boom period for contemporary art (<a href="http://bigthink.com/Picture-This/can-contemporary-art-become-too-popular">some would say it’s a “bubble”</a>).</p>
<p>The number of <a href="https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-how-art-fairs-expanded-the-contemporary-art-market">auctions, art fairs and galleries</a> dealing in that genre has grown enormously to accommodate this burgeoning market. Works by the undisputed master in contemporary art, German artist Gerhard Richter, <a href="https://news.artnet.com/market/top-100-collectible-living-artists-504059?utm-buf">have generated $1.2 billion in sales</a> in recent years.</p>
<p>In a world with <a href="http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/">about 1,800 billionaires</a>, it only takes a relative few to drive high-end art prices to astronomical levels. Recessions, stock market declines and turmoil in international affairs rarely subdue the fight among these collectors for the best of the best, especially in contemporary art. </p>
<p>In addition to such vaunted names as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, “hot” young artists born after 1955 are earning top auction prices. From July 2014 to June 2015, auction “hammer prices” by the late Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christopher Wool and Jeff Koons reached <a href="http://www.widewalls.ch/most-expensive-jean-michel-basquiat-artwork/">$33 million</a>, <a href="http://www.artyou.com/newsview/30">$26.5 million</a> and <a href="http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/21/collecting-art-auctions-forbeslife-cx_nw_1121koons.html">$23 million</a>, respectively, for single works of art.</p>
<p>These soaring prices mean museums simply can’t keep up and must usually depend on donations to assemble portfolios of the best work, or they’re priced out.</p>
<p>And billionaires themselves <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/new-york-billionaire-private-museum-chelsea-582314?ut">are increasingly setting up</a> their own, private museums, further distancing the ability of public museums to get the good stuff. </p>
<h2>Demographics and recessions</h2>
<p>A third interrelated problem is that demographic issues have exacerbated the problems of museum finance and operations by putting pressure on the revenue side of the equation. </p>
<p>Unemployment, early retirements and the aging of the population in the United States have all contributed to increased attendance at museums of all types. You might think that’s simply a good thing. And in many ways it is. But more traffic means higher costs, and when those additional visitors don’t result in more revenue, profitability goes down. </p>
<p>This is because of the longstanding movement toward making museums “free” by having individuals, government or businesses “sponsor” the cost. But when that support gets reduced by budget costs or another reason, museums must either choose to pick up the tab or lose patrons by suddenly charging fees. </p>
<p>There is <a href="https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-199068924/art-museum-attendance-public-funding-and-the-business">empirical evidence</a> that museum attendance is countercyclical. That is, it rises when economic growth slows, but that’s also when those “sponsors” are more likely to begin to disappear. In other words, the Met’s record attendance figures sound great on the surface but may have contributed to its budget shortfall by adding to its costs.</p>
<h2>Value of art</h2>
<p>Museums will certainly continue to exist and provide hundreds of millions of us with invaluable insights into our culture, both past and present. </p>
<p>But they must exist under the imperative of economic principles. Tastes will change, income distribution will alter the availability of art and demographics will shift. </p>
<p>While none of these factors negate the importance of art museums, it’d be wise for their stewards to consider the economics in their calculations.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/58619/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Ekelund does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
New York’s Met just announced more job cuts to balance its books as the shifting tastes and demographics make it harder to make a museum’s ends meet.
Robert Ekelund, Eminent Scholar and Professor of Economics Emeritus, Auburn University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/62063
2016-07-06T15:50:53Z
2016-07-06T15:50:53Z
How to stop creative GCSE subjects being squeezed out by the EBacc
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129542/original/image-20160706-12753-116q8xn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Turn up the volume of creativity. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">kyokyo/www.shutterstock.com</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Anger at the way creative subjects for teenagers seem to have been sidelined by a new focus on core subjects at GCSE reached parliament on July 4, <a href="http://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/ca06ebdb-0a8e-4867-a9ea-4cc82c94ff54">when MPs discussed</a> the impact of the new E-Baccalaureate (Ebacc) on students and schools. </p>
<p>The government insists that its focus on five core GCSE subjects – English, maths, science, history or geography and a language – as part of the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/english-baccalaureate-ebacc/english-baccalaureate-ebacc">Ebacc</a> has not had an impact on the take up of creative subjects.</p>
<p>But <a href="https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/111731">the petition</a> that led to the parliamentary debate, signed by more than 102,000 people, and supported by 200 organisations from the creative sector, stated that:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The exclusion of art, music, drama and other expressive subjects is limiting, short sighted and cruel. Creativity must be at the heart of our schools. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Campaigners are calling for an alternative fix. In the debate, suggestions included the creation of an Ebacc plus where students would be able to select from a range of creative subjects, including art, design, music and drama.</p>
<p>Nick Gibb, the schools minister, indicated that students taking the Ebacc currently choose five out of a possible seven or eight subjects (depending on whether they take all three sciences). But I’d argue it is possible for this element of choice – which students already make between geography and history or between different foreign languages – to include a creative arts subject. </p>
<p>Many academic colleagues I speak to agree that we need to encourage an interdisciplinary approach and creativity as the bedrock of the UK’s education system, in order to prepare young people for higher education and the economic and social needs of the future. Take the example of the entrepreneur James Dyson, taught by the first professor of fine art at Leeds, <a href="https://library.leeds.ac.uk/features/409/article/124/maurice_de_sausmarez_1915-1969">Maurice de Sausmarez</a>, or Jony Ive, chief design officer at Apple, who studied industrial design at Newcastle Polytechnic. Both of these influential and successful Brits were enabled to study and value the creative subjects in school. </p>
<p>My solution would be to ensure that this opportunity is embedded in every child’s GCSE choices, and valued equally in terms of school performance measures. </p>
<h2>Impact on choices</h2>
<p>The Ebacc was first introduced in 2010 as a performance measure, but in 2015 the secretary of state for education, Nicky Morgan, announced a goal to <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/implementing-the-english-baccalaureate">make sure 90%</a> of state school students take it. The government is yet to publish its response <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/implementing-the-english-baccalaureate">to a consultation</a> on how to implement this. </p>
<p>There is mounting evidence that this focus on the Ebacc is having an impact on students’ choices and opportunities. On the same day as the debate, I spent the morning with 50 art and design teachers from across Leeds, hearing about the impact it is having on their students’ choices and opportunities. One pointed me towards <a href="http://schoolsweek.co.uk/strike-ballots-in%207-schools-after-academy-chain-spta-ditches-creative-subjects-and-cuts-jobs/">an article</a> about the curriculum restructure at seven secondary schools in Yorkshire and Humber, which led to 88 job cuts “as creative subjects are ditched in favour of a more academic focus”. </p>
<p>But <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-07-04/debates/16070422000001/EbaccExpressiveArtsSubjects">in parliament</a>, Gibb claimed that there would “still be room to study other subjects, including the arts”. He said there had been no impact to date as a result of the Department for Education announcing 90% of state schools students undertake the Ebacc subjects. </p>
<p>This was despite figures quoted throughout the debate, recently <a href="http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/news/exclusive-arts-schools-plummets-new-figures-show">published by Arts Professional</a> reporting that there are 46,000 fewer entries to arts and creative GCSEs in 2015-16. The magazine found that this drop coincided with a rise in the number of students sitting those subjects included in the Ebacc. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129545/original/image-20160706-12739-sqd55x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/129545/original/image-20160706-12739-sqd55x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129545/original/image-20160706-12739-sqd55x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129545/original/image-20160706-12739-sqd55x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129545/original/image-20160706-12739-sqd55x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129545/original/image-20160706-12739-sqd55x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/129545/original/image-20160706-12739-sqd55x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">GCSE art work on display.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/dumbledad/3609619775/sizes/l">dumbledad/flickr.com</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>MPs from both sides of the house <a href="http://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/ca06ebdb-0a8e-4867-a9ea-4cc82c94ff54">debated the impact of the Ebacc</a>, citing its effect on children from schools with low social and economic groups, the current skills shortages in the creative industries at a time of great growth and the growing gap between rich and poor – both in terms of participation and employment in the cultural sector. As Labour MP Catherine McKinnell <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/2016-07-04/debates/16070422000001/EbaccExpressiveArtsSubjects#contribution-16070429000088">concluded</a>, “the new Ebacc proposals will leave the creative sector without a future workforce”.</p>
<p>A number of speakers also drew attention to the increasing requirement to be able to measure education and its impact. Fiona Mactaggert, another Labour MP, <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/MemberContributions?house=Commons&memberId=12">stated that</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The problem at the heart of this debate is that we all know that what counts in public policy is what is measured and if what is measured is only Ebacc subjects, only they will count.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>An alternative</h2>
<p>Gibb tried to suggest that opponents to the Ebacc were asking for the arts and creative subjects as an alternative to the existing subjects – but it was made very clear by numerous speakers in the debate that they were asking for a choice of creative subject to be added.</p>
<p>Nobody doubts the importance of a foundation in English, maths and science and the inclusion of a language is entirely necessary, particularly given the UK’s current precarious position in the world. But, as McKinnell elegantly stated, a decision that excludes all creative subjects sends the wrong message to society about our values as a country. </p>
<p>This is an easy problem to fix. Extending the Ebacc to include a choice of a creative subjects, would not water down the emphasis on the other “core” subjects, but <a href="http://parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/ca06ebdb-0a8e-4867-a9ea-4cc82c94ff54">instead</a>, as MacTaggert <a href="https://hansard.parliament.uk/search/MemberContributions?house=Commons&memberId=12">concluded</a>: “nurture one of the traditional strengths of British education – that creativity has always been at its core”.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62063/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Abigail Harrison Moore does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
A focus on core subjects for 16-year-olds should not exclude arts, music or drama.
Abigail Harrison Moore, Head of School, School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies/Professor of Art History and Museum Studies, University of Leeds
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/50126
2015-11-04T05:58:23Z
2015-11-04T05:58:23Z
Australia wins at the global creative game
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/100723/original/image-20151104-21203-fafvxb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">lauren rushing</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>I like a good index, and the University of Toronto-based American economic geographer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Florida">Richard Florida</a> has been my main supplier for a few years now. </p>
<p>His super-popular <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Rise-Creative-Class-Transforming/dp/0465024769">Creative Class</a> products are all made of the same three progressive ingredients: <a href="http://www.slideshare.net/mpian/overview-of-the-creative-class-theory-and-the-3-ts">Technology, Talent and Tolerance</a>. </p>
<p>The label on the bottle tells an uplifting story of how great American cities are not made of steel mills anymore, but of gay-friendly citizens, great universities, and bicycle paths. Like Helen of Troy, his ideas were of such inestimable beauty that some <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/html/14_1_the_curse.html">1,000 city government plans</a> were launched to create, at very least, some of these university-flavoured bicycle paths. </p>
<p>Dr Florida’s idea is that you take these policy prescriptions, then you wait (it was never actually specified how long – some say 10-15 years) for the effects to kick in. What will happen is that first you will start to feel creative, and then later prosperous.</p>
<p>So I always look forward to my latest delivery of creativity index. (Some colleagues and I sometimes even make our own, <a href="http://www.regionalstudies.org/uploads/Does_residential_diversity_attract_workers_in_creative_occupation_-_Sveta_Angelopoloulos.pdf">here</a> and <a href="http://cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/article/view/51">here</a>.) This year’s product (from his <a href="http://martinprosperity.org/">fine research group</a>) does not disappoint – being a <a href="http://martinprosperity.org/media/Global-Creativity-Index-2015.pdf">Global Creativity Index</a> no less! </p>
<h2>We’re #1!</h2>
<p>And guess what? Australia is number one! We win at the global creative game! Ozzy, Ozzy, Ozzy!</p>
<p>NZ is number three – suck that NZ and your stupid Rugby World Cup – and the USA is rather pathetically only number 2. </p>
<p>(An entirely predictable list of Canada, some bicycle path-ridden Nordic countries, Singapore, and some other overeducated quasi-Nordic countries make up the rest of the top ten. The 11-20 spots are mostly occupied by the good coffee precincts in the Eurozone.)</p>
<p>Australia wins because of its consistent performance over all of the measures. Most countries fall down on at least one.</p>
<p>Australia is 7/112 on the Technology index component. (South Korea, Japan and Israel make up the top 3.)</p>
<p>Australia is 4/136 on the global tolerance index, a mix of attitudes to gays and lesbians and racial and ethnic minorities, only just behind the world-class tolerance of the Canadians. But they also gave the world Justin Beiber, so should probably lose some points for that.</p>
<p>And get this: Australia is 1/134 on the global talent index. (This is a mixture of creative class density, and educational attainment.) That’s amazing – we win over education powerhouses of Finland, Singapore, Denmark and the US because of our proportionally higher ranking in the creative class measure, which in many ways is a reflection of the high past quality of Australia’s education.</p>
<h2>Yay! Now what?</h2>
<p>So, what would be an appropriate way to celebrate this great and deserved win? Let me suggest with a few hearty rounds of deregulation.</p>
<p>If these index findings are indeed true – and I have no reason to doubt them: the list of ingredients is clearly labelled on the bottle – then our economic and cultural performance, our overall prosperity, should be better than it is. </p>
<p>Some ingredient is missing. Australia is a world-beater at the creative game. But we don’t seem to be as good at translating that sort of winning creative on-field performance over inputs (our tolerance, our talent, our technology) to the off-field realm of deliverables, our “merchandising” if you will. </p>
<p>What’s missing from our great potential in innovation is entrepreneurship. Being creative is not enough. We also need to improve our entrepreneurial game. (This same point was also made, in specific reference to Australia, by the US think-tank <a href="http://www.kauffman.org/blogs/policy-dialogue/2015/november/australia-most-creative-country-but-what-about-entrepreneurship">the Kauffman Foundation</a>.)</p>
<p>Dom Talimanidis of the Institute of Public Affairs produced a report last year entitled <a href="http://ipa.org.au/publications/2299/where-have-all-the-entrepreneurs-gone">Where have all the entrepreneurs gone?</a>. It showed how the number of new firms created has fallen by almost 50% since 2002. A major reason for this is the <a href="http://ipa.org.au/publications/2338/innovation-strangled-by-red-tape">high and growing regulatory burden in Australia</a>, which raises the costs of entrepreneurship, inhibiting entry. This is bridling our great creative potential. </p>
<p>Maybe the Assistant Minister for Innovation <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/business/what-happened-at-wyatt-roys-policy-hack-20151017-gkbtpy.html">Wyatt Roy</a> will lead us through this with the tech-community’s favourite answer: start-up incubators and accelerators. </p>
<p>But a better strategy to work on our translation game is simply to increase the size of the team on the field. This doesn’t require redirecting resources, or increasing taxes, but simply giving our highly creative world-class players a bigger, freer space to run.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/50126/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<h4 class="border">Disclosure</h4><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jason Potts receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with the Institute of Public Affairs. </span></em></p>
‘If these index findings are indeed true then our economic and cultural performance, our overall prosperity, should be better than it is.’
Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/31262
2014-09-30T02:41:25Z
2014-09-30T02:41:25Z
Cultural nationalism feels good but Australian stories have a cost
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60365/original/6dprzp97-1412041955.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60365/original/6dprzp97-1412041955.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/60365/original/6dprzp97-1412041955.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60365/original/6dprzp97-1412041955.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60365/original/6dprzp97-1412041955.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60365/original/6dprzp97-1412041955.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60365/original/6dprzp97-1412041955.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/60365/original/6dprzp97-1412041955.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=464&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Who gains from trade policies based on cultural nationalism?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Matt Nettheim/AAP Image/ABC (Still from ANZAC Girls)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The warmest, most welcoming home of cultural nationalism is appeal to the provenance of “our stories”. Real Australian stories are made by Australians, for Australians, using only Australians, and only in Australia. Trade Unions love this type of cover, and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) has been bumptiously running this line recently to hold firm on <a href="http://arts.gov.au/sites/default/files/pdfs/film-foreign-actors-guidelines-feb10.pdf">restrictions on hiring foreign actors</a>. </p>
<p>While it seems even the MEAA’s members <a href="http://if.com.au/2014/09/16/article/Op-ed-Roy-Billing-on-imported-actors/BAEPNLUZWV.html">don’t buy this nonsense any more</a>, the Vegemite-stained sentiments animating the cultural nationalist instinct remain a popular but potentially very costly delusion. </p>
<p>Economists have made considerable progress in persuading voters and politicians of the fundamental truth of the principles of specialisation and the gains from trade – or its inverse, the enormous costs of seeking industrial self-sufficiency and isolation. We specialise in producing what we’re comparatively good at – a wide but also very specific range of goods and services – and we trade for the rest. Australia is a wealthy and prosperous nation because it specialises and trades, not in spite of it. </p>
<p>This is no less true of arts and cultural production. And we risk doing a great harm to the production of Australian stories if we allow this fallacy of provenance to run unchecked. But to understand why, we need to dip into some economic reasoning. </p>
<p>On the face of it, it could seem plausible that a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage">comparative advantage</a> to the production of Australian stories would lie with real-born Australians using Australian technologies in Australian production companies. But if that were the case, we wouldn’t then require laws prohibiting such trades, or requiring various union permissions: there would simply be no demand for such inferior inputs. </p>
<p>That this is an issue signals that someone wants foreign actors, writers, producers or directors involved. So the question is why. Is it because they come at lower price, or because they offer higher quality? If lower price, then the higher-priced Australian actors are an additional cost. Australian stories will cost more than they would in a free market, which means we’ll produce fewer of them. </p>
<p>Australians as consumers of Australian stories are harmed by that restriction – although some Australian actors will benefit. So that’s perhaps just a transfer from the many to a few. </p>
<p>But if it’s higher quality – which is the more likely account, and note that quality may not mean acting chops but may be composed only of better global name recognition – then the Australian story-telling industry is actively engaged in self-harm if it does not choose these higher quality inputs. </p>
<p>A further harm the pursuit of cultural <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autarky">autarky</a> (self-sufficiency) causes under cover of Australian stories is a long-run distortion of the Australian cultural production sector itself in relation to the global economy of arts and cultural production. </p>
<p>The goal of cultural autarky is to have a complete arts and cultural production economy within Australia with every stage of production represented locally. That sounds like a good plan – who wouldn’t want that? – so it’s easy to vote for policies that push in that direction. </p>
<p>Yet we tried it with manufacturing for many decades and it was an utter disaster because of what we give up when we try to do that. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_cost">opportunity cost</a> is specialisation and concentration of all our resources and energies into what we’re best at. Instead, you end up with a mediocre everything, rather than a smaller space of excellence that you can then sell to the world. </p>
<p>Who gains, then, from trade policies based on cultural nationalism? A primary beneficiary is the Trade Union itself, as it captures the right to sell the permissions – a type of action economists call <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking">rent-seeking</a>. It’s also good for a handful of Australian actors, screenwriters or others who likewise capture the rents created by the artificial market distortion. </p>
<p>But that’s it. It harms everyone else – including Australian and overseas consumers of Australian stories, because now there are less of them and they’re more expensive. And it harms the long-run prospects of the Australian arts and cultural sector by distorting it away from fitting into <a href="http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7347.html">global production and markets</a>.</p>
<p>Now perhaps these effects are small, and maybe the production of Australian stories is vigorous enough to withstand these insider taxes. But let us not fool ourselves that there is any solid logic to this. </p>
<p>It feels good, but really we shouldn’t do it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/31262/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
The warmest, most welcoming home of cultural nationalism is appeal to the provenance of “our stories”. Real Australian stories are made by Australians, for Australians, using only Australians, and only…
Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/29939
2014-08-06T03:23:43Z
2014-08-06T03:23:43Z
Are the arts & culture a public good?
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/55833/original/62yvy9rc-1407297452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/55833/original/62yvy9rc-1407297452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/55833/original/62yvy9rc-1407297452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55833/original/62yvy9rc-1407297452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55833/original/62yvy9rc-1407297452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=430&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55833/original/62yvy9rc-1407297452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55833/original/62yvy9rc-1407297452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/55833/original/62yvy9rc-1407297452.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=540&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Rod</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Regular readers of this column will know that I’m neither an artist nor a cultural expert, but something much more déclassé: I’m a cultural economist.</p>
<p>Part of this involves studying the incentives that operate in the making of art and culture, and its consumption, and thus extends to the institutions that shape and govern those incentives. But mostly this involves arguing the extent to which <a href="http://individual.utoronto.ca/diep/c/fullerton.pdf">art and culture</a> are a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good">public good</a>. </p>
<p>I want to elucidate this much misunderstood concept here “as an economist”. This matters because the basic rule of a modern economy in a modern political system, as certified by economists, is as follows: if something is a public good, then it should be provided by government (and financed by willing taxpayers). </p>
<p>These are the arguments that occupy cultural economists, both as friends of the arts, and as friends of taxpayers. There is a certain lose-lose dynamic here that makes being a cultural economist sometimes a thankless task. But to do this we do need to be clear about what a public good really is. </p>
<p>First, calling something a public good is not a moral claim, but a statement about economic efficiency. Public goods experience what is called “market failure”, which means that markets will create insufficient incentives to induce producers to supply the socially optimal level. </p>
<p>Second, a public good is not something that is public, and good. It doesn’t mean something we all like, or can in some majority sense agree is socially valuable.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc1/PublicGoodsandExternalities.html">technical definition</a> is a good that is both “non-rival” and “non-excludable”. Goods that are rivalrous (if I consume it, you can’t) and excludable (I can stop you from consuming it) are private goods: markets work well for them. Non-rivalrous and excludable are “club goods”. Whereas rivalrous and non-excludable goods are “common pool resources”. These require somewhat different governance mechanisms in order to be efficiently provided. </p>
<p>Pure public goods are actually quite rare: e.g. national defence. If you provide it for one, you provide it for all (non-rivalrous), and if produced I can’t stop you from consuming it (non-excludable). Another example is a mathematical algorithm. But many things that we commonly think of as public goods – such as health-care and education – actually aren’t. Hospital beds are rivalrous, and education places are excludable. That’s why private markets can work in these areas.</p>
<p>So is art and culture a public good? Here’s the thing. It’s tricky – you can argue it in good faith either way. On the one hand, a piece of music or sculpture or the aesthetic feeling of beautiful design is plainly a public good in the same way the formula for calculating the solution to a quadratic equation is. If I’m enjoying it, you can too, and moreover I can’t exclude you from the experience. But on the other hand, I can devise mechanisms to make it rivalrous or excludable – an obvious one being attaching intellectual property rights, or by limiting access by making it a commodity or a service. These are sometimes called business models.</p>
<p>For an economist, then, the economics of art and culture come down to the study of the efficacy of this translation between a public and a private good. The main point is that this rarely stays fixed. It is limited not only by artistic imagination, but by entrepreneurial imagination in ways of converting an idea into a revenue stream. This is affected by new technologies – the printing press, for example, and again with the Internet – and by new business models – William Shakespeare not only wrote plays, as high-school students know him for, but was <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/education-22435649">the entrepreneur</a> behind the commercial venture of the Globe Theatre, which MBA students might appreciate him for. </p>
<p>The fundamental question of the economics of arts & culture – is art and culture a public good? – has only circumstantial answers that for the most part turn not on the objective merits of the artistic and cultural output, but on the entrepreneurial imagination of the artist and their backers.</p>
<p>The first step in any engagement with the economics of arts and culture is to <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/creativity-and-the-arts-are-public-goods-20130314-2g2e5.html">buttress their status as a public good</a>. But that also does a disservice, because the ongoing viability – i.e. the sustainability – of an art form depends on its transformation into a private good. </p>
<p>The public good argument for government support of the arts has costs as well as benefits. Strong public support encourages, to be sure, but it also distorts incentives. The role of the cultural economist is to point out that any eventual total classification of arts and culture as a public good by arts and culture lobbyists risks being a Pyrrhic victory. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/29939/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Regular readers of this column will know that I’m neither an artist nor a cultural expert, but something much more déclassé: I’m a cultural economist. Part of this involves studying the incentives that…
Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/26737
2014-05-15T02:18:51Z
2014-05-15T02:18:51Z
Hockey’s budget ignores the cultural economy, to its shame
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/48540/original/zd644mpb-1400111526.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">How grim a message is the budget inadvertently sending?</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/64502870@N00/12461157594/in/photolist-jZ9G1J-mCAnia-jCYoVJ-jFvwLj-8DRWTY-5TsDdV-mUgZ7t-gcmYf2-78tUT3-iK7agW-kZcGtd-mXj4ca-fZDwrC-fZDDki-7vWww8-6A2i3M-e6y1Rv-bXaqpL-kZcEuU-8m2dvQ-7vWt8x-bHzgme-cS6fWE-dynCkB-47YqGy-ndf75F-gZ8pgD-jFsyo2-e6sGgQ-8Ko6Xn-mUhJxf-7vVFzP-b1utSg-diF5Zj-8KnXt8-7td9pP-drFgCd-8DoXwq-8bgLwR-6jo5W4-bpsvMT-6zZm2R-8DkRCe-89FEyZ-9DsihA-6zZxwR-89GCkF-a8vsKM-8kD3py-dHQsj1">Maria Schaefer Photography</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The reality of <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/federal-budget-2014">the 2014 budget</a> is now pretty clear, not just its specific provisions but the kind of nation it wants Australia to become. </p>
<p>How it affects culture relates not just to this or that <a href="https://theconversation.com/federal-budget-2014-arts-and-culture-experts-react-26638">cut to arts funding</a> or to the public broadcasters but to that wider vision of society. </p>
<p>The staggering political cynicism on display in Hockey and Abbott’s broken promises is a new low and will further contribute to the diminishing of political life in Australia. The Coalition has invented a “budget emergency” to set up a “cut-spending-or-die” scenario. With this budget, it’s performing emergency amputations with a blunt saw.</p>
<p>A smart re-drafting of taxation, public management, economic governance and social welfare is the long-term answer to the structural problems in the Australian economy. Instead we get a one-size-fits-all, low-tax, small-state mantra.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/thomas-piketty">Thomas Piketty</a>’s best-seller, Capital, has documented the rising levels of inequality in advanced economies. He proposes three broad ways to rectify this:</p>
<p>1) increased taxation, especially of top earners <br>
2) economic growth <br>
3) increased investment in skills for the workforce. </p>
<p>The first has not happened in any meaningful way in this budget. Despite the one-off debt-reduction levy, this is a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/14/this-budget-is-a-clear-victory-for-australias-1">budget for the 1%</a>, built on the erroneous belief that taxation stifles growth. </p>
<p>Ignoring all the evidence to the contrary, Joe Hockey’s position on economic growth is that it will be secured by getting the state out of the economy. This is a profligate abdication of responsibility and we are not likely to witness anything more than a 1% or 2% growth. </p>
<p>As for skills, <a href="https://theconversation.com/federal-budget-2014-education-experts-react-26649">education</a> has just got a whole lot more expensive.</p>
<p>These changes will have profound implications for the cultural economy.</p>
<h2>Young people in the cultural economy</h2>
<p>Young people, the creative heart of the culture of tomorrow, are already saddled with increased educational debt. Those unwilling to take this on will be forced into low-paid jobs or threatened with a removal or any kind of income support. Universities, the powerhouse of a cultural economy in which a higher degree is the norm, will be set against each other in a false market in which they can name their own price. </p>
<p>As students and management glare at each other through return-on-investment eyes, the space for creative engagement with the contemporary world will further diminish. Creative thinking will continue to migrate to those private or charitable institutions that can afford to be out of the stifling <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradgrind">Gradgrindism</a> that is contemporary academia.</p>
<p>As with the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/12/comedians-musicians-revolution-russell-brand-beppe-grillo-neoliberalism">music industry</a>, television, or art and design schools, the cultural economy will become the preserve of the <a href="http://creativeskillset.org/assets/0000/5069/2009_Employment_Census_of_the_Creative_Media_Industries.pdf">wealthy middle class</a> – those people with the time, the money and the social connections to make a living in this sector.</p>
<h2>The cost of cutting public broadcasting</h2>
<p>Cutting funding to the arts is as lazy and inevitable as the decimation of the overseas budget. It speaks the mean ignorance of the current political elite, certainly – but also its economic illiteracy. This can be seen above all in its assault on public broadcasting.</p>
<p>The ABC and SBS are not some social-democratic hangover from a time of scarcity before the internet brought choice for all. They are exemplary models of what a cultural economy is, why it should be valued, and how it should be managed.</p>
<p>They are built on the ideal of inclusive cultural citizenship, valued for their economic and cultural contribution to society. Their management involves a detailed and sustained knowledge about how they operate as industries at the intersection of economic, cultural and social values. They act as flagships and “market organisers”, with enough heft to open up opportunities for small and medium-sized cultural business to participate. </p>
<p>What’s more, they retain a strong professional and public service ethos, invest in training and are committed to recruiting from across the community and the regions of Australia. They are absolutely crucial to our image and influence abroad, and could be one of the beacons projecting Australia as an open creative democracy throughout the Asian region.</p>
<h2>The cultural economy’s vital signs</h2>
<p>The ABC and SBS point to how a cultural economy is conceived and managed. It is a complex ecosystem with a range of different values and players involved, from the gratuitous to the rampantly commercial, from the individual artist to the corporate giants. </p>
<p>Rather than nurture the sophisticated infrastructure of public and third-sector agencies, which are essential to the governance of this sector, the government can see only state (bad) and private sector (good).</p>
<p>Cheered on by the theologians of the Institute of Public Affairs this budget is a disaster for a country facing increased competition from a China climbing rapidly up the value chain, including its burgeoning cultural industries. </p>
<p>As the resource boom fades this is the worst possible way to respond.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/26737/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Justin O'Connor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
The reality of the 2014 budget is now pretty clear, not just its specific provisions but the kind of nation it wants Australia to become. How it affects culture relates not just to this or that cut to…
Justin O'Connor, Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy, Monash University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/26323
2014-05-08T20:38:33Z
2014-05-08T20:38:33Z
The state of Australia: cultural economy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47831/original/2qmn5j9s-1399337504.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The state of culture in Australia? Basically, it’s in rude health</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/4308925550/in/photolist-7yLnrQ-7yN6nb-7BtLcP-7Bun38-7Bxzm5-7yGA2p-7yGA1k-7yNTJS-7BtLca-7yK7yR-7yK7xt-7Bybey-7Bun4V-7BuBXK-7Bybhy-7BybfC-7BuBVB-7BtLba-7BuyxV-7By4Vy-7By4Wo-7BuBWR-7By4Y9-7BuyzV-7By4Xj-7BA1om-7yLnmw-7Bwcn2-7yGA4i-7yGzWi-7Bwckp-5j1Q5m-5j1VAb-7yGzZH-7yN6uj-7BuyAT-7yGA2R-7BwciK-7yGA52-5j6Es1-7Buqgi-7yGzYX-7yGzY8-7yN6sj-7yNTP7-5j1KJw-7yN6tj-5j1TLj-5j1HBW-7BAJPd">Ars Electronica</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>In the lead-up to the budget, the story of crisis has been hammered home, but there’s more to a country than its structural deficit. So how is Australia doing overall? In this special series, ten writers to take a broader look at the State of Australia; our health, wealth, education, culture, environment, well-being and international standing.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>Naturally, federal budgets are fretful times for economic sectors underwritten by discretionary public expenditure. The arts and cultural sector is composed of parts that rely heavily on public funding (such as heritage, museums), parts that are a mixture of public and private (such as film, television, radio), and parts that are largely private (fashion, design, video games). Obviously, some parts of this sector therefore have more reason for trepidation than others.</p>
<p>The recent report from the <a href="http://www.ncoa.gov.au/">Commission of Audit</a> makes clear that there is indeed a budget crisis – although <a href="https://theconversation.com/australias-economy-is-healthy-so-how-can-there-be-a-budget-crisis-26036">not everyone</a> would see things that clearly. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47835/original/ys3xmv6j-1399338216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47835/original/ys3xmv6j-1399338216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47835/original/ys3xmv6j-1399338216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47835/original/ys3xmv6j-1399338216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47835/original/ys3xmv6j-1399338216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47835/original/ys3xmv6j-1399338216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47835/original/ys3xmv6j-1399338216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47835/original/ys3xmv6j-1399338216.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Neal Sanche</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But if we can accept for a moment there <em>is</em> such a crisis, political reality indicates it will need to be met with expenditure cuts as well as tax increases (although the Abbott government did make an election promise not to do this). As <a href="https://theconversation.com/commission-of-audit-and-the-arts-cuts-are-not-galore-26211">I previously noted on The Conversation</a>, those spending cuts – come May 13 – will probably not have much impact on arts and culture in this budget cycle (although the Commission did recommend that <a href="https://theconversation.com/proposed-merger-of-screen-australia-and-australia-council-spells-incoherence-26178">Screen Australia face funding cuts</a>).</p>
<p>So what then is the state of culture in Australia? Basically, it’s in rude health. We know this from government data itself. The Australian Bureau of Statistics collects a variety of statistics, although as with most aggregate economic data, there are several years of lag between gathering and reporting. </p>
<p>In February of this year the ABS released an experimental set of <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/AusStats/ABS@.nsf/Latestproducts/5271.0Main%20Features12008-09?opendocument&tabname=Summary&prodno=5271.0&issue=2008-09&num=&view=">cultural and creative activity satellite accounts</a>. These are for 2008-9.</p>
<h2>How we’re doing now</h2>
<p>The ABS Satellite account for 2008-9 shows the contribution of the cultural and creative economy to Australian GDP was A$86 billion, which is almost 7%. Cultural activity makes up A$50b of that, and creative activity is larger, at A$80b (a A$42b overlap of cultural and creative explains how these numbers add up to A$86b).</p>
<p>Public cultural spending was A$7.6b. Some A$2.3b of this was from federal spending, about half of which was for public broadcasting.</p>
<p>A <a href="http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/4102.0Main+Features40Jun+2011">2010 survey</a> carried out by the ABS indicates that Australians get a regular fix of culture, with about 85% reporting attending a cultural event, the most popular being cinema, but with music festivals, parks, and museums and galleries not too far behind.</p>
<p>Private cultural spending in 2010 was just under A$20b, with television, books and film capturing the bulk of that spending. According to the <a href="https://www.ato.gov.au/About-ATO/Research-and-statistics/In-detail/Tax-statistics/Taxation-statistics-2010-11/">Australian Tax Office</a>, just A$28 million was donated to cultural organisations from tax-deductible private ancillary funds.</p>
<p>By industrial sector, gross value added (GVA) estimates run to A$65b, the majority of which was broken down as:</p>
<ul>
<li>design (A$26b)</li>
<li>literature and print media ($13bn)</li>
<li>fashion ($12bn)</li>
<li>broadcasting, digital media and film ($8bn). </li>
</ul>
<p>The cultural and creative sector produces more GVA than health care, but less than construction.</p>
<p>There were about 1 million employees in this sector, with a quarter of those working in cultural and creative occupations outside the cultural and creative industries. There are more than 160,000 business or non-profit organisations in the cultural and creative industries sector.</p>
<p>International comparisons are plagued by definitional consistencies, but the ABS reports that Australia’s cultural and creative sector is very similar to that of Canada, Finland, Spain and the UK by most measures. (The largest, on a per-capita measure, is <a href="http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/nea_guide_white_paper.pdf">the US</a>.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47834/original/gjn7r4sq-1399338094.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47834/original/gjn7r4sq-1399338094.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47834/original/gjn7r4sq-1399338094.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47834/original/gjn7r4sq-1399338094.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47834/original/gjn7r4sq-1399338094.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=401&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47834/original/gjn7r4sq-1399338094.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47834/original/gjn7r4sq-1399338094.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47834/original/gjn7r4sq-1399338094.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=504&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Yu Shibao</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>How we got here</h2>
<p>There is much more detail that we could report from the above statistics. Yet we don’t need to worry too much about the lags in the data or the crude aggregations because a few overarching findings and long-run trends stand out.</p>
<p>The first is that the cultural and creative industries are large, vibrant and growing, and it is the creative, market-facing parts that are doing most of the heavy lifting.</p>
<p>That is entirely unsurprising, and nor – I will stress to add – is it an ideological point. These sectors can grow because they face not just millions of Australians but billions of global consumers. </p>
<p>The single most important factor driving and shaping the Australian cultural and creative economy is the global marketplace. And within that, Australia’s single greatest advantage is that we are a multi-cultural English-speaking nation, meaning that we have a comparative advantage in cultural content production for a global market.</p>
<p>The factor most accelerating this is the rise and spread of digital and computational technologies into all corners of cultural and creative production. This lowers the cost of production and distribution, increases access and variety, creates new platforms, and makes possible new business models.</p>
<p>A further significant trend is the long-run <a href="http://www.step.org/global-wealth-report">growth in household wealth globally</a>, not just in Australia. This increases the quantity of household spending and, consequentially, demand for cultural and creative content. Furthermore, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/07/does-art-help-the-economy/277842/">as demonstrated recently in the UK</a>, a strong case can be made connecting the growth of the arts and cultural sector with GDP growth. </p>
<p>These three factors – globalisation, technology and wealth – are not the only things that matter, but to a first order of approximation they are most of the story of how we got here.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47833/original/m6h2qmzg-1399337844.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47833/original/m6h2qmzg-1399337844.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47833/original/m6h2qmzg-1399337844.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47833/original/m6h2qmzg-1399337844.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47833/original/m6h2qmzg-1399337844.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=379&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47833/original/m6h2qmzg-1399337844.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47833/original/m6h2qmzg-1399337844.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47833/original/m6h2qmzg-1399337844.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=476&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">National Museum of Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Sam Ilić </span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The next ten years</h2>
<p>The most important policy forces affecting the cultural and creative economy in Australia are not those from within Australian cultural and creative industry policy. They are the factors affecting Australia’s position <em>vis-à-vis</em> the global economy, digital technology development and adoption, as well as the factors affecting household wealth.</p>
<p>These are factors relating to bilateral trade agreements (and the intellectual property provisions written into these), the state of the National Broadband Network, Australian tax policy, the vibrancy of the mining sector, and so on, will likely continue to have a far greater impact on the state of Australia’s cultural economy than, say, specific details pertaining to the funding of the National Gallery.</p>
<p>What is likely to change? We might usefully distinguish among the cultural economy between those parts that are more in the manner of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good">public goods</a> (such as national galleries, museums, and so on) from those that are subsidised industries (such as public support to the film industry).</p>
<p>Public goods suffer <a href="http://www.standard.net/topics/opinion/2011/01/14/free-rider-problem">free-rider problems</a>, and are best supplied through public funding. We can expect that Australian cultural public goods will continue to be funded, and maybe even receive greater funding as Australian wealth grows.</p>
<p>But the subsidised industries part of the cultural sector will face a tougher time. These can survive through lobbying and scare campaigns. But they also tend to be eventually defeated by innovative competition and new technologies.</p>
<p>It’s unclear where, for example, <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/the-future-of-public-broadcasting">Australia’s public broadcasters</a> fall on this spectrum. In the early years they very clearly were a public good. They still are in the case of some remote and regional broadcasting. But they are a purely subsidised industry in most urban markets and many media segments.</p>
<hr>
<p><strong>Further reading:</strong> <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/state-of-australia">The State of Australia series</a></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/26323/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jason Potts is affiliated with the Institute of Public Affairs.</span></em></p>
In the lead-up to the budget, the story of crisis has been hammered home, but there’s more to a country than its structural deficit. So how is Australia doing overall? In this special series, ten writers…
Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/26333
2014-05-06T06:38:54Z
2014-05-06T06:38:54Z
The three languages of arts and cultural funding
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47866/original/82qt92gq-1399357200.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47866/original/82qt92gq-1399357200.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/47866/original/82qt92gq-1399357200.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47866/original/82qt92gq-1399357200.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47866/original/82qt92gq-1399357200.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47866/original/82qt92gq-1399357200.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47866/original/82qt92gq-1399357200.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/47866/original/82qt92gq-1399357200.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock.com</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It is a truth universally acknowledged that the public funding of arts and culture will cause political strife. Reasonable people just do not agree on this, and can be surprisingly quick to accuse others of ideological warmongering.</p>
<p>That’s code of course for your own views being sound and sensible, while those of the other side are naïve, selfish, tyrannical, philistine, or just flat-out wrong in a way that is impervious to logic and evidence. It’s almost as if they’re speaking another language.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com.au/Three-Languages-Politics-Arnold-Kling-ebook/dp/B00CCGF81Q">The Three Languages of Politics</a> is a short e-book by Arnold Kling, a US economist and blogger. It will take perhaps an hour to read, and costs just A$2. Or you can listen to a podcast <a href="http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/06/kling_on_the_th.html">here</a>. The book is about why intelligent, well-meaning people disagree so much, and so bitterly, about politics. Kling’s thesis is that they are, in effect, speaking different languages.</p>
<p>Kling frames his essay about three political tribes: the left (known in the US as liberals), the right (conservatives), and libertarians. Each views the political world along its own axis of discourse and understanding.</p>
<p>For the left, the political world is viewed in terms of: oppressor – oppressed.</p>
<p>For the right, the worldview is on an axis of: civilisation – barbarism.</p>
<p>For libertarians, the relevant axis is: freedom – coercion.</p>
<p>These axes are largely incommensurable. When one groups sees an issue – say, refugees – through the lens of civilisation–barbarism, and thus as about border protection, other groups do not even register that framework, seeing it instead as about freedom of movement, as libertarians might, or as an issue of oppression, as the left does. </p>
<p>The result is that political discussions become polarised and ill-tempered. Kling offers these three axes as a kind of translation service that he hopes might enable each group to better understand how other groups see and discuss the world.</p>
<p>I think the same claim can be made about arts and cultural funding, which is equally dyspeptic in a similar three-languages way. Following Kling, it may be useful, especially in the shadow of the upcoming budget, to attempt to put one’s self in the mind of how the other side(s) thinks about these issues.</p>
<p>For conservatives, public funding of arts and culture is worthy when it supports the values of civilisation, which means a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruskin">John Ruskin</a> type view of the best of cultural heritage: museums, galleries, botanical gardens and opera will always do well here. What this group is hostile to are threats against that – barbarism – which come from the transgressive, edgy frontiers of arts and culture.</p>
<p>Those on the left see things almost exactly the other way, valuing the transgressive, edgy work precisely because it stands up for the oppressed, the outsider, the powerless minority view. They don’t see this as barbaric at all, but as a meeting of power against a hegemon, which for them is the real threat. </p>
<p>For conservatives, this is completely baffling. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Righteous-Mind-Politics-Religion/dp/0307377903">The Righteous Mind</a> that there are simply different moral dimensions at work here.</p>
<p>Libertarians tend to be confused by both such perspectives, seeing the real threat coming from coercion, which appears from the left by way of compulsory tax contributions, and from conservatives in the drive to compulsory aspects of support for, say, the cultural canon. They thus find themselves allied with the left in supporting the avant garde, but because of its experimental newness, not its power politics. </p>
<p>They usually hate that aspect. And they support the right in market-facing endeavours, but because of what evolutionary economists call <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Creative-Destruction-Globalization-Changing-Cultures/dp/0691117837">creative destruction</a>, which is the tendency of the market order to generate cultural novelty from within, not from a desire to minimise political activism. </p>
<p>Now these are obviously almost cartoonish simplifications of actually complex and subtle positions, but I think that these axes can help make sense of the level of heat in so many debates about arts and cultural funding.</p>
<p>Take <a href="https://theconversation.com/topics/the-future-of-public-broadcasting">public broadcasting</a>, for instance. For the left – along the oppressor-oppressed axis – it is a near article of faith that a healthy and robust ABC and SBS is necessary to maintain a bulwark against the potentially oppressive forces of commercial mainstream media. It is a necessary countervailing force.</p>
<p>But the right – along the civilisation-barbarism axis – doesn’t see it that way at all. They love some parts of it: Sunday morning shows, ABC Classic, and regional news and talk especially. But they despise the Ultimo productions of stacked Q&A panels and risible youth comedy that seem to represent encroaching barbarian hordes. So for them, the ABC needs to be brought under control.</p>
<p>The libertarians – along the freedom-coercion axis – are the only ones who really want it dismantled. But not because they don’t value what it offers, whether its promise of countervailing media power or its projection of civilising influences. They just don’t like being forced to pay for it.</p>
<p>The problem with a political society that speaks three different languages is that we get easily lost about why we disagree. The challenge is to try and see things from the other side’s perspective rather than continue to shout in our own languages.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/26333/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the public funding of arts and culture will cause political strife. Reasonable people just do not agree on this, and can be surprisingly quick to accuse others…
Jason Potts, Professor of Economics, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/19595
2013-11-22T04:28:53Z
2013-11-22T04:28:53Z
UNESCO leads the way on a truly global approach to cultural economy
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/34754/original/mwxdtdtd-1383885980.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">What happens when we reduce cultural value to the bottom line? </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">@yakobusan Jakob Montrasio 孟亚柯</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Last week, UNESCO launched its <a href="http://en.unesco.org/events/launch-united-nations-creative-economy-report-2013-special-edition">Creative Economy Report 2013</a> in New York. It’s a key document in a major reorientation of global cultural policy – away from <a href="https://theconversation.com/go-on-then-what-are-the-creative-industries-18958">creative industries</a> and towards a more inclusive and sustainable creative economy approach. </p>
<p>Creative industries focus on culture as an economic sector, while cultural economy emphasises:</p>
<p>1) the wider ecology of profit and not for profit, subsidised and commercial, large and small <br>
2) that cultural values are as important as economic values in framing policies for this sector<br>
3) that these cultural values inform how we should organise that economy</p>
<p>The UNESCO report sets out a new framework for culture, economy and sustainable development over the next decade. </p>
<p>On one hand, the report is part of a <a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/culture-and-development/hangzhou-congress/">concerted attempt</a> to insert a cultural dimension into the next version of the UN’s <a href="http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/bkgd.shtml">Millennium Development Goals</a>, currently being negotiated for 2015. </p>
<p>On the other, it aims to correct bullish claims that creative industries are set to transform the economies of developing countries. Culture can provide jobs and wealth – but reducing it to an economic bottom line will simply repeat the mistakes of GDP-driven development. </p>
<p>In 2008 a widely cited and highly influential <a href="http://unctad.org/en/pages/publications/Creative-Economy-Report-(Series).aspx">Creative Economy Report</a> by the UN’s trade and development agency, <a href="http://unctad.org/en/Pages/Home.aspx">UNCTAD</a>, suggested developing countries were set to be “one of the most dynamic sectors of world commerce”. </p>
<p>Developing countries were stealing the march on the Global North, taking 10% of their market share and accounting for almost half the global export of creative goods and services. After three decades in which culture was seen as the humanising facilitator of sustainable, local development, creative industries were then placed right behind the wheel of rapid economic growth. </p>
<p>There has been growing disquiet in cultural policy circles about the “creative industries” in general. </p>
<p>The term is notoriously vague. It is often confusing as to what the creative industries sector actually consists of – digital, software, hi-tech, consulting? Advocates of a creative industries approach stand accused of over-emphasising the commercial aspects of culture, reducing creativity to intellectual property rights, ignoring the growing exploitation of creative labour, and becoming narrowly economistic, reducing cultural value to the bottom line. </p>
<p>A recent <a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/cultural-diversity/cultural-expressions/programmes/technical-assistance/">UNESCO workshop</a> in Shanghai, co-organised with Monash and Shanghai Jiaotong University, suggested these concerns about the creative industries are now global in scope.</p>
<p>Though the creative industries have been promoted as an engine of development in the Global South, this ignores the deep-seated and persistent inequalities between North and South. </p>
<p>Indeed, the focus on high-value creative industries (such as digital marketing and communication design) in developing countries has led to widening imbalances between educated elites and the rest, and between metropolitan centres and poorer regions. </p>
<p>As to their growing share of world trade in creative goods and services, if China is taken out of the “developing country” category, the actual percentage falls to around 20%. If we take the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BRIC">BRIC</a> nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) out, it shrinks even further. </p>
<p>The new UNESCO report significantly changes tack. It builds on the <a href="http://www.unesco.org/new/en/culture/themes/cultural-diversity/cultural-expressions/">2005 UNSECO convention</a> on the diversity of cultural expressions, suggesting that purely market-oriented development erodes local cultures and undermines the ability of individuals and communities to access material forms of cultural expression. </p>
<p>The uncritical adoption of creative industry policy nostrums from the Global North, wrapped in promises of a dynamic new source of economic growth, has become increasingly counter-productive. </p>
<p>In response the new report has moved towards the idea of a cultural or creative economy. </p>
<p>Here, economy is not defined exclusively in terms of markets, growth and GDP indicators. It is a return to an older notion of economy as a commonwealth – how we produce wealth and distribute the surplus, with all the political and ethical questions this entails. It is also an ecosystem, a complex balance of diverse entities and activities that cannot be reduced to a single metric or motivation. </p>
<p>Cultural economies do create jobs and wealth; but that wealth is not just about profit or GDP, but also about human wellbeing. </p>
<p>In the hitching of creativity to purely commercial outputs, the creative industries agenda has forgotten why people make and participate in culture. This is not an argument for some return to artistic purity and public subsidy. </p>
<p>Direct public funding has its place alongside a range of different policy tools around investment, taxation, regulation, education, research, development, and so on. </p>
<p>It is an argument that suggests a new approach to cultural economy would not just ask what kind of culture we want to produce – but what kind of economy we want to help us do this. </p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/19595/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Justin O'Connor is a member of the twenty person Technical Expert Group appointed by UNESCO as part of its Technical Assistance for Cultural Governance, under the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions.</span></em></p>
Last week, UNESCO launched its Creative Economy Report 2013 in New York. It’s a key document in a major reorientation of global cultural policy – away from creative industries and towards a more inclusive…
Justin O'Connor, Professor of Communications and Cultural Economy, Monash University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.