Konstnären och kulturnäringarna Artists and the Arts Industries

Yudhishthir Raj Isar | Problems with the Paradigm Yudhishthir Raj Isar | Problems with the Paradigm
market or taken over by the ever-growing transnational corporations.
For Throsby (2008: 33), ‘the crisis of value engendered
by these trends is clear: music production in these circumstances
becomes increasingly a process of creating economic value
rather than a cultural expression whose primary importance is
as a purveyor of cultural meaning.’ It is difficult to escape the
conclusion that there is steadily increasing emphasis on the economic
value of cultural production, a trend that may be accepted
willingly by some producers, and reluctantly and inevitably by
others. The technological impacts also have a range of effects,
from the undoubted benefits of new media for artistic creativity
to the more uncertain effects on the interpretation of cultural
value in the new technological utopia. Yet, as Stuart Hall (2004:
34) warns us, we must not overplay the beneficial effects of globalization
on artistic production, for:
One of the immediate effects of globalization has been the in-
ternationalization of the circuits and circulations of cultural
and artistic production . . . it’s now ideologically represented
to us as if there’s a frictionless cultural universe in which any-
body can get on the tramline anywhere, any work of art will be
seen anywhere . . . [But] in reality . . . you see massive dispari-
ties of access, of visibility, huge yawning gaps between who can
and who can’t be represented in an effective way.
Economics isn’t everything...
My initial questioning of the primacy accorded to creative industries
reasoning stems from an abiding sympathy for the ‘arts
for arts’ sake’ school of thought. In other words, I start with a
belief in the intrinsic value of the arts, a stance that has little
purchase among most analysts of cultural policy issues nowadays,
and indeed is seen by many as ‘old-fashioned obfuscation,
and just not hard-headed enough’ (Holden, 2002: 22).
This belief of mine is not just soft-headed, however, for as the
experience of decades of economic and social impact studies
of the arts clearly shows, the problem is not just that much of
the case made for that economic impact is overstated as a result
of special pleading, but also that the performance of the
arts sector is easily exceeded by other sectors of the economy
in terms of their contribution to the economy. Nevertheless,
it would be difficult to find a cultural politician or official
anywhere who would talk or act on the basis of intrinsic value
arguments. A notable exception is the cultural manager and
writer John Tusa, who in 1999 first aired the view that the
arts matter not for the instrumental reasons – in other words
not for the potential contribution to the economy, etc. – but
for their aesthetic value and everything that accompanies it.
In reality, however, and across the entire spectrum of political
systems today, ‘the search for at least alternative, if not actually
superior, justifications for the creation of cultural and
artistic policies has led to an increasing ‘attachment’ of arts
and cultural policies to other sets of policy concerns in a quite
clearly instrumental fashion’ (Gray, 2007: 203). This instrumentalization
has many different consequences; among them
is a different kind of relationship between states and their
citizens. Tusa himself, revisiting in 2005 his purist stance of
1999, was ready to admit that
The arts do stimulate the growth of a creative sector in the
economy. They do play a part in the vigour of the ideas eco-
nomy. Yet, true as this is, it still seems to me to miss the
point. The value of the arts is not to be defined as if they
were just another economic lever to be pulled. That would
place them on a level of activity where measurement of re-
sults, predictability of outcome and direction of activity are
rated as conditions of success and therefore as grounds for
investment in the first place. It puts us back in the bind of
instrumentality. The real question, then, is this: if art cannot
repay the public subsidy; if it represents an investment on
which there is no return; if it cannot guarantee audiences; if
it cannot demonstrate immediate social relevance - if all of
this is the case, why does art matter? Real art can fail every
measurable objective set by economists and politicians. Yet
it will still be art, sometimes great art. The criteria by which
it is judged are different and must be appropriate to the ac-
tivity. This is not to evade accountability; it is to insist that
accountability must be right for the activity.
Although for the John Tusas of this world the terrain of the
political might simply represent just another form of instrumentality
– and not offer in their eyes the kind of accountability
that is right for artistic activity – I contend that there are
concerns of a political nature, questions of political philosophy,
that should be given as much importance as the claims of market
viability or profitability. One such claim is that of democracy
itself, which needs the arts (and the humanities which
they anchor) as crucial elements in driving and energizing civil
society. I would follow the American political scientist Benjamin
Barber here, when he asserts that (1997: 1) ‘a free society
gains its liberty and its democratic vitality from civil society,
and the arts and humanities invest civil society with its creativity,
its diverseness and its liberating spontaneity.’ As Barber
also observes, what complicates the relationship is the market,
with which civil society is now almost always conflated in our
neo-liberal systems of governance. To be sure, the market offers
free and private space to art and culture and thus insulates
them from official governmental direction and censorship;
yet the commercial space can imperil artistic autonomy as
well. Artists may be invisibly coerced more strenuously by the
constraints of the marketplace today than by any other force,
subjected to the dynamics of commerce that pushes towards
uniformity of taste, a levelling of standards, and the commodification
of art products. Artists in turn, although they may
certainly choose to pursue their muse free from interference,
may discover that by assuming public responsibilities, say for
arts education and civic engagement, they contribute to a climate
that is as tolerant and pluralistic as liberal philosophy
says it ought to be. Artists may be responsible only to their
art, but they are also citizens, and as citizens they contribute
to and nourish an arts-supportive civil society. In doing so they
at once serve democracy and themselves, their fellow citizens
and their art. As Barber puts it (1997: 11-12),
As democracy depends on civil society for its liberal spirited-
ness, so civil society depends on the arts. Democracy ultima-
tely rests on the arts’ commitment to free creativity, liberal
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