aceUVi

Art, culture, and the creation of value: the
big picture
Over the past three decades public arts funders have increasingly come under
pressure to report on and justify their spending on arts and culture. Complying
with these demands has been quite challenging, since many of the outcomes of
cultural funding are not immediately measurable or easily summarised in a tidy
statistic like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This problem is not unique to
the arts. The health care and environmental protection fields, for instance, have
faced similar challenges in measuring and reporting the value they produce
(O’Brien 2010, 4).
The initial response to these demands was to gather evidence that demonstrated
that arts and culture produce outcomes that clearly contribute to policy objectives
that the government had identified as priorities. This led to an initial emphasis
on economic impacts of the arts in the 1980s and early 90s, to which a number
of studies of social benefits generated by the arts were added beginning in the
mid 90s (Selwood 2002; White and Hede 2008, 20-21). In the first decade of the
new millennium this approach was criticised for forcing cultural organisations to
justify their existence based on outcomes that have little, if anything, to do with
their mission statements (eg, Ellis 2003; Holden 2004, 14), which usually focus on
producing high-quality art and meaningful cultural experiences. This gave rise to
debates that have often been framed as a clash between ‘intrinsic’ and ‘instrumental’
arguments for the arts (described in Bunting, 2008), though it was realised
early on that the two positions are in fact integrally intertwined (McCarthy et al
2004, 69; Coles 2008; Knell and Taylor 2011, 8).
To position the present literature review within the larger context of outcomes
and values that are produced by arts and culture, the following overview addresses
some of the main areas of inquiry within the larger field as well as methods that
have been used to measure the outcomes and values that arts and culture produce
in each of these areas. While this overview is of necessity brief, readers are
referred to relevant literature where these issues can be explored more fully.
Introduction 30
UNDERSTANDING the value and impacts of cultural experiences