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ing of ‘value’ is closely related to notions of ‘benefits’ and ‘impacts’ though the
terms are not entirely synonymous. Brown, RAND, Klamer and Holden agree
that education may be necessary to experience value, and Klamer and Holden
maintain that it may take the trained eye of an expert to recognise a hidden
potential for value that can be brought to blossom by appropriately framing the
cultural experience and engaging the public.
Cultural value
For Throsby ‘cultural value’ refers to the value that is created by cultural goods and
experiences that is not ‘economic value’. Klamer largely agrees with this, except
that he also separates social values out from the cultural. In both cases, it is unfortunate
that cultural value is defined in the negative: it is value that is not economic
value and is not social value. So what is it Throsby’s identification of several constituent
elements of cultural value (largely adopted by Klamer) is a useful step
towards answering this question; however, this approach has several flaws. In subdividing
cultural value, we are cutting a pie into pieces without knowing how big
the pie is. How would we know if Throsby missed any significant components of
cultural value in his list How would we know if the components he has identified
are the right ones
Despite these lingering problems, the notion of ‘cultural value’ as that which
exists in excess of any economic and social value is extremely useful. Holden uses
‘cultural value’ in a less technical sense, to describe a way of thinking about and
describing the many ways in which cultural organisations produce value. In this
usage, ‘cultural value’ refers to a strategy rather than an outcome. If ‘cultural value’
is used as a rhetorical catchall for the work cultural organisations do, there is a
danger that the term will be reduced to a hollow slogan or rallying cry. Since both
the term and the concept are well established in cultural economics, future references
should take the prevailing definitions in that literature into account.
Cultural capital
In thinking about the development of more productive language to debate issues
related to valuation and evaluation in the cultural sector, it is clear that conflicting
definitions of the same term, as exist in Throsby’s and Klamer’s respective notions
of ‘cultural capital’, are to be avoided whenever possible. Since both the economic
sense of the term (Throsby’s) and the sociological (used by Klamer) are well established
in their respective disciplines, it will be difficult to resolve this conflict
at this stage in the conversation. This is a great pity since both meanings of the
term are potentially significant in understanding how value is created through
arts and culture. Both meanings are related in that they refer to an investment in
Framing the Conversation 56
UNDERSTANDING the value and impacts of cultural experiences