Tony Bennett, Differing diversities - Council of Europe

Differing diversitiesPortraits of cultural participationOver the last fifty years, policy makers described the involvement of minority anddiverse groups in the arts by creating a portrait of arts participation drawn fromlabour market characteristics and then analysing similarities and differences ofartists with other comparable members of the overall work force. This approachmisses the differences between persons working in commercial and non-profitfields. It also neglects the “crossovers” or patterns of multiple jobs, as well asexperiences within and across cultural fields or across lines of gender, race andethnicity. Galligan and Alper (1998) suggest using a new conceptual paradigm thatpermits a better understanding of the crossovers within and across the commercial,non-profit, self-employed and unincorporated facets of the cultural sector. Of specialimportance to studies of cultural policy, it is crucial to include in any portraitthe “unincorporated arts” which includes a range of “citizen” arts, including community,traditional and indigenous arts (Peters and Cherbo, 1998) and to documenttheir contribution to cultural diversity.Arts and culture indicators for community-based organisationsThe Arts and Culture Indicators in Community Building Project (ACIP) is anexploratory effort to develop arts and culture indicators for community neighbourhoodsconducted by the Urban Institute, a Washington DC-based non-profitpublic policy research organisation. This project sought to develop indicatorsthrough a better understanding of the presence and role of arts and culture, culturalinstitutions, artists in inner-city neighbourhoods and community-building contexts,and to assess the existing data collection practices among the communitybasedand mainstream arts and culture organisations. According to the project’sprincipal researcher (Jackson, 1998):i. mainstream definitions of “the arts” exclude the culture and values of manygroups that live in the inner city and that many expressions of artistic creativityhave not been understood as art or culture;ii. arts and culture should not be viewed only as products to be consumed but alsoas processes and systems that are part of the life of the community;iii. cultural participation should be measured along a “continuum of cultural participation”and not only as audience participation;iv. cultural activities are found in mainstream cultural venues and also in manyother community locations; andv. “indigenous venues of validation” must be understood by using ethnographicresearch methods before appropriate indicator categories can be created.Building evaluation capacityIn recent years substantial funding investments in the arts, the emergence of professionalarts administrators, and growth of arts agencies have strengthened the102