Thursday, May 19, 2011

Cultural indexes and city rankings....again

An article in The Australian by Stuart Cunningham and Jason Potts represents the sort of intervention that is less about extending our understanding of the issue at hand but about appearing to intervene. The content is less important than the fact of the intervention and the patina of expertise further added to the brand. The main point of the article is that their new research method shows culture is more expensive in rural areas than in cities; and that the National Broadband Network will address this. Lots of space is given to showing how better their methodology is than others, but when we come to the substantive account the whole thing looks decidedly wobbly.

The basket of ‘mainstream’ cultural consumer items is made up of:

“mass culture (blockbuster movie); family culture (library visit); interactive culture (cultural or music festival); home culture (music album, downloaded where possible); high culture (theatre); and cultural learning (piano lesson).”

‘Mass culture’ as term was creaking when early cultural studies began its sustained onslaught in the late 1950s: how is mass distinguished from or a sub-set of ‘mainstream’? What is ‘family culture’ and what evidence is there that families visit libraries as a group or that library visitors are characterized in this way? How is a cultural or music festival ‘interactive’ – and what is the difference between a cultural or a music festival? How is 'home culture' about a downloaded music album – rather than a book (bought ‘live’ or via Kindle) or a film or a picture. What on earth makes theater ‘high culture’ – and how is this different from reading James Joyce at home after having gone to the library (on your own). As for 'cultural learning' – I take it this means lessons given live rather than the constant learning by reading a book, watching a movie etc.

Why nit pick? Because these sorts of interventions claim the authority of statistically grounded fact and the ability to throw dispassionate light on particular issues. But at bottom they are advertisements for themselves, as expertise and as method, aimed not at elucidation but the generation of interest around the possibility of more ‘indicators’ which we can use to decide public policy. Yet as they admit, all they come up with is the obvious – that the need to travel to cultural facilities makes it far more expensive to consume culture in rural than in city areas. Therefore there is no cultural divide in terms of taste but merely in terms of affordability. So much for the bush-city divide. The solution is the NBN – which will bring digital culture to these areas.

But hang on; of the basket of ‘mainstream culture’ only one category involves downloads. So how will the NBN address this divide? By downloading films, books and maybe on-line piano lessons. That is, turning this basket of diverse cultural activities into 'home culture'. Now there is nothing wrong with that; indeed most city dwellers I suspect engage in home culture more than any other. But how is this bridging the cultural divide – which is marked by the availability of public, live facilities located (necessarily, mostly) in dense regions. Well it doesn’t. Not on this account. And, as a sort of afterthought, what has that got to do with the opaque account of a ‘population scaled index’, which somehow puts Byron Bay first and Alice Springs third in a national league table of ‘per capita cultural productivity or local cultural engagement’? The answer is nothing. But then it is not meant to; its purpose is to advertise its authority as such, that it actually knows what it is talking about.

1 comment:

  1. Justin
    Whilst I am an artist, I am commercially viable artist , a sole trader who paints pictures of gum trees and sells them for a living. I suppose I thus have a foot in 'arts' and a foot in 'industry'.
    My partner is a historian who has (roughly speaking) specialised in the history ,in Australia, of the evolution of 'the arts' between 1960 and 1980, as a phenomena driven by complex interactions between sociological forces, Tertiary Arts Education, Government policy and new Belief systems ; interactions that often produced , in reality, ironic results.

    Most of the time, posts about subjects like 'arts' 'creativity' and 'cultural policy' remind me of Spinoza's account of a neighbor who sincerely believed that 'his yard had flown into his neighbors chickens' .
    Your post is one of very few posts that I have read where, again in Spinoza's phrasing, the 'figures in the mind are the same as the figures on the piece of paper'.

    It seems to me that what Mr Keating set out to achieve in Creative Nation , in execution became a figure-ground reversal: a drawing of its exact opposite.
    And that this was provably no accident.

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