CCA Bulletin 03/08

FROM THE DESK OF ALAIN PINEAU

National Director
Canadian Conference of the Arts

Ottawa, February 11, 2008

Chalmers Mini-Conference by John Holden, Head of Culture for the Influential British think tank DEMOS

Just The Facts

On Thursday January 31, the Canadian Conference of the Arts, with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, presented a public lecture by John Holden, Head of Culture for the influential British think tank DEMOS. This event was held at the University of Ottawa.

Mr. Holden gave a detailed presentation on what he calls the “cultural system”, i.e. the framework in which various stakeholders in the cultural sector have to interact: the politicians, the public and the cultural professionals. According to him, this system’s legitimacy is in crisis, which is the result of more than 30 years of cumulative conceptual problems. Cultural professionals would very much like politicians to affirm as strong a commitment to cultural issues as they show towards health or education. However, according to Holden, while a number of politicians demonstrate a genuine interest in cultural issues, such a commitment will remain unattainable as long as the three main agents of the cultural system can’t reach a consensus.

Holden’s analysis revealed that public investment in culture brings about three types of benefits: intrinsic, instrumental and institutional. However, these benefits do not raise the same level of interest for each participant in this cultural system: politicians are mainly interested in the more demonstrably measurable instrumental benefits (social and economic), while the public and cultural professionals put greater value on the intrinsic and the institutional benefits. This leads Holden to conclude that the entire cultural system has become dysfunctional, leading more particularly to miscommunication between politicians and culture professionals. Subsequently, culture professionals must take this problem into consideration if they hope to legitimize their request for increased support from governments. This approach should include improved dialogue with politicians, informing them of the intrinsic and institutional values of culture. Furthermore, culture professionals should also seek to increase the public’s level of awareness of the importance of culture in our societies. This would certainly influence decision makers obviously concerned with the population’s preoccupations.

Tell Me More

John Holden is Head of Culture at DEMOS where he conducts research on individual and organizational development in the arts and culture sectors. With a track record in several artistic disciplines, he has amongst other achievements been the main architect of the conference Valuing Culture, a topic which has become one of his main areas of research. He has published a number of essays for DEMOS, primarily discussing cultural diplomacy, a topic that has been of great interest to the CCA for the past several months.

For almost 15 years now, DEMOS has been one of Britain’s most influential think tank, with conferences and publications pertaining to a large number of topics linked to public policy. DEMOS’ publications can be downloaded, free of charge, from the organization’s website at http://www.demos.co.uk/publications.cfm