FROM THE DESK of Alain Pineau: Chalmers Mini-Conference by John Holden, Head of Culture for the Influential British think tank DEMOS

CCA Bul­letin 03/08

Feb­ru­ary 11, 2008

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.