A Cultural Policy Doctorate

The Australia Council has released its latest consultancy about the MPO’s. It’s a slightly shallow report full of catch-phrases from internaionally renowned consultancy AEA Consulting (home of some heavy-hitters in the British sector) entitled “Anticipating Change in the Major Performing Arts.”

It’s certainly good that the MPOs are anticipating change in their future - but I’m not sure how prepared they are. Indeed, some sections of the report reveal that some of the organisations are far from the kind of financial health that the Nugent Inquiry was meant to “secure.”

Interestingly, the report contains a sprinkling of statistics on new works, which may be useful for my thesis. It also confirms, anecdotally at least, the operation of Baumol’s cost disease in this sector of the Australian performing arts.

The fuil report is available here.

Apologies are due to Elaine and any other readers of my blog: I’ve been rather silent here of late, owing to some very hard work I’ve been doing producing a play in Melbourne.

The play is called “Venus in Furs” and is a new adaptation by my friend Neal Harvey of the 19th century novel by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch - a minor classic of fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungarian literature that also gave the world the term “masochism.”

You can read some reviews of the play in The Age, The Australian and a very fine engagement with the piece at Vibewire.

The reason I mention this involvement is that, rather in the style of Edward Epstein, The Hollywood Economist, I’m going to unpick the economics of this independent production on this blog. In the process, it will hopefully illustrate some of the themes of my upcoming confirmation draft concerning the structure of the cultural industries, and the implications (if any) for cultural policy.

I haven’t been totally slacking off on my confirmation, by the way - I’ve been doing a lot of reading in the daytim, and later this afternoon I’m going to post a series of reviews of monographs I’ve recently read - Bruno S. Frey’s Arts and Economics, David Hesmondhalgh’s The Cultural Industries and Tyler Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture.

But for for those of you interested in the micro-economics of independent theatre, read on …

Read the rest of this entry »

The United Nations’ Conference on Trade and Development has released its Creative Economy Report 2008: The challenge of assessing the creative economy towards informed policy-making.

The report has tons of useful statistics which I’m going be looking at over the next couple of days. it promises to shed significant information on international trade flows in this vital area - not just in cultural goods but in cultural services as well.

From the website:

The 350-pages Report recognizes that creativity and human talent are fast becoming powerful engines for economic growth and development, and calls for the adoption of effective cross-cutting mechanisms and concerted inter-ministerial policy action.

Developing countries around the world can find ways to optimize the potential of the creative economy for generating economic growth, job creation and export earnings while at the same time promoting social inclusion, cultural diversity and human development.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading the Dominic Power and Allan J. Scott edited Cultural industries and the production of culture (Routledge, 2004).

It contains some excellent chapter articles by some heavy-hitting contributors. One of the best is “Making a living in London’s small-scale creative sector” by Angela McRobbie, Professor of Communications at Goldsmiths College in London. McRobbie is perhaps bets known for her insightful writing on contemporary feminism, but this chapter’s discussion of his research into emerging visual artists in London is a gem. Read the rest of this entry »

Over at New Matilda’s PollieGraph blog, I’ve given my analysis of the 2020 “Creative Australia” group’s published communique.

As I discovered when talking to Marcus Westbury last night, the final report doesn’t resemble the discussions that took place, at least according to many who were there. Full details over the fold: Read the rest of this entry »

The beneficiary of a late call-up for the 2020 Summit, my friend and colleague Marcus Westbury has been discussing what ideas about cultural policy might be worth bringing to the “Towards a creative Australia” group.

The discussion taking place on his blog is notable not only for the sophistication of many of the comments but also for Marcus’ timely ideas for cultural policy reform:

Half a century on from the Whitlam era few Australians would be convinced that a 2020 cultural vision focusing on innovation and initiative will be found in shovelling bigger buckets of money at conservative major institutions. Expecting it to trickle down through the layers of management to actual risk taking artists is naive at best.

Many of the comments posted here over the last few days either explicitly or implicitly acknowledge this. While many argue directly for a more diverse, competitive and dynamic funding environment the aim is less for grand, centralised and expensive top down public programs than for attention to the impediments and practical barriers that make it hard for creators to create, to find audiences, to take risks and to innovate.

The amazing lack of a single representative of the game design or interactive digital media industries at this panel has also been taken up at Fairfax’s Screenplay blog by Jason Hill.

South African academic Jeanette Snowball has written a timely and important new monograph entitled Measuring the Value of Culture.

Snowball’s aim in writing this valuable short review is explained in her introduction:

“Economic impact studies are thus one way of measuring the value of arts, but only one way, and it smethodology is not unproblematic. A better way of capturing the non-market value of culture might be to use contingent valuation (willingness to pay) studies or their newer relation, choice experiments (also called conjoint analysis).” (Snowball, 2008: 3).

Unfortunately for my doctorate, such analyses are typically large and expensive and carried out by professional market research firms. Never-the-less, there is much of value for the professional arts administrator and cultural policy academic in this book. It summarises the debate about willingness to pay studies -  in particular , the controversy over the Exxon Valdez environmental damages litigation, where courts used contingent valuation studies as part of their reasoning.

What follows is a detailed analysis of four different ways of measuring culture:

• “qualititative/historical” - art historical and sociological analyses. Snowball is raher weak here when she dismisses this vast field by pointing out that it “does not result in one, easily comparable figure.”
• economic impact - Snowball summarises the controversies over the rubbery figures of economic impact studies, especially of arts events like festivals. She correctly points out that the “multipliers” used by many of these studies are so various as to be basically meaningless
• willingness to pay - in contrast to economic impact studies, willingness to pay or contingent valuation studies represent an imporant methodological advance in the cultural economics literature - however these studies have their own methodological controversies too
• choice experiments - the newest frontier in valuing culture, incorporating some of the discoveries of behavioural economics, choice experiments are also labour-intensive in their survey methodology.

A major disappointment for me in the book was that Snowball has not examined the micro-economic efficiency studies in the musuems sector of researchers like Stefania Funari and Paul Bishop.  Even so, it remains an important review.

Earlier this year Fuel4Arts commissioned me to examine the incoming Arts Minister’s likely arts and cultural policy agenda. That paper is now online.

I’ve also posted the full text of my piece over at PollieGraph, New Matilda’s blog page.

Over at Larvatus Prodeo, I’ve published an annotated linked analysis of the attendees to the “Towards a Creative Australia” forum at Kevin Rudd’s 2020 summit. The list is cross-posted at Nick Pickard’s “Sydney Arts Journo” blog, with some interesting back and forth between me and Alison Croggon.

The link is here.

The Cultural Minster’s Council has released its new paper, Building a Creative Innovation Economy.

The paper relies heavily on the work and wisdom of the various arts and information departments of the New Zealand and state and territory governments. As such its an extremely valuable snapshot of the Australian and New Zealand creative sector.

It’s less clear whether the fairly vague policy prescriptions will make a real difference. Difficult questions are glossed over and motherhood statements abound.