Two important new research reports from the Australia Council

With the excitement of Australia’s hung Parliament and everything I have been giving cultural policy matters a back seat for my writing on Australian politics itself.

Indeed, the election campaign has also obscured the release of two important research reports from the Australia Council on the state of artists’ incomes and career prospects in Australia.

On August 17th – in other words, during the last week of the election campaign – the Australia Council released the new reports, which it claims “offer a comprehensive picture of the working lives of Australian artists.”

The first, Do You Really Expct to Get Paid? is the latest in the long-running artists’ income survey conducted by eminent Macquarie University cultural economist David Throsby.  This is an important and extremely rich research research project, as it has been running for nearly three decades across five separate surveys.  The latest installment is particularly rewarding, offering fascinating insights and precious hard data on issues like artists’ basic demography, income levels, working hours, employment patterns, professional challenges and use of new technology. It’s a treasure trove of sociological information which I’ll be exploring here in more detail over the next few weeks.

Stuart Cunningham and Peter Higgs’ What’s Your Other Job?: A census analysis of artists’ employment in Australia is a very thorough and interesting dissection of available Australian Census data. But it inadvertantly shows up of one of the biggest policy  problems posed by the Australia Council by the methodological definitions it employs. Presumably at the request of the Australia Council itself, census definitions  used are not those the ABS uses in it Employment in Culture series, but rather a subset of those classifications that deal only with the artforms currently funded by the Australia Council: Chiefly literature, music, visual arts and crafts, theatre and dance, “cross-artform” arts, and design.

The relevant definitions are carefully explicated – but what it is significant is who is missing. If I read the definitions correctly,  whole swathes of the cultural sector are missing. There are no film-makers, no animators, no game designers or developers, no broadcasters or book or magazine publishers, no librarians or archivists, no journalists and no bloggers – nor any of the related professions that might be snobbishly considerd “non-artistic” but in fact are vital to the production and performance of the arts – jobs like sound recorders and producers, festival promoters, museum curators and film and TV producers.

In fact, the film and television sector appears to have been excluded altogether – a strange and arbitrary decision which appears to have more to do with existing policy ambit of the Australia Council than the relevance or cogency of this definition to the broader debate. After all, what is it exactly makes design more “artistic” than cinematography?

None of which is to criticise Cunningham and Higgs’ report, which still has some really interesting things to tell us – data I’m going to explore over the course of the next week or so.

What’s new in the Journal of Cultural Economy

The latest issue of the Journal of Cultural Economy is out, themed around the idea of “Assembling Culture”.

The editorial for this issue by Chris Healy and Tony Bennett is available online, and what an interesting issue it is too. Taking their cue from Bruno Latour’s rethinking of power and its agency, Bennett and Healy ask:

If the social does not exist as a special domain but as ‘a peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling’, what implications does this have for how ‘the cultural’ might best be conceived? Is this too usefully thought of as composed of distinctive processes of assembly giving rise to ‘cultural assemblages’ which produce and exercise particular kinds of power? If so, how are we to think the relations between such assemblages and those processes and forms through which the economy and the social are made up? What new ways of thinking the relations between culture, the economy and the social might be developed by pursuing such lines of inquiry? And what are there implications for the relations between culture and politics? And what, finally, are the limits of recasting the concerns of cultural analysis through the prism of assembly/ assemblage theory?

The edition itself contains a fascinating series of articles including Tim Rowse on the “ontological politics of closing the gaps”, Celia Lury on “Brand as Assemblage”, Gerard Goggin on “Assembling media culture: the case of mobile phones”, and GayHawkins on the politics of bottled water. Lots to get your teeth into here.

Bejmain Genocchio on Avital Oz in the New York Times

 

Avital Oz's “Linkage” (1982), left, and “Black Sun” (1980), from Benjamin Genocchio's review of his retrospective in the New York Times, courtesy of Art Sites.

Australian visual art audiences will no doubt be pleased to see art Australian critic Benjamin Genocchio writing for thew New York Times.

In a recent article, Genocchio reviews the work of noted minimalist Avital Oz, a former protege of Sol Le Witt. It’s typical of Genocchio’s stylish yet understated prose, which makes him one of our best art writers.

For those interested in Genocchio as a critic and writer, the ABC’s Ally Moore interviewed him last year (click forward to 19 minutes in the sound file). The interview canvasses resale royalty rights and why Genocchio thinks that any droit de suite will only benefit the estates of the top few artists. His most recent book is Dollar Dreaming, about the Australian Aboriginal visual art market.

Michael Berube on the trouble with cultural studies

There’s plenty, as seemingly everyone in the field seems to agree. Now we have Michael Berube at the Chronicle of Higher Education, arguing that:

Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (1978), the Birmingham collection that predicted the British Labour Party’s epochal demise, is now more than 30 years old. In that time, has cultural studies transformed the disciplines of the human sciences? Has cultural studies changed the means of transmission of knowledge? Has cultural studies made the American university a more egalitarian or progressive institution? Those seem to me to be useful questions to ask, and one useful way of answering them is to say, sadly, no. Cultural studies hasn’t had much of an impact at all.

I’m saying this baldly and polemically for a reason. I know there are worthy programs in cultural studies at some North American universities, like Kansas State and George Mason, where there were once no programs at all. I know that there is more interdisciplinary work than there was 25 years ago; there is even an entire Cultural Studies Association, dating all the way back to 2003. But I want to accentuate the negative in order to point out that over the past 25 years, there has been a great deal of cultural-studies triumphalism that now seems unwarranted and embarrassing.

Berube conludes by arguing that despite the fertile interdisciplinary links the movement has established, it appears to have exerted little influence on sociology in the US (followers of Paul Di Maggio might beg to differ); worse, “the situation is even bleaker if you ask about cultural studies’ impact on psychology, economics, political science, or international relations, because you might as well be asking about the carbon footprint of unicorns.”

I think there is actually much more cause for optimism than Berube admits. Even so,  this is a enjoyable and provoking little piece.

Andrew Ross’ No-Collar

I’ve spent the last couple of days reading Andrew Ross’ No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Costs , his early 2000′s book exploring the working lives of the employees of New York web consultancy Razorfish.

As usual with Ross’ work, it’s a highly enjoyable read. Ross has an effortless prose style that is simultaneously nuanced and succint, placing him somewhere between intelligent long-form journalism and engaged ethnography, though of course that term itself is a loaded one in the academic context of the sociology of work.

The book is some years old now and I don’t propose to thoroughly review it, but a couple of features are salient.

First is Ross’ ambivalence and curiosity about the nature of what a “good job” might constitute. Given the very different working conditions of most white- and blue-collar workers (again, taking these general and somewhat outdated terms very advisably),  he is understandably fascinated at the promise of what a really enjoyable work culture might provide.

Nathan Jurgenson on Facebook, the transumer and liquid capitalism

Mark Bahnisch at Larvatus Prodeo has posted on Nathan Jurgenson’s blog post at Sociology Lens on Facebook, the transumer and liquid capitalism:

During this “great recession” capitalism might become lighter and more liquid while older and more solidified traditions wash away in the flux of unstable markets (potentially an economic “reboot,” similar to Schumpeter’snotion of capitalism as “creative destruction”). Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquidity” thesis about our late-modern world becoming more fluid seems relevant in light of the “transumer” and “virtual commodities”, both having received recent attention.

The transumer (video) is, in part, one who encounters “stuff” temporarily as opposed to accumulating it permanently. Zipcar, Netflix and others mentioned articulate that for many, especially the young and/or wealthy, the physical amassing of “stuff” is unwanted and instead have begun to rent items people once accumulated. “Stuff”, for many, is decreasingly allowed to solidify on our shelves and in our attics, instead flowing in a more liquid and nimble sense through consumers’ lives.

Another article discusses the rise of “virtual goods” -digital commodities such as gifts on Facebook or weapons on World of Warcraft. Again, the trend is towards “lighter” exchange as opposed to the solid and heavier exchange of physical goods. Microsoft was Bauman’s example of “light capitalism”, producing light products such as software, which is, opposed to heavier items such as automobiles, more changeable and disposable. The proliferation of virtual goods also exemplifies this trend.

As Bahnisch points out, 

For quite some time, it’s been becoming easier to conceive of the commodity as something immaterial – a social relation – and indeed of economic value as a social construct. [...] To cut a long story short, there is a real sense in which the concept of the ‘prosumer’ gestures towards a hypostasised economic (and social) relation as well as a blurring of borders between consumption and production of content and knowledge.

Philip Schlesinger on think-tanks and the policy process

From Philip Schlesinger, Professor of Cultural Policy at the University of Glasgow, comes a fine paper on think-tanks as cultural and policy institutions: “Creativity and the Experts: New Labour, Think Tanks, and the Policy Process.” It’s published in the January 2009 issue of The International Journal of Press/Politics, 14(3): 3-20.

This enviably well-written article looks at the phenomenon of UK think-tanks specifically from a creative industries perspective: an important topic, given the vast influence exerted by institutions like Demos and the Institute for Public Policy Research on the Blair and Brown governments.

Those who work in think tanks, as policy advisers or consultants, are a tiny and select segment of the university-educated

intelligentsia. They operate within elite circles where the costs of entry to

knowledgeable policy discussion are high. Their exclusivity — or as Pierre Bourdieu (1986) would put it, their “distinction” — is based in the claims to expertise made by the ‘thinktankerati.’

Those who work in think tanks, as policy advisers or consultants, are a tiny and select segment of the university-educated intelligentsia. They operate within elite circles where the costs of entry to  knowledgeable policy discussion are high. Their exclusivity — or as Pierre Bourdieu (1986) would put it, their “distinction” — is based in the claims to expertise made by the ‘thinktankerati.’

Organising the musical canon: US symphony performances in the 19th and 20th centuries

Today, a look at one of the more interesting papers in the sociology of music of the last decade: Timothy Dowd, Kathleen Liddle, Kim Lupo and Anne Borden’s “Organizing the musical canon: the repertoires of major U.S. symphony orchestras, 1842 to 1969,” published in a special issue on music sociology in Poetics in 2002 (volume 30, issue 1-2).  

This impressive work of scholarship analyses 86,000 musical performances by 27 major US symphony orcehstras over more than a century. There’s a lot of fascinating discussion in this paper that draws on the work of Paul DiMaggio – but in terms of the data, the take-home message for me is that “the canon” is both more diverse and more stable than you might expect. Take the following data points, from Table 2 of this paper:

Top five composers accounting for the most performances in a given time period:

1842–1857

Mendelssohn (14.4); Beethoven (12.1); Weber (10.6); Mozart (8.6); Spohr (6.6). Combined percentage: 52%

1874–1889

Beethoven (15.0); Wagner (8.1); Liszt (7.4); Mendelssohn (7.1); Schumann (5.1). Combined percentage: 43%

1922–1937

Wagner (10.2); Beethoven (7.3); Brahms (4.9); Mozart (4.1); Strauss, R. (4.0). Combined percentage: 30%

1954–1969

Beethoven (8.8); Mozart (7.2); Brahms (5.5); Wagner (4.2); Tchaikovsky (3.4). Combined percentage: 29.1%

 

What does this tell us? What do you think?

 

Organizing the musical canon:

the repertoires of major U.S. symphony

orchestras, 1842 to 196  

The First ISA Forum of Sociology in Barcelona: some interesting abstracts in the sociology of the arts

Last September saw the first International Sociological Forum of Sociology held in Barcelona.

It’s a sobering excercise to examine the 8Mb PDF that contains the many hundreds of abstracts presented at he conference. It must have been a weighty tome when printed.

But contained in this document are a number of fascinating abstracts in the sociology of the arts.  Below the fold, I’ve reproduce just a few that caught my eye:

 

What’s new in the International Journal of Cultural Policy: Parker and Parenta on Australian film policy

I’ve been busy lately with my NEAF ethics application, but after emailing that off to Elaine earlier this week I thought I’d spend some time today on some close reading of a recent journal article on Australian film policy. In doing so, we might be able to draw out some of what I think are the antinomies between the way academics and practitioners write about cultural policy in Australia.