Culture and the conversive community: framing arts policy for the twenty-first century

Abstract

This research explores the question of how we might develop public policy for the arts that actively engages the many in a meaningful, enriching and impartial way. Setting the research into an ethical framework, two postulates are established to clarify what is meant by art and what is meant by impartiality. The first asserts that the nature of art is vested not in the object, but in the experience of the object. The second asserts that all members of the community should have equal opportunity to access and experience the arts in their own way. Taking a radical and innovative approach, the thesis is a synthesis of two distinct lines of argument. Part One undertakes a critical review of the development of the arts council movement as an intermediary body. Set against the broader canvas of industrialisation, educational reform and eventual universal suffrage, the research shows a marked shift in policy emphasis during the twentieth century. This began with the encouragement of citizens to be active participants in the nation’s cultural life. However, following the Second World War, an increasingly hard line was drawn between a minority of professional producers and a majority of passive consumers. The research traces the fortunes of the arts council movement from the 1940s to the present, and the way in which it was adapted and adopted in other Anglophone countries. Finally, the current relationship between art, the people and the arts council is discussed. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the funded arts faced a crisis of legitimacy linked to falling attendances and waning confidence in elites, while new communications and economic models facilitated by the internet, the renaissance of the professionally skilled amateur (the pro-am) and the deliberative potential of the ‘wise crowd’ were opening up new possibilities. Part Two addresses the challenge of how arts policy might be shaped to serve a diverse, increasingly multi-cultural society. To explore this question a range of scientific research in the fields of evolutionary psychology, neurophysiology and theories of mind combined with archaeology, ethology and demography are employed within the nascent discipline of sociobiology. The research identifies a number of aesthetic mechanisms that are common to all – part of our human nature. These include the pleasure of shared attention (but not shared meaning) and the significance of ‘making special’. Distinct groupings of value in the arts are traced back to the evolutionary processes of sexual selection and group selection – one with an emphasis on individuality, spectacle and ‘uselessness’, the other on mutuality, intensity and empathy. The origins of Palaeolithic cave painting are discussed in the light of recent scientific theories that suggest they arose from mechanisms of empathic connection. The thesis begins by setting the social, economic and political context for the research. The final chapter outlines a series of deliberative and delivery frameworks and educational reforms through which improved policy may be developed and enacted, and citizens creatively empowered.