Does culture need explaining?

Abstract

This keynote paper focuses on the relationship between the idea of culture and the different ways it is talked about in the contemporary world. The media, the Academy, the creative professions and public policy all provide different discursive regimes in which key terms describe and evaluate artworks and cultural experiences. Words are shared but their context of use is not. We think (as critics, academics, artists and policy-makers) we are talking about the same thing, equal participants in ‘the rhetorical economy’. But in reality we occupy radically different subject positions. Referencing Matthew Arnold’s Culture andAnarchy, the paper teases out the implications of functional cultural provision for one area in particular: the ‘fit’ between the categories of government policy and the idiosyncratic processes of creative practice. Can the state define culture save as a general figure? Can it measure artistic value in any but an aggregate way? What are the implications for the language of cultural reporting, and the relationship between the artist and the state, with the ‘cultural industries’ now representing 3.6% of Australia’s GDP?