Cultural Policy Discourse Research Articles

Immunize-Nation: Hollywood Contagion and the Biopolitics of the Canadian Nation-Building Project

This exploratory essay investigates the fruitfulness of thinking about the intersection of fears of contagion and the construction of national cultural boundaries in relation to cultural nationalist discourse in general and to the specific Canadian nation-building project. It begins by tracing the rise of biopolitical discourses on contagion in the 19 th century, explores how these discourses took on a moral-cultural character with the rise of fears of "moral contagion" and "moral degeneracy" and demonstrates how the latter fears were central to early formulations of the cultural policy/media literacy apparatus in the Victorian period. It then investigates how this Victorian fear of cultural contagion continues to animate contemporary Canadian cultural policy discourse and, through a reading of some of the Heritage Minutes, contemporary Canadian cultural nationalist texts.

Going global and staying local: nation-building discourses in Singapore's cultural policies

Utilizing the ‘Singapore Story’, this study will explore cultural policies implemented and aimed towards cosmopolitanism, and how these policies have affected the international arts scene, which has led to a polarization within the community by excluding the elderly and disadvantaged members of the population from participating. Singapore's cultural policy has served the function of nation-building and at the same time goes with globalisation and thus calls for constructing a cosmopolitan yet patriotic citizen in terms of identity. This article considers the role of nationalism as a guide to the understanding of cultural policy discourses and argues that a top-down cosmopolitan construction of national identity in cultural policy discourses lacks representation of people's daily life.

Private investments, public values: a value-based approach to argumenting for public support to the arts

Support to private investments in culture has been subject to much attention lately due to the lack of public funds during the present economic crisis. Influenced by a neoliberal paradigm that emphasises market philosophy in the provision of public services, including arts and culture, mixed-funding economy is being acclaimed as an ideal, in that it depends on private funds to supplement public funds. It is often even claimed that private funds constitute a substitute for the lack of public support. Neoliberal cultural policy discourse, implemented through the instrumentalisation of culture, is based primarily on the use value of culture. In the present economic crisis, when all existing concepts come under question and when available empirical data show that private funding of culture is decreasing, many voices are calling for a rethinking of cultural policy. We show that private investment in culture is not unrelated to state support, and furthermore, that they are not even necessarily private, in the sense of pure market mechanisms. We suggest that they are driven by non-use values, and are therefore much more “public” than commonly thought and we provide arguments in favour of state support for the development of such mechanisms.

“Creative Britain”: myth or monument?

This paper is based on a keynote address for the 2010 Cultural Trends Conference “A Golden Age?”. It explores the rhetoric of “creativity” that dominated the New Labour government's cultural policy discourse, and argues that while the promotion of the creative industries and of the economic contribution of culture strengthened the hand of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in attracting resources, there was a price to pay, in the form of auditing, that proved ultimately hostile to creativity. With its main focus on the English region, the paper reviews New Labour's institutional reforms and substantial investment in the cultural infrastructure, but argues that the competing claims of “access” and “excellence” remained unresolved, while policymakers failed to respond to the rapid technological developments in “unofficial” culture.

The Artist and the City in “Euro‐Mediterranean” Marseille: Redefining State Cultural Policy in an Era of Transnational Governance

AbstractFocused on an arts center in Marseille, this article explores how globalization and Europeanization are affecting relations between local cultural producers, national culture, and the state. In France, the state's claims to reshape civil society through cultural policy have been challenged by critics who conclude that economic priorities have ended an era of civic‐centered state arts policy. At the same time, local authorities in the Provence‐Alpes‐Côtes d'Azur region value “new territories of art” projects as initiatives consonant with Euro‐Mediterranean commerce and exchange. Adapting to this context, these artists both challenge and rearticulate state cultural policy. They pursue the same universalist Republican ideals of earlier state policy but they re‐define them for the distinctively Mediterranean setting of Marseille. Thus, in spite of anti‐state discourse by artists, and fears that the public nature of their work has been compromised by economic liberalization, this case shows the ongoing power of the state to shape cultural policy discourse at the same time that it shows artists interpreting the terms of this discourse in ways that are dynamic, locally‐distinctive, and transnational.

Researching the social impact of the arts: literature, fiction and the novel

This paper offers a contribution to current debates in the field of cultural policy about the social impact of the arts. It explores the conceptual difficulties that arise in the notion of ‘the arts’ and the implications of these difficulties for attempts to generalise about their value, function and impact. It considers both ‘essentialist’ and ‘institutional’ perspectives, first on ‘the arts’ in toto and then on literature, fiction and the novel with the view of making an innovative intellectual connection between aesthetic theories and contemporary cultural policy discourse. The paper shows how literature sits uneasily in the main systems of classifying the arts and how the novel and fiction itself are seen as problematic categories. The position of the novel in the literary canon is also discussed, with particular reference to the shifting instability of the canon. The paper suggests that the dilemmas thrown up in trying to define or classify the novel are likely to be encountered in attempting to define other art forms. The implications of these findings for the interpretation and conduct of traditional ‘impact studies’ are explored.

NO DISCORD, OR, AN AREA WITHOUT SIGNIFICANT POLITICAL STAKES?

The aim of this paper is to give a broad sketch of the Swedish cultural policy discourse during the twentieth century, with special reference to the specific features of Swedish history, notably the hegemony of the social democratic Folkhem period from the 1930s to the 1980s. The discourse may be divided into four different periods. Each of these periods, in various respects, goes back to the ideas behind the Folkhem. The paper argues that the discourse still shows the same logic even after the downfall of the Folkhem model in the 1980s. The regulative principle being that there no longer exists, from the 1950s, any competitive concept of culture to the conventional aesthetic concept of high culture.

Capitalising on culture: cities and the changing landscape of cultural policy

English Over the last two decades, the cultural sphere appears to have gained a more central role in urban policy and urban governance. This article gives an outline of the changing cultural policy landscape in the UK over the last decade, and then explores the significance of this changing landscape from the standpoint of one of the country's main regional cities. It argues that there has been a growing congruence between national and local cultural policy discourses, but that a number of deep-seated issues remain.

Creative Industries and Cultural Development — Still a Janus Face?

Since the 1970s, it has been possible to discuss cultural policy in terms of the discourses ‘art as industry’ and ‘cultural rights' (for a discussion of this history, see Gibson, 2001). ‘Creative industries' is the policy ‘buzz term’ of the moment. The ways in which the terms ‘creative industries' and ‘cultural rights' are understood in contemporary cultural policy encapsulate the ways in which the economic and humanistic benefits of creative practice have been articulated as existing in competition. I argue that it is counterproductive to understand these discourses as mutually exclusive. Are these discursive constructions — art as profit versus art as identity — constitutively oppositional? To pose this same question using the terms which frame contemporary policy debate, how do we negotiate between the (seemingly) competing logics of the creative industries and cultural development policy discourses?

Danish cultural policy--from Monoculture towards Cultural Diversity

The discussion of the multicultural society has long been current in Danish social and educational policy, but it is only at the turn of the millennium that the issue has been placed on the agenda in a serious way in relation to the Danish national cultural policy. The transformation from a homogenous identity concept to the acceptance of a diversity of voices and interpretations is occurring only slowly in both the production and dissemination of art and culture. In the cultural policy discourse up through the 1980s there is an acute lack of discussion about the ethnic or multicultural. Far up into the 1990s, the cultural political contributions within the multicultural field are left to the social or humanitarian organs, with integration as the general goal. At the advent of the millennium we can identify greater openness and interest for the multicultural field. In the evaluation of The Ministry of Culture's Development Fund I have analysed the subsidized activities according to the strategies of ethnic revival , interculturalism and hybridisation , and in the article I discuss the problems of formulating criteria for artistic quality in an area new to members of the board. On this background I discuss the relation between multiculturalism and cultural diversity , where I find the concept of cultural diversity to be a better reflection of the new hybrid cultures, which not only transcend boundaries and traditional cultures but dissolve them and create new expressions across genres and cultural forms.