Welcome to Measuring the Immeasurable, a newsletter helping arts and culture leaders understand the language of public value. Today’s post is a not particularly timely response to Revive, Australia’s National Cultural Policy, which was released a few weeks ago. Here I try to unpack what this might mean for art evaluation. If you find it useful, please consider sharing and subscribing.
There has been a great deal of enthusiasm around Revive, Australia’s National Cultural Policy1. There has also been a kind of compensatory reflex which seeks to diminish that excitement. As the saying goes, we ought to be careful what we wish for. We have gotten what we wished for, and now we are wondering exactly what we ought to be careful about.
This sense of unease and precarity has defined the arts and cultural industry in Australia for some years. The politicsed funding cuts of the George Brandis era thrust the arts and culture sector into the spotlight of the culture war. This severed whatever fragile social contract existed between the sector and the Federal Government. This meant that funding applications, acquittals, and evaluation — the main channels by which arts organisations communicate to government — increasingly became transactional and performative. Evaluation became a means to an end rather than an opportunity for critical reflection. We provide the numbers, but we aren’t sure how they will be used, who will be see them, or if they have any meaningful impact around decision-making. Each funding request was just another hopeful pull on the slot machine.
Without a National Cultural Policy, it is difficult for arts organisations to demonstrate in a compelling, coherent way that their activities align with the public interest, because that public interest has not been defined and articulated. Applications and acquittals become a mess of statistics and rhetoric, like a path beaten through thick brush.
Without a National Cultural Policy, it is difficult for arts organisations to demonstrate in a compelling, coherent way that their activities align with the public interest, because that public interest has not been defined and articulated.
With the release of the National Cultural Policy, we have returned to what Jennifer Craik calls the ‘facilitator’ model of cultural policymaking2, in which governments’ “aim is to create the conditions that favour cultural production.” The ‘facilitator’ model is most obvious in the myriad reviews, bodies, and plans in the NCP. The NCP also contains elements of the ‘patron’ model in that it backs specific initiatives and forms seen to align with national ideals. The ‘patron’ model is best seen in the National Aboriginal Art Gallery, the Works of Scale Fund, and pilot funding for arts and wellbeing programs.
If you put the ‘facilitator’ and ‘patron’ model together, you get what some call an ‘arms-length’ approach to cultural funding. In another context, we might use the term ‘arms-length’ pejoratively: Nobody wants an ‘arms-length’ romantic relationship. However, this is maybe cultural policy at its best in a liberal, settler-colonial nation. It makes for a flexible, pluralist environment that respects the diverse meanings of art and culture. The NCP is not a North Star towards which all ships must sail, but a night sky, by which each organisation might chart its own path.
Therein, I suspect, lies the thing we ought to be careful about: Although there are many priorities from which we might choose, we still must choose. We have a pluralist vision for arts and culture, but that does not mean that anything goes. Strategic alignment is of renewed relevance for arts organisations. Applications will still land on desks, and Creative Australia bureaucrats will still need to decide between your thing and another thing. What has changed is that that decision-making process is backgrounded with a coherent policy agenda. If the wheels of government turn as they should, the NCP will function as a mechanism for discernment about who and what to fund (or it will support and generate such mechanisms).
If the wheels of government turn as they should, the NCP will function as a mechanism for discernment about who and what to fund.
This may all be terribly obvious, but I fear that the sector’s rightful cynicism towards reporting, acquittals, and evaluation may be out of lockstep with our enthusiasm for the National Cultural Policy. Evaluation and impact remain the lingua franca of government. In the past, we would speak the Government’s language but had no assurance they would listen, and so we would — rightly — just babble away and hope for the best. Now, we have a sense they may listen and the kinds of words they want to hear. We must learn how to speak that language. We must be willing to relax our cynicism and speak with more candour and honesty, and less performance and persuasion. We may even, if we truly have escaped the culture wars, be in that rare and unique position where we can speak truthfully about the work we do to the people who finance that work.
Speaking truthfully means acquainting ourselves with more rigorous approaches to collecting and evaluating data. It means being more critical and discerning about our own work and its impact. It means considering more deeply what role our art plays in civic and social life. It means bringing business development, marketing, and organisational performance into conversations with each other.
Arts and cultural organisations have always sought to align themselves with the national interest. The NCP now means there is a stated national interest to align with and that government will actively be seeking that alignment.
This, I think, is what we ought to be careful about.