Whose value is it anyway? A neo-institutionalist approach to articulating and evaluating artistic value

Abstract

The neo-liberal agenda that has dominated the creative industries for the past few decades has engendered a range of problems for artists, arts managers and policy-makers. This article critiques the application of commercial strategic management and marketing tools, theory and principles to arts and cultural organizations and proposes alternative approaches to assist these organizations in creating, identifying and evaluating value on their own terms and in line with their artistic missions and objectives.The solutions proposed are generated by an application of the literature on arts management and evaluation, cultural policy and sociology and through a qualitative study of audiences' articulations of value. The article reports and analyses the responses of 34 semi-structured in-depth interviews on the value of theatre with participants drawn from audiences in the United Kingdom and Australia. It highlights the discrepancies between the instrumental methods of evaluating value imposed on arts organizations by governments and the personal, intrinsic insights provided by audiences themselves. It argues ultimately for a neo-institutionalist and creative approach to articulating artistic value, which would evaluate organizational performance in line with artistic objectives. In so doing, it makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about cultural value, and proposes a creative, alternative evaluation framework for artists, arts managers, arts marketers and cultural policy-makers.

Guest editorial

“…Despite the overall positive rhetoric around the economic impact and growth of the CIs and CE, many academics have pointed to the shortfalls of the association between CIs and CE and a neoliberal agenda. These scholars consider the limited understanding of the value held by CIs practitioners (Walmsley, 2012;Comunian, 2009) and the negative impacts on careers and social welfare (Dent, 2019;Conor et al, 2015), as well as the impact of the sector on cities and gentrification dynamics (Comunian and Mould, 2014;Mould, 2015). More recently, other academics (Wilson et al, 2020) address concerns around the prevailing accounts about the ideas of "economic success" and "growth" that surround policy and academic discourses on the CE and consider the importance of interconnecting this research with three other discourses, which markedly each have a very clear social dimension: human development, cultural development and care.…”

“Audience exchange”: cultivating peer-to-peer dialogue at unfamiliar arts events

“…The findings of our research with the audience exchange method suggest there is significant potential for arts and cultural organisations to create new opportunities for peer-to-peer discussion. While our audience exchange participants welcomed the presence of a facilitator who was perceived not to be an “expert” or linked to the arts organisation, they simultaneously demonstrated their own distinctive expertise as co-creators of organisational value, fulfilling Walmsley’s (2013) call for “a neo-institutionalist, creative management approach to articulating and evaluating artistic value” (p. 214). Our work in Birmingham strongly suggests the potential for strengthening the relationships between audiences and cultural organisations through the audience exchange approach, creating conditions in which audience members are more likely to become committed participants and “cultural citizens” (Gross and Pitts, 2016), for whom cultural organisations are a site of on-going encounter and conversation.…”

Mission-driven arts organisations and initiatives

“…Funding iniquity is also the process by which access to participation is restricted for potential performers. Given limited funding, the need to prove “value”, the inherent funding biases in favour of certain forms of art, within certain places, and the demands on organisations that compete for or are dependent on funding, mission-driven arts organisations need to think in terms of being resilient (Walmsley, 2012).…”

“…Of course, we do not argue that what we here term “rupture” as the set of conditions that inspire these papers is unique as the crisis for funding in the arts is always cyclical at best. Nonetheless, we are experiencing a greater degree of self-awareness in the organising and funding of what can broadly be termed art and its role in society with all sides of the debate keen to define and determine what “value” the arts brings to creators, providers and to those who experience and consume art (Walmsley, 2012). “Value” in this context clearly means different things to different groups, from challenging the status quo to create space to make art to a justification of funding based on metrics (ticket sales, visitor numbers) and the greatest benefit to the greatest numbers, which masks the iniquity in funding and asset transfer decisions (Rex, 2019).…”