Counting eyeballs,soundbites and ‘plings’: arts participation,strategic instrumentalism and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad

This article examines cultural participation, its metrics and ‘drivers’ as they are defined through cultural programming for the London 2012 Olympics. The meanings and interpretation of these terms are considered by examining the development of an evaluation framework for the We Play programme in the North West of England, an initiative funded by Legacy Trust UK and part of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. It argues that in spite of the dissonance between arts and sports within Olympics programmes and claims of the deleterious impact on arts funding, particular within the regions, London 2012 has engendered creative programming which strategically deploys the Cultural Olympiad to satisfy local cultural policy objectives as well as meeting broader interests in ‘legacy’ from the Games. Such ambitions require the development of appropriate methodologies for understanding arts participation and engagement for the purpose of evaluation and evidence-based policy making, a particular challenge for such a complex range of activities, sites and settings for arts participation.     

Youthful geographies: from Cool Places to hyper-dynamic Asia

ABSTRACT

Cool Places: Geographies of Youth Cultures published in 1998 effectively launched young people's geographies and provided interesting examples of the ‘cultural’ and ‘feminist turns’ through its engagement with cultural studies. It placed young people as central and showcased young arts students through their printmaking self-portraits. This article looks back to 1998 and forward beyond 2018 to explore the concept of ‘youthful geographies’. It reflects on the starting points for this edited collection and explores the ways in which scholarship focusing on young people worked to establish the space to pursue a challenge to the youthful ‘present absence’ in Geography. It poses the question: ‘Where are young people in the sub-disciplines of Geography’? and acknowledges the value and innovation that youthful scholars bring to geographies of young people. In the final section I reflect on a decade of the nascent growth of scholarship located in, and focused on, Asian youthful geographies.     

Site Management: An Application to Wadilmeluk (the Valley of the Kings)

‘Value has always been the reason underlying heritage conservation. It is self‐evident that no society makes an effort to conserve what it does not value.’ ¹ 1. de la Torre and Mason, Assessing the Values of Cultural Heritage, 3–4. However, assessing the value of a cultural heritage asset as a representative sample of our tangible and intangible heritage for present and future generations is a difficult concept to deal with. It is, therefore, the aim of the researchers to help the conservation decision process by attempting to make an assessment of the values attributed to the cultural heritage assets of one of the most notable heritage sites in Egypt: the Valley of the Kings in Luxor.     

Handcraft as Cultural Diplomacy: The 1968 Mexico Cultural Olympics and U.S. Participation in the International Exhibition of Popular Arts

Mexican post-revolutionary cultural institutions excelled at implementing Mexican art and popular arts as key elements in cultural diplomacy. However, while there is abundant research regarding these arts and their inclusion in international exhibitions during the first part of the twentieth century, there is little research on their role in international cultural diplomacy during the second half of that century. In the first part of this article I present a historiographical appraisal of the 1968 Mexican Cultural Olympiad and the resolutions of the “First Latin American Seminar on Popular Arts and Crafts” sponsored by UNESCO in Mexico City in 1965. In the second, I examine the case of U.S. participation in the “Exposición Internacional de Artesanías Populares” (International Exhibition of Popular Arts), which was part of the 1968 Cultural Olympiad’s programme – largely neglected by the historiography of the XIX Olympics – to explain how popular arts were made to perform as agents of cultural diplomacy in Mexico and the U.S. during the Cold War. In addition, I argue that U.S. participation in this exhibition also reveals negotiations and redefinitions of the concepts of handcraft and arte popular, and the economic and social situation of their makers in the United States.     

Cultural policy and revolutionary music during China’s Cultural Revolution: the case of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra

This paper examines the relation between the cultural policy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the music of model plays (yangbanxi 样板戏), especially music produced by Western symphony orchestras, during the ten-year Cultural Revolution in China. It takes the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra (SSO) as the focal point of this historical episode. Model plays of the Cultural Revolution promoted communist and revolutionary themes. All aspects of their performance were examined for conformity to Maoist thought. This paper explores how the CCP’s ideology and its cultural policy were embodied in revolutionary music, using one of the model plays, Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, as an analytical case study. Most of the historical materials cited in this research are held by the SSO Archive. The SSO played a crucial role in creating and performing the music for Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The academic value of its archive has long been overlooked. This paper provides a new perspective on the Cultural Revolution, one viewed through policies of a Western symphony orchestra, and it suggests that scholars apply the term ‘cultural policy’ more deliberately in future studies of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.     

Putting the drum in conundrum: Guadeloupean gwoka,intangible cultural heritage and postnationalism

Since 2004, Felix Cotellon, the president of the centre for traditional music and dance on the island of Guadeloupe, has spearheaded a grass roots campaign to see gwoka inscribed on the UNESCO’s list of Representative Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanities. The move has been surprising, even controversial. Gwoka, a drum-based music and dance, has been used as a symbol of Guadeloupean cultural identity and resistance against French colonialism since the late 1960s. Moreover, Cotellon has had a long association with separatist activism. However, because Guadeloupe remains a French overseas department without a seat at the UN, the petition to add gwoka to the ICH list had to be sponsored by the French state. Following a successful bid, gwoka is now listed as representative of the culture of a French region. In this article, I draw from my ethnographic work as well as my own involvement in the committee that drafted Guadeloupe’s application to trace the complex network of individuals, who are shaping gwoka’s transformation from weapon of national resistance to symbol of humanity’s cultural diversity. I argue that these individuals shape and operate within a ‘zone of awkward engagement’ that allows for the emergence and expression of a postnationalist political subjectivity.     

Cultural planning in Ontario,Canada: arts policy or more?

Cultural planning is often explained as a strategic approach to urban cultural development; an approach that involves the ‘mapping’ and leveraging of a wide range of ‘cultural resources’ (arts, culture, and heritage). However, it is increasingly being questioned whether cultural planning is anything more than a fairly traditional arts policy with a different name. In particular, it has been observed in Australia that cultural plans usually fail to address more than arts sector concerns. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether this assessment applies to cultural planning practice in Ontario, the province at the forefront of the current ‘municipal cultural planning’ push in Canada. An examination of all cultural plans in Ontario’s mid‐size cities and interviews conducted with municipal staff members overseeing these initiatives shows that whereas several municipalities do follow an arts‐driven policy agenda, this is not the case with most mid‐size cities in the province.     

The nonprofit arts organization concept and its transformation in Korea

ABSTRACT

After the Korean War, both the autocratic and later democratic South Korean governments actively fostered the development of Korea’s arts sector, in part by emulating the organizational and legal structures of U.S. nonprofits. Yet, in this policy transfer, Korea has taken a different path, notably rearticulating the U.S.-style hands-off facilitation model to reflect and accommodate Korean political, institutional, and cultural exigencies. We analyze the effects of the resulting cultural policy on Korean public arts institutions, using documentary evidence and narratives from our case studies of two national arts organizations restructured by the government: The National Theater Company of Korea and the Seoul Arts Center. We employ the concept of cultural statism, conditioned by "culture as glorification," resource dependence, and path dependence, to understand the development of Korea’s public arts sector. Specifically, we consider: the government’s desire to use the arts to enhance its image on an international stage shaped by western liberal democratic values; arts leaders’ desire for reliable support (resource dependence); and the tendancy of Koreans to want to be associated with the stability and prestige of the government (path dependence).     

Paragone: notes on hegemony and realism in the 1950s

This article focuses on the literary review Paragone and on the debate on realism articulated by the review and by the Cultural Commission of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the 1950s. By analysing the review’s internal composition, correspondence between its contributors, and records of the PCI’s Cultural Commission, this article highlights a series of issues relating to the debate on realism in the 1950s, as a critical time, in both aesthetic and political terms, for the determination of Italian culture’s identity profile. Specifically, the article discusses the key features of the debate on realism that unfolded in Paragone, and relates these to the debate simultaneously developing within the Cultural Commission. This comparison allows us to argue for a close connection between the aesthetic habitus displayed by an independent review and that embraced by a cultural institution with a distinctly political as well as cultural agenda.     

Aims and contradictions of cultural diversity policies in the arts: a case study of the Rich Mix Centre in East London

In recent years, the concept of diversity has become prominent in cultural policy, echoing community arts philosophies of the 1960s and 1970s that questioned the notion of universal artistic value and argued for greater recognition of the relationship between cultural identity and inequality. Cultural diversity policies today implicitly challenge the liberal‐humanist discourse of ‘the best’, and emphasise what is ‘relevant’ to particular communities. Official policy rhetoric can often hide contradictions that are only apparent in practice. How does ‘diversity’ shape the way organisations engage with audiences and does this contradict the still present discourse of ‘universalism’, with its emphasis on value judgements? This paper explores this tension through the study of Rich Mix, a multi‐functional arts centre in London's multi‐ethnic East End. It argues that Rich Mix is caught between discourses of universalism and diversity, leading to confusion over the project's rationale and ambivalence amongst artists about how their art is judged.     

Whose cultural value? Representation,power and creative industries

ABSTRACT

The debate around ‘cultural value’ has become increasingly central to policy debates on arts and creative industries policy over the past ten years and has mostly focused on the articulation and measurement of ‘economic value’, at the expense of other forms of value—cultural, social, aesthetic. This paper’s goal is to counter this prevalent over-simplification by focusing on the mechanisms through which ‘value’ is either allocated or denied to cultural forms and practices by certain groups in particular social contexts. We know that different social groups enjoy different access to the power to bestow value and legitimise aesthetic and cultural practices; yet, questions of power, of symbolic violence and misrecognition rarely have any prominence in cultural policy discourse. This article thus makes a distinctive contribution to creative industry scholarship by tackling this neglected question head on: it calls for a commitment to addressing cultural policy’s blind spot over power and misrecognition, and for what McGuigan (2006: 138) refers to as ‘critique in the public interest’. To achieve this, the article discusses findings of an AHRC-funded project that considered questions of cultural value, power, media representation and misrecognition in relation to a participatory arts project involving the Gypsy and Traveller community in Lincolnshire, England.     

Debating heritage authenticity: kastom and development at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre

In October 2003, 28 cultural expressions from around the world were proclaimed Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, complementing the adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO. This proclamation has been part of the broader remit of the international organisation to protect the world’s cultural diversity from modernity and globalisation. Inherent in this is an underlying notion of cultural authenticity, implying that certain expressions, which are considered to be endangered and therefore in need of institutional protection, constitute ‘original’ and ‘pure’ manifestations of cultural identity. Taking forward debates on the safeguarding of intangible heritage, this paper examines cultural authenticity in the context of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, the principal cultural organisation, museum and research institution of the Melanesian archipelago. The proclamation of the practice of sandroing (sand drawing) as a masterpiece of intangible heritage, and other heritage interventions taking place in Vanuatu and recorded during fieldwork in 2007, provide an interesting perspective for examining how global cultural initiatives are negotiated by local constituencies. Here, heritage preservation is coupled with calls for development, which invites new ways for thinking about authenticity not according to predefined criteria, but with respect to local understandings.     

Second Laws,Two Cultures,and the Emergence of an Ecosystem Aesthetics

Abstract

The appropriation of scientific concepts by the humanities and the visual arts exemplifies what many feel are both the pitfalls and possibilities of interdisciplinary engagement. The principle of entropy, which C. P. Snow claimed could serve as a litmus test of the ‘two cultures’ divide, provides an excellent starting point for exploring how artists have employed scientific concepts far beyond their original contexts. As a case study in interdisciplinarity, the use of entropy in the visual arts is also a lens to consider the evolution of an artistic proposal from the 1960s known as ‘system aesthetics’. As an early challenge to the clean demarcation of art and science, system aesthetics was a precedent for what might be described as the emergence of an ecosystem aesthetics within contemporary art and design today.     

Establishing a ‘Cultural Base’? The Creation of the Fulbright Program in Portugal

This paper deals with the cultural and educational relations between the United States and Portugal during the Cold War. It is built upon the premise that cultural policies and cultural relations between states are a fundamental part of international relations. History of International Relations, therefore, should overcome an analysis based only upon political and diplomatic dimensions to address what can also be referred to as ‘cultural diplomacy’. The Cold War period, because of its historical features, is particularly relevant to the study of processes of cultural diplomacy and some authors even consider it as the ‘golden age’ of cultural diplomacy.¹1. William Glade, ‘Issues in the Genesis and Organization of Cultural Diplomacy: A Brief Critical History’ in The Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society (Winter 2010), vol. 39, issue 4, 242. For cultural diplomacy during the Cold War see Jessica Gienow-Hecht, ‘Culture and the Cold War in Europe’ in Leffler, Melvyn & Westad, Odd Arne, The Cambridge History of the Cold War Vol. i, (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 398–419; Akira Iriye, ‘Culture and International History’ in Michael J. Hogan and Thomas G. Paterson (ed), Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Richard T. Arndt, The First Resort Of Kings: American Cultural Diplomacy In The Twentieth Century (Virgínia: Potomac Books, 2005).View all notes     

Making creative industries policy in the real world: differing configurations of the culture-market-state nexus in the UK and South Korea

ABSTRACT

This paper compares creative (content) industries policies in the UK and South Korea, highlighting the coevality in their development. Seeing them as ‘industrial policies’, it focuses on how state intervention is justified and why a certain set of policy options have been chosen. The UK policy-makers prefer passive and decentralised roles of the state that addresses market failures via generic and horizontal policies. Meanwhile, Koreans have consistently believed in the strong, resourceful and ambitious state in developing centralised, sector-specific policies for cultural industries. While demonstrating two contrasting approaches to the nation state’s management of cultural turn in the economy, both cases seem to present a ‘paradox’. Despite its neoliberal undertone, the horizontal and fused approach taken by the UK’s creative industries policy engenders some space for ‘cultural’ policy. On the contrary, the non-liberal and state-driven content industries policy in Korea has shown a stronger tendency of cultural commodification.     

Ordinary culture in a world of strangers: toward cosmopolitan cultural policy *

The image of Zwarte Piet, as part of Dutch Sinterklaas celebrations has caused heated debate in the past decade, which has polarized tensions between the ‘Dutch’ and ‘strangers’. This article argues that the debate cannot be resolved within a framework of a methodologically nationalist cultural policy. Building on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, I argue that a cosmopolitan framework for belonging is not only a normative but also a policy imperative. Cultural policy should recognize our shared global belonging, rather than building a national polis predicated on difference that sets us apart. However, a methodologically cosmopolitan cultural policy cannot be a blanket approach to replace or undermine national frameworks. It should embed the nation in a cosmopolitan public policy to accommodate cultural and religious diversity under globalization that has irrevocably eroded the illusion of a national unity.     

The Ambivalent Thematics of Commodity Fetishism in Contemporary Latina/O Narrative Fiction

One of the chief cultural dynamics in the contemporary United States is the omnipresent commodity fetishism that drives its consumer society, so it comes as little surprise that this figures prominently in the attempts of much contemporary U.S. Latina/o fiction to come to terms with the social milieu of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United States. This essay argues that Helena Maria Viramontes’s Miss Clairol, Sandra Cisneros’s Barbie-Q, and Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao each manifest a deep-seated ambivalence towards commodity fetishism: an awareness of how the agency to break with traditionalist modes of being and some measure of cultural assimilation might be achieved through engagement with fetishized attributes commodities place on offer, yet one that is tempered by an appreciation of the dangers such as alienation and cultural homogenization that also proceed from immersion in a world defined by commodity fetishized relations.