Cultural Policy

Cultural Policy Lecture

I am doing a lecture tomorrow night for the unit Creative Industries: Theory and Policy, which my colleague Mark Bahnisch co-ordinates at QUT, on the topic of cultural policy. My presentation is below.

Cultural Policy Lecture

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The presentation is timely as I attended the launch of The Cultural Economy. Edited by Stuart Cunningham from QUT, this book is the second volume of a series being edited for Sage by Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar as part of their Cultures and Globalization series.



At the launch, Helmut Anheier emphasised the importance of conceiving of the relationship between cultures and globalization as a two-way street. Globalization is shaping and reshaping cultures of course, but cultures also shape the forms that globalization takes. This approach is in contrast to the more naive approaches to globalization common in the 1990s, which saw globalization as a force driven by economics or technology, which then acted on cultures, for good or ill.

In their Introduction to the book, Stuart Cunningham, John Banks and Jason Potts draw attention to four models of culture and the economy:

1. A welfare or subsidy model, where the arts are seen as unique and different to the economy, and where there is no little or no correlation between artistic or cultural value and economic value;
2. A competitive model, where the cultural industries are seen as 'like other businesses', except with some distinctive economic features;
3. A growth model, characterizing the creative industries, where they are seen as drivers of the new economy;
4. An innovation model, where the spectrum of practices associated with the arts and culture begin to permeate all aspects of the 21t century creative economy.
   

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