The arts, along with almost everything else, have become a political lightning rod. Many commentators have warned of the Trump Administration’s effects on the arts, which include, among other things, sweeping changes to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts. There has been a vast re-staffing of the Kennedy Center, the nation’s symbolic performing arts house. Former Washington Ballet dancer Stephen Nakagawa, who previously criticized the “radical leftist ideologies in ballet,” was hired as Director of Dance Programming. The administration does certainly have political and ideological goals, but critics act as though the “capture” of public arts, in which politically powerful groups control funding and artistic agendas, is something new when, in fact, previous incarnations of these organizations clearly reflected a left-wing agenda. In a pluralistic society, people are bound to disagree over what art deserves prioritization.
Whereas many cultural economists have taken as a given that the government must directly support the arts, in Realizing the Values of Art: Making Space for Cultural Civil Society, Valeria Morea and Erwin Dekker encourage readers to rethink the very foundation on which cultural policy rests. In an innovative and thought-provoking volume, the authors contend that we should begin discussions of art by exploring why people produce it in the first place: to pursue their values. Both consumers and producers pursue art for the values it enables them to imagine, realize, or evaluate. This may seem like a heterodox starting point for a cultural economics treatise, but the authors make a persuasive case that this should be the foundation for a shift in arts policy.
Don’t expect, however, the authors to discuss in philosophic detail what constitutes great art or beauty. The authors discuss values commonly thought of as universal, such as beauty or enlightenment, in a social context: “The diverse values of the art are realized through social practices, rather than through an esoteric activity, where isolated individuals seek to realize some absolute goal of beauty or perfection.” This suggests that value itself is socially defined and therefore malleable, rather than permanent and enduring. The authors treat cultural policy as a collective action problem, considering how to make space for different types of art when public values come into conflict.
Today, much cultural policy is focused on the so-called positive externalities of the arts for the economy. For instance, Morea and Dekker point to the European Commission’s Cultural and Creative City Monitor, which attempts to measure value across three dimensions: cultural vibrancy, creative economy, and the enabling environment. The authors correctly argue that this sort of study only encourages instrumentalization of the arts by reducing the value of the arts to their economic contribution. High marks are given to arts organizations that contribute to tourism, generate innovation, and create job opportunities. The environmental dimension, which looks at the institutional and governance factors that influence the openness, tolerance, and trust of the overall culture, ignores more informal organizations, failing to take into account communities in which “true” value is being created. The authors point, for instance, to a vibrant underground Venetian art scene, through which local artists offer an alternative to the Biennale, a tourist-dependent contemporary art festival, thereby reclaiming, in a sense, space in their city.
To this point, Morea and Dekker’s biggest objection to quantitative attempts to measure the value of the arts is the lost information regarding the dynamics of entry, adjustment, and exit that happen between the diverse array of groups in civil society, analogous to what the price system tells markets about what to produce and when. By joining particular artistic entities, people signal which movements and social practices are becoming more influential. To facilitate a fluid cultural civil society, the authors argue for a separation of arts and state akin to the separation between religion and state.
Indeed, Morea and Dekker seek to move the arts “beyond market and state,” to paraphrase the Nobel Prize address of the political economist Elinor Ostrom. Just as Ostrom argued that no panacea or optimal form of governance exists to solve the “tragedy” of the commons, the authors argue that no optimum form of governance, public or private, exists for the arts either. Cultural civil society operates in a variety of institutional forms with a plethora of collectives, artistic circles, and co-creation communities. There is a decentralized, polycentric form of governance. The authors contend that the arts should no longer be viewed simply as perennially struggling “creative industries” that cannot exist without government support, but rather as a decentralized group of civil organizations more akin to religious organizations.
Valeria and Morea suggest that artistic innovation need not arise from institutional backing, and they cite various cases in which creativity effectively thrived in the absence of support, public or private. They discuss the rise of hip hop from neglected neighborhoods in the Bronx in the 1970s and how artists repurposed spaces in the empty houses of East Berlin following the collapse of the wall. These successes in cultural entrepreneurship and self-governance indicate the resilience and innovation of cultural civil society, even in the absence of institutional frameworks.
The authors contend that government funding of the arts, which has traditionally privileged high-brow art over popular art, has crowded out marginalized communities.
Ostrom described how society could solve collective action problems in this decentralized, self-governing manner, and Morea and Dekker indicate that this could be translated to cultural civil society. Elinor and her husband, Vincent, initially studied how public goods such as safety were produced by cooperation between the citizens and police. The arts are similar, contend Morea and Dekker, in that they are artifacts of cocreation, requiring, for instance, the participation of the audience to gain meaning. This idea of cocreation is especially inherent in modern arts, which can be temporally liminal and invite open-ended interpretation. The authors cite the work of the contemporary artists Jeanne-Claude and Christo, who wrapped landmarks such as the Arc de Triomphe in giant sheets of fabric. These temporary, site-specific public artworks use existing art to create new meaning. As products of cocreation, they depend upon, for instance, complex institutional partnerships and the interpretation of passersby to be fully realized.
The audience is a central part of this decentralized cocreation process, argue the authors. They draw on the work of the philosopher John Dewey, for whom, the authors write, “the ‘human contribution’ to art does not merely consist of the creation of artefacts or the acts of performance, but just as much of the attention that is paid to art, the way that individuals and social groups attend to art.” The authors later discuss Star Trek fan communities, “instagram museums,” and even online meme culture in which “participants” infuse preexisting works with new meaning through the creation of fan content. According to the authors’ framework, these art communities practice decentralized self-governance in the creation process. While the authors note that the “public good” category is far too narrow for the arts in general, public art is created for shared spaces, so it’s conceivable that an Ostromian solution of decentralized governance that arises directly from the needs of particular communities is viable.
Surely fan and popular art can be generated without any government support, although guardrails should remain, adapted to our digital age, to protect the original owners’ copyright. High art, however, and the lack of market recognition of its value could signal a need for government funding. Ballet, opera, and art museums arguably have an enduring value that markets cannot reflect because of insufficient availability, information, and mass appreciation. Yet, Morea and Dekker, suspicious of any claims of universal value in the arts, choose a different tack to address this fairly common argument.
The authors contend that government funding of the arts, which has traditionally privileged high-brow art over popular art, has crowded out marginalized communities, encouraged a dependence on the state, and an unresponsiveness to changing tastes. Morea and Dekker point to national museums, whose purpose came about in European capitals in the 1800s to relate an officially sanctioned narrative of national identity based on the idea that that identity would be a permanent fixture of society. Then, according to the authors, with the advent of modern art, “art for art’s sake” became entrenched after World War II, alienating the average viewer from the ivory tower modernist tastes of the elite. More recently, governments have prioritized social change, supporting marginalized artists by using, for instance, graffiti art to transform and even gentrify neighborhoods, a co-opting that the authors argue could transform street art away from its transgressive roots. Morea and Dekker seem to say that no matter the art government chooses to favor, the preferential treatment will spawn a negative spillover effect of social contention as differing public values come into conflict.
Contention over the values displayed in public art is bound to arise and has arisen more in recent years, especially with calls to tear down public statues of figures such as Robert E. Lee, Theodore Roosevelt, and Cecil Rhodes. Writing that “the violent destruction of objects which are meaningful to others is certainly not the way forward,” Morea and Dekker point to the very nature of public art and national museums as the problem. They argue that in an increasingly heterogeneous society, it makes less sense to prop up a specific version of national history and identity. Aside from a misplaced emphasis on traditional museums as being the root of social contention, Morea and Dekker thoughtfully propose a public policy rooted in epistemic liberalism that ensures an open space for people to pursue different public values without favored groups receiving unfair advantages.
To that end, the authors emphasize the importance of institutional diversity in cultural civil society, especially with their case study of the Queer Museum in Brazil. After encountering both public and private hurdles to secure funding, the Queer Museum held a successful grassroots crowdfunding campaign to become a reality. The authors argue that the government should provide only the guardrails to allow for this diversity. They point to Italy as an example, which has created a variety of legal forms to recognize more informal associations, including volunteer organizations, association networks, mutual associations, philanthropic entities, and social enterprises. These broader recognitions create “a legal framework for different types of communities to govern themselves” and encourage a diverse cultural society. Presumably, these would be somehow more expansive than the United States’s current tax exemptions for non-profits, but Morea and Dekker give no concrete proposals.
Can a hippie cultural community truly provide the starting point for a decentralized, polycentric “heterotopia” on a large scale?
In the final chapter, the authors lay out a visionary heterotopia that embraces a variety of ideas and institutional arrangements, exploring, with the same spirit of diversity of thought, this rather quaint concept from the vantage point of the philosophers Michel Foucault and Robert Nozick. Nozick, for instance, imagined a heterotopia in which people could either join a dominant set of social practices or create new ones. Varying social practices could compete for members, but none would be inherently superior to another. In practice, this means that public squares would be occupied not with publicly commissioned art exemplifying a single narrative but by a rotating array of diverse practices. The authors don’t say much about how this diversity would be enforced, although they indicate that this “framework” would be a task for the government.
The authors suggest “creating space” for alternative cultural movements, with Morea and Dekker pointing to the autonomous community Freetown Christiania in Copenhagen as an example of this utopia. Founded by squatters on an abandoned military base in 1971, this experiment has since become a magnet for counter-culture artists, both dependent on Copenhagen for tourism but also deeply self-governed, at least in the sense that Copenhagen allows the thousand or so residents to self-organize to govern matters such as business, education, and waste collection. According to the authors, this “counter-cultural square” indicates how public squares can allow for alternative cultural civil society, even if they must tread a pathway between establishing legitimacy and becoming co-opted by institutional forces.
Nonetheless, can a hippie cultural community truly provide the starting point for a decentralized, polycentric “heterotopia” on a large scale? It’s conceivable that broader legal frameworks are needed to allow for more alternative, self-governing communities such as this to arise—on a certain scale, this could encourage the expression of alternative viewpoints—but it seems that this soft-form anarchism could also foster more fragmentation rather than social cohesion. According to the authors, however, contestation is simply part of how cultural society works. The reader feels excited about the possibility of a Tocquevillian cultural civil society, but it’s possible that within this milky relativism, the search for the good and the true that is inherent in artistic creation and appreciation will be lost in a kind of post-state democratic experiment.
What Morea and Dekker propose is more of a framework for collective action problem-solving rather than any specific policies, yet some of the implications of their ideas will meet resistance from many artists themselves. One wonders how many artists will choose to vote out government funding boards. Regulatory “capture” may be especially difficult to expel in the arts because some people’s livelihoods have become dependent on funding. Yet, Morea and Dekker are more interested in an overall framework for a robust civil society than in policy prescriptions.
At the same time, some arts do thrive with structured arrangements. The arts can stand for stability as well, and the idea that art has moved beyond the permanence of traditional museums seems doubtful. If everywhere became Freetown Christiania, would space still exist for traditional museums that celebrate artworks that have withstood the test of time? Can we still appreciate the difference between Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and its cocreation counterpart, the meme of a Mona Lisa? Perhaps, but I worry maybe not in “Freetown.”