Culture Works blog

Commodified Culture

Its my fault, I started it. Well I was struck by two statements Dr Mercy Mirembe-Ntangaare made during her presentation. One was that capitalism destroys communities, the second that culture has become commodified. The first is a political position I happen to agree with but which nobody seems to take seriously any more in our society; although a rather interesting BBC World Service survey (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8347409.stm) revealed earlier this week that in France over 40% of people believe “Capitalism is fatally flawed and a different economic system is needed” And they’re coming out of recession much faster than we are! Certainly if you take an international perspective, capitalism is widely viewed in a negative light, even if alternatives are not obvious. Africans like Mercy are amongst the sceptical (CO2 emissions from the whole continent slightly less than the state of Texas). So it is worth remembering the destructive as well as the creative forces of ‘the market’. Indeed that is the point, or a major point, in a debate about culture and the degree to which it has become just another commodity to be traded.

A brief history based on http://www.moyak.com/papers/adorno-modernist-art.html

It was Adorno and Horkheimer of the ‘Frankfurt School’ who first drew our attention to commodification of culture in the 1930’s. They wrote a book called, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In it they argued that mass culture had become a commodity that was different from the aesthetic ideological concerns of those autonomous men and women artists who ‘trod their own path’. They saw the development of ‘Cultural Industries’ which tended not to tolerate autonomous thought or deviation because of economic necessity. Their critique of mass culture is quite complex and was based on the belief that culture had become a form of domination. For them, the industry was selling a package of ideas and beliefs so that people no longer had to think. They believed mass art was based on “a medicinal bath” of amusement and laughter, rather than on transcendence or happiness. A great perversion had taken place: people were amused and liberated from the need to think and their laughter affirmed existing status quo in society.

In short they saw ‘high’ art as separate from the mass culture they so accurately criticised as commodified.

More recently Frederick Jameson moved these initial ideas on a significant amount. He realised Adorno and Horkheimer were a bit confused about context and thus conflated pre-capitalist art (lets say Renaissance art) with modern movements (specifically for them, Modernism). He pointed out that they did not fully comprehend the magnitude of commodification’s domination and how art changes as a result of it.

Art is historically-specific, changing its structure depending upon the prevailing economic system it exists under. The conception existed that art was intrinsically complete, but the theory of commodification allows us to see how differences in history and structure change everything. When the market takes over, nothing is an end in itself any more. High and mass culture are both historically and structurally related as well as being dialectically interdependent: “as twin and inseparable forms of the fission of aesthetic production under capitalism.” They depend upon one another for their individual identity and do not rise up autonomously. Significantly, they do share a number of structural features which point to the confusion of establishing values and the significance of how the opposing reactions of mass culture and modernistic art respond to commodification.

In short we must recognise that all forms of culture are, in fact, commodified; the question therefore is by whom, in what way, and to what end?

I notice writing this that the words culture and art become interchangeable in my use of them, but perhaps we should acknowledge that whilst culture contains all art there are some cultural manifestations which are not art?

Anyway lets go back to the question posed towards the end of Culture Works’s blog about commodification, an old question of the value of process against that of product, and ask whether an obsession with measurement has commodified culture into a reductio ad absurdum?

Is culture’s only value in its outputs in jobs, skilling and wealth creation? If that were so then it would certainly be the case that our attitude to culture could be argued to have passed from the creative to the destructive. That we are actually inhibiting cultural development.

Fortunately you can’t kill the spirit; and I am sure delegates at the World Alliance would be horrified at the suggestion they were complicit in such inhibition. The problem remains as to both how and why we measure. Whether you can, in any meaningful fashion, measure well-being and belonging.

I would take issue with Culture Works here over markets following rather than leading. Its precisely because of the convergent tendencies that measurement can generate that the ‘market’ in Arts Education is determining itself. And by so limiting itself, all that fails to meet the measurement benchmarks excludes itself from the marketplace. I know several artists with in depth experience of working over 10,15 even 20 years in schools and communities, who have been effectively put out of work by Cultural Partnerships. Why has this happened?

I believe this to be a particularly acute problem in Britain. This was a World Alliance and I would not presume, upon the brief contact I had with them, to ascribe these problems on a global scale. We however do seem to have become enmeshed in one aspect of the doctrine of Logical Positivism: if you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist.

Furthermore the suggestion that Newcastle Gateshead was an exemplar in Arts Education when it is, if anything worth studying at all, an exemplar of Arts Regeneration, was worrying. As my friend at the conference pointed out in the discussions between speakers: Newcastle Gateshead is a better place today, culturally, for the educated professional classes; but it hasn’t made much impact in the poor parts of town. Elswick is an area in the inner west of Newcastle which rates amongst the top 20 or so most deprived wards in England and Wales, I represented it on Newcastle City Council for 20 years, and I see little impact having been made by this cultural renaissance. A couple of years ago I took a taxi from near my home in Elswick. I asked the driver to take me to an arts venue in the Newcastle Gateshead Quayside cultural quarter. He had no idea where it was!

Finally, I was impressed by Captain Garcez of Bahia, Brazil. So impressed I could hardly believe he was for real. So my entry in the strapline competition is:

The North East of England: Land of the all Singing all Dancing Police Force

Now that would be something to write to the world about. Let me see if I still have the Chief Constable’s number.

<I just had an idea! How about we re-brand culture? If you were invited to write a strapline for culture in the north east that promotes it in terms other than job creation, increased turnover and the knowledge economy, what would you write?

I felt myself very lucky to be one of the few locals to be invited to part of the World Alliance for Arts Education (WAAE) 2009 Summit at Dance City a couple of week-ends ago. (If you’d like to know more about this event you can visit http://www.worldcreativitysummit.org/index.htm ). Whether that makes me (as it said in the publicity) ‘one of the brightest minds working in the forum of arts education today’ is doubtful, so as I say, I felt myself lucky. And that’s where the idea of re-branding culture first started to take root in my mind.

The topics under discussion were Advocacy and Evidence, both right up my alley.

We kicked off with a presentation by Captain Tiago Garcez of the Military Police, Bahia, Brazil who got his colleagues to dance their way to a new vision of their role in creating public safety. Apparently he used dance - a culturally prized activity - to explore what public safety means to the public and to create a partnership between the police and the community to achieve it, safety, that is (at least, I think this is the gist of what he described). There were lots of lovely slides showing everyone dancing and having a really great time. He also asked us to hold hands, led us in song, and left me and my friend gobsmacked and wondering if we had heard what we had heard. Perhaps it’s got to do with the weather but it’s hard to see how such joie de vivre might be acceptable as a basis for shaping our own concepts of policing. I imagine I would be arrested (at best) if I proposed the samba as a tool for engaging in dialogue with one of our local constabulary on Northumberland street – so I wouldn’t consider it even though, believe me, I like a challenge.

This led me to reflect on the benefits of life in our ‘developed’ world.

Dr Mercy Mirembe-Ntangaare (Makere University, Uganda) nudged my thoughts along. Highlights of this presentation for me were her warning against the commoditisation of culture; and a reminder that one of the impacts of poverty is that the whole continent of Africa would have difficulty hosting events such as these. We still take this opportunity for granted, but maybe given our dire economics, and our expectation of how this will impact on the arts, not for much longer.

A short question and answer session produced a proposal that we could pay more than lip service to equal participation if we were prepared to forego conference facilities and meet in the open air, and share food as well as thoughts. I gather a separate session indirectly returned to this theme with a discussion about the value of micro finance as a way of oiling the equal participation engine.

My friend and I had an animated discussion. Between the presentations we had been asked to share thoughts with those sitting nearest to us. We happened to be close by two people from Africa who premised their comments with a reference to the success of Newcastle Gateshead in mobilising the arts to the cause of social re-generation, the jobs, the quality of life, the buzz…images of Benwell and Cowgate came to mind,  we weren’t so sure. Later I Googled Cowgate and first item, up came this -

It is three short miles from Cowgate to the wine bars and restaurants on the banks of the Tyne. Three miles and a whole world apart. Down on the river bank, the Baltic art gallery, the Millennium bridge and the Malmaison hotel are the visible signs that Tyneside is recovering from the industrial meltdown of the 1980s. Newcastle was once famous for its ship-building and heavy industry. Today, it is famous for its high culture and hen parties; the Budapest of the North-east, some call it…. In Cowgate, parents keep their children off school because they do not have £2.40 for the bus fare. In well-off Britain, there are music lessons after school. In Cowgate, there is that traditional escape route from poverty - a boxing gym.

Well, in my eyes, boxing is culture, but that’s another story.

Regeneration policy values and puts money into culture because it’s a high growth industry and investment in it is meant to deliver jobs. If you can’t tick the job creation box, your culture will have to get created somehow else.

How come a job, any sort of job, is deemed to have intrinsic value?

In a previous life I was part of research that showed that women who were economically poor rated economic poverty as less relevant to them than poverty of esteem and social isolation. They could find ways round a lot of the economic hardship and in fact their economic needs were modest, but poverty of esteem and social isolation made them physically, mentally and emotionally ill.

So I was glad the other day to hear Radio 4 reporting on new research from the Rowntree Trust that finds work doesn’t guarantee a route out of poverty. It poses the question - what about the quality of these jobs? What if these jobs are rubbish jobs that eat your will to live and leave you financially even less well off (my words)? YES! Can we start talking about this? If we can’t, we’re effectively debating the relative merits of the latest version of the Emperors new clothes. – hemline and all – where’s the cultural value in that and where will it take us?

There’s a lot of double hubble bubble think going on here. Of course we may say that we creatives create jobs that don’t sap the will to live – but we can’t really argue that on the whole, they’re well paid since research shows artists (and especially those in the north east) to be extremely poor given their level of education. So, when regeneration funds invest in us on the grounds that we create jobs, what exactly are we regenerating?

Back to the conference. I wrote down the following – ‘A nation without culture cannot sustain itself’ (no record of who said it, sadly).

Here’s what I think. The need for self expression is intrinsic – it defines us as human beings- as individuals and in relation to others. It is the material from which we create a sense of belonging and a sense of belonging is essential to our health. Our sense of belonging is contingent on our ability to make connection – and increasingly in a global context and accelerated by technology- these connections have to tolerate difference. Developing the capacity for self expression (and isn’t this what creative people including artists know about?) should be one of the primary functions of education - it underscores the capacity of nations to be sustainable and of individuals to be healthy. In the hierarchy of needs, knowledge of self tells us what we need to be happy, the jobs that need to be done to sustain us and where and how we can make our best contribution.

One of the youth ambassadors for art asked the question – what is excellence in art? Good question!

I think it depends on your view of the relative value of the process and its benefits – (sense of belonging, self confidence, open-ness to difference) and the product – its aesthetic and innovative/illuminative values, amongst others.

Increase the emphasis on the first, and you create sustainable societies more likely to generate people able to produce things of aesthetic, innovative and illuminative value – win win.

Focus on the product and you decrease the gene pool from which ideas emanate, and encourage the creation of groups of elite, whether as producers able to innovate or as people with the purchasing power – who then become the ones who determine quality.

The commoditisation of culture is where funders’ passion for the creative industries is leading. It’s true you can educate your market to some extent to be more educated consumers but its unlikely they’ll pay to be challenged overmuch. Markets follow, they don’t lead.

It was great to see Newcastle drawing such wise and cosmopolitan audience for an event on art education and well done Culture ¹⁰ for organising it, but it would have been nice to think the audience was drawn to the north east by our expertise and track record in art education since that was the point of the conference. Buildings are good but people and their interpretations of experience are the thing.

So, I just had an idea! How about we re-brand culture? If you were invited to write a strapline for culture in the north east that gets closer to its intrinsic value than job creation, increased turnover and the knowledge economy, what would you write?