Remembering the FuturePlace and narrative in the age of

the internet

Aims• An end to the begging bowl• Art and heritage as an investment• Culture as infrastructure

• Why are public spaces treasured?• Place and the construction of memory

• The responsibility of the curator• Places are constructed• The centrality of narrative• The case for public arguments

Art as a public service• The arts are indispensable to the creative economy• We can no more do without them than snowploughs

• Not an alternative to infrastructure• They are infrastructure

• Not a cost• They are an investment

• New dialogue needed• Not ‘art for art’s sake’ • But art for everyone• A human basis for a human economy

The irresistible economics of art for all

How culture makes money

• From 1997 to 2013, UK Creative Economy jobs rose from 1.8 to 2.6 million - 2.3% per year, four times the UK Economy as a whole.

• Creative Industries GVA was £76.9bn in 2013 - 5 per cent of UK output.

• Creative Industries GVA grew 10 per cent in 2012, the last year we have data for. This is more than any other industrial sector.

• The value of services exported by the Creative Industries was £17.3bn in 2012, 8.8 per cent of total UK service exports

• In 2011, the last year we have data for, Creative Industry service exports grew by 11.3%. This compares with 2.8% for total UK service exports.

Health and Social Work

Education

Manufacturing

Construction

Creative Industries

Transport and storage

Financial and insurance

Real estate

0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000

Projected 2030 2013 jobsSource: DCMS January 2015 estimates

Source: DCMS January 2015 estimates, figure 5 and table 6

The engine of creation

The rise of creative employment

Why are there no people factories?• Art, we are told, is a luxury• Public money is wasted on it• We should produce necessities

• But people are necessary• How are they produced?

• Isn’t school a necessity?• Isn’t health a necessity?• Culture is a necessity too• It produces society

What places are, and why they matter• Place is a space plus what people do in it

• A playing field• A concert hall• The Exchange District• A sacred place• A monumental place• A museum• A library

• What do people do in a museum?• What do people do in a library?• Why do we put statues outside our civic buildings?

Places of memory: an attempt at definition• We are nothing without memory• In Museums and Libraries, we recover our society’s

memories• They are repositories of memory• What is special about them?• Objects• Messages• Narratives

Aesthetics become affordable

1976

1980

1984

1988

1992

1996

2000

2004

2008

0%5%

10%15%20%25%30%

Leisure goods and servicesFood and Non-al-coholic drinksServices

Share of UK family spending on:

Source: UK Family Expenditure Survey, author calculations. Reproduced from Freeman, A. 2014. Twilight of the Machinocrats: Non-substitutable labour and the future of production. In van der Pijl (ed). The International Political Economy of Production. Routledge

Revenue from recorded music

Revenue from Live music

Music as share of consumer spending

The paradox of live performance

Source: Page, W.; Carey, Chris; Haskel, Jonathan, and Goodridge, Peter. 2011. ‘Wallet Share’. Economic Insight 22, 18 April . http://prsformusic.com/creators/news/research/Documents/Economic%20Insight%2022%20Wallet%20Share.pdf

So how do we pay for it?• Externality: a benefit that people don’t pay for directly

• Classic example of the clover field and the bees• Cultural institutions create benefits for all which they don’t realise in gate revenue• For example, schools• Just like roads….

• Usual solution: capture the income (tax, royalty, philanthropy, etc)• Including ingenious solutions

• Billboard tax• Cellphone tariff• Penny for the arts

• The first step is to understand this is real value• But it really has to be valuable…

So what value do we add?

Benefits type 1: what people want• Contingent valuation (Throsby and Hutter, etc)• What would you pay to have an orchestra in your city?• Surprisingly, quite a lot• ‘Option’ benefit – I’d like to be able to go, even if I don’t• ‘Heritage’ benefit – I’d like my children to be able to go• ‘Choice’ benefit – I like being able to choose between the

orchestra and the theatre

Benefits type 2: social benefits• Mark Stern studies of Philadelphia• Provable causal improvement in social indicators in the

presence of cultural institutions• Crime• Health• Poverty• Etc

• Winnipeg example: Art City• Note that this results in a direct reduction in welfare

costs so it is monetary as well as ‘social’

Benefits type 3: wealth generation• Moretti and ‘Smart Cities’• If you don’t have a smart city, you don’t just stay where

you are• Cincinatti versus Portland• Cincinatti lost more people after the crash than New Orleans

after Katrina

So why don’t people ‘vote for the arts’?

• Lack of understanding? Maybe they understand something we don’t• Lack of universality

• If some people have access to the arts and others don’t- It is regarded as an elite privilege- It is seen as a luxury- It doesn’t actually produce the benefits

- Contrast with roads: a necessity if everyone has a car- If everyone had a piano, culture would be seen as a necessity

- Note (nearly) everyone DOES have a cellphone- Nearly Everyone DOES have internet and television- But NOT everyone goes to live performance- NOT everyone is a performer

- Conclusion: public culture as an agent of change

What constitutes ‘good culture’?• Culture that performs its function• We judge art by whether it is good art, not whether it

creates jobs or makes money• We should judge museums and libraries in the same

way• But what is a good museum or library?• If we can’t define what is a good museum, there is no

accountability