Arts, Market and the State: Cultural Policies in Introspect.

• Author: Yaslicimen, Faruk
• Position: REVIEW ARTICLE - Arts Management and Cultural Policy Research; Cultural Policies in East Asia: Dynamics Between the State, Arts and Creative Industries; Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries - Book review

Cultural Policy: Management, Value and Modernity in the Creative Industries By Dave O'Brien London, New York: Routledge, 2014, 166 pages, ISBN: 9780415817608

Arts Management and Cultural Policy Research By Jonathan Paquette and Eleonora Redaelli London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 162 pages, ISBN: 9781137460912

Cultural Policies in East Asia: Dynamics between the State, Arts and Creative Industries Edited by Hye-Kyung Lee and Lorraine Lim London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, 229 pages, ISBN: 9781137327765

The field of cultural policies is novel and burgeoning; it harbors diverse and even contradictory approaches, with no universally recognizable principles; it has no common language of its own nor any unified theoretical perspective. The field is fragmented and heterogeneous in nature and bound to the interaction of multiple actors in different institutional settings. Although it began initially as a western academic and institutional endeavor, and developed mostly in the U.S. and Western Europe, cultural policies has turned out to be a common good for the entire world both as an academic discipline and as a bureaucratic and institutional enterprise.

The relationship between arts, culture, market, and state gets more problematic when the diversity and the desired homogeneity of culture are considered with anthropological sensitivity. The use of culture for nation building and nation branding has been criticized by circles who approach art from an "art for arts' sake" perspective and bestow a sui-generis privilege to the artistic realm independent of any government or public engagement or intervention. States, however, are keen on making cultural policy as a part of both their hegemonic and economic development agenda.

Economic and political developments have always influenced cultural policies that governments pursue, and this is more apparent in countries which follow the trend of cultural industries and associate artistic and cultural production with economic growth. Yet certain legitimacy problems emerge. When cultural policy makers become actively involved in the process of nation building and nation branding and profile the limits and breadth of the cultural identity of a nation, concepts such as governmentality and governance become meaningless. The role of bureaucrats, state officers, and public managers becomes questionable, but as the authors argue below, cultural policy, in essence, is public policy and, in a democracy, the field is governed by representatives elected by people themselves. In this regard, what kind of arts are funded by governments and consequently the volume of arts are two outstanding issues that will continue to shape the political debate over cultural policies.

The three books under review here cover cultural policies in diverse geographies: O'Brien's book draws on British examples, while Paquette and Redaelli's tome is confined to a North American context. Lee and Lim's edited book, on the other hand, covers an extensive, multifaceted and complex geography, namely East Asia.

Paquette and Redaelli's Arts Management and Cultural Policy Research aims to draw a map of the loosely connected fields of arts management and cultural policy. Confining their work to the North American context, the authors suggest that scholars in the field have to consider the 'totality of knowledge production' since there are varieties of disciplines concurrently at play and various kinds of knowledge production occurring in and out of academia. The book aims to provide scholars with an ethics of research in this broad, complex, loosely connected, and fragmented landscape, arguing that despite their differences, the disciplines, in essence, are fluid and permeable entities. Neither arts management nor cultural policy can be defined as independent bodies even though the former was produced in the discipline of management and the latter in the field of public policy. Therefore, the authors call to merge the two sides of the literature.

A novelty of the book is that it offers a transdisciplinary approach. Paquette and Redaelli argue that transdisciplinarity is better than interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, or cross-disciplinarity, as it brings different institutional knowledge together by considering academics, practitioners, policymakers, researchers and communities as essential stakeholders, going beyond the conventional lines of academia.

The organization of chapters, definitions, tables, and other features give the book the function of a textbook; this brings an advantage as well as a disadvantage, as the narrative turns didactic at times, directly addressing students of the field. In accordance with the book's textbook function, the authors provide a brief history of arts management training programs in the second chapter and describe in the seventh chapter how the main epistemological traditions in the humanities and social sciences influence current cultural policy research, and how the influence of post-structuralism affects arts management and cultural policy. In the eighth chapter, Paquette and Redaelli exclusively focus on the U.S. institutions that produce knowledge in the field.

Paquette and Redaelli underline an important tension between institutionalization and originality: despite the pressure of institutionalization over the field, as it moves towards standardization through its either coercive, normative or mimetic features, the very nature of arts manifests the contrary as it tries to find more and more peculiar, unique means of expression. Therefore, there are serious discrepancies between institutionalization and artistic expression, as the former imposes structures while the latter tries to divorce itself from and dismantle them once formed. It is a reflection of the same tension that occurs between bureaucracy's engagement in the cultural field, and which all of the books under review critically examine.

Paquette and Redaelli do not discuss the ethical or aesthetic aspects of the issue of marketing arts. Similarly, the authors don't go into detail about power relations and ideological baggage in the study of cultural policies, although these forces may entirely influence scholarly outcomes. Such pitfalls are also valid for 'foreign' scholars who study the cultural policies of a 'different' country, if they embrace existing ideological positions and biases...