Culture: it’s not the economy, stupid!

How should we measure the value of culture? Take, for example, Michelangelo’s sculpture of the biblical hero David shown preparing for battle with Goliath, in the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence. As the statue attracts visitors – the gold standard of a successful art gallery – the box denoting popularity gets a tick. And those audiences pay – not just to look, but to leave with merchandise, from t-shirts to postcards. Plus they’ll no doubt consume coffee and cake. The sculpture, then, stimulates revenue. It attracts millions to Italy. And there is the amount the piece would fetch in a hypothetical sale: so much so that it is priceless.

Adding up these numbers is one method of assessing the value of the work. But such an exercise clearly misses the point: David is a masterpiece. As the first large, nude sculpture made after ancient times – no-one had dared to better Greek and Roman achievements – it recalls antique models, but it is also anti-classical. The young boy in marble is paused in a brief moment before he launches an attack: strong, tense and, above all, filled with an inner life. For Florentines he expressed the spirit of the New Republic that had removed the Medici in the fifteenth century. Knowing what the Galleria dell’Accademia raises in euros, the audience figures and its attraction as a tourist site, does not capture the value of this amazing work.

Society has long debated how to assess the arts: What is their role? How do you know if a work is good and who chooses? Admittedly, deciding that a work is excellent is difficult, at times controversial and far from a science. But the absence of certainty had not been a problem with consequences for public funding, until recently. Rather, it has long been recognised that the vagaries of the market do not always produce excellent culture and, for the sake of the public good, most people have accepted that the government should support art without requiring the kind of evidence of its worth that a court room would demand.

Public funding requires a leap of faith and a shared agreement that a civilised society finances something that is not always predictable, profitable or even popular, because there is a belief that something beautiful, truthful or provocative could be created. I think many could still share that ideal. But the Department of Culture Media and Sport, and other bodies that fund the arts, have given up trying to make that case. They are frantically trying to quantify value in a way that they think can prove the worth of culture.

A fraught discussion about how to measure the impact of the arts as a way of justifying their existence has developed since the 1980s. Much cultural policymaking today is about how to measure culture, rather than address how it might be created. Over time the suggestions have become more artistically illiterate. Most recently, claims of worth have focused on two kinds of impact: economic (art makes money) and social (art makes people feel better, raises self-esteem and regenerates communities).

Despite strenuous efforts, the attempts to prove economic and social impact have failed. Not all art produces profit or has direct social consequences, and trying to account for it in this way ignores art’s intrinsic qualities. Struggling to produce figures to prove impact has led to a desperate search for ‘evidence’, resulting in a burden on cultural organisations to collect data that appears to show results but is just advocacy research.

Nonetheless, the DCMS are gearing up to formalise further methods to value culture, which will waste even more time and money. The new project involves the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council, with advisers from NESTA, the GLA, English Heritage, and Arts Council England. Many, desperate for funding and unsure of another way, have rolled over and jumped on board.

It’s an important group that will have serious implications for the future of cultural funding and academic research. It wants to move away from impact, and instead ‘value’ the arts with the techniques of economics. In the words of one report, Amazon(UK)). Visit Tiffany’s website here.