Measuring the value of culture

The new Measuring Cultural Value programme — funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council — recommends using economic measures to demonstrate the value of arts and culture and thereby justify investment. The programme stresses that the sector does not need to focus solely on economic value, but should be able to articulate its worth in the language of economics.

This ties into larger questions about how evidence is used in cultural policy decision-making, and what this reveals about government and the nature of the British state.

There are deep suspicions within the sector about measuring the value of art and culture. But in the context of significant cuts, should new approaches to economic valuation make a stronger case for culture?

Cultural policy academic Dave O'Brien, author of a recent DCMS paper on the subject, looks at well-being and health outcomes alongside economic ones. He argues that other areas of public policy — most obviously health and the environment — have evolved valuation tools that have entered mainstream policy appraisal and raised the quality of public decision-making. The same needs to happen for cultural policy.

There is resistance to this approach, not least from figures such as Richard Eyre, former Artistic Director of the National Theatre. Writer John Holden has argued that cultural value should be understood across three dimensions: instrumental value (the social and economic uses of culture), institutional value (the trust and esteem organisations generate through engagement), and intrinsic value (that which is unique to the cultural sector and cannot be found elsewhere — associated with aesthetic excellence and individual enjoyment, and resistant to the language of outputs and outcomes).

In the context of the current cuts, it is worth watching how the Coalition balances the useful and the irreducibly useless aspects of art. The coming months will bring key decisions related to cultural policy, and it will be important to examine whether arts and culture can hold its ground when its value is assessed in purely economic terms.