Demos Project : Cultural Literacy

Ever so Hidden Dragon

samuel[dot]jones@demos[dot]co[dot]uk ( Sam Jones ) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:16:10 -0100

Literature, the arts and cultural production are one of the most crucial means by which we learn about norms, behaviours, outlooks and attitudes.

In Cultural Diplomacy, we argued that we need to start thinking about cultural literacy, and how we build not only greater awareness of the many cultures that we encounter, but also to take that beyond simply informing of facts to providing skills to accommodate and respond to them in every situation, everyday or institutional, in which we meet them. One of the ways we could go about doing this is through building engagement with everyday culture from around the world.

In that light, this article in The Guardian, whihc points out the gap between ideas of China's importance in the world today, and general knowledge of its contemporary and everyday culture makes for interesting reading.

Museums and Cultural Literacy

samuel[dot]jones@demos[dot]co[dot]uk ( Sam Jones ) — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 17:52:33 -0100

On 26th and 27th June, I'll be at a conference on Museums and International Collaboration. I'll be delivering a paper on museums, and their role in 'Building Cultural Literacy'. You can find out more, and read a synopsis of the paper here.

The Mad-for-it Hatter's Tea Party

samuel[dot]jones@demos[dot]co[dot]uk ( Sam Jones ) — Wed, 16 May 2007 10:15:45 -0100

David Sillito has written a piece on the BBC's website in which he looks at Blair's legacy in relation to culture and the arts.

Much of it will be familiar: free access to museums, the Gallaghers coming round for tea, Britpop, YBAs, the disillusionment of Damon Albarn, Chris Martin and the rest.

It's the story of politics and culture over the last decade. I've just been chatting to Charlie, here in the office, and he's right - if there's one image that we'll remember in relation to Blair and culture, it's him shaking hands with Noel Gallagher. But what did that really represent? Blair's pledge to culture, or Noel Gallagher welcoming a left-wing government after growing up in Manchester in the 1980s?

Part of the reason why that image is so memorable is that is could be read in many ways - even more so when we know the subsequent history.

The last ten years is also the story of an uncomfortable and never clear relationship between the arts, the creative industries ... and, sometimes, spin. The arts look good, sound good feel good ... ten years down the line, the YBAs are still going down a storm in Beijing ... but, for all the rhetoric, it's never been entirely clear how the much vaunted creative industries and cultural provision actually mesh. It feels right that they do ... but how? That's something we're investigating here at the moment - more of that in a couple of weeks.

That aside, David Sillito's conclusion makes for interesting reading:

'... one thing is certain. The early enthusiasm for talking about transforming our culture and expanding the government's role in it was always going to mean that he was opening up a whole new collection of largely ungovernable things that he would be answerable for.'

That's a really interesting point ... one of the big stories of the past decade has been the scrutiny on how art and politics get on together Much-resented encroachment, or insufficient attention? In effect, the early emphasis on culture, the arts and creativity had the effect of creating a rod for a governmental back. Growing attention has been paid to culture, and that has tested the boundaries of culture and politics.

But it's not all down to Blair & co.. As Sillito points out, the cultural fleld-days of the late 1990s span the Major government as much as the Blair years. The cultural world was changing of its own accord, in part as a response to politics. This ran alongside the growth of the creative industries and the attention that they came to command. What this demonstrates is that culture, creativity, the creative industries ... all those things change just as much as politics. It's not a case of picking up on a vote-winner here, a bit of regeneration there, it should be about shaping policy to respond to big changes that are going on.

One of the key differences between the two political eras (Major/Blair) is the awareness that culture matters - that wasn't always the case in the 1980s and 1990s. By the late 1990s, though, culture was the UK's calling card - people were switched on to it and it became a new space in which support could be won, both through alignment with cultural figures and through greater attention paid to arts policy, albeit sporadically. There is much disagreement about the methods and how consistent those efforts have been (and I'm not going to get into that here), but the relevance of the arts and culture was slap bang up there , from the 'Mad for it Hatter' tea party all those years ago, right through to the legacy speech a month or so back.

The simple reason is that, if there's been one constant over the last decade, it's that we know that people like culture and this, after all, has been a government that's been pretty anxious to please. Efforts made have ranged from the simple alignment with already liked figures, to some genuine successes in the arts and cultural policy (Tate Modern, The Sage Gateshead ... mention should also go to the work of Chris Smith in the early years).

Question is, if we know that the arts and culture matter, and we know that people like it - how come we've still got so much to get right?

One answer is that culture and politics are ever changing and there is no static relationship to get right. Sure, culture absolutely should not be at the behest of government and politics. However, as the above examples illustrate, culture and the arts are very much spaces in which politics are conducted. By politics, I mean small 'p' stuff, the expression of attitudes an opinion. It feels like, for various reasons, we're heading towards a point where all those expressions are going to be very important indeed. In the future, we need policy that responds to this. That shouldn't be about vote-winning and, in part, it requires changing attitudes on the part of government, cultural professionals and the public. Big asks, I know, but something we really need to think about.

Cultural Literacy

samuel[dot]jones@demos[dot]co[dot]uk ( Sam Jones ) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 10:20:10 -0100

We’re currently developing some work around the idea of cultural literacy. Both Cultural Diplomacy and As You Like It raised the need to focus on a new skill. Mass communication enables us to express and focus on individual interests to a greater degree than ever before and culture has come to the fore as a means by which, and space in which, we relate to each other. But do we have the skills to interpret and navigate this world to best effect?

At the moment, I’m reading Lauro Martines’ account of the history of Savonarola, the Dominican friar and demagogue whose influence shaped politics and society in Florence of the 1490s. Martines begins his account with some thoughts on the role of the historian. Thinking beyond historiography, they struck a chord, both with some of the themes we are thinking about in relation to cultural literacy, and also with quite a lot of the rest of the work we do.

‘Historical writing has two different stories to tell. There is first of all the one that passed before the eyes of contemporaries: a panorama of individuals, crowds, incidents, and dramatic scenes. Anecdote and colour are likely to govern this narrative. Streaming through all of it, however, in shifting forms of consciousness, is the second story: that is, a constant flow of cultural and political phenomena, the so-called impersonal forces. We dare not forget these for the simple reason that they both precede and succeed the life of every individual, every group, every singular event. And the job of the historian, surely, is to weave back and forth between the two stories; or at the very least, to keep the impersonal and seemingly formless story constantly in mind, for there, in and among the ‘forces’ without faces, is the ground of historical analysis, the social settings that serve to turn the actions of men and women into something more than unrelated fragments – indeed, into tapestries of historical meaning.

‘It follows that one thing we should not do to the men and women of past time, and particularly if they ghost through to us as larger than life, is to take them out of their historical contexts. To do so is to turn them into monsters, whom we can then denounce for our own (frequently political) motives – an insidious game, because we are condemning in their make-up that which is likely to belong to a whole social world, the world that helped to fashion them and that is deviously reflected or distorted in them. Censure of this sort is the work of petty moralists and propagandists, not historians’.

Martines, L., Scourge and Fire: Savonarola and Renaissance Italy, (London, 2006), 4-5