We founded Arts Analytics to help anyone share, explore, and interpret data about the arts more easily. At its core, Arts Analytics exists to change the culture of how information is used in the arts and culture sector. But changing a culture often requires provocation—breaking a few eggs to make the omelet of progress, stirring the pot to challenge conventions and shed the trappings that may hold us back.
In the course of our work (and sometimes our play), we’re fortunate to have rich conversations with thoughtful, generous colleagues and friends. We value those exchanges most when disagreements illuminate new or contested terrain. From time to time, we invite those colleagues to share their perspectives with a wider audience.
Last summer, we debuted a “Provocations” series in this Words space, aimed at unsettling our settled wisdom. Since then, we’ve been honored to feature provocative ideas from Terry McDonnell, Claire Rice, and Bill Ivey. Together, these contributions raised questions about arts policy centered on the public rather than producers, and explored the implications of paying artists more. While these ideas may not have been as controversial as calling for a reboot of arts administration programs, they nonetheless sparked thoughtful responses—including reflections from wise friends like Michael Rushton. We also shared one of Bill Ivey’s final public messages: a “what next?” call to action for an arts sector in need of new strategies and priorities.
In 2026, we will continue these Words. We will keep inviting others to share ideas that challenge, unsettle, and inspire. If these contributions make you think, we’ll consider that a success. As scholars, our aim is not to chase clicks in an attention economy, but to offer provocations that are genuinely thought-provoking and, at times, productively disruptive.
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By James Doeser
Dr James Doeser was a freelance researcher, writer and consultant who worked with artists, cultural organisations and policymakers in the UK and overseas.
Here are some thoughts about the state of cultural policy – thoughts that have been gestating for two years since I left the sector for other things. The further you step back from the cultural sector the more it seems like a church, with the policy makers in government and funding agencies the high priests. I sense that they have a serious problem: their god is being killed by the 21st century (its technology, its social movements, its demographic “churn”). It’s undeniably a thrilling time to observe the cultural sector as it disintegrates and decomposes, but I sense that policy making and policy makers are in a crisis, for the following reasons:
Cultural policy is (and always was) derivative and downstream of other “first order” public policy areas. The issues that have historically preoccupied the sector – artistic expression, audience demographics, workforce conditions, economic and social impacts, innovation etc, are problems created by larger social conditions such as welfare, housing, education, technology, infrastructure, etc. I would argue that these are also the policy domains where cultural policy solutions reside. Fixing housing for everyone fixes housing for artists.
Our historical moment is one of unprecedented abundance in every conceivable form of cultural content. On the seventh day God rested but on the eighth day she created the internet. Widely adopted technologies afford near limitless production and distribution of every conceivable form of art. Across the digital horizon scarcity became abundance. Artificial Intelligence further tips the balance from abundance into surplus. Infinity plus one equals infinity. Cultural policy used to be about solving problems of scarcity. But now the questions come in a different form: How much of culture is enough? How much is too much?
Abundance begets a vertiginous nihilistic redundancy as well as great art for everyone. Want to be a published author in 2025? Great! Use your phone to get ChatGPT to spew out a few words online and hey presto you are now a published author! Not enough? Not what you meant? Ah… You want to be “A Published Author” like in ye olden days… Enrol in a competitive MFA Programme and get entangled with gatekeepers, agents, publicists who can connect you with a legacy publisher to have your physical book reviewed in legacy newspapers and stocked in legacy bookstores. Invest, legitimate, affirm, validate, repeat. The anachronistic certainties of the legacy and the analogue are part of the nostalgic appeal of taking part. One hitch: this a pay-to-play game now, and it’s winner takes all. Is it any wonder that the the ratchet of family connection or financial privilege has become so fundamental to whose culture predominates within the sector?
Dissensus and dissolution of normative concepts like taste, quality and value have eaten the foundations of cultural policy. Why is it that all the big money funds the art that your grandparents liked? Why does it feel like the never-retiring boomer managerial class preside over a fading world of anachronisms? One part must be technological: cultural policy in the analogue world of scarcity was directed to making, sharing, impacting, reproducing, innovating, sharing again, etc. Another part is the vacancy of judgement and the inevitable relativism that abundance generates. A long-overdue collapse of dogmatic canonical consensus culture along with content surplus has worked to undermine the very foundations that historically underpin “the sector as conventionally constituted”. So policy has taken a defensive turn: it remains in the interest of “the sector” to fortify dissolving concepts like “song”, “artist”, “book”, etc, or else what is the policy about? What is it for?
Contemporary cultural policy largely supports the sector as conventionally constituted to behave like a gigantic self-referential status-validation engine. The flow of energy through the sector looks to me as follows: museums, orchestras, literary festivals, theatres etc provide the mechanism for wealth and power to legitimate itself and launder its reputation; for aspiring creatives and administrators in the workforce to validate and affirm their talent, ego and investment in their own education; for media to amplify and gate-keep, and for audiences to congratulate themselves on their own distinct good taste taste. Donors buy with their money, artists and administrators buy with their sacrifices, media buys with its hard-won access, audiences buy with their attendance. Every component must feel like they are getting something for their efforts. It holds together because the donor class keep dutifully recycling their capital into the engine and everyone involved gets their token of tradable status.
Maintaining the health, shape and boundaries of the sector is the essential but unarticulated work of cultural policy. Dissensus, fracture, atomisation, relativism, these should be thrilling and vertigo-inducing times. But it’s costly for incumbents and legacy institutions. The shape and size and boundaries of the sector are straining to the point of existential collapse. It wasn’t any counterculture wot killed it, but rather an irrelevancy and redundancy brought about by technological and social change. From a certain distance the “sector as conventionally constituted” appears to be the key policy concept, the unit of mutual solidarity, whose welfare matters most of all: it looks from the outside like fortification and mythologizing. Complaints about funding cuts or lack of representation are introspective concerns about the remains of the sector, although they are often considered to be about the welfare of culture in general. After the death of god it’s not scripture or salvation that matters but the welfare of the church. There must be only so many new old people to fill the auditoriums. Only so much new old money to keep the show on the road. For the time being it seems like every expiring boomer can be replaced by a petrostate rascal or crypto bro looking for a reputational rinse, but I do not know how long this will last.
Personally, I think it’s an exciting time to be alive, but a tough time to be a policy maker. It’s as if some old observations have been super-charged by recent developments in digital technology (the abundance doctrine has been preached for decades, and most of my thinking is reheated Frankfurt School material). I mostly find myself looking through and beyond “the sector as conventionally constituted” when arranging my own cultural life. I’m not sure it’s possible to use the 20th century tools, institutions, mechanisms, of “the sector” to engage with the spark of novelty or uncaptured artistic expression in the 21st century. You might as well ask Google Maps to find you a “hidden gem” of a cafe. A “fresh new artist” featured in the New York Times is dead on arrival. For “the sector” to convince me otherwise it will need new institutions with new logics, and policy that supports them to flourish. Most people likely swim in contemporary cultural waters not caring about the legacy engine that algorithmically produces and distributes the art they have been instructed to enjoy and the policy that underpinned it all. I wish them well but I am exploring a different path.