by James Doeser
This is the second of three short essays which respond to recurring themes in Words @ Arts Analytics from the last year. My first essay ended by suggesting that cultural policy needs to support new institutions with new logics for the new realities of a contemporary culture characterised by dissensus and abundance. This essay offers a related set of observations about the role of research in such circumstances. I spent a good long decade advocating for the use of research in cultural policy, working with universities and those actively commissioning research. Here are a few reflections:
There are no policy problems that can be solved with more or better data. When I began working in the sector the common claim was that dysfunction or inability to meet goals was partly the result of a lack of good data. The sorts of issues I’m talking about are enduringly familiar: audience and workforce diversity, sustainable business models, efficient fundraising and effective advocacy, etc. Further exacerbating things was a sense that even if the data did exist we still didn’t know “what worked”. Such complaints spurred a flurry of investment and activity that generated countless resources, manuals, toolkits and portals. Data, research and insight became abundant. Most of the time very little changed and the issues persisted. Data never was the problem. Instead it was probably about appetites for risk, for bearing the costs of hard decisions, or overturning conventional wisdom and vested interests.
There is a reason why our contemporary cultural landscape is dominated by platforms and devices that are built upon demographic and behavioural data. The simple fact is that Google, Amazon, Spotify, and YouTube know me better than I know myself. The best paid cultural sector researchers are not administering after-show surveys to opera audiences, they are crunching behavioural data from platforms, devices and payment providers. After decades in the field and a couple of years outside it I have concluded that people’s motives, behaviours and beliefs are a mystery to themselves. They are beyond the reach of an earnest researcher inquiring in good faith, exploring the accounts that people give themselves. It’s a great way to reveal post-hoc delusion and misdirection, not so much for accurate or predictive insight. The gaping chasm between the stated and revealed preferences of people has been made undeniably vivid by digital tools of cultural engagement (what you search for and what you subsequently watch/buy/read), yet ironically this insight is locked away inside the bowels of corporate tech giants. They are using it to further addict and enslave us. Conventional researchers with their ethics codes and antique methods stand no chance.
Research and researchers in the field are poorly served by the infrastructure that should support their work. This is hardly a controversial observation, but I cannot understand why there are so many willing participants in systems that are increasingly immiserating. The happiest academics I know have either escaped core teaching and admin duties or they are actively subverting them. Academic publishing is completely broken. Journals could be a place where new discoveries are shared and discussed, rather than a venue for building academic careers and lining the pockets of publishers. Universities could be a place of free-flowing and curious academic inquiry, rather than revenue-maximizing degree mills that confer various grades of status on graduates and faculty. The consultancy ecosystem could be a place where tangible insight and impact are rewarded, rather than a race to the bottom sustained by patronage and dodgy expediency. Ultimately, there is something awry with the incentive structures. The desire for growth has rewarded some at the expense of the field in general. Anyone who shuts down an academic journal deserves our respect; anyone who starts a podcast needs a serious talking to. But overall I’m surprised that so many of my peers would rather grumble and carry on, rather than quit altogether.
It would be thrilling to see a fresh set of research questions that respond to the 21th century cultural sector. Something that tackles the conditions and predicaments of abundance and dissensus using data, methods and theories that are truly up to the standards of the tech giants that dominate our culture. There is a tendency to utilise long-running data series or methods or theories that were designed in the analogue age when things like genre, media and art form distinctions still held, as did consensus ideas about what even constituted art or artists. I wonder if this explains why academic literature seems to be exploring the same recycled questions that excited scholars when I began working in the sector some twenty years ago. Nobody seems to have formulated a powerful or clear theory as to what to do with the answers that such inquiries generate in our contemporary world. I feel like most of the questions about supply have been answered. But great mysteries remain about what people want, what are the contexts that shape their desires, what their cultural utopias look like. I have a hunch that some combination of neuroscience and psychoanalytic inquiry is probably the most fruitful approach to understanding the impacts and attractions of 21st century culture. I no longer feel equipped or qualified to sketch out a research agenda that is genuinely new and responsive to current conditions, but I would love to see it.
Any new research agenda would need to move past settled science and kill zombie facts. “Every dollar invested in the arts generates three dollars in the wider economy, arts bring communities together, piping Mozart into the womb improves the child’s test scores, high ticket prices dissuade disadvantaged attendees” etc, are the sorts of claims that were pretty comprehensively refuted during my working life. And yet they seem lodged in the minds of advocates and decision-makers. By contrast, there were things that were conclusively discovered and validated: cultural participation that was structured, physically active, and social improves subjective well-being; spending money on cultural programs generates employment and economic activity; increasing demand through education and appreciation attracts audiences in ways that increasing supply do not; life changes like moving or having children disrupt cultural participation patterns” etc. There will be many more zombie facts and settled science that I have forgotten, and some of you may contest that these are closed files. But I am genuinely curious to discover what might be the most pressing outstanding unanswered questions for cultural policy. Otherwise the sector will continue relitigating the same old questions we had in 2020, and in 2000, etc.
The same conditions that animated my first essay about policy – the abundance of cultural content and ways to engage – prompt the same existential questions about research. How much more data do we need to answer the questions that matter? How many arts graduates is too many arts graduates? If higher education is to become an arena in which students submit AI-generated assessments in response to AI-generated course materials then everyone’s incentives are met but the culture as a whole is diminished. Some of you will be lucky enough to have institutional buffers that protect you from all this. For others on the way up or on the way in I wonder if it’s going to be any fun, which is a shame because it could be vital and thrilling work.