Cultural Participation according to Pier Luigi Sacco

New Challenges and opportunities

http://www.culturalpolicies.net/web/compendium-topics.php?aid=241

Pier Luigi Sacco, Professor at the IULM University in Milano, stressed in his keynote lecture given at the Council of Europe Conference of Ministers responsible for Culture, which met in Moscow with the overall theme: “Governance of Culture – Promoting Access to Culture” 16 April 2013

(see the final statement of the Conference here).

Compendium provided a link to Sacco's presentation, and remarked that this is based on an earlier analysis of the road leading from "Culture 1.0" towards "Culture 3.0".

Of interest is what likely consequences it will have for future cultural policy making in Europe. To a large degree, this on-going process is shaped by the success of new technologies (in particular, the digital revolution) as well as by social change in most of the European societies.

His main conclusions are as follows:

Culture is not simply a large and important sector of the economy, it is a ‘social software’ that is badly needed to manage the complexity of contemporary societies and economies in all of its manifold implications.
The total indirect macroeconomic impact of cultural participation is likely to be much bigger than the (already remarkable) direct one.
Once we become able to measure the indirect effects of culture on the various dimensions (to ‘capitalize’ culture), it will be possible to bring cultural policy at the top ranks of the policy agenda.
These effects are further strengthened by the growth of the cultural and creative industries, but only insofar as such growth is as inclusive and participative as possible.

Comments:

Participation is shaped through various forms of finding access. Most recently an article about the opera of Athens performing in all possible places, and this being free, points out that this makes music of a special kind become accessible not only for the first time, but also to those who are hit by the crisis and cannot afford anymore the expensive tickets for theatre and cinema. While management of a society having become complex due to going more and more global, there is the point made by Baumann about modern management losing increasingly so the oversight and, therefore, the interplay between informal and formal impetus to do the work is left out. As Phil Cooke showed in his comparative analysis of successful regions with his term 'culture of excellence', a lot depends upon shared values to make possible outsourcing and decentralization of work as form of distribution of resources. The key aspect is that smaller units tend to be highly motivated and better disposed to be innovative while large companies serve another purpose in terms of overall production needs and this within a macro-economic framework. Of interest is that this kind of discussion ends up with a reflection more about organisational strategies and therefore shows how crucial is a shared value system.

How will the "total macroeconomic impact of participation" be assessed, when there is no clarity about how cultural participation at micro level comes about. For instance what someone feels and images when hearing a poem or listening to a song, that is as well participation, but of a very different kind than the one imagined as being useful for the overall economic performance. Naturally the onus is upon 'indirect', but what is then the value of direct communication and participation if suspended again for the sake of macro performance? Still, cultural participation of the intimate and highly qualitative kind is largely invisible to the outside world, but expresses itself in forms of appreciation and recognition with future consequences hardly realized e.g. someone listening about stories from Africa and becoming later in his life a doctor specializing on tropical medicine and doing volunteer work in poverty ridden shanty towns of the new Africa.

Any attempt to reformulate 'culture' by use of metaphors and terms derived from the digital economy e.g. 'soft ware' of society, may be a useful heuristic device, but can contribute as well to misunderstandings as to what culture is all about.

While Pier Luigi Sacco seeks to upgrade culture and wishes to be put on the agenda, it is doubtful if this promises any success only if the indirect impact of cultural participation becomes measurable. The reasons for culture not to be so high on the list of priorities are as varied as much an outcome of confusion which reigns between politics and the knowledge base (policy research) used for making recommendations.

hf 6.5.2014

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Cultural Participation according to Pier Luigi Sacco

New Challenges and opportunities