SRG Bennett, 24 October 2020
Ice Watch (2018) Olafur Eliasson, outside the Tate Modern, London (Image credit: the author)
The growth of digital information and data, globalisation and the growing complexity of society are causing profound tremors in public policy. This includes citizens feeling dislocated from decision making, a shift towards ‘post-truth’ politics and a broad questioning of the value of expertise. These underlying movements have been thrown into excruciating relief by the coronavirus crisis which has seen a real time drama play out in the relationship between experts, politics, emotions and the public, on a global stage.
I am leading a short AHRC-funded research project, in collaboration with the Social Design Institute, to explore the role that art and culture can play in policymaking in a post-truth, post-globalised and post-pandemic world.
Facts, emotions, action
Facts are one part; just as guilt does not inspire initiative, people will not act on facts alone. We are inspired to act by emotional and physical experience. Knowledge can tell us what we should do to achieve our goals, but the goals and the urge to act must arise from our emotions
- Olafur Eliasson and Minik Thorleif Rosing, writing about Ice Watch, 2015).
There is no point in taking the time to make evidence-based solutions easier to understand if policymakers are no longer interested. Successful advocates recognise the value of emotional appeals and simple stories to draw attention to a problem
- Paul Cairney, writing in The Guardian, 2016).
Successful policymaking closes holes in the Ozone, reduces infant mortality and leads to the creation of the national health systems. Bad policymaking hurts individual citizens, exchequers and states. The last 15-20 years have seen progress underpinning policymaking with better science and evidence in the UK, from ‘evidence-based policy’ to SAGE. The aim has been to improve policymaking, avoiding the kinds of ‘blunders of government’ which waste large amounts of public money and wreck the lives of ordinary people.
The arts and sciences frequently end up portrayed as opposite sides, with C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’, first articulated in 1959, still reverberating down the generations. It seems the scientific end of the spectrum has a well-established formal infrastructure for informing British policy, including a Chief Scientist network, the Government Office for Science, the Science and Engineering Faststream and so on.
Is there a role for art and culture in policymaking?
The quotes from Eliasson and Cairney, above, come from quite different perspectives (fine art and political theory, respectively) yet are underpinned by the same notion. Humans act because of emotions, beliefs, convictions and stories, not just evidence and facts alone. If art and culture can stir such feelings, this implies a role in policymaking. An interesting historic example is the 1961 film Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde, about the suicide of a man who is being blackmailed because of an affair he had with another man. The film has been widely cited, including by politicians at the time, as creating a climate of public opinion in the UK receptive to the decriminlisation of homosexual relations, with the law changed in 1967.
Dirk Bogarde and Silvia Syms in Victim, 1961 (Image credit: BFI)
Enter stage left: big data
Developments in science and technology may paradoxically create another important role for art and culture in public policy. We live in a society where data is at once increasingly omnipresent yet also alienating. Regan et al. (2015) describe how datasets – from census results, to property prices, to shopping habits, to Facebook likes – are unprecedented in their scale, availability and impact on our lives. Yet, they note, the processing, analysing and presenting of such data is “increasingly removed from the everyday experience”.
Sophia Rosenfeld places such trends into a broader historical context. She argues that Western liberal democracies since the Enlightenment have negotiated a careful balance between ‘expert knowledge’ and ‘popular knowledge’:
While both elite knowledge born of extensive education and commonsense perspectives are vital to democracy as first imagined, either mode, without the other, can lead not only to bad policies. They can lead to the dismantling of democracy altogether [...]
- Sophia Rosenfeld speaking at the OECD, 2019).
It may be that the power of big data has so fundamentally tilted the balance towards nebulous, technocratic, data-analytic enabled centres of power, it has caused a highly vocal and visible kickback the other way. The ‘wisdom of the kitchen table’, two and half centuries after Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, is now jet propelled by social media, growing inequality and globalisation. This is how we find ourselves at a time where anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers and climate change deniers co-exist alongside incredible scientific discoveries, from gene-editing to gravitational waves to exoplanets to smart phones. Can artists play a role in a public forum buffeted by such volatile trends?
What do artists do (and how could it be useful to policymakers)?
The Future Energy Lab (2017), Superflux, a visceral example of ‘speculative design’; the image is of a UAE policymaker inhaling a synthetic sample of air pollution from a 2050 energy scenario (image credit: Superflux)
Whilst ‘artists’ are a heterogenous group (notwithstanding important research on the lack of diversity of the cultural sector), we can identify clear policy-relevant processes and outputs from many artists and cultural practitioners:
Artists deploy sophisticated techniques to communicate complex, nuanced and ambiguous policy-relevant ideas, drawing on a range of visual and material languages to convey meaning.
Artists and cultural practitioners might be considered ‘experts’ at engaging emotions.
Artists could also be described as being ‘professional’ creatives. It is said that many of today's ‘wicked’ policy challenges require innovative approaches. Why not borrow some of the micro-strategies artists employ on a daily basis to move beyond the blank canvas towards insightful, novel and dynamic contributions?
Nicolas Bourriaud’s (2002) work Relational Aesthetics describes a trend in conceptual art away from gallery-based work towards time and place-based artworks which emphasise dialogue, participation and engagement with audiences. Participatory approaches borrowed from contemporary art practices can provide diverse ways to engage citizens, stakeholders and policymakers in decisions, reaching places that a Green Paper perhaps cannot.
Policy decisions made today have long lifespans, yet thinking about the future is difficult for citizens and policymakers alike. Artists and designers have, over the last 10 years, been developing ‘speculative design’, the practice of creating speculative visions of possible future worlds. The aim is to use such speculations to help decision makers - politicians, citizens, consumers, voters, businesses - think about what a better future can look like, and how to achieve it.
Useful art in policymaking?
Should art be useful? To policymakers?
New Linthorpe (2014-ongoing), Emily Hesse and James Beighton, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, a project to use of local clay (earth) to bring about community empowerment and social change, part of the Arte Útil archive
A simple question with potentially explosive answers, depending when it was asked. Ingres’ stunning Napoleon on His Imperial Throne was probably very useful to that French policymaker, and such artworks perhaps led to the Romantic era attempt to disassociate art from political/religious/moral utility, neatly condensed into the phrase ‘art for art’s sake’.
However Chantal Mouffe (and many others) argue that every form of art has a political dimension, whether it intends to or not - so if art is going to be political anyway, might it as well be useful?
The curator Alistair Hudson and artist Tania Brughera bring a pragmatic perspective on this debate, championing Arte Útil, ‘art as a social tool’ (Hudson 2016). The former oversaw the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA) redefining itself as the ‘useful museum’, and is now turning over parts of the Manchester Art Gallery to an early years wellbeing centre. The Arte Útil movement is assembling a formidable archive of art having direct social, economic and arguably political impact.
A work-in-progress piece by the author, for possible exploration later in this research project
The next steps for my research project are to review case studies of how artistic and cultural practices have been used in policymaking. Alongside the Arte Útil archive, there is the recently created Centre for Cultural Value, and indeed the more historic 1960s-70s Artist Placement Group, a collective which sought to reposition art within a wider social context through placing artists in industry and government departments to aid ‘decision making’. At later points, I hope to establish a framework for how art and culture can be used in policy, and create an artistic intervention to enable experiential research into this question.
Do you know of other case studies or resources for thinking about a role of art and culture in policymaking? Are there conditions or timings which might mean art and culture are particularly impactful? Can art and culture diversify who and how people engage with policy? Please contact me via mail or twitter with your thoughts.
SRG Bennett is a practicing visual artist and a policymaker. He is a Clore 16 Fellow. His research “A use for art and culture in policy?” is conducted as part of the Social Design Institute (University of the Arts London), and is sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Clore Leadership.