The Decline of Political Trust in Culture: Where Did It Go Wrong?

24 October 2024

Elena Polivtseva

This piece is based on a subchapter from the State of Culture report, published by Culture Action Europe in October 2024. The full report is available here.

The State of Culture report, that I authored for Culture Action Europe, presents several key messages about the current state of cultural policy-making and the perception of culture’s value in society. One of its less optimistic findings is that culture remains under-appreciated and marginalised in policy agendas, with its true value still not fully recognised in political and social debates.

The report also highlights the growing trend of hyper-instrumentalisation in cultural policy. Culture is viewed as a tool, product, or resource for achieving external goals - such as economic growth, diplomacy, building national identities, or enhancing well-being. Meanwhile, culture's worth in its own terms is not clearly defined, defended, or let alone prioritised in policy discussions.

Critics of instrumentalisation argue that an excessive focus on defining culture’s value through external policy areas weakens cultural policy’s independence, dilutes the genuine aspirations and values of artists, reduces culture to a mere tool for achieving non-cultural objectives, and in some cases, leads to the disappearance of distinct cultural portfolios or the erosion of arms-length systems.

In today’s world, the alternative to the instrumentalisation of cultural policies is not ‘art for art’s sake’. What the cultural sector needs is trust in its agency and unique role. This would mean the cultural sector is not seen as a mere tool but as an active, equal agent, entrusted with proposing alternative models for the future of societies. Rather than being called upon to 'solve problems,' culture should be recognised for its unique power to reimagine systems that can prevent these problems from arising in the first place.

The reality is that culture is not part of any major policy agenda, whether it's the UN's SDGs or the EU's Green Deal. Cultural budgets are shrinking, and artists' working conditions remain precarious. In today's world, culture in its own right seems to lack political trust.  If this is our today’s state of culture, how did we get here?

Perpetual state of emergency 

Nowadays, the position of culture is challenged by many other priorities governments juggle with. From rising military expenditure to social inequalities, from inflation spikes to natural disasters - today’s decision-makers seem to be overwhelmed with concrete, immediate dangers to stability.

Indeed, we live in a time marked by multiple emergencies, including the climate crisis, social divides, terrorist attacks, armed conflicts, human displacement, health crises, economic slowdowns, and more. Experts and opinion-makers use various terms, such as ‘polycrisis,’ ‘perma-crisis,’ and ‘meta-crisis,’ to characterise our current reality. The data indicates that it's not merely our heightened awareness causing increased concern about the future; the world is indeed experiencing an era that is objectively more challenging than preceding decades.

First of all, the escalating climate transformation and the governments’ failure to slow it down are widely recognised and discussed: the COP 28 UN Climate Change Conference held in late 2023 concluded progress was too slow across all areas of climate action. A real war is unfolding on the borders of the European Union: Russia’s aggression against Ukraine having a profound impact on the EU’s agenda. The instability is further aggravated by the conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. 

These challenges, as well as other major trends, such the ageing of the European population, put significant pressures on the European economy. Mario Draghi, the former European Central Bank chief and Italian prime minister, who was asked by the European Commission to produce the report on European competitiveness, predicts a ‘slow agony’ for the EU economy if radical measures, including massive investments, are not implemented. In the meantime, another trend - the digital transformation - has reached its unprecedented pace. It is not seen solely as a problem; however, the discourse framing ‘digital revolution’ as an opportunity has long been counterbalanced by the perception of it as a potential threat and a source of disruption.

This backdrop does not impact people’s perception of reality in the most positive way. Climate anxiety has become a significant trend for the European population, especially among younger people. Some surveys show that many people are increasingly more fearful about the future, thinking that the financial situation will be worse for future generations.  

Jonathan White, Professor of Politics of the London School of Economics, described the tactics and strategies of governments in the present ‘age of emergencies’ in his book In the Long Run. The Future as a Political Idea. According to him, in a volatile world, policymaking becomes responding to necessity rather than pursuing chosen goals; short-term predictions are more reliable and pertinent than long-term thinking; and the major focus is placed on immediate and practical steps. 

The multiplicity of interrelated disasters facing Europe and the world contributes to the political sense of the time running out and the narrow space for a mistake. This, undoubtedly, has a profound effect on policymaking - from setting priorities and shaping agendas to allocating budgets and selecting stakeholders to be around the table. As White highlights, the political discourse has increasingly become a warning of a ‘now or never’ moment.

There is something about the impact of culture that is hard to demonstrate and promote as essential in such a political climate. In the last two decades, evaluation and measurement of the impact of art and culture were widely recognised as challenging tasks, to put it mildly, especially with the tools and metrics used by governments to detect ‘tangible’, quantifiable impacts. Even more so today, as Europe is evidently shaken by too many emergencies, the genuine value of culture, such as being an essential part of people’s life and a vital element of social foundations, is hard to trace with tools of short-term, emergency-driven strategies. 

An important part of the story is the longevity of culture’s impact. Justin O’Connor, Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia, in his book Culture is not an Industry talks about the different ‘temporalities of impact’, referring to how culture is more of a component of the long-term ‘social reproduction of life’ rather than a response to immediate need. O’Connor warns, however,  that these temporalities of impact should not be establishing the hierarchy of what is important based on how quickly its impact can be seen. 

It is hard to disagree that societies often take much longer to notice the degradation of the cultural sphere compared to the decay of food logistics, healthcare, or education systems. Yet, looking back at history, each era often emerges for us through the lens of the artistic movements of that time, alongside other scientific and technological advancements. Whether it's the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, pop-art of the 50s, or the counterculture of the 1960s, it is clear art played a crucial role in Europe’s progress in history and the development of critical thought. 

But if we try to capture the immediate role of artists in today’s reality, it seems rather ephemeral, or to say the least, debatable. The ambiguity that the arts are naturally giving space to can be a helpful model for dealing with the complexity of our living together in today’s world. Yet ephemeral, debatable, ambiguous are not the characteristics policy-making in times of emergency leans towards. On the contrary, today, there might be an unprecedented quest for clarity and predictability. As White put it, ‘calculating the future means identifying key measures of success and policies that can lead to their demonstrable attainment. It means leaving out the messier stuff - the things on which people disagree, and the ways in which values and deeper structures might change’.

As one of our survey respondents put it: ‘As a writer my role is to create, not change society. History will judge my work’. If history is to judge culture’s value, it will certainly do so. However, present-day politics, driven by emergencies and calculations, tend to overlook or misunderstand this value. The crises and rapid changes challenging our world have led to a rise in pragmatism, caution, and short-term thinking in political strategies. In this context, culture - with its ephemeral, unpredictable, yet immense power - does not seem to enjoy an absolute trust by contemporary politics.

Imagination replaced by calculation

Many of the people we spoke to as part of the State of Culture interview series emphasised that the reason for the erosion of the recognition of culture’s value is that ‘there is something wrong with the system’. ‘We live in neoliberal society that is obsessed with numbers’, one of our contributors said, further reflecting on how such society shows a high degree of distrust towards culture: 

Look at the medicine sector: there is an accepted possibility for side effects for every medication. But if a cultural project deviates from the originally planned design, or fails, there might even be a need to return the money. Culture does not fall under the umbrella of a direct value exchange. 

One of the old explanations for this could be that culture is hard to measure in quantitative terms, which makes it especially vulnerable on the political priority ladder of the systems where calculation is the key means of decision making. Yes, medicine tends to produce side-effects, but the probability of those can be quantified. The impact of a cultural project is much harder to forecast. Moreover, forecasting such impacts might be counter-intuitive and even harmful for the cultural project itself. As written in the publication of IETM (International network for contemporary performing arts) Lost in Transition?: 

Art should remain liberated from assumptions about communities, avoiding the reinforcement of societal compartmentalisation. While it is common for policies to outline aims and target audiences, it is equally reasonable for artists not to predetermine who will engage with and benefit the most from their work.

This goes at odds with the tendency to calculate and forecast which has been gaining ground since centuries. Jonathan White points to the overshadowing of ‘imagined futures’ by ‘calculated’ ones - a trend which is not only connected to emergencies and crises but also to a broader system defining how politics operate today. ‘It has been a money economy which filled the daily life of so many people with weighting, calculating, enumerating and the reduction of qualitative values to quantitative terms’. This tendency gave ground for the growing number of various forecasting techniques used by governments, studies of consumer behaviours, predictions of market dynamics, opinion polls, and more. White further reflects that ‘a desire to apply calculative techniques encouraged a focus on the things that can be measured’ and gave priority to relatively short-term perspectives, simply because they are easier to forecast compared to long-term outlooks requiring speculation.

As cultural policy is tuned to serve multiple external goals, cultural activities and practices have come under the quantitative measurement. For example, the European Commission has established a comprehensive set of indicators to assess the Creative Europe programme, described as 'qualitative and quantitative' in both the 2013 and 2021 Regulations establishing the two editions of the programme. However, in the 2013 Regulation, all 18 indicators primarily focus on numerical data. In 2021, while there is now an indicator for 'success stories', the majority of indicators remain predominantly quantitative. Moreover, these indicators are designed to allow for short evaluation periods, with beneficiaries required to demonstrate their achievements in the final project report at its conclusion.

But if we want to capture the real and full value of culture, it is neither about the short-term nor - and even less so - about the quantitative. The world of culture, composed of symbolic expressions, objects, images, melodies, stories, movements, styles, techniques, practices, and more, offers more of an ‘imagined future’ rather than a ‘calculated one’, and drives a long-term shaping of social foundations. 

Culture is about activating societies, but in the words of White, ‘an active public is one of the many things that can make the world more unpredictable’. This might be one of the reasons why instead of cherishing that perspective on the long-term, imagined and unexpected elements of our life, we are pushed to regard it as part of the calculated and forecasted system. 

But does the cultural sector itself play any role in shaping the policy rhetoric about culture and art?

Cultural stagnation? 

There is a wide-spread opinion that these are the cultural policies and funders' pressures that make the cultural sector tick the various boxes of social cohesion, wellbeing, innovation, economic development, urban regeneration and many more, often at the cost of their artistic worth. An interviewee even referred to the homogenisation of the cultural offer fostered by the overprescription of the culture funding programmes, all putting forward similar expectations driven mainly by instrumental approach to culture and art. 

But what if there is also something about today’s art and the art institutions themselves that makes the discourse on culture instrumental or at least nourishes the ongoing instrumentalisation of cultural policy?  To understand what is in reality happening, let us for a moment shift away from advocacy to the arts.

For a few years now, a growing number of art critics and cultural experts discuss the general standstill or inertia of cultural progress characterising our age. For them today’s ‘state of culture’, mostly referring to the Western culture, is not more than the perpetual recycling of the artistic innovations of the past decades and centuries, a replication of tried-out styles and pathways. They talk about ‘cultural stagnation’, ‘monoculture’, ‘cultural inertia’, ‘cultural immobility’, even ‘cultural sclerosis’.

Jason Farago, an art critic for The New York Times, wrote in October 2023: ‘Today culture remains capable of endless production, but it’s far less capable of change’, referring to the erosion of the arts’ capacity to renew its forms and styles. Claiming that our era will be ‘the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press’, Farago reflects on how present times miss the previous centuries’ radical renewal of artistic languages and styles:  

When you walk through your local museum’s modern wing, starting with Impressionism and following a succession of avant-gardes through the development of Cubism, Dada, Pop, minimalism, in the 1990s you arrive in a forest called “the contemporary,” and after more than 30 years no path forward has been revealed.

In resonance with Farago’s ideas, Aaron Timm, New York-based author, wrote in March 2024: ‘From the academic heights to popular bestsellers, from Christian theology to secular fashion, from political theory to pop music, a range of cultural forms and intellectual pursuits have been stuck for decades in a pattern of recurrence’, and provocatively wondered: ‘We are stuck, progress has stopped, culture is bad, and it’s someone else’s fault. But whose?’.

For Kyle Chayka, author of the book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, one of the major reasons for this development is the influence of the Big Tech and the algorithmic system they have imposed on producers and consumers of the cultural content - both now stripped of their ‘vitality and individuality’. For an artistic work to achieve commercial success, it must be tailored to maximise engagement on digital platforms, often resulting in the creation of many similar-looking and sounding pieces. In the meantime, as people’s cultural consumption is closely intertwined with the Internet and the algorithms governing it, the version of culture they are encountering is replicable and accessible, rather than challenging and disturbing. Indeed, platforms are not interested in ‘adventurous directions’; they are interested in high numbers of users.

Farago also talks about how the modalities of the Big Tech platform culture are pushing cultural producers to make clearer, more communicable, more taggable content, in order to be embraced by the platforms, suggested to or discovered by consumers. He also highlights a few other reasons for why we are not living through cultural revolutions anymore: there is a general slowdown of breakthroughs compared to previous centuries; and the plunge into an ‘infinity of information’ driven yet again by the Internet - the new reality, in which information can surpass the limits of time, ‘everything is recorded, nothing is remembered’, and, in this sense, the notion of ‘an era’ is losing its significance. 

Finally, for Fagaro, the very urge to be innovative, which has been a trend of cultural development since at least a century, is the factor that suffocates progress. ‘To audiences in the 20th century, novelty seemed to be a cultural birthright‘. It might be true that something is recognised as ‘art’ only because it is unique and offers something new compared to what people have already seen. Today’s decay of stylistic innovation has not, however, helped the world of culture to emancipate from this ‘modernist trap’. Driven by the innovation hunger and ‘commitment to novelty’, cultural producers and institutions are now more interested in delving into new topics rather than inventing new forms and styles. According to Fagaro, this shift of the expectation of new stories vs new languages to tell them nourished the interest of young people in political activism (‘plant a tree and call it a sculpture’), and the focus on socially-engaged issues: 

This evangelical turn in the arts in the 21st century has been conflated with the long-overdue admission of women, people of colour and out sexual minorities into the culture industry […]. A gay rom-com is trotted out as “the first”; a Black Little Mermaid is a “breakthrough”; our museums, studios and publishing houses can bring nothing new to market except the very people they once systematically excluded.

In other words, while socially- or politically engaged work is certainly valuable, the problem lies in the growing (self-)expectation within and from the cultural sector to address particular topics, tell specific stories, for the sake of being fresh and thus relevant.

Can it be that this trend of cultural decay amidst enduring commitment to novelty has also been conflated with the systemic quest for calculation, clarity, predictability and communicability that we discussed above? Has it also resonated with the emergency and crisis politics which does not see value in anything that is not immediately useful and easily comprehensible? 

Fatoş Üstek, an independent curator and writer, reflected in her book The Art Institution of Tomorrow: Reinventing the Model that amidst the multilayered global crisis, art institutions are in stagnation, ‘fixated on their current circumstances’. They are also challenged by the fact that, in the digital age - when everyone has a platform to express their opinions - there is much more scrutiny of art institutions' actions. Üstek reflects further:

The consequence of institution’s constraining finances, underpaid and overworked staff, authoritarian demeanour, archaic operational frameworks, and financial dependencies all play a crucial role. I believe the majority of art institutions are at the moment standing still in the fear of any movement that might precipitate their demise. It is painful to see art institutions in this frozen state, lacking the resourcefulness to imagine new horizons. 

One of the values of the world of culture and art - being unexpected - has been losing its vitality in present systems. Out of survival instinct, culture has slowly abandoned its ‘sense of self’, as Timms put it, its self-confidence, and is now giving in to its position of being ‘subordinate to higher forces’. 

Certainly, the message is not that the art and culture field must abandon its social and political role and withdraw into its own world. The worrying trend, on the contrary, is that this role - or the perception of it, even within the sector itself - is becoming blurred and watered down.

In times of disruption, this lack of self-worth can be especially pronounced. One of the manifestations of it was the provocative statement by Ariane Mnouchkine, French stage director, who said to ‘Liberation’: ‘People are fed up with us [the art sector - E.P. ], with our helplessness, our fears, our narcissism, our sectarianism, our denials’, after the French right-wing party National Rally achieved its highest-ever result in a nationwide election in June 2024 and the President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the Parliament. 

How can culture escape algorithmic capitalism, the overall obsession with measurements and calculations, the politics of catastrophe and urgency, and finally the growing uncertainty about its own worth? 

Perhaps, a starting point should be the restoration of this eroded ‘sense of self’. As O’Connor put it: ‘start by asking yourself and answering, as a collective, some fundamental questions: What are we for? What do we stand for? What is our most essential contribution? Politics change, narratives shift. Start with consolidating your own understanding of what your value is’.

The cultural sector needs to articulate its value on its own terms and according to its own temporality, strengthen its own understanding of its role, and develop its own ‘inner rod’ of confidence, rather than relying on externally imposed KPIs. Policy-makers are certainly the primary audience who should understand and embrace these messages. However, as citizens play a crucial role in shifting the power from one force to another, investing in deepening and expanding relationships with communities - to co-create shared impact - can be more effective than over-focusing on how to demonstrate this impact to policy-makers.

You can download the State of Culture report from the website of Culture Action Europe.