The Quest for a New Narrative on Culture: Foundations, infrastructures, Public Goods (and Bads)
1 April 2025
by Justin O’Connor, Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia
Reframing Culture
Cultural policy is in deep crisis.
Since the 1980s, the cultural sector has been forced to advocate on what it can deliver to various government agendas, proffering weak quid pro quo deals to those with the big budgets. These are mainly about economic growth of various kinds, but also social cohesion, strengthening communities, crime reduction, mental health, wellbeing and so on.
However, the progressive marginalisation of culture is at its most visible in the failure of the cultural sector to get its own distinct goal in the set of 2015 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. It was a marginalisation repeated at the September 2024 UN’s Summit of the Future, where culture received barely a mention, was lumped together with sport, and instead of being recognised as a distinct policy area was diluted within economic, social, and environmental policies.
As I argue in Culture is Not an Industry (2024), all this rests on a fundamental category error. There are many cultural industries, including some major global corporations, but culture itself is not an industry. We therefore need a radical repositioning of culture as a core area of public policy, alongside material infrastructure, health, education, and social services.
Over the last decade, many heterodox economists have focused on how we can ‘re-embed’ the economy in the social, to make it work for the social good, rather than as a generator of abstracted GDP growth. What is noticeable, at least on the left, is the absence of art and culture from these progressive re-imaginings. New, heterodox economic visions mostly omit mention of culture. For instance, Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics (2018) does not include culture in her ‘social foundations’, not surprising as they are based on the SDGs.
But some shifts have begun to occur. The Foundational Economy Collective (FEC), on whose work I draw here, have spent the last decade seeking to reshape social and economic policy by foregrounding the basic requirements for any liveable society – material infrastructure, public services, and small scale local ‘everyday’ economies (FEC, 2018). This ‘foundational economy’, coupled with a strong local ‘everyday’ economy of retail, personal services, recreation and so on, provide the crucial foundations to ensuring the collective material security which a healthy democracy requires. The fully capitalist ‘transactional economy’, to which creative industries are urged to aspire, is only one part of the overall economic field. Initially positioning culture as a ‘discretionary’ luxury spend, FEC’s recent work now includes culture as part of ‘foundational liveability’ (Calafati et al, 2023).
Culture as Foundational
Before I sketch the outline of a foundational approach to culture, I would point to three essential principles underpinning these arguments. First, art and culture is a human right, as outlined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights: Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Second, we need the array of material resources and capabilities to make these abstract rights concretely effective. That means not just cultural consumption but education (in its broadest sense), access to spaces of cultural practice, and to craft and expertise, and some public funding, underpinned by a functioning welfare state. Third, to participate in the cultural life of the community, there actually needs to be such a cultural life. Without these pillars cultural rights become formalistic lip-service.
We first need to be clear that the culture I am talking about here is not culture as a ‘whole way of life’ - traditions, language, rituals, etc. but a narrower part of it, what I would call ‘art and culture’: the symbolic, the representational, the aesthetic. The keywords are imagination (without which we can never change the world or build a future) and freedom (humans do not act by instinct but must choose what kind of world they want to live in). Art and culture work through these using sound, rhythm, shape, movement, colour, image, metaphors and narratives. They create a knowledge based on the senses and a particular relation to the world, one different to that of analytical reason, science, administration, or technology. One that accepts the particular on its own terms and tries to give it a full, meaningful, and ultimately, I would say, ethical relationship to the world. And if that sounds very educational, this knowledge brings with it entertainment and delight, contestation and disruption, comfort and joy.
Culture as Public Goods
However we attempt to define it, ‘art and culture’ is an ‘irreducibly social good’ - understood as goods that are produced collectively, in close relationship with the broader social context and cannot be reduced to individual benefits. As irreducibly social goods, culture and art are unthinkable outside shared conventions, understandings, forms of practice, and expectations, which yet are always open and contestable. Yet culture as a social and public good has been progressively marginalised in cultural policy.
The repositioning of culture as an individual consumer good was one of neoliberalism’s first privatisations. The cultural policy settings of the last twenty-five years involved trying to ‘scale up’ a would-be entrepreneurial sector to competitively serve this market, while at the same time pushing publicly funded institutions to act as quasi-market actors.
Public funding is kept afloat only with arguments for ‘market failure’, and here the notion of ‘public goods’ finds its place. Developed in the 1950s within neoclassical economics, public goods are defined as ‘non-exclusionary’ and ‘non-rivalrous’. In basic terms, everyone can use them, and one person’s use does not diminish that of another’s. Economists recognised that there were some goods that could not be charged to the user, or at least not at a rate that would guarantee a commercial return on investment. Water, electricity, roads, mass education – these kinds of things were supplied free or at low cost and so, normally, the public rather than the private sector needed to provide supply. This is a negative definition of ‘public goods’, in the sense that it is based on the departure from market-led supply and demand, which is deemed less than optimal, a regrettable necessity.
There are however many older traditions in which a positive version of these public goods can be understood not simply in technical economic terms but as pertaining to the public good per se. This certainly includes the Aristotelian and classical republican vision of public good, but it can also be found in socialist, social democratic, social liberal, pre-neoliberal conservative, communitarian, and anarchist thought, and in older civilisational traditions such as Confucianism, or Islam, and is directly palpable in the indigenous and First Nations’ sense of a community life that encompasses generations past and future.
Experts working in material infrastructures, concerned with the consequences of systemic underinvestment and deterioration in the face of new challenges, have taken a different view of public goods, which is not all about the ‘market failure’. Deb Chachra (2023), an engineering professor, defines infrastructure as ‘everything we don’t have to think about’, pointing to a degree of invisibility and thus taken-for-granted. But it does need looking after. For Chachra and Brett Frischman (2012) infrastructures deliver public goods. Non-excludable here is not a negative impediment to ‘market first’ principles but a positive attribute - it is for everybody, the more the merrier!. Infrastructures provide collective benefits, some predictable and measurable by targets, others down stream, less predictable, and enabling. They imply intergenerational trust and are best delivered outside the narrow profit motive. And as collective projects, they ought to be subject to democratic oversight and decision-making. Frischmann wants to connect infrastructure with the “commons, a resource management principle by which a resource is managed within a community” (2012:ix). That is, they imply not just ‘efficiencies’ but a certain normative-political dimension. This is more so in respect of social and cultural infrastructures.
When we speak of culture as a public good, it is essential to consider the perspective from which we define ‘public good’ - whether as a mechanism to correct market failure or as a community-centred approach to resource management. This distinction has significant policy implications.
Social and Cultural Infrastructure
Social infrastructure provides a range of public goods that are enabling for any human flourishing, and this can be applied also to the specific field of cultural policy. As with other policy areas, cultural infrastructure is best provided as a public good. The social benefit is not an aggregation of individual private benefits, but is a positive collective good, in which the participation of each one enhances the overall benefit to all. That is, they are not state provided ‘goods’ delivered to individuals, but in their very collective nature sustain community and connectivity: a public. State funded culture is provided non-exclusively to all citizens, not because it is difficult to make them all pay for it but as an explicitly social good - that reflects the vision that culture should belong to society as a whole.
This means not just access to diverse forms of cultural consumption but to production too. This active participation is what Mark Banks (2017) calls ‘contributive justice’, the right of all to actively make or ‘do’ culture. This requires a range of cultural public goods, tangible and intangible, starting with education, in its widest and deepest sense. This would involve not only the skills and craft of creative making but exposure to diverse historical and contemporary cultural works and forms of artistic practice. It would require a broad, accessible public cultural life, allowing participation in those multiple conversations through which knowledge and judgment are developed and exercised. It would include access to diverse physical spaces of cultural practice (rehearsal, dance, performance, making, recording, coding), to related sources of craft, making and expertise, and to some project funding.
Culture infrastructure as a public good would include institutions of education and training, preserving, exhibiting, and performing; cultural services such as libraries (with their multiple forms of material resources), workspaces, archives, print and coding; small scale grants and project funding; legal and regulatory basics, accessible public media; and so on.
Public Goods in the Private Sector
The idea of a ‘public good’ applies not just to state funded cultural infrastructure and related public goods, but also what the FEC call the small scale ‘everyday economy’. Those elements of the cultural infrastructure that take place not just in spaces that ‘may be public and free to use, such as libraries, parks and youth centres’, but may also ‘be provided in commercial spaces, for instance pubs, cafés and restaurants’ (Kelsey and Kenny, 2021:11). Often presented as ‘the market’, at local level it is far more like Ferdinand Braudel’s ‘embedded markets’, or Edward Thompson’s ‘moral economy’, than Hayek’s efficiently humming, calculating machine. Small scale, everyday cultural life is a mish mash of gift economies, sacrificial labour, sole traders, small businesses, real and de facto co-ops, hand to mouth cash flows, gig and portfolio work, businesses hanging on by their fingernails and seat-of-the-pants. In short, everything that provides our cities with ‘vibrancy’, which interlaces with and enhances the social infrastructure, where artistic innovation happens, and animates the ecologies within which art and culture take place.
It may be straightforward to equate public goods with state subsidised goods, but the concept also covers the regulations, capacity building, legal frameworks, and the overall ‘political license’ within which the private sector operates (Kaul, 2016; Frischmann 2012). Markets rely on a whole legal-regulatory infrastructure, and as Michel Callon (1998) and others have shown, they need to be created and shaped. Hayek himself suggested they could only work within a prior framework of shared values (Slobodian, 2018), and, as Marianna Mazzucato (2024) has it, they can be ‘tilted’, by concerted state action, toward the public good outcomes we want them to deliver.
Nancy Frazer (2022) suggests that, in socialism, between the basic social foundations and the large-scale industrial production, there is a role for the market. And these parts of culture fall squarely within that space. How to ‘exclude’, to put people behind a turnstile so they are obliged to pay, or to create discreet commodities capable of being purchased, or an intellectual property demanding pay-per-use, requires a business model. Finding a way to ‘monetise', at the same time somehow keep the artistic vision ‘real’, is a challenge with which most cultural practitioners are all too familiar. These complex challenges have long been known in the political economy of culture, but a salient aspect for us is the need to make commodities pay before their inevitable tendency to become public goods wins out. Cultural goods are not used up by private consumption. Privately produced cultural goods gradually leak out, get hacked, shared, copied, pirated, put in libraries and on school reading lists, bought by museums, run out of copyright, streamed on TV. Cultural goods are thus ‘irreducibly social goods’ in two senses. Their production is inconceivable without the accumulated knowledge of all previous productions, they are a kind of specialised language, which must be learned and practiced within these complex public-private ecosystems. And they contribute in turn to that shared language, that ferociously complex and multifaceted public conversation which is art and culture.
That culture should be free from excessive government interference, have its autonomy, be annoying, and make noise, is crucial for any open and progressive view of culture. Hence the importance of the ‘everyday’ economy of small and medium cultural businesses, co-ops and collectives, associations, semi-formal social networks – the clusters and milieu of the current policy imaginary – which produce the public goods of a multifaceted, rambunctious culture. They do so most visibly in their immediate vicinity – vibrant cities, flourishing cultural events and spaces, strengthened communities, democratic contestation, artistic innovation. As the criticism of the ‘creative city’ concept has shown, these public goods – conceptualised as ‘externalities’ – are very easily captured by private capital (real estate, hospitality, retail, universities), unless some concerted public countervailing intervention is made. Attempts by (usually) local governments to retain (some of) these goods for the public is also a form of public goods. These actions include insisting on open public spaces and access, percent for art, contributions to local cultural facilities and events, property trusts and other such mitigations of the rampant property market (Banks and Oakley, 2024). Matthew Thompson’s argument for locally delivered services could easily be applied to culture:
A state-funded foundational economy need not be delivered top-down by a centralised structure but rather devolved to place-based, democratically-governed organisations such as social enterprises and cooperatives, trading through a decentralised form of market socialism. A democratic and publicly-accountable market-socialist system for coordinating [services] might be supported through progressive public procurement favouring firms demonstrating efficient service delivery, social value creation and multiplier effects for local jobs and reinvestments in the local economy. Multiple cases of innovative coordination of foundational and social economies at the municipal scale in recent experiments with new municipalism and community wealth building…suggest possible ways forward (Thompson (2022) 15-16).
However, the question of how to retain these public goods produced by the everyday economy of culture also relates to the capacity and sustainability of the local cultural ecosystem itself. As we know, pressures on cultural sector pay and conditions, on working and living spaces, on small music and performance venues, on bookstores and galleries, on conditions of access to production software and distribution platforms – all these are making small scale cultural producers as endangered as insects on an agri-business megafarm. Here there are options for public good interventions around creative spaces, night-time entertainment zones, community trusts, co-operatives, rent controls, forms of basic income for artists, shared purchase options and many others.
How we manage this is a difficult, complex question with no easy answers. This is – or should be – the primary role of cultural policy, to find ways of sustaining and expanding the production of and participation in culture by the widest possible range of people. The question of culture as a public good is about the right to full participation at one end, and at the other, about how to ensure continued functioning of the interconnected public and private system of art and culture.
Facing Public Bads
The task not only involves redefining culture as a public good, but also confronting some serious public bads. By that I mean all those forces that threaten to enclose, monopolise or thwart the contribution of art and culture to the public good. This too has a long history, involving states, markets, monopoly capital and technologies in complex ways. It forms part of the history of culture over the last 250 years, at least.
Currently the immediate ‘public bad’ is the ongoing capture of art and culture by global corporations, whose control of access to market, distribution technologies, and multiple forms of IP, as well as the creeping domination of philanthropy within state finances for culture is now well underway. Indeed, as some authors have pointed out, these are no longer markets in any accepted sense of that term, more like enclosures. Six out of the top ten global corporations deal in the distribution and often production of art and culture, and their impact on the ecology of cultural production across the globe has been profound (Doctorow and Giblin, 2022). For the economic development officers in the cultural and creative industry departments, this is about navigating the shifting horizon of threat/ opportunity in an endlessly disrupted world. The deleterious impact of this reality on the very possibility of art and culture as a public good in a democratic world is not in their remit.
The permeability of art and culture to the wider culture - in its definition as a ‘whole way of life’ - is underlined negatively when we see how platform capitalism has annexed much of the very lifeworld out of which art and culture grow. Its algorithmic capture of expressed preferences, the technological expression of aggregated individual choice, aims to reduce the conversation of art and culture to endless distraction and repetitive addiction. With the rapid, unregulated upsurge of large language model computing (‘artificial intelligence’) what Karl Marx called ‘the general intellect’, the common accumulated stock of civilisational knowledge, has now been given over, just like that, to a group of sociopathic tech bros in Northern California. As Jeremy Gilbert suggested,
‘ultimately, there can be little question that platformisation is today the key social, technical and institutional logic affecting the everyday experience of billions of people, and the ways in which they relate to each other, conceptualise themselves and even manage or express their most intimate emotions.’ (Gilbert, 2024:4)
However we wish to revive the relationship between the ‘art and culture’ and the wider anthropological culture - the definition that encompasses a way of life, tradition, language, religion, rituals, and more, the ways in which both are being effectively privatised must give considerable cause for concern.
A New Imaginary
Brain Eno described culture as ‘a set of collective rituals that we’re all engaged with… everyone, …all the people actually in the community, everybody – has been generating this huge, fantastic conversation which we call culture. And which somehow keeps us coherent, keeps us together’ (Eno, 2015). How do we sustain the ongoing possibility of this collective, ‘fantastic conversation’, in all its messy and disruptive multifacetedness? One in which our symbolic, aesthetic or metaphorical understanding of the world, already visible thirty thousand years ago in the Chauvet Cave in France, seventeen thousand years ago in Balanggarra Country in the north-east Kimberley, Australia, or three thousand years ago in Homeric Greece, can continue to evolve.
We currently look on powerless, at the wholesale slashing of culture budgets in North and (parts of) South America, across the UK, Australia and Europe, and elsewhere. As state broadcasting and public cultural policy is whittled down, or made a direct arm of politics. As art and culture are cut from education, or made prohibitively expensive, effectively privatising whatever remains of the system of public goods. As the commercial sector is handed over to the platform companies. The ‘fourth estate’, national television and screen ecosystems, games, films, festivals, books, theatre, live music venues, are all under immense stress, threatening to atrophy in some instances. Local ecosystems are undermined as any public value they produce – the liveliness, diversity and obscure wonder that help make life worth living – is captured by real estate, hospitality, platform companies, up-market retail and corporatised universities.
In these circumstances, seeking for yet more metrics of impact, retooling advocacy to suit the fleeting objectives of the government of the day – this has now reached its endgame. It is time to radically divest from the baroque edifice of desperately seeking ‘cultural value’ and start, as a matter of urgency, to articulate the value of culture outside the technocratic policy tweaking and consultancy generating morass of actually existing cultural policy. We need art and culture to contribute to that new imaginary, part of the urgent renewal of a sense of shared purpose and shared future.
References
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Banks, Mark and Kate Oakley (2024): Cakes and ale: the role of culture.
in the new municipalism, Cultural Trends, DOI: 10.1080/09548963.2024.2344468
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