Add Value to Contents: the Valorisation of Culture Today

This article (on www.transform.eipcp.net - a site worth checking out) talks around and through the industry-paradigm of culture.

As a critique of the industrial frameworks surrounding valorization of culture, Esther Leslie offers a thoughtful portrayal of perspectives on culture, and she responds to it. Starting with UNESCO's insistance that:

‘cultural industries’, which include publishing, music, audiovisual technology, electronics, video games and the Internet, ‘create employment and wealth’, ‘foster innovation in production and commercialisation processes’ and ‘are central in promoting and maintaining cultural diversity and in ensuring democratic access to culture’

She rapidly moves on to attest that within this paradigm, "value is a gift of industry, not a quality of artifacts themselves."

What I find particularly resonant (and strangely not paradoxical, even as it ironically tempts hypocracy), is the say she frames her statement that value has become a debased term. She rephrases the cultural economic argument (the value that is more valuable than all others is monetary) with cultural marketability.

Alongside, Adorno and Benjamin, she invokes Marx in the article.

Click here to read the whole article

excerpt:

In Britain today, as elsewhere, culture is the wonder stuff that gives more away than it takes. Like some fantastical oil in a Grimm fairytale, this magical substance gives and gives, generating and enhancing value, for state and private men alike. Culture is posited as a mode of value-production: for its economy-boosting and wealth-generating effects; its talent for regeneration, through raising house prices and introducing new business, which is largely service based; and its benefits as a type of moral rearmament or emotional trainer, a perspective that lies behind the ‘social inclusion’ model, whereby culture must speak to – or down to – disenfranchised groups. Culture is instrumentalised for its ‘value-generating’ spin-offs.

Raises for me broad questions of value, valorization, partnership, leadership, and the relationships between culture and art (both theoretical, perceptual, and functional) in post-industrial capitalism and productive consumerism.