Justin O’Connor recently sat down with Rob Watson from Artworks Alliance to discuss his book Culture is Not an Industry and the ideas that have resonated with the members of the Alliance.

You can listen and download the interview on the Artworks Alliance website here.

Here’s a little bit of an introduction to the conversation, from the Artworks Alliance page:

“In this conversation, Rob Watson speaks with cultural policy thinker and writer Justin O’Connor about the ideas behind his book Culture is Not an Industry, and what they mean for artists, policymakers and communities engaged in participatory and community-based practice.

They begin by locating the personal and political moment from which the book emerged. Justin is Professor of Cultural Economy at the University of South Australia. Justin reflects on his early experiences in Manchester’s music and cultural scenes in the 1980s and 1990s, and how what once seemed like a hopeful model for urban renewal and creative regeneration slowly became absorbed into a more instrumental, economised framework—one that often sidelined the very cultural values and community aspirations it was supposed to promote.

As Rob notes, the book resonates because it feels like a reckoning with a story many of us have lived through: the promise that culture could transform lives and places, followed by a sense that this promise was hollowed out by managerialism, short-termism and the shift towards “creative industries” as a catch-all policy tool. Justin and Rob discuss what are the consequences of treating culture as a sector rather than a shared space of meaning-making? How did the language of economic growth and innovation come to dominate the ways we talk about and support cultural work?”