Culture as Foundational

Justin is currently developing the ideas outlined in Culture is Not an Industry. How do we develop a new public policy approach to culture? One that breaks with ‘creative industries’ without a return to the older settings of top-down public subsidy. In other words, how do we take up the radical challenge of culture and democracy that was shut down in the 1980s. This has multiple dimensions, including the tradition of “cultural studies”, the practice of cultural actors in re-inventing the modern (Mark Fisher’s ‘popular modernism’), as well as recovering the radical intent of the early work around cultural industries.

The aim is to challenge the economic orthodoxy of the last 40 years, and the cultural policy establishment which has thoroughly absorbed this orthodoxy, mostly without understanding. As the challenge to such orthodoxy gathers pace, from Left and Right, and the ‘real world’ policy settings leave it far behind, what might this look like for cultural policy?

The focus here is around Culture as Infrastructure; the public and common good; productivity and innovation; and the idea of the cultural professional.

Culture as Global Public Good

This project connects with Culture as Foundational, but is concerned with global cultural policy. The United Nations now promotes culture as a global public good, part of its attempt to reset the its mission in a Compact for the Future. This project seeks to elaborate the idea of culture as a public good and ask how might the UN and other global agencies and civil society organisations promote global public goods.

This is not some technical public policy question but relates to the longer history of global public policy. UNESCO’s 1982 Mondiacult Conference in Mexico City is usually taken to be the beginning of a new era in which European models of ‘high art’ were challenged by a more inclusive definition spearheaded by (what was then known as) the Third World. Yet this date marked the collapse of the Third World as a global political force, UNCTAD’s New World Economic Order, and UNESCO’s New World Information and Communication Order roundly defeated by the new neoliberal leaders of the UK and US. A new information and communication did happen, but firmly under the control of (what came to be called) the Global North. The arc of Mondiacult did not bend to the empowerment of the Third World but to the ‘creative economy’.

What comes after the “Washington Consensus”, in an era of both accelerated interconnection and profound global tensions? Where should a global cultural policy vision locate itself? I’ll be working with many others to work out where we might go from here.

Reset Arts and Culture

Reset Arts and Culture is a loose collective started in 2021. Mostly based in South Australia we ran a number of seminars, talks and conferences, the last being Bodies of Work in late 2023. The main goal was to highlight the marginalisation of arts and cultural policy in Australia, to ask why that might be, and suggest ways we might change this. This was a critique of the domination of economic arguments amongst advocates and government, along with an attempt to outline new and emergent ways of thinking about culture.

The arrival of a National Cultural Policy in 2023 (as well as new cultural policies in New South Wales and South Australia) saw a marked shift away from the economic and creative industries arguments of the previous two decades. Indeed, taking culture seriously enough to give it a policy represented a step forward from the previous Right wing governments which, like newer right wing forces elsewhere, either ignored or actively disliked art and culture.

However, though economic arguments have receded, it is still not clear where art and culture sit in public policy. Though the “vision statements’ stress the social and community benefits, the day to day policy justifications and spending decisions still operate within the old econometric frameworks in which art and culture must show ‘bums on seats’ and ‘hotel nights’ if they are to be taken seriously. Reset intends to develop a more challenging agenda for government, and to deliver events across multiple states and territories.

Manchester, Joy Division, Popular Modernism

A long standing book project aimed at locating the moment of Joy Division – 1978-82 – in a wider historical context. A longitudinal approach to Mark Fisher’s idea of ‘popular modernism’ will be set aside a radical unpicking of Manchester hagiographical orthodoxy in which Manchester music kick started its current ‘regeneration’. At the same time the aim is to place this in a far more global context, one in which the post-war settlement of the European welfare state was coming apart and the geo-political order which sustained it was undergoing radical transformation.

China

Justin has been a regular visitor to China since 2004, mainly Shanghai based. He has been a visiting Chair at Shanghai Jiaotong University’s Department of Media and Design since 2010. Justin has published many articles and chapters on cultural and creative industries in China, and on Shanghai’s ‘creative cluster’ programme. His book Red Creative: Culture and Modernity in China came out in 2020. Other edited books have covered Shanghai’s phenomenal development of its cultural sector, and the – often difficult – relations between China and Australia. In May 2024 Justin will return after a four-year absence, giving a series of lectures at Shanghai Jiaotong University. He’ll also be updating and reflecting on his Shanghai Diary, which he wrote between 2005 and 2006.