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[Inaudible] we'll start when he gets here. Thank you for joining us professor.
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Welcome everyone.
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To this session of the headlight Festival of Ideas,
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launching the book that my colleagues, Julian, Tully and I have been working on
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for the last couple of years in the laboratory Adelaide project.
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I'm Robert Phiddian. I teach Flinders English in Flinders University.
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And we welcome you on behalf of the, about Festival of Ideas.
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I know I'm only supposed to do this at the beginning of the day,
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but I think it's particularly appropriate on this occasion.
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So I've wished to acknowledge that we are today.
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We gathered on the traditional country of the Ghana people or the Adelaide
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Plains. We recognize and respect their cultural heritage,
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beliefs and relationships with land,
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with knowledge that they are of continuing importance to the garner people
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living today, and we respect their elders past and present.
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So please have your phones on silent
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and and by all means by all means tweet
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and and the other format
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Y on ado IFR or on
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IDEO, I F I Y and so we're going to w we are launching the book
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today.
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And so we're each going to talk I'm going to introduce him and
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and do the do the MC then Richard Morphy. Yeah, mentor we'll,
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we'll talk about the book, but just quickly. Why am I here?
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Why am I on this is the same reason I am here in that I have been involved in
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the festival of ideas since 1999.
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When that one there drew me with black hair and
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lots of it. It's a while back. And I've, I,
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I Ted three sort of three, three festivals,
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and it's one of the best things I feel I've done. And how much do I value it?
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Well, according to my donations, the festival it's $8,000. What does that mean?
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This project is all about what the numbers mean and how we understand it.
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How do I value it?
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Is it the hundreds of thousands of hundreds of hours that I've spent voluntarily
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working? Maybe, maybe over a thousand or it didn't quite work. Yeah. Great.
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Do you have an opinion, possibly. It is over a thousand by this day on,
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on various boards since last century.
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And the crucial thing to understand is that this has been yeah,
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is an event that builds public value and the value is
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very hard to measure, and it's very real,
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and this is the case. Yeah, it's in culture.
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I think there are many other areas as well and education and so on.
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That value is a thing that we build it together,
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that we co-create rather than something that we consume.
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And that is sort of obvious,
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but all of our ways of accounting for value for the last couple of
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decades have focused,
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focused much more on the image of the individual as a consumer
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of cars, consumer of value and, and work and,
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and and treating it as some sort of a commodity.
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And that's only true of some of it. It's not all wrong,
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but only true of some of it.
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So what are the contributions of the festival that I feel I've helped with
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the contribution to civil and intelligent device debate,
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a commitment to an ethic of democracy, equality, prosperity the life of the mind
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bringing people here is, as I've said,
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or don't dozens and dozens of times if citizens, rather than his customers.
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And so we are building something here and it exists
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largely in the room, no algorithm we'll do we'll, we'll tell you what this is.
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No algorithm will do your thinking for you.
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And so the image that we have
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that we are very grateful to have for free on the cover of the book from the
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cartoonist John Codelco I think is a great way of it is,
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is a great way of illustrating what it is, what it is we do. And, and,
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and what it is that we're trying to put some, and we'll talk more about this,
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but we're trying to put some real, real,
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real strengths and categories around this was from last year when the liberal
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Senator from Victoria Patterson responded to the
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evaluation of blue poles at,
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I think it was $450 million and said, well, why don't we sell it?
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And yeah,
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it's both a logical and an avionics thought it's,
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it's its meaning to the nation is crucial, is huge.
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And so Kudelka just took it a stage further,
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and it's particularly good imitation of blue poles as well.
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He's really worked on it carefully I don't know much about art,
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but we ran the numbers and it's worth more if we sell it one pole at a time
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and the world is full of this instrumental thinking,
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which has its uses, but it has its limitations.
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And I think in so many ways in our public life, in the last few years,
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we are reaching those limitations. And we in,
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in laboratory Adelaide are working on ways to,
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to push back, to get a bit of balance between the meaning. You can only get,
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you get to in words with the meaning that you connect with the meaning that you
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can, you can appear to think is objective in numbers.
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So now I invite Richard mopey, professor rich Richard Maltby,
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who really got the band together in his capacity
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as,
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as the executive Dean of education humanities in law offenders
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university. So, Richard, thank you.
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Thank you, Rob. And, and thank you all for coming out on.
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What's turned out to be such a nice day.
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So I'll do my best to keep you entertained for not very long,
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which is my brief I some wrong responsibility.
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As Robert said for encouraging Julian, Robert, and Tully,
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to begin a conversation about what has variously
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been about valuing culture, cultural value and the value of culture.
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And since that conversation began about five years ago,
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I've also had the opportunity to sit in on bits of it and make the
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occasional irresponsible contribution much like the one I'm going to do now.
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As I say,
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the conversation began actually over a lunch about five years ago,
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a few months after Julian had joined Flinders,
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we'd invited some of Adelaide's cultural leaders and over
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dessert, we asked them what,
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by way of a practically oriented research project we could do with him.
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By the time we got to coffee, we had a remarkably clear answer,
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find it way for them to talk truthfully about what they do.
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When they talk to government and funding agencies,
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they were, they said,
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unable to incorporate their real motivations and experiences into
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their reporting. Instead,
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they were required to express their value through purely economic
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measures that were ill connected to their core purposes and to
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launder their reporting through a nebulous abstract nouns,
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passive verbs, and claims the strategic positioning. Could we,
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they asked,
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find a new better way of communicating the actual value
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of arts and cultures culture in ways that intersect with government
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decision-making processes yet we're true to their own
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cool missions. Simple.
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All the team had to do was drum up a few partners, right?
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A successful grant application to the AARC resolved the dichotomy between
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intrinsic and instrumentalist value and convinced treasury departments across
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the country of the validity of qualitative assessment problem solved
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and do all this in the face of the metrics in army of big data,
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the early 21st centuries version of Taylor isms time and motion,
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the belief that anything can be measured and everything must be measured in
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order to be managed,
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what David beer has described as the neoliberal desire to measure
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as an instrument of governance through competition.
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Not simple of course,
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but a seriously interesting and important question to address,
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particularly for humanities scholars.
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I think that the first thing that the team discovered was that Adelaide was an
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ideal place to try to do this big enough to have one of every cultural
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institution you might want to consider small enough that they actually talk to
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each other and a place where culture is a distinguishing part of the city's
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self-definition as the author say in the book,
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a Petri dish of the right scale,
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hence the project's descriptive title of laboratory Adelaide.
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And I I'd like at this point to acknowledge the,
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the three partner cultural institutions that the project team worked with
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the state library and south Australia,
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the south Australian state theater company, and the Adelaide festival,
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my own interest in listening to the conversation was
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encapsulated in two quotations that have haunted me for much of the past decade.
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One is Oscar Wilde's description in lady Windermere is fan that a cynic is
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someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
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The other comes from a book by Roger Birnbaum called management
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fads in higher education, where they come from, what they do,
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why they fail.
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And it is that if we cannot measure what is valuable,
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we will come to value what is measurable distorting organizational
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efforts by prizing and over producing,
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what can be measured neglecting what cannot Birnbaum's
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book. Interestingly enough was written in 2001,
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several years before the publication of the first of those
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endless university ranking lists, all of them rely on, on spurious metrics.
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It should have earned a first year statistic student of fail.
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So burn bones was an extremely prescient observation where higher
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education went from where he wrote the book to where it is now,
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wilds aphorism haunted me.
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When I contemplated how long it would be before there would be no one left on
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the planet who could have had any idea of what he might possibly have meant.
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The semantic opposition of value and price is evacuated.
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A meaning when the only evaluative questions we may ask are those of the market
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and the evacuated vaccination of meaning,
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particularly the evacuation of the meaning of abstract nouns like
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excellence, innovation, creativity. There is a long list,
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is both a consequence of the desire to replace judgment with measurement
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and an enabler of its implementation
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theory, Theodore Adorno and max Horkheimer called their 1941 book,
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the culture industry, because it was an inescapable oxymoron,
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but for the last 30 years with only a minor modification,
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that's been the normative descriptor for a sector of the economy,
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as well as the unembarrassed name of too many university departments.
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Metrification assaults the opposition between
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quality and quantity and the arts council of England jazz has
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just last week announced its adoption of a compulsory
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quality measurement system for evaluating and benchmarking the
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impact of the artistic work produced by the major organizations that supports.
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I'm sorry to say that the system in question is a proud piece of Australian
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entrepreneurial-ism.
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So quality metrics has now joined by collection of
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reformed oxymorons.
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Although this book is a,
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an outcome of quite local conversations about the specific conditions of
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cultural life and its governance in south Australia,
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it is about large questions that do not stop at state or for
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that matter national waters.
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It addresses anyone seriously interested in the value of arts and culture,
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but particularly those with an operational interest in them, arts practitioners,
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managers of cultural organization and policymakers,
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it seeks to engage rather than have the final word,
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but its aim is to change the conversation around the evaluation of culture,
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especially with government.
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It identifies the problem of value and describes the outline of an alternative
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approach with an enhanced sensitivity to language and narrative that would
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let that conversation be more honest and make more sense a
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conversation that would be spoken in what Don Watsons called the other way of
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speaking.
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The one in which you try to say what you mean beyond that
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it joins an increasing body of work that shares its core contention that
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metrical modes of analysis are claiming conceptual control over
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domains of human existence. They have a limited capacity for understanding,
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as we continue to discover the social lives,
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that metrics are replete with unintended consequences.
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And it's politically naive to believe that a metrics of cultural equality
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would be used only with care by practitioners and policy offices
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and the society of surveillance and audit in which we find ourselves they
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would be used as weapons just as those in higher education have been.
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And their spirits in validity will in the process be rendered invisible,
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the ideas and arguments in what matters offer us much saner safer
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or more palatable alternatives.
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So I welcome it into the public world and look forward
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to what I hope will be the many conversations that will follow from it
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starting this morning. Thank you.
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[Inaudible].
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My turn. Just to say a few words
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to talk a little bit about where we went with that set of problems.
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So you've heard from Richard, the set of problems that we inherited,
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which was the idea that we might solve the whole cultural sectors problems with
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numbers with over metrification of in, on not sensible methods,
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methodologies for, for understanding the value of arts and culture.
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And we blindly gallantly throw ourselves into that project,
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into that problem to try and come up with a few things that we might do to say
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about it. So you've heard about the problem from Richard.
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So we've our key focus was that numbers.
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Weren't going to be the solution that the,
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we needed to understand better the rhetorical power of a number that they appear
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neutral, but aren't that we needed to maybe say a few things about how cultural
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organizations are, you know,
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through no fault of their own I'm addicted to growth cycles because the numbers
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make that a requirement that you have to have better numbers than the year
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before. And so we needed to think about what was going to happen when cultural
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organizations got a bad number and how that might help them to push
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towards a better sense of value. And we had a few things to say about that,
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and we wanted to think about, you know,
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how we might tell the story of the problem of numbers.
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So I came at the Julian and I were at the science communicators conference a few
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years ago. And there, we heard the number that, you know,
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97% of scientists believe that climate change is the biggest issue that's facing
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us today. And we thought, well, that's, you know,
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that's about as big a number as you can get.
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You can get a little bit bigger than that is empathy, but not much,
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not much bigger. That's a big number.
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And yet there's still no meaningful action on climate change in our, in our,
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in our society.
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So clearly the size of the number is not the answer to getting meaningful
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action.
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We had to find another way we had to figure out what happens between the number
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or the evidence and action and see if we could intervene into some of the
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issues.
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And inside of that gap between number or evidence and action are a
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whole range of problems,
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but we can only go a little bit of a way towards starting to figure out some,
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some solutions towards one of them is time. You know,
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we've got a problem with the timescale that arts and culture operates on that
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doesn't work to a one-year annual report,
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a three-year electorate or four year election cycle,
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even a five year plan, strategic planning you know, the,
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the, the time of value in culture does not operate in that, in that scale.
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There's the problem of history and memory versus innovation that we needed.
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We were also addicted to the, to,
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to the new in arts and culture and that our grants systems and our funding
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mechanisms are inevitably push us in that direction by always seeking to
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find the new thing to fund and never providing a mechanism for
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continuing to support the, the work,
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the brilliant work that arts and cultural arts and culture does the problem of
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narrative that we think in arts and culture and in the humanities that we're
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experts in narrative because it's our, it's our core skill.
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And yet we don't really have enough of an understanding about how it operates in
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these kinds of ways and the retreat of the notion of intrinsic value.
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So intrinsic value,
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it's something that is not very cool to talk about because it has been
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relegated to the high cost, high art, low art divide.
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It's seen as something that is used to make arguments for the funding of opera
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and in, you know, instead of you know, a sport for example,
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or other forms of arts and culture that entertainment that,
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that more easily get fit into the entertainment bucket. So I'm wondering,
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can we figure out how to inflect the notion of intrinsic
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value by which, I mean only,
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not any kind of essential this kind of understanding of the value of arts and
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culture,
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but only something that's not instrumental because if we're continuing to focus
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only on the instrumental value for arts and culture,
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then our funding bodies are going to fund that
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outcome, but the instrumental purpose for that, for that funding,
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they're going to fund that in a different way.
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Artists are pretty pretty challenging creatures artists make a lot of trouble in
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the world. We saw that when the brand has the fair happened,
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when groups of artists got together and had submission writing parties,
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when they made a w the brand is live art experience,
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where they imposed Senator George Brandis is a face on top of the Venus de Milo
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and circulated that around the world. So the, you know,
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artists are quite troubling for F for government sometimes.
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So the minute that an arts that,
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that an instrumental outcome for arts and culture,
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be it well-being be it economic, be it you know,
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social cohesion be it a vibrant city,
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the minute that can be achieved by some other mechanism,
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that's not quite so challenging, you know, governments might take that option.
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And so we've got to find ways of talking about the value of arts and culture
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that isn't stuck inside inside the
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instrumental category. And so in the book,
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which I'm not going to talk about now,
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but you'll find a few things such as our star starting tips and tricks about how
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to communicate value,
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what kind of writing skills are required to start to talk about it,
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what kind of things to avoid. And so there's an indication that we might that,
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that there might be something useful.
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We wanted to make sure that it wasn't just us talking academically about the
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problem of value,
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but that there was a real world tips and ideas that
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were going to be of use to the arts and culture sector,
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because everywhere we were going, we were asked, okay, that's great,
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but what what can you actually do for us? You know,
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how can we intervene into this problem? And so now I'll hand over to Julian,
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thank you for.
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Giving me some instructions on what to do. And apart from that saying,
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be very quick, he said, charisma and wrap up.
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So I got one quote too. First time you've listened to me.
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It's one quote, quotes, transmit, and then something to show you
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my study economics before I went into the theater.
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And it was a discipline that left me quite cold,
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except for one particular problem that value,
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which I didn't think that after I was in my graduated in my early
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twenties. And when it came back,
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it was a bit of a return of the repressive.
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The more you look at the problem of value in the abstract,
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the harder it is to talk about or to communicate what it is that you mean.
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And in way, it's easy to just show you. So I've got something to show you.
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18 months ago,
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my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's and I don't have to clear up her flat.
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And in her class, I found this
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it's her travel diary as a young Australian traveling in Europe for the
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first time in the 1950s. And I get it,
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it's about her experiences as a young woman,
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encountering many of the cultural institutions and artists and
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art that she had up until that time.
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So this is a book I think I'm a fan of,
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and it's a value because it has meaning it has meaning to me, of course.
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And so a particular value to me because she's my mother.
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But if I communicate that meaning to you, it will have meaning to you as well.
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It won't have the exact thing because she's not your mom.
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But you do have mothers and maybe you're a bit like her and you had these kinds
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of experiences. So this is the object.
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This is what as it is,
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value really looks like here's the quote,
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it's from a book called man's search for meaning, which you may know.
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It's written by a man called Victor Frankl,
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who was a psychiatrist in Auschwitz
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for three years. He was an inmate there prisoner. And his problem,
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I realize when I was reading the book was what kind of family
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do things have when you're in an environment that has no value at all,
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or puts more value on anything. I'm not gonna paraphrase the book,
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but this particular quote caught my life.
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The other conditional meaning is paralleled by the unconditional of each.
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And every person is that which warrants,
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the indelible quality of the dignity of man justice life remains
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potentially meaningful under any conditions,
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even those which are the most miserable.
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So to just the value of each and every person stay with him or her. And it does.
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So because it is based on the vans that he or she has realized in the past
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and is not contingent on the usefulness that he or she may or may not pertain
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to the present. Most specifically,
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its usefulness is usually defined in terms of functioning for the benefit of
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society.
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But today's society is characterized by achievement orientation and
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consequently, the doors to people who are successful and happy.
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It virtually ignores the value of all those who are otherwise and in,
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so doing blurs for decisive difference between being valuable in the sense of
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dignity and being valuable in the sense of usefulness,
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if one is not cognizant of this difference and holds that an individual's
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value stems only from that present usefulness, then believe me one over,
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is it only to personal inconsistency,
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not to plead for euthanasia along the lines of Hitler's program.
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That is to say mercy,
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killing of all those who have lost their social usefulness
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because of old age, incurable illness, mental deterioration,
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or whatever handicap and I suffer.
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And you can imagine how much those words mean to me because of my
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mother's present condition. And this time
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I said to Robert,
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some tally richer to that answer is here in a bit when we began this
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project that we would lose, we weren't going away.
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And that's because I felt the forces that we were up against were hideous
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strong. But that's not our job.
390
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Our job is not to win a debate. Our job is not to come in and say,
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this is the solution you're wrong.
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Our job is simply to start a different kind of conversation.
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And that's what I hope this book will do.
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[Inaudible].
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Well, we have, we thank you, everyone. We have, as we intended,
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which is a bit of a shock 15 minutes of the conversation.
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So we,
398
00:29:12.500 --> 00:29:16.550
so we would we invite you know,
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specific questions about the book. We haven't really talked,
400
00:29:19.221 --> 00:29:23.690
talked in detail about it all questions and in the
401
00:29:23.750 --> 00:29:27.710
brief observation from, from, from, from, from people here.
402
00:29:27.711 --> 00:29:30.680
So as we're recording at, I'll try and rush around.
403
00:29:30.680 --> 00:29:31.513
With.
404
00:29:32.930 --> 00:29:36.860
With this hand handed to you. Do we have,
405
00:29:36.920 --> 00:29:38.510
do we have a question or not.
406
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With big businesses now, increasingly running the world,
407
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how can we make our lives more meaningful?
408
00:29:54.640 --> 00:29:55.473
Very good question.
409
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I'll secretary I'll say project.
410
00:30:00.600 --> 00:30:03.960
Yeah, I think we need to say that. Probably I should hang on to it.
411
00:30:08.520 --> 00:30:13.080
Sure. Yeah. Occupationally and wide up.
412
00:30:14.980 --> 00:30:18.630
Okay. Oh, okay. That was great. Thank you.
413
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Do you want to observe?
414
00:30:21.660 --> 00:30:25.710
Yeah. interestingly enough, in the book,
415
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the second half of the book there's a chapter on new corporate
416
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reporting frameworks.
417
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And I think partly those frameworks arise out of new
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tendencies in the very businesses that you're alluding to, you know, the,
419
00:30:41.780 --> 00:30:46.170
the big businesses. One of them is the effects on the climate,
420
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on the environment in which these businesses do ultimately depend.
421
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The other is the changing nature of our wealth and increasingly the
422
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importance of intact, what they call intangible capitals,
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which is intellectual capitals and so forth. So weirdly enough,
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at the very moment that the high tide of metrics
425
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seems to be touching culture in other areas, they're actually letting it go.
426
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So I think there is at least in some segments of the corporate world a
427
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desire to get away from the balance sheet thinking, and we lay that out. It's,
428
00:31:23.310 --> 00:31:26.760
it's difficult in a short book to lay it out in detail, but,
429
00:31:26.940 --> 00:31:28.590
but we lay it out in essence.
430
00:31:28.830 --> 00:31:32.970
And we give lots of links for those who might be interested in going forward,
431
00:31:33.000 --> 00:31:37.800
because it's absolutely not true that the only way forward
432
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is through these metrical ways. So that's just a lie.
433
00:31:43.620 --> 00:31:48.180
And if you look out there, there are some interesting alternatives. So yes,
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there's some hope.
435
00:31:49.970 --> 00:31:52.350
And, and, and I guess the, the particular thing I would,
436
00:31:52.410 --> 00:31:57.390
I would say about that is that we have had no success finding
437
00:31:57.391 --> 00:32:00.030
an economist. Who's willing to talk to us intelligently,
438
00:32:00.630 --> 00:32:02.880
but we've had lots of success with accountants
439
00:32:04.440 --> 00:32:08.640
because they understand that in the real world values and
440
00:32:09.030 --> 00:32:12.820
2007 with a great wake-up call the, the,
441
00:32:12.821 --> 00:32:17.300
the global financial crisis, th th th th the idea that somehow these, the, the,
442
00:32:17.301 --> 00:32:21.510
these new cool metrical ways of doing things would just endlessly create wealth.
443
00:32:21.540 --> 00:32:25.730
Well, it B it was the bubble, but it was always going to be, and,
444
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and that recognition, so,
445
00:32:27.750 --> 00:32:31.740
and companies can have companies can have their reputations disappear in no
446
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time. And they've discovered just outsourcing, outsourcing their, their, their,
447
00:32:36.390 --> 00:32:37.680
their ethics to an ethics
448
00:32:39.540 --> 00:32:42.350
[inaudible] and ethics business hasn't worked terribly well.
449
00:32:42.620 --> 00:32:47.510
The banks have all been employing ethicists, and they realize that.
450
00:32:47.930 --> 00:32:49.100
So, so the problems that, again,
451
00:32:49.190 --> 00:32:53.780
the problem is a judgment or about actually having to go to judgment.
452
00:32:53.870 --> 00:32:55.670
And we have a question on here. Oh, sorry.
453
00:32:56.420 --> 00:32:59.770
Just to say that I think language plays a role in that as well.
454
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And so insisting on the use of sensible language,
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around value with cultural institutions and in the public space
456
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in order to ensure that we're not talking about how innovative or
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vibrant that arts experience was,
458
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but to actually talk in more meaningful language about what it did.
459
00:33:20.351 --> 00:33:24.520
And that requires us to do a bit of work as well. I think as, as citizens, as,
460
00:33:24.850 --> 00:33:27.340
as, as people who work in, who,
461
00:33:27.460 --> 00:33:31.810
who live in circulate in this cultural sphere to always be pushing ourselves,
462
00:33:31.811 --> 00:33:36.220
not to slip into that easy language, to talk about the value of that to us,
463
00:33:36.430 --> 00:33:40.570
but to push it beyond those limits towards something more meaningful.
464
00:33:41.290 --> 00:33:44.230
And that's something that has to be lit out of the humanities,
465
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but we have to do it better than we have done. Kathy.
466
00:33:54.790 --> 00:33:58.990
Julian is brilliant, but he's technically used volume and up. So first of all,
467
00:34:00.040 --> 00:34:04.240
I'm on. Okay. I'll try it now. Yeah. Yep. Okay.
468
00:34:05.350 --> 00:34:08.080
I guess I'm going to look at the other element of a narrative and,
469
00:34:08.081 --> 00:34:12.010
and taking up your point about language. You talk about culture,
470
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but you also talk about cultural institutions, art organizations, and,
471
00:34:15.880 --> 00:34:18.850
and maybe the answer to my question is read the book, which has to do,
472
00:34:18.851 --> 00:34:23.260
but what do you mean by culture? Because in a sense, everything is culture.
473
00:34:23.710 --> 00:34:23.981
And,
474
00:34:23.981 --> 00:34:28.630
but you usually get in a kind of capital C it's clear that there some implicit
475
00:34:29.380 --> 00:34:34.150
reification of culture or, or scope of culture that you're talking about.
476
00:34:34.570 --> 00:34:38.620
And, and I'm not entirely sure what that is because the sport is culture.
477
00:34:38.621 --> 00:34:42.250
I mean, you know, one may or may not be excited about the Adelaide oval,
478
00:34:42.251 --> 00:34:43.840
but it is called sure. Yeah, no, I think.
479
00:34:44.620 --> 00:34:47.080
I'll just say a comment and then I'll pass the Julian who has more intelligent
480
00:34:47.081 --> 00:34:50.230
things to say about this. But when I started working on this project,
481
00:34:50.320 --> 00:34:50.980
I used to say,
482
00:34:50.980 --> 00:34:55.210
I'm working on a cultural value project that's culture as in arts and value as
483
00:34:55.211 --> 00:34:59.140
in worth. And it was not long at all before I had to go hang on a minute,
484
00:34:59.320 --> 00:35:00.880
I have to reassess that whole thing,
485
00:35:00.970 --> 00:35:04.960
because not only is the space of art inside culture,
486
00:35:04.990 --> 00:35:08.830
a complicated one, but so is the relationship between value and values.
487
00:35:09.100 --> 00:35:09.521
And that's,
488
00:35:09.521 --> 00:35:12.160
I think something that we actually need to pay a bit more attention to.
489
00:35:12.340 --> 00:35:15.670
So we are living the tension between those,
490
00:35:15.700 --> 00:35:20.620
those definitions of culture and trying to be as open as possible to the,
491
00:35:21.130 --> 00:35:23.740
to, to that broader definition.
492
00:35:23.950 --> 00:35:28.660
But all the while realizing that we are working very hard on behalf of the
493
00:35:28.661 --> 00:35:31.450
cultural institutions that we're partnering with,
494
00:35:31.451 --> 00:35:32.890
the large ones in this project.
495
00:35:33.550 --> 00:35:36.460
But on behalf of the small to medium sector as well,
496
00:35:36.461 --> 00:35:40.620
who are the ones don't have the funds or the political power to be pushing back
497
00:35:40.621 --> 00:35:42.480
against this. And then I'll on that,
498
00:35:42.481 --> 00:35:47.220
on behalf of the meaningful language of value for the other kind of culture in
499
00:35:47.221 --> 00:35:48.054
society.
500
00:35:50.300 --> 00:35:54.680
Yeah. Read the book. There's,
501
00:35:54.740 --> 00:35:56.960
there's a chat before you buy them. Yeah.
502
00:35:57.880 --> 00:36:00.680
We've only just seen them for the first time. We're a bit excited. Yeah.
503
00:36:01.130 --> 00:36:01.580
So,
504
00:36:01.580 --> 00:36:05.690
so there's a chapter in a chapter three where we talk about the definitions of
505
00:36:05.691 --> 00:36:07.160
culture and value.
506
00:36:08.570 --> 00:36:11.750
And w when I was looking at the book in draft, I thought, oh,
507
00:36:11.751 --> 00:36:14.060
do we really need that chapter? Shouldn't we just get on with it?
508
00:36:14.390 --> 00:36:16.220
And your question reminds me that we did.
509
00:36:17.330 --> 00:36:21.620
So I think that there's a kind of an easy mix in the authors here,
510
00:36:21.800 --> 00:36:25.490
if I include Richard really, cause he's kind of like the synoptic gospel
511
00:36:28.370 --> 00:36:29.540
but between those,
512
00:36:31.460 --> 00:36:34.820
those who are a little bit more kind of popular culture and those a little bit
513
00:36:34.821 --> 00:36:37.670
more arts culture. So for us, it's a pragmatic debate.
514
00:36:38.510 --> 00:36:43.370
And in the book I talk about we talk about really the definitions and
515
00:36:43.371 --> 00:36:45.770
how definitions work because there's,
516
00:36:45.830 --> 00:36:47.900
there's two ways in which things get defined.
517
00:36:47.901 --> 00:36:50.180
One is by the Oxford dictionary of definitions,
518
00:36:50.390 --> 00:36:52.940
but the other is by what you might call traffic of use.
519
00:36:53.150 --> 00:36:57.920
And so we have a look at that and I think the take home just to be really
520
00:36:57.950 --> 00:37:01.880
kind of quick about it is look, that's an important conversation,
521
00:37:01.910 --> 00:37:06.050
but don't let it stop having the conversation about value.
522
00:37:06.530 --> 00:37:10.700
Because I think that we began this investigation
523
00:37:11.450 --> 00:37:15.950
thinking that the problem with value in culture was culture. It was so tricky.
524
00:37:15.980 --> 00:37:17.570
Oh, look at all the different things.
525
00:37:17.870 --> 00:37:21.260
But the real story here is the degeneration of our idea of value.
526
00:37:21.710 --> 00:37:26.570
And that is a huge story that affects many different
527
00:37:26.571 --> 00:37:30.800
areas. And in a way it's sucked in arts and culture. We're not alone here.
528
00:37:30.801 --> 00:37:35.480
We're not the only ones kind of going, oh, please look at us more intrinsically.
529
00:37:35.690 --> 00:37:39.980
There's lots of different areas. There's been a collapse of our notion of value,
530
00:37:39.981 --> 00:37:42.650
particularly public value in the last 50 years.
531
00:37:42.980 --> 00:37:45.530
And I think we've even got some economists to say that,
532
00:37:45.531 --> 00:37:49.100
which is in a pretty good going. So that's, that's where we,
533
00:37:49.130 --> 00:37:51.170
we have a pragmatic approach to.
534
00:37:51.170 --> 00:37:55.220
The question that you talked about and it's particularly value over time,
535
00:37:55.280 --> 00:37:56.360
including the past.
536
00:37:57.800 --> 00:38:02.690
Not just the future way of specifically futuristic society and valued
537
00:38:02.691 --> 00:38:07.460
institutions, which have, which have great difficulty explaining it,
538
00:38:07.800 --> 00:38:11.600
which have had increasing difficulty explaining why they shouldn't just have
539
00:38:11.780 --> 00:38:14.540
their money taken off them and outsource to somebody else.
540
00:38:15.440 --> 00:38:17.430
So we have a question here and then why not?
541
00:38:17.990 --> 00:38:19.760
I just want to share my observation,
542
00:38:19.790 --> 00:38:24.770
talking to artistic artistic directors or a leader of cultural organizations
543
00:38:25.640 --> 00:38:29.480
for, I mean I'm talking about who's measuring what value,
544
00:38:29.990 --> 00:38:31.880
because for them it's their rule.
545
00:38:32.060 --> 00:38:36.460
They have to keep talking to funders government and their
546
00:38:37.030 --> 00:38:41.590
reporting values because it is especially in instrument devalues because it's
547
00:38:41.920 --> 00:38:45.490
mandatory for them. They do all their, they create intrinsic value,
548
00:38:45.580 --> 00:38:50.140
but there's no time to measure them because nobody actually wants to hear about
549
00:38:50.141 --> 00:38:54.940
it. Yeah. I mean, not asking too much to art practitioners to do everything.
550
00:38:55.270 --> 00:38:58.860
To capture yeah. Much too much, but, but just to back up a bit,
551
00:38:59.160 --> 00:39:02.820
you can't measure intrinsic value, full stop.
552
00:39:04.050 --> 00:39:07.560
Don't do it, but you can understand it. Right.
553
00:39:09.610 --> 00:39:10.860
We can talk about it,
554
00:39:11.070 --> 00:39:15.150
but if you're going to think that you can measure the value of the book that I
555
00:39:15.151 --> 00:39:19.800
took out of my bag, which is a simple end of it, isn't it really,
556
00:39:20.130 --> 00:39:23.640
you're already in a sort of false register. So, I mean,
557
00:39:23.641 --> 00:39:27.600
I guess part of the book, and it's not toothy in that respect,
558
00:39:27.601 --> 00:39:29.430
but when does this stop,
559
00:39:30.270 --> 00:39:34.050
when do you stop trying to do that and start having a different kind of
560
00:39:34.051 --> 00:39:34.884
conversation.
561
00:39:36.210 --> 00:39:39.990
And perhaps it's not entirely true that arts organizations have no power.
562
00:39:40.530 --> 00:39:42.150
They may have only a little power,
563
00:39:42.480 --> 00:39:45.180
but they certainly have some power to influence the debate.
564
00:39:46.980 --> 00:39:50.490
And it's also a bit of a watch this space kind of answer because the phase two
565
00:39:50.600 --> 00:39:55.050
of, of archery Adelaide is working with art south Australia.
566
00:39:55.140 --> 00:39:59.460
And in order to have that kind of conversation with the people that do have the
567
00:39:59.461 --> 00:40:03.840
power to change those things rather than just with the cultural organizations
568
00:40:03.870 --> 00:40:05.550
that are already under the pump, as he saying.
569
00:40:06.270 --> 00:40:09.120
And the thing I'd add to that is if you actually look at the way the decisions
570
00:40:09.121 --> 00:40:10.980
are made, yes,
571
00:40:11.130 --> 00:40:16.080
arts organizations spend fastener is three hours of their time filling in forms
572
00:40:16.081 --> 00:40:17.100
and giving data.
573
00:40:17.580 --> 00:40:21.360
But the decisions are very filled in may and not made objectively on the data.
574
00:40:21.990 --> 00:40:24.240
The decisions are still made politically,
575
00:40:24.750 --> 00:40:27.780
and these mechanisms are often ways.
576
00:40:27.960 --> 00:40:30.630
These mechanisms of algorithms are often ways of laundering.
577
00:40:30.990 --> 00:40:34.560
The fact that someone has to make a judgment somewhere and they don't,
578
00:40:34.650 --> 00:40:38.040
and it's best they'd be judging that something that they had some understanding
579
00:40:38.041 --> 00:40:39.730
of because I,
580
00:40:39.731 --> 00:40:43.080
I can't think of any brands with a classic example of this.
581
00:40:44.820 --> 00:40:48.360
We all thought in the arts and culture sector that things were getting,
582
00:40:48.490 --> 00:40:50.910
we were just getting better and better organized. And the,
583
00:40:51.010 --> 00:40:53.580
and the methodologies of the Australia council would work.
584
00:40:54.630 --> 00:40:58.770
When the brand has came along and took 40% of it and said,
585
00:40:58.830 --> 00:41:00.660
put it over here and said, I'm going to play with that.
586
00:41:01.650 --> 00:41:06.210
And he could write because that's actually a political
587
00:41:06.750 --> 00:41:10.110
event that that's where the decisions the decisions are made, they're made,
588
00:41:10.111 --> 00:41:14.280
and they're often made by you, you're often made by your, your peers as well.
589
00:41:14.640 --> 00:41:16.410
Anyway, we have another question up here.
590
00:41:20.160 --> 00:41:20.280
I'm,
591
00:41:20.280 --> 00:41:25.200
I'm just thinking of the way people that some people value
592
00:41:25.230 --> 00:41:30.000
culture, different different group of people, perhaps for,
593
00:41:30.540 --> 00:41:35.480
and Julian. When we were that talk in the hits all the other day, there was the,
594
00:41:36.260 --> 00:41:37.970
you should only produce art,
595
00:41:37.971 --> 00:41:41.330
which is politically engaged and changes the world.
596
00:41:42.680 --> 00:41:47.090
That's another one that I have problem with, because most of what I do,
597
00:41:47.120 --> 00:41:50.030
doesn't change the world in that sort of way.
598
00:41:51.140 --> 00:41:53.960
W how do you, how do you talk to those people?
599
00:41:59.650 --> 00:42:03.160
There needs to be an ecology of culture and range of things.
600
00:42:04.970 --> 00:42:08.230
If, if you want to I can't believe I'm even talking like this,
601
00:42:08.231 --> 00:42:11.770
but you kind of got to got to really in a way, obstruct yourself and go,
602
00:42:12.190 --> 00:42:15.550
would you like to live in an successful evaluative environment?
603
00:42:18.880 --> 00:42:22.000
Sure. Why not? Yeah. I'll, I'll go for that.
604
00:42:22.570 --> 00:42:27.340
It needs a lot of trust. You need a lot of trust. You know, I I've, I've,
605
00:42:27.400 --> 00:42:32.200
I'm a theater director I've worked on plays and including lots of not very good
606
00:42:32.201 --> 00:42:33.034
ones.
607
00:42:33.790 --> 00:42:38.530
And but the concept of not very good play is, is,
608
00:42:38.770 --> 00:42:43.360
you know, you have to be reasonably flexible about it because I'm a,
609
00:42:43.390 --> 00:42:48.370
you can't tell, you don't know. And, and B it's,
610
00:42:48.450 --> 00:42:52.570
it's part of a larger thing that you might kind of go, well,
611
00:42:52.571 --> 00:42:55.300
that's the body of work. So you know,
612
00:42:55.330 --> 00:42:58.060
when I'm working on plays,
613
00:42:58.840 --> 00:43:02.620
sometimes I say the most important is when not, not do judge, of course,
614
00:43:02.740 --> 00:43:06.550
but when, when do you judge, you know, cause if you're,
615
00:43:06.580 --> 00:43:11.230
if you're always breaking down time into smaller and smaller units and
616
00:43:11.231 --> 00:43:15.130
becoming obsessed with evaluating those smaller and smaller units,
617
00:43:15.460 --> 00:43:19.600
then you are losing the shape that things have. You know,
618
00:43:19.630 --> 00:43:23.890
if you had measured, I mean, the books full of examples,
619
00:43:23.970 --> 00:43:25.450
and one of the examples is Patrick White.
620
00:43:26.200 --> 00:43:29.830
And if you look at Patrick White in 1968, he's a failure.
621
00:43:30.130 --> 00:43:32.590
And if you look at Patrick White in 1978,
622
00:43:32.591 --> 00:43:36.310
he's the greatest playwrights Australia is produced. So, so which,
623
00:43:36.460 --> 00:43:39.430
which do you choose? You,
624
00:43:39.880 --> 00:43:42.580
I think the only way you can get through that is,
625
00:43:42.670 --> 00:43:47.350
is if you have a bit of trust I drink
626
00:43:47.500 --> 00:43:50.440
decaffeinated coffee and the fellow who sold it to me this morning said,
627
00:43:50.530 --> 00:43:54.960
it's got no caffeine in it, but it's made with love. And, and you,
628
00:43:54.961 --> 00:43:57.310
you have to love your culture that you, you know,
629
00:43:57.311 --> 00:44:01.150
you can't just expect something from it. And out of that love comes trust.
630
00:44:01.180 --> 00:44:02.650
And out of that, trust comes value.
631
00:44:03.040 --> 00:44:07.660
It doesn't mean you constantly trust it to do anything without evaluating it at
632
00:44:07.661 --> 00:44:08.494
all,
633
00:44:08.500 --> 00:44:13.480
but it does mean that you are judicious in deploying your sense of judgment and
634
00:44:13.481 --> 00:44:17.920
sensible about what you extrapolate from those judgments.
635
00:44:18.550 --> 00:44:22.660
And you don't have to do the judging all the time and constantly, yeah.
636
00:44:22.750 --> 00:44:26.020
There were many forms of evaluation that really only hadn't made to happen.
637
00:44:26.080 --> 00:44:30.640
Occasionally for organizations, you know, in a healthy state of trust. Yeah.
638
00:44:31.140 --> 00:44:33.450
Is you're going to find the same thing this time next year,
639
00:44:34.080 --> 00:44:35.580
it's three years down the track.
640
00:44:35.581 --> 00:44:39.570
Maybe that you should be checking to see how things are going rather than let
641
00:44:39.571 --> 00:44:42.300
alone the constant monitoring possible in.
642
00:44:42.560 --> 00:44:47.120
You're also evaluating your own art practice all the time, you know,
643
00:44:47.810 --> 00:44:51.890
for yourself and to see if it's, if it's doing what you,
644
00:44:52.540 --> 00:44:57.170
what you hoped, but it's, it's this sort of outside.
645
00:44:57.740 --> 00:45:02.270
Well, not, I mean, evaluated, you're judging yourself, you, as you write,
646
00:45:02.330 --> 00:45:05.600
you read and think, oh, that didn't work and change it, you know?
647
00:45:05.601 --> 00:45:09.830
So it's there's that? Yeah,
648
00:45:09.920 --> 00:45:10.850
but that's different. Yeah.
649
00:45:11.180 --> 00:45:15.560
She wasn't master chef. We don't constantly need to be giving it points.
650
00:45:15.620 --> 00:45:20.060
That's not what it's about. Oh,
651
00:45:20.090 --> 00:45:20.923
one last question.
652
00:45:23.720 --> 00:45:28.340
I I was just wondering how useful or this
653
00:45:28.850 --> 00:45:33.770
book would be to for Aboriginal Australians and
654
00:45:33.800 --> 00:45:35.750
for their particular
655
00:45:37.370 --> 00:45:41.600
difficulties in communicating their culture. You know,
656
00:45:41.601 --> 00:45:46.020
which I feel like is almost, I mean, I don't,
657
00:45:46.050 --> 00:45:47.450
I was going to say an elephant in the room.
658
00:45:47.451 --> 00:45:50.780
I don't think he deliberately not talking about it, but it's big, you know.
659
00:45:52.700 --> 00:45:56.810
I'll say briefly in the past, not useful enough in my dear.
660
00:46:02.060 --> 00:46:06.170
To come up with a good answer to that while Julian talked. No,
661
00:46:06.171 --> 00:46:11.000
I th I think that it is useful to that set of
662
00:46:11.030 --> 00:46:13.730
issues that, that entangles set of problems.
663
00:46:13.790 --> 00:46:18.530
And we work as closely as we can with the your
664
00:46:19.040 --> 00:46:21.740
Grandy morbid Flinders university because,
665
00:46:21.770 --> 00:46:26.390
and particularly the Unbound collective women of Allie banker and net Harkin
666
00:46:26.660 --> 00:46:29.900
and, and Simone to, because that,
667
00:46:30.050 --> 00:46:34.160
because that their set of issues is so
668
00:46:34.190 --> 00:46:38.690
particularly emblematic of you know, of that,
669
00:46:39.070 --> 00:46:42.620
of both of those two questions, that the problem of value and the problem of,
670
00:46:42.970 --> 00:46:47.840
of being beholden to always being politically engaged and politically
671
00:46:47.841 --> 00:46:48.674
charged.
672
00:46:49.040 --> 00:46:53.600
And so there are a set of issues in there that in our book that
673
00:46:53.780 --> 00:46:57.710
are informed by conversation there and relevant to that,
674
00:46:57.740 --> 00:47:00.950
that community and the set of problems. But we, we, oh,
675
00:47:01.030 --> 00:47:03.140
we w we recognize that we are a great debt to them.
676
00:47:04.051 --> 00:47:07.910
We're very aware that there are cognitive sets of issues in
677
00:47:08.840 --> 00:47:11.840
the Aboriginal area, but also many other areas in,
678
00:47:12.140 --> 00:47:14.330
in local government in health,
679
00:47:14.480 --> 00:47:19.380
in education where w w w where the w w where the,
680
00:47:19.400 --> 00:47:20.120
the,
681
00:47:20.120 --> 00:47:24.950
the consumer model only catches part of it extremely the case, of course,
682
00:47:24.951 --> 00:47:27.440
with indigenous people, because they,
683
00:47:27.460 --> 00:47:30.670
because of the market economy is not a very good way of,
684
00:47:31.090 --> 00:47:35.950
is a terribly bad way of framing the way value circulates in
685
00:47:36.160 --> 00:47:36.993
those communities.
686
00:47:37.540 --> 00:47:41.940
But we don't presume to speak for them because we can't. And we shouldn't.
687
00:47:42.300 --> 00:47:47.130
Yeah. You may find that conceptually speaking the book,
688
00:47:47.160 --> 00:47:50.790
even though it doesn't have many examples from indigenous culture,
689
00:47:50.791 --> 00:47:52.770
and that's because we're not indigenous,
690
00:47:52.771 --> 00:47:56.910
so it would have been disrespectful to take those as examples, I think,
691
00:47:57.210 --> 00:47:58.890
but the concepts that we talk about,
692
00:47:58.891 --> 00:48:03.870
particularly the deeper sense of time that the need for meaning before you have
693
00:48:03.871 --> 00:48:06.030
value that meaning is central to value.
694
00:48:06.031 --> 00:48:10.950
It's not just sort of a little side effect and the importance of narrative and
695
00:48:10.951 --> 00:48:11.784
language.
696
00:48:12.510 --> 00:48:16.830
I think that they offer in important ways for
697
00:48:16.831 --> 00:48:19.530
engaging, you know, again,
698
00:48:19.590 --> 00:48:24.480
the evaluative environment that we've got for those who do
699
00:48:24.481 --> 00:48:27.690
not find what they do reflected in the metrical mode.
700
00:48:29.130 --> 00:48:31.200
Well, we are not dangerous. We, over time.
701
00:48:35.220 --> 00:48:39.780
Culture is really brilliant evolution concept.
702
00:48:42.690 --> 00:48:43.800
We'll leave you to write that book.
703
00:48:46.170 --> 00:48:49.830
So I'd just like to finish by thanking people.
704
00:48:50.580 --> 00:48:53.310
Obviously the people here at the front also
705
00:48:56.160 --> 00:48:57.450
[inaudible] people who've hooked people.
706
00:48:57.451 --> 00:48:59.910
Who've helped us enormously at various stages.
707
00:49:00.150 --> 00:49:04.260
Heather Robinson and Matt Russell our partners, the state library,
708
00:49:04.261 --> 00:49:06.120
the state theater and the Adelaide festival,
709
00:49:06.960 --> 00:49:11.400
and all the dozens of institutions and people and human beings that we've talked
710
00:49:11.401 --> 00:49:13.290
to cause very important in this project.
711
00:49:13.590 --> 00:49:16.720
So to speak from where you come from to to, to, to,
712
00:49:16.721 --> 00:49:19.290
to to understand the value in situ.
713
00:49:20.100 --> 00:49:22.470
And I'd just like to conclude by saying, we,
714
00:49:22.650 --> 00:49:26.030
I give this session a 37 and you can work out what that means later.
715
00:49:33.780 --> 00:49:34.613
[inaudible]
716
00:49:42.870 --> 00:49:47.220
Thank you, Richard. That was exactly, it was
717
00:49:49.140 --> 00:49:49.973
exactly
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00:50:08.760 --> 00:50:08.760
[inaudible].