Page 277 - Cultural Theory

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••• Nick Stevenson •••

cultural citizenship requires the intensification of the presence of the school within
working-class people’s cultural lives.
Yet it might be objected if the dominant culture is ‘arbitrary’: why should dominant
institutions seek to intensify rather than reform the cultures it socially reproduces?
This is because while the artistic avant-garde has historically pursued a strategy of
distinction it has also historically preserved a sense of cultural autonomy against the
market place. While the idea of ‘art for arts sake’ is mystificatory in that it hides the
symbolic dividend of bohemian life-styles, its mythology has preserved ideas of artis-
tic creativity against the market place. The democratisation of art cannot be pursued
through its commercialisation. The invasion of the market into the cultural domain
will inevitably ‘cheapen’ the value of the work, and undermine the inevitably spe-
cialised knowledge and experience necessary to produce and experience the work of
art (Crook 2000). Hence Shusterman (1992) has argued that while Bourdieu has
exposed the hidden economy of the disinterested aesthetic of high culture he
remains so enchanted by its myth he retains hostility to popular art. This means the
creativity evident within popular forms such as rap music, the working-class novel,
and diverse forms of youth culture or alternative art forms like Pop Art are neglected
by Bourdieu (Fowler 1997). Arguably, these questions become particularly pressing
once we consider the relationship between the market, popular culture and cultural
policy. Here I shall argue for both a cultural policy that pursues a strategy of equality
while continually seeking to deconstruct claims to cultural hierarchy and status. That
is, Bourdieu is right to draw attention to the ways in which working-class people
commonly exclude themselves from dominant cultural institutions, but mistaken in
the way he remains sceptical of the aesthetic merit of much popular forms of cultural
expression.

Cultural Policy

The development of debates within cultural policy has been a welcome addition to
the number of concerns mapped by cultural studies. These developments have been
accompanied by an increasing concern on the part of European, North American and
Australian governments in particular to develop substantial cultural policies covering
a range of cultural practices. According to Tom O’Regan (2001), we might roughly
talk of three ages of cultural policy. The first involved democratic initiatives through
arts councils and other publically funded organisations to bring the arts to the peo-
ple. This approach largely characterised initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s where a
variety of cultural policies were developed to overcome social (mainly class based)
barriers to high culture. Since the 1970s there has been an increasing amount of
questioning as to what counts as ‘art’ or ‘culture’. More inclusive definitions of ‘cul-
tural’ experience and aesthetic forms of experimentation have sought to encompass
more ‘popular’, community orientated and multicultural definitions. Finally, these
trends and directions have increasingly focused question upon question of diversity
and identity. Here cultural policy questions increasingly have to take into account
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