Julian Meyrick

Counting culture to death: an Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics

ABSTRACT Metrics-based approaches to understanding the value of culture imply homogeneity of artistic purpose, invite political manipulation and demand time, money and attention from cultural organisations without proven benefit. The system retailing as Culture Counts, a dashboard approach to quality measurement that emerged from Western Australia and is currently trialling in Australia, the US, the UK and Asia, serves to further abstract assessment processes. Cultural policy-makers across international domains need a more robust appreciation of the limits of metrics. Statistical data, well channelled, may provide useful ancillary information. But, where questions of value are concerned, it cannot replace critical judgment.

Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid

ABSTRACT In March 2013, after six years of consultation, an Australian Labor government launched the national cultural policy document, Creative Australia. In July 2013, a Coalition government was elected, Senator George Brandis became Minister for the Arts, and the policy was dumped. With it went cross-party consensus about funding rationales and measurement strategies, with disastrous consequences for the cultural sector. This cautionary tale of gaffes, pay-back and abrupt changes of direction, highlights the fragility of policy memory that condemns artists and arts managers to a never-ending reinvention of the evidentiary wheel. Our paper examines the problem of collective understanding (“world”) in cultural policy-making in Australia, exacerbated not only by the short-term electoral cycles which undermine long-term cultural outcome timescales, but by a fixation on what Hannah Arendt calls “the peculiar and ingenious replacement of common sense with strict logicality”. Evidence of value is only meaningful when it occurs in a policy memory that can fully avow it and respond in appropriate ways. Measurement methods are over-determined by epistemology and by experience. We argue that the balance between these determinants of effective cultural policy-making has been lost. An emphasis on numerical data – especially economic data – has forced arguments for culture into a decontextualised register of quantitative proof. Recent events in Australia suggest that different, more direct ways of engaging with cultural policy-making are required for the problem of collective understanding to be successfully assayed.

Cut and Paste: The Nature of Dramaturgical Development in the Theatre

This practice-based paper looks at the nature of dramaturgical development in the theatre, and at the role of the dramaturg. It has two objectives: to examine the meaning of key terms such as ‘play text’, ‘dramaturgy’ and ‘development’, and to look at how, and according to what values, dramaturgical interventions into particular play texts are best structured. The differences between production, generative dramaturgy and adaptive dramaturgy are detailed, and the analysis of play texts using simple categories such as plot, character and language is briefly explored. The conclusions clarify some of the predicates of dramaturgical development as they impact on the theatre-making process today and identify some of the fundamental problems and challenges thereby associated with the role of the dramaturg.

Telling the Story of Culture's Value: Ideal-Type Analysis and Integrated Reporting

ABSTRACT This article aims to encourage the reunion of economics and sociology in respect of cultures value underway in the work of David Stark and Michael Hutter. It proposes cultural reporting as an important domain it might address. Using Weberian ideal-type analysis, it examines the distinctive mode of contemporary cultural provision. I argue there are features of modern bureaucratic systems which account for the significant failures seen today. I introduce the Integrated Reporting Framework and explain its basic principles. has the capacity to streamline cultural reporting and equip it with appropriate narrative accounts, mitigating the reductive aspects of bureaucratic evaluation.

Numbers, schnumbers: Total cultural value and talking about everything that we do, even culture

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to argue for the importance of separating out three key dimensions of culture’s value – definition, measurement and cultural reporting. This has implications for the balance between quantitative and qualitative methodologies in achieving a meaningful context for interpreting numbers-based cultural data, as well as for the management of reporting regimes – the process by which value is “conferred” – by individual cultural organisations and events. It concludes with a brief sketch of a new set of priorities for assessment processes based on a less unitized, more cooperative understanding of cultural value (a Total Cultural Value exercise) Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a keynote address from the Global Events Congress. Findings – Valuation processes are comparative processes. They involve benchmarking, standardisation, unitisation and ranking. Cultural activities have an incommensurable aspect that makes them resist this kind of assessment and not infrequently make a nonsense of it. This makes it difficult for policy makers to choose between them from a resource perspective. No new proof of worth is going to change this fundamental characteristic of culture. A Total Cultural Value exercise is “allocutionary” and helps cultural programmes “make a case” based on best use of the available data and a meta-cognitive appreciation of the biases different proofs of worth involve. Originality/value – Total Cultural Value is a new concept developed to bring quantitative and qualitative methods for valuing arts and culture together

Australian Theatre after the New Wave

Australian Theatre after the New Wave charts the history of three ground-breaking Australian theatre companies, the Paris Theatre (1978), the Hunter Valley Theatre (1976-94) and Anthill Theatre (1980-94), analysing the growing dominance of government in shaping the nation’s theatre.

Response: Culture counts: “A step along the way” or a step back?

Crossick, G., & Kaszynska, P. (2017). Understanding the value of arts & culture: The AHRC Cultural Value Project. London: Arts & Humanities Research Council. Gilmore, A., Glow, H., & Johanson, K. (2017). Accounting for quality: arts evaluation, public value and the case of “Culture Counts”. Cultural Trends. doi:10.1080/09548963.2017.1382761 Holden, J. (2006). Cultural value and the crisis of legitimacy: Why culture needs a democratic mandate. London: Demos. Hutter, M., & Throsby, D. (Eds.). (2008). Beyond price: Value in economics, culture and the arts. New York: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, K. M., Ondaatje, E. H., Zakaras, L., & Brooks, A. (2005). Gifts of the muse: Reframing the debate about the benefits of the arts. Los Angeles: The RAND Corporation. Phiddian, R., Meyrick, J., Barnett, T., & Maltby, R. (2017). Counting culture to death: an Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics, Cultural Trends, 26(2), 174–180. Throsby, D. (2010). The economics of cultural policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Hunter Valley Theatre Company 1976–1994

Australian Theatre after the New Wave charts the history of three ground-breaking Australian theatre companies, the Paris Theatre (1978), the Hunter Valley Theatre (1976-94) and Anthill Theatre (1980-94), analysing the growing dominance of government in shaping the nation’s theatre.

The Paris Theatre 1978

Australian Theatre after the New Wave charts the history of three ground-breaking Australian theatre companies, the Paris Theatre (1978), the Hunter Valley Theatre (1976-94) and Anthill Theatre (1980-94), analysing the growing dominance of government in shaping the nation’s theatre.

Australian Nouveau Theatre 1986–89

Australian Theatre after the New Wave charts the history of three ground-breaking Australian theatre companies, the Paris Theatre (1978), the Hunter Valley Theatre (1976-94) and Anthill Theatre (1980-94), analysing the growing dominance of government in shaping the nation’s theatre.