Creative Enterprise and Public Value: From Ideas to Action
Date: May 4 – 6, 2006
Location:
The Blackwell Inn & Conference Center
Columbus, Ohio 43210
Presented by the Ohio State University College of the Arts and Department of Art Education
Symposium Description
For the past decade and a half, the arts and cultural policy community has been struggling to find a new vision that repositions the place of the arts in American society and which, in turn, redefines the relationship between government and the arts. In part, this search has been prompted by a number of tectonic shifts in the policy environment: demographic change, influences of globalization, technological impact, political polarization, and governmental decentralization and privatization. In this search, we have fought many battles of the “culture wars;” reorganized the National Endowment for the Arts; explored the public purposes of the arts; contemplated the ideas of a “creative class,” the “creative economy,” and “the “creative industries;” undertaken efforts to broaden public engagement in the arts; posed new arguments for the intrinsic value of the arts; recognized the relationship between the instrumental value of the arts and the generation of social capital; cultivated the development of the field of cultural policy studies; and sought to stimulate the public value of the arts and culture. Clearly, there has been a lot of activity, experimentation, and adaptation as we have reacted, in part, to the shortcomings and criticisms of the patron state model. But has it created a new vision for what cultural policy and the arts might be for the 21st century?
The Barnett Symposia are an on-going endeavor to reconceptualize the place of arts and culture in contemporary society. In 2003 the Symposium began to develop a model of the creative sector and explored the changing configuration of key cultural professions including artists, arts educators, and arts administrators. In 2004 the Symposia investigated the relationship of education and training to launching and developing careers in the creative workforce. In 2006 the Symposium will combine ideas about the creative enterprise in all its aspects—individual professions, organizations, art industries, and sector infrastructure—with ideas about public value and public purpose as the guiding motivation in a new vision of arts and cultural policy. The Symposium also will explore the interactions of these ideas on the current condition and the future of creative communities. However, this is not simply a theoretical exercise. This symposium will explore a plan of action leading to full participation of these communities in the creative economy; participants will:
- trace two strands of emergent cultural policy thinking on creative enterprise and public value,
- examine the implications and applications of these ideas in the selected fields of Music, Contemporary & Traditional Visual Art, and New Media,
- assess the information needs and thinking strategies useful in planning for the sector,
- gain an understanding of the challenges and the capacity for change in the creative sector,
- clarify public values and purposes as a step toward community cultural development,
- and, finally, survey existing policy approaches that offer potential benefits for the current policy environment.