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NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 63rd episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” This episode will be available starting 17 April 2026. You can find it and all episodes at iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Podbean and find links to accompany the podcasts.
Late March was a big adventure for us. My husband Rick and I visited François in his village in the hills of Burgundy, just in time see the first trees bud and a beautiful green carpet everywhere, the opposite of the dry New Mexico ground we are used to. We were all on our way to the International Community Arts Festival (ICAF) in Rotterdam, a triennial event we’ve touched on in prior podcasts and blogs. We got to see people in the flesh who had only been words on paper or Zoom images before, learning more about their work and their lives. And we offered two workshops, each of which was recorded for a podcast episode.
This is the first, on community arts and cultural policy. You’ll hear the whole of our shared presentation, but not the few minutes of Q & A that unfolded at the end. I hope a few excerpts will give you a sense of the episode.
Here’s what we hoped to accomplish:
I explained that “the idea of the workshop is to give you a good understanding of the historical development and current problems of cultural policy, so that you appreciate the political, social and moral complexities involved, and are better able to situate your own practice within it.”
Francois added “that community artists, inevitably, because they are working and have been working in a developing marginal area, are often putting all their energy into doing their work in a context which did not originally include them because they they weren’t conceived at the time. The difficulty is that unless you engage with cultural policy, you will not be able to change and make things easier for you to work. We believe that to bring about lasting change, we must engage on that political level.”
It was kind of sobering introducing ourselves via the long march through cultural policy each of us had taken: research, books, reports, talks, campaigns, and more. Participants came from across the world, including quite a few places where there is more opportunity for engagement and more likelihood of a response than in the U.S. at this time. But it comes down to not giving up on what’s right because it’s difficult. If we don’t engage, the alternative is to passively accept what’s being done by people who don’t share our values or aims. We’re definitely not ready for that.
François and I began by defining and offering top-level observations about cultural policy. François described many constraints affecting cultural policymakers, noting that “there is a real temptation for performative rhetoric where cultural policy is concerned,” citing documents that describe programs and approaches that sound wonderful but lose a lot in the translation to action. He also stressed that “policy has to be understandable enough for people to have an opinion about it.” This point is easily lost when you start looking at actual existing cultural policy documents, many of which are so granular and complex that people who aren’t specialists abandon them after a page or two. He contrasted this with an issue such as immigration, where there’s a general understanding of what’s at stake, enabling people to comprehend relevant policy proposals. He mentioned two projects that illustrate this. The 1999 Council of Europe publication Balancing Act: twenty-one strategic dilemmas in cultural policy, which clearly frames guiding questions in a way that hasn’t yet become the least bit outdated. And the Rome Charter, a 2020 cultural policy resource commissioned by United Cities and Local Governments and the vice-mayor of Rome.
Next I offered some descriptions of what cultural policy is in practice, and how much that differs from place to place. “Typically, cultural policy is expressed in two ways. One of them is a bit more narrow. It’s how culture arts and culture are conceived, organized, paid for” as by the National Endowment for the arts in the U.S., organized around funding programs for dance, opera, music, theater and so on. “In other places, culture is expanded to include lots of things that people have a choice to do and in doing so, express identity, express connection, express possibility. That could include sport and other leisure activities; it often includes telecommunications, also connecting with how other forms of policy address culture, for example, urban planning, like the physical structure of neighborhoods, what provision exists in those neighborhoods for people to get around, what opportunities there are for sociability in those neighborhoods and so on. It could include preservation and heritage, the built environment, historic buildings, things that can’t be taken down to build a new shopping center; training, the training of artists, yes, but also the training of cultural organizers and other types of workers.
“One of the big dividing lines in the United States turns on the commercial cultural industries which are completely separate from the nonprofit arts, which have to beg for money all the time and don’t have access to the vast capital and and structures that feed the commercial cultural industries. I don’t really see any reason to separate them off. I think is a really bad idea. If I were running the world, I’d say that Hollywood should support real, in-person, human cultural expression. Social inclusion is another question, in countries that have a lot of immigration, what happens? Do you just show up on the doorstep of a country and fend for yourself? Or are there actual programs and interventions that promote social inclusion? Where I come from the red carpet institutions get the lion’s share of cultural funding, and everybody else has to squabble over which crumb is left on the table. These institutions are generally not vetted the way small, struggling groups are. The assumption is that the money is their right.”
And that’s just the beginning.
We had a few points of disagreement in explaining cultural policy. François analogized the situation of funding agencies such as Arts Council England to the predicament Gulliver found himself in when held down by countless tiny ropes wielded by the Lilliputians: decades of prior commitments and relationships, constraints from the Treasury and Parliament, vulnerability to critiques from a press that treats arts funding as a waste, and so on. I think that’s a fairly accurate description of how bureaucrats and policy makers see themselves, and agree with François’ observation that no one in such positions sets out to do harm. But I’m more inclined to think they are at least as held back by their own assumptions and blind spots, which obscure the possibility of change.
Tune into the episode and you’ll hear François talk about the two historic streams in the evolution of cultural policy, “the democratization of culture,” which might be summed up by “art for all,” and cultural democracy, “art by, for, and with all.” That debate started in the sixties, and he brings it up to the present with an analysis of the third stream, which might be called cultural neoliberalism and comes down to everything being marketing.
If you aren’t already a cultural policy wonk, I think you’ll find this episode a worthy introduction. And if you are, I’m guessing the stories and dialogues will be interesting and useful. I know you’ll want to keep listening when François talks about the role of trust in supporting community arts work—that is, how trust should be a guiding light but is generally hard to come by.
Annie Lennox, “Why”