The relational politics of aesthetics. Negotiating relations between art and society through cultural policy

This project has investigated the relationship between politics and aesthetics. It has dealt with the topic of how cultural policy facilitates art and culture to play a role for both citizens and the society of which they are a part. Art and culture are often described as entities that have an intrinsic value, which in turn legitimates public support. At the same time, it is also argued that art and culture contribute to the development of society, either directly or indirectly. This creates a meeting between two spheres and value systems - aesthetics and politics. A question that follows, is how these value systems interact, and how to argue that aesthetic value has relevance outside the aesthetic realm. How and why does actual art contribute to the development of society? And how is cultural policy organized to enable such development? These questions and fundamental topics form the basis of this project. To study these themes in practice, we have studied five different cases: 1) Concerts Norway and Concerts Sweden, 2) The music policy of Arts Council Norway 3) Music policy and music education towards children in Norway and the United Kingdom, 4) The use of culture in Norwegian foreign policy and 5) the relationship between knowledge development and policy development. In all these five sub-studies we analyse different types of meetings and translations between values, as well as the historical changes of these intersections. For example, in Concerts Norway and Concerts Sweden and in the Arts Council's fifty-year music policy, we find a clear change in the view of what kind of music can make a difference, which the two institutions thus include in their respective music policies. Both of these institutions have also been institutions of construction and education. In Norway, Concerts Norway and the Arts Council have in many ways constructed the infrastructure of a music nation, through their involvement in almost all parts of the music field. Thus they have been musical nation builders. Concerts Norway have also been an educating institution, through the ambition to reach an audience as broadly as possible geographically, dispersing the music they consider to be good enough to be conveyed to the Norwegian people. In this regards, the school concerts are especially important, and until Concerts Norway was reorganized as Kulturtanken (2016), they were the largest concert organizer in Norway, with up to 9000 concerts annually. In the comparison between music education and music policy towards children and adolescents in Norway and the UK, the project has shown that the countries are characterized by their respective educational traditions. Although there are similarities in the view of how children and music should meet each other, it is clear that the two countries' different ideas about education also characterize their organization of music education. While Norway's music education is characterized by a social democratic, inclusive education ideology, the teaching in the UK is far more class-divided, hierarchical and focused on the training of musical skills. In the study of how Norwegian foreign policy use culture, the project shows how Norwegian art and Norwegian artists become an integral part of cultural diplomacy, in which an obvious instrumental use of art is combined with decisions based on artistic judgment. The study also illustrates and describes how Norwegian diplomacy is an extended diplomacy, through the close cooperation with the professionalized and internationalized part of Norwegian cultural life. The fifth topic of this project has been the relationship between the development of knowledge and the development of politics in the cultural policy area. Most of the researchers in the project have also worked with commissioned research, thus gaining personal knowledge of the processes that take place when public institutions commission and potentially utilize a knowledge base. We investigate this topic by studying specific cases exemplifying the production and use of knowledge in cultural policy. We have also developed a model that illustrates the interaction between politics and knowledge in this specific area. This project has shown through five different studies how different ideas about value are an integral part of cultural policy. Thus, cultural policy will always contain an element of translation, interpretation and potential distinction between different forms of value. Thus, cultural policy becomes a game of values, between values that are not necessarily comparable. The combination of art and aesthetics on the one hand and public governance and financing on the other hand, might make this an inevitable trait of cultural policy.

This project studies the relations between aesthetics and politics, highlighted through public measures to ensure a social impact of the arts. This topic will be studied by empirical analysis of attempts to give arts and music a form of developmental agen cy: through democratization of culture, through pedagogical work, through a general music policy, and through the use of culture in foreign policy. These themes will be analyzed in integrated subprojects. The different strands of the project will have a m ethodological common ground in focusing upon the relations between aesthetical valuation, perceived political relevance and social/societal impact. A pivotal concept for this project is cultural policy; both in the explicit and the implicit sense of the word (cf. Ahearne 2008, Bennett). Cultural policy is a highly relevant focal point for the study of cultural conditions underlying social change, for several reasons. Cultural policy is in essence attempts to let culture in the narrow sense (cultural exp ression/ the arts) influence culture in the broad sense; forming, changing or challenging "the sphere within which various groups and individuals think, communicate and act", to quote the SAMKUL programme. The belief in a social impact of the arts has a l ong intellectual history, as described by e.g. Belfiore and Bennett (2008), and such a belief lies at the core of most European varieties of cultural policy. We are interested in the way this belief is transformed to different kinds of political practic e, and how this practice systematically combines the question of aesthetic valuation on the one hand with the question of effect and impact on the other hand. This can be interpreted as a form of translation and/or transformation of values - from aesthet ic value to e.g. political, economical or democratic value. This project will study this process of translating/transforming values as it unfolds in concrete versions of cultural policy.