Artful Conversations 2020 David Stevenson Interview
Welcome to Artful Conversations - a podcast about arts and cultural management. Hosts Annetta Latham and Katrina Ingram, interview leaders who help shape the world of arts and culture. We share their stories, their insights and observations. This podcast season has been brought to you with the support of MacEwan University and The Rozsa Foundation.
ANNETTA: Welcome to Artful Conversations, I’m your host, Annetta Latham. Today, I'm speaking with David Stevenson. David is the Dean of Arts, Social Sciences and Management, and a professor of cultural policy and arts management at Queen Margaret University. David's research concentrates on questions of cultural participation, specifically focusing on the relationship of power and the production of value within the UK cultural sector. David is also a member of the National Partnership for Culture, which helps to inform and influence cultural policy decisions in Scotland. Welcome, David.
DAVID: Hello, Annetta, pleased to be here.
ANNETTA: It's great to have you join us today in this funny little covid world that we're in. Can you tell us a little bit about your scholarly career path?
DAVID: I guess it's not straightforward and it's certainly not sort of linear. And so I originally didn't go to university, I went straight into work and I worked within the tourism sector, actually worked at an aquarium. And then kind of, out of that I was interested in a kind of customer service and I was interested in working with people. And so from that, I went to work in retailing and I did and management developed programs within the organization.
But alongside that I also studied at the Open University. And the Open University in the UK is a university that allows people to kind of study at a distance and study flexibly. And that was that time before we had the Internet. So we used to get exciting packages in the post where I would kind of get my books and my assessments delivered in the mail. And so I did a degree in art history. And I became particularly interested in doing that with kind of discussions around museums and galleries, the spaces in which the art was presented, which was something I hadn't really thought about before. I certainly didn't start an undergraduate degree with that being my area of focus. And so when I completed that, I'd kind of continued in various jobs. I worked as a consultant, I worked for the Scottish government, not in areas specifically related to culture, but I also got involved in boards.
And what I became really interested in was the way in which a lot of what I'd been trained in when I worked in retail and that I took for granted is kind of an effective way of running organizations, didn't seem to happen in the organizations that I was on the boards of. And so these are sort of cultural organizations or cultural spaces. And so I really became interested in this idea around managing arts organizations and these organizations that looked after cultural treasures. We were not talking about selling socks and pants. And not as I was doing previously in retailing, these were incredible artworks. And yet somehow the organizations were being managed as well. So I went back. I did a Masters qualification in arts and cultural management, and I then started to do some teaching work. And I realized that I kind of enjoyed the space. And so alongside that, I did a PhD in cultural policy and I've spent most of my academic career at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh. And it's an institution that I'm really passionate about, but also because we've had a longstanding kind of commitment to this area of study. And so I've been through various jobs. I've been a lecturer, a senior lecturer, and I've been the head of the department. And I'm currently the dean of a school. So covering a range of different subjects.
ANNETTA: Yeah, fantastic. Busy, but interesting career and interesting the way you talk about the flow of something that started quite a long time ago. And it's just kind of threaded through everything. So how is that kind of fed into your current interests and projects and what are you actually currently doing?
DAVID: I mean, I guess if I start with what I'm currently looking at or currently focused on in terms of research, there's two main areas of inquiry that I'm looking at now. And one of them is around failure and particular failure in cultural policy. And this comes out of a longstanding interest I've had around about participation and around about the extent to which a lot of policies in the UK and not only the UK, you find it in a range of different countries, talked about the extent to which we're very keen to have an inclusive and egalitarian cultural sector. And for a long time I've been curious why we keep doing the same things, but we don't seem to be getting any difference. So this problem, this idea that people are not taking part in certain activities, certainly in the UK has been around for 20 years. And yet we still are doing projects that look exactly the same as the projects we're doing 20 years ago. And so there's a question there round about are we not recognizing failure or are we not talking about it or do we just not even want to think about it?
So I'm working on that project with a colleague Dr Yankovich from the University of Leeds. And that's very exciting and it's something I'm excited about. And I think back to your other question about does my past fit into that? I actually think it does. And I think it causes, I think I have to be careful with it, because I think where I'm driven by is training I received in retailing and in retailing you're interested in your audience. You're interested in what they're interested in, because fundamentally, if you don't have people coming, you don't have a business. And so I think that sense of being interested in the people who are coming to you does run through my own interests. And I think a lot of people talk about that as kind of marketization and being driven by the market.
But I guess I've always understood it as a two way discussion and a two way dialog, and that, of course, you need to talk to people about what they want. But equally, even if you go to retailing, you don't just design a shop around what people want. You have to read between the lines and you need to think, well, actually, what else is there that they want? Or they're telling me they want this. But actually, if I listen to it, maybe I can come up with something new and I can push the envelope. And so I don't see the two things as being separate. And I do think that informs where I approach my research because I am interested in what people are doing and their cultural life that they express. And that ties into the second thing I'm doing, which is primarily and work around cultural values, which is a kind of longstanding interest of mine, and in particular the New UK Centre for Cultural Value.
ANNETTA: We've talked a little bit about how you became, your interest in failure, but how did it become so fine tuned as to be such a prominent research area and focus?
DAVID: I guess it kind of happened as these things do kind of iteratively. And to a certain extent, I think quite a lot of the way I work is by being a little bit provocative and seeing what lands. I can often be, I can often use a provocative argument in a space to facilitate some discussion, because sometimes I find that both within this field of research and within the cultural sector, I go to a lot of events and I hear a lot of the same types of narratives, the same types of discussions, even when the people are diverse. So you may see a very diverse panel, but I'm hearing a lot of the same logic. And I guess a lot of my research interests are about language that are about the way they talk about things. And they're interested in discourse, by discourse, I'm interested in what that means in terms of the logics that are underlying that.
Sometimes when we talk about things, there's an implicit logic behind it that none of us challenge. And so I guess I enjoy occasionally challenging those logics and seeing how people respond, seeing how comfortable or uncomfortable we are with them. And I notice that actually in a few events I went to, if you said the word well, because this project has failed, I mean, it was sort of like dropping a nuclear bomb into the center of the space. You know, it was just like, you know, it wasn't a word that people felt comfortable with, or that they could, that they wanted to include in the discussion. So I got interested in that. And then my colleague I spoke about, we have worked separately in the past, but I'm interested in very similar things. And as often happens in academia, you have casual conversations when you meet up. And again, I think we've been talking about this. And again, I think I said something like, why do you keep doing stuff that fails and so we kind of just started to riff on this idea of failure and about, and in fact, I remember the day that we met up in Leeds and we kind of started to sketch this out. And I think that was where the idea of the title of the project that we're doing, which is called Stories of Success, Histories of Failure came out, which was sort of recognizing that all we ever heard was about the cultural sector being successful and that every project that it had done in terms of widening access appears to have worked. But if it has, why is that problem not going away? And so it was kind of that confluence. And to be honest, it was an area within policy studies that hadn't, again, even myself really looked at. And I think that's quite exciting when you realize that it's not just other people that haven't thought about it. It's also you.
I think sometimes there is an assumption that academic research is something by which they already know a lot. Whereas actually I would always argue that being an academic is about having the skills to research, inquire and to ask questions in a methodical way that allows you to explore this. So at the beginning, you know, I had a term, I had a gut idea. And so I start to go and look at some of the policy studies literature, and I need to explore how much it had been looked at outside of culture policy maybe, and lots of other fields. And what was interesting was that it had, but not in any extensive way. It was, it was a term that where it had been discussed, had primarily either been discussed in a very sort of theoretical level, but never really applied or had been used quite casually. And so people would sort of just use it without kind of exploring it. So that's always exciting for an academic as well. If you start to do the reading and you go, wait a minute, actually, I can see where they're still here to contribute to the literature, but also contribute to practice because obviously I'm interested in effect.
ANNETTA: Yeah, it's interesting because being someone who came out of quite an extensive arts management career, I've written grants where we've gone, oh, we're going to have thousands of people at this thing hoping for the big dollar payout ticket and then had to report to those grants afterwards. And certainly we certainly rounded up figures more than we rounded down figures. And so, you know, it comes into that, you know, when you're writing those reports, thinking about, what was cultural participation, what was it, what did people engage with, what didn't they, you know, did we count somebody ringing in to ask a question about or what is the exhibition going to be about and can they enter into it or is there a competition? Can their children come to a training? Do we count the phone calls as cultural participation, or is it people who walked in the door as cultural participation? It was always an interesting debate. We always had, certainly when I was the manager of Campbelltown Art Centre in Australia, that was certainly always an interesting narrative. So from your perspective, how would you outline cultural participation?
DAVID: I think for me cultural participation is something that is relatively easy to do, and I think cultural participation is something that we seek out as part of a way for us to have meaningful lives. And I think that if you take a kind of culture as a way of living in a kind of anthropological sense, and a lot of people will then start to say, OK, well, is brushing your teeth taking part in culture. And you can, it's often very easy to kind of put up the defenses around about this. My argument is that, no, it's not everything that we do, but it's everything that we do that has a symbolic value in some way. And that can change depending upon you, depending on the group that you're part of, depending on the community you live in, depending upon your background, your education, your ethnicity, the things that have symbolic value to us individually and collectively differ. And I think cultural participation is your interaction with those objects and processes that you recognize as being symbolically valuable, both to you, but to other people with whom you have an affinity and relationship, who you associate with.
ANNETTA: So in evaluating cultural participation in that framework, where do you think the arts and culture actor is neglecting to take into it, what do you think are neglecting to take into account in their evaluation of cultural participation?
DAVID: I guess the question is often framed in terms of who is or isn't coming to and then fill in the blanks with a kind of list of activities, organizations, events. Depending on the country, it may well be that we're most interested in things that have received some public subsidy, not always, in some cases, we're interested in some other activities. The difficulty, I would say, in a lot of cases is that the approaches that are taken are approaches that are predicated upon pieces of research or whitegate surveys, social surveys that have an exhaustive list.
The difficulty with that is exactly what I just said, which is if you accept that cultural participation is something that is intersubjectively understood between a group of people and that that may differ, it becomes very difficult to write an exhaustive list. And so you will inevitably get into the argument of going is it that or is one of these or just another one. And my frustration is what we end up with is data that that tells us essentially who is or isn't likely to go to a cinema and who isn't likely to go to the theater. Who isn't likely to read a book. And what it doesn't tell us is if somebody isn't doing one of those things, are they doing something in their life that they find symbolically meaningful? And the reason that I would say that this really matters is that we have a lot of very well-meaning policies in the UK and Scotland and in other countries that are supposedly about supporting people's well-being, supposedly about supporting them to take part in their cultural life. But they are predicated upon an assumption that certain people are essentially not doing anything, or are doing nothing that they find meaningful.
Now, I do not argue with the fact that the structural inequalities that many countries face mean there are lots of people for whom there precarity or their shortage of income, their own living environment means that they are unable to do the things that they want to do to the extent that they would want to do them. Yeah, but we never ask them first what that is. We always assume that we know what that is for them.
And again, I use myself as the example because, you know, I, as a middle class white man typically fitting that space, I have disposable income, I'm educated. But fundamentally, if I find myself at some point in my life in a position whereby I need somebody else to help me with my cultural participation. If they send me or if they give me free tickets to go to the ballet or to a community arts activity, I wouldn't want them, because fundamentally, although I think they're great, they are great things, you know, in terms of what really matters to me, what I would say you have to kind of fix for me, it's things like going to see Marvel films at the cinema. I love escapism, that really matters to me. And it's listening to Elaine Page on Sunday. For those of you that don't know what an international audience Elaine Page is, is a musical star within the U.K. She has a program on Radio 2 on a Sunday, which is essentially musical songs. And you know, fundamentally for me, if someone took Elaine Page away, then I'd be really worried about that. But that's what matters to me. But the difficulty is that as soon as your participation relies upon being facilitated by the state, your ability to express your own values to a certain extent is taken away from you.
The one thing that sticks in my mind from a piece of research I did, and it's always stuck with me. I was talking to a respondent, someone who I was interviewing, who came from a lower socio economic part of Scotland, so economically didn't have a lot of disposable income and really, really articulate and women that I was speaking to about our cultural life and really able to express to me what she valued, really able to express to me the things that she really mattered to her. And I remember her saying to me, she's like, well, I know the museum is free. And she's like, I'm really grateful that the museum is free because she's like, I hope that people use the museum. She's like, but me and my kids don't want to go to the museum. We want to go and see Frozen. And because it was around it at the time, that Frozen was OK. And she was like, I cannot afford the fifty pounds to take my children to see Frozen. And all of the friends are talking about it at school and they feel excluded, they feel excluded from those social interactions about that cultural object. And nobody cares. And I remember her saying and it wasn't that she was putting it in opposition, it wasn't that she was saying Frozen is better than the museum. What she was saying was, because of my circumstances, I just have to take what's on offer and actually what's of interest to us, you know, that we're not going to get help with that. We don't value it in the same way.
ANNETTA: It's really interesting because it's driving really, kind of, state assumed cultural engagement of what you should and shouldn't be engaged with. Would you say that also drives some of the funding that is available to people where you know? I certainly know my experience has been that grants are written with a very specific slant on them, to either have a youth element, you know I've written grants where there has been really strong indigenous communities engagement [grant focus]. But grants have been written with an assumption of ‘it's not going to fail’, and there's an assumption of a gap analysis that goes on [in grant writing]: [the groups mentioned are not] engaged with the grant writing or [program you are apply for funds], so if you apply for this grant, then you have to make sure you engage them. It sounds like from what you were saying, that when organizations apply for grants, they have to somehow massage, ‘what they are doing’ into what is almost a state prescribed engagement. And would you say that that's kind of relevant, real, going on in Scotland and does it miss the gap of what you're talking about, of people going actually, can we engage with what we want to engage with?
DAVID: I think it does and I think that there's a difficulty, because as soon as you start talking about this and I think, again, I think you sort of you slipped into that just now, is that we start saying states and of course, people think of that, they kind of imagine an autocratic state and a minister for culture that's sitting there going, you know, you will go and see this, you won't go and see that. Now, that isn't happening. I’ve not encountered anybody who's doing that. But what I'm interested in particular about this, is the way in which this happens without necessarily recognizing that it's happened. And it's the notion of governance.
It's not about governments. It's not about people saying you should or shouldn't do this. You must do this or you mustn't do that. But it's the way in which, the way we talk about things, what we choose to fund, the way in which funding applications are structured, all of these small, incremental things start to build up so that what we're doing is it's not necessarily intentional, but we are creating paths that say, well, actually we are implicitly suggesting that you should go to this or we are saying implicitly that this matters more because there are choices involved, government is about choices. And what worries me with this is that it requires or it assumes, as I say that people aren't doing anything. And again, another one that I always remember was talking to the representatives from a minority ethnic arts group in Glasgow. And they spoke a lot about constantly being invited to take part in projects being run by arts organizations in the city center. They were like, you know, that's great. They were like, but we're doing our own arts projects and we actually just like that they would fund them.
You know, it would just be nice if they supported what we were doing rather than asking us to do something else. And, you know, it's the word invitation sounds great. It's like, oh, you've invited someone, you invite them in. Welcome. And it doesn't it's not a word that you kind of you feel negatively about. And but again, it's this idea that there is to a certain extent what's understood maybe as an opportunity cost, which says, OK, your invitation is great, but in order to come and do your invitation, I have to stop doing this thing that I'm already doing that I value an awful lot. And as I'm always saying to people, I think that's really important for even an arts marketing point of view. And I'm always saying to students, and I should probably apologize to them because I'm probably creating an image that they don't want to consider. But I'm always saying that if you're asking me to come to the cinema or if you're asking me to go to the theatre, what you're actually asking me is not to have a bath with a candle and a book. But it's fundamentally that's what I want to do on a Saturday night. And if you want me to come out with my bath and go out in the cold and come to your theatre, that I need to know that it's better than the thing that I'm already doing.
And, you know, entering into that discussion with people and seeing them not as people who are not doing anything, but actually as people who are cultural participants in the same way that you are, whereby you're going to recognize that you've got a lot of amazing stuff going on. I'd like you to come and try this out, because what it also then does is invite a two way interaction which says, well, why don't I come to see you, but next time you come to see me. So why don't you, what we are doing. And that's I mean, it's referred to within a lot of the policy literature as the deficit model. There's an assumption that there are a deficit in certain people, there's a deficit in certain places and I guess I'm driven by this sort of a kind of provocation, or belief that says, well, what if we flipped on its head and said, actually, there is an abundance of cultural participation? It's just that we don't recognize, it's a bit like dark matter. So we absolutely know and can see huge chunks of matter. But then there's all this other stuff that we're like, it's probably there, but we don't know what it is. Cultural policy is a bit like that. You know, if it's a neutron or a proton and I'm well out of my depth here, you can understand that literally as far as my high school physics is going to carry me. But if it's those, then we recognize them. But there's all this dark matter of culture that sits around that we are talking about. So it's a deficit when actually it's in abundance. And I think it would be revolutionary if we start to look at our policy landscape through the lens of abundance.
ANNETTA: So if you take the deficit, that notion of deficit, cultural availability, whatever you want to call it, how do you then define that into success and failure within the sector?
DAVID: OK, so I think that, again, this question around the difference between somebody's cultural life and policy, because fundamentally again, what you have is lots of overlapping parts of the social world. So when we move into questions of success and failure, we're moving into questions of policy and the extent to which the state is involved in the lives of its citizens. We live in democracies and in those democracies there is a negotiation between the people who form those democracies and the governments put in place about how far that government will stretch into their lives and different countries have different opinions about it.
Now, there is a sort of unwritten agreement that says if the government is going to intervene in your life in some way, then they need to be doing it in order to fix a problem, to keep you safe, to help you and to make you more secure and more successful, more healthy. So when we are in the realm of policy and when we're talking about arts and culture policy, fundamentally, there is an implicit assumption that there is a reason the state is involved there and it is trying to do certain things and it's trying to do certain things, and I'm not going to sort of start to critique individual governments. So I'm going to assume that the state wants the best for its citizens. And so they are intervening in order to do something good for citizens. So when it comes to something like culture, what is particular is that numerous countries and the UK, Scotland, Canada, they all fit within this box in some way, shape or form, have made a commitment around supporting the cultural life of their citizens, supporting people to engage, supporting people to participate. That has a commitment in it. And now different countries have developed that to different degrees.
Some of them have left it quite vague, which isn't that helpful in terms of policy. Some are more specific. But once you start to break that down, you then look at the organizations you find you then look at some of the projects that you're funding. Those projects are attempting to do something. Now as part of that, if you're saying what we want is we want to ensure that everybody that lives in Canada in 10 years time is spending more of their week on culturally significant activities than they were doing 10 years ago. So there is success and failure in policy terms. And there may not necessarily be success or failure for the individual in terms of each interaction that they have, although we may well talk about it in those terms. But from a policy perspective, there is an objective and that objective can be succeeded or failed. Now, what's been interesting about our research, both looking at the existing literature and also the data that we collected, is that it's important when you're trying to think about cultural policy to not only focus on those objectives because, of course, people say, but art and culture does other things as well, and so you can't just say that something was a failure because we didn't have our policy objective, because if you were going to say that and, you know, we could sit here and list every single government policy objective that's been missed in the world, it just adds to a long line. And the reality is that a lot of policies never properly succeed. They have degrees of success or failure. And so in part, what we're trying to do is to develop a more nuanced language about success and failure within the culture policy sector.
ANNETTA: And so with the people that you have been focusing your research on, what's been the response to what you’re doing? Are they free and easy with the dialog around failure?
DAVID: And it's been really, it's been interesting as well as all good research should be. And we've approached it in various ways. So we've run workshops and we have done one to two on interviewing and we've done an anonymous survey. We did that online and we also did it in hard copy. And I mean, one of the things that came up and we were very conscious from the start that this was going to be sensitive and the people were, they were going to find it difficult and in part we had assumptions about why people were talking about failure, and you've already talked about some of them already, the basically implicit assumption that if I put in a grant report that 15 people came to something that I said was going to have 500, I'm never going to get funding again.
And we knew that that was going to be there. And so we did quite a lot to try and make the spaces that we were in as safe as possible. So, for example, in the initial workshops, we spoke to funders, separately from arts organizations, separately from artists, so that we tried to make sure that people were just talking to their peers. What became really striking, first of all, was that people just find it difficult. And again, to use a kind of physics analogy, I have no idea where these are coming from today, but it was a little bit like kind of pushing two magnets together where you pushed it together and it was like, let's talk about failure. And then they just missed each other and it felt like people wanted to talk about it, but the minute that the fail word came up, it was kind of swapped out for could have been better or, you know, and partial success. And all of a sudden it was just, it was a real sense of being uncomfortable. And I did have a couple of quite robust interactions, I would say, with people who are like, why are you doing this? Why, as though there was a sort of vendetta against the arts sector. It was rare, but there was certainly a couple of people who really felt this was unnecessary. It was just unnecessarily awkward, and there was no reason to talk about it. And what also struck me was that even in some of the workshops, where at the end of the workshop, I thought, yep, that was great, people were really honest, they were quite open.
They had the opportunity to write anonymously on a postcard and post it in a letterbox that we made. And this was just we kind of thought a nice way to finish it off. What was interesting was that to a certain extent it became some of the most interesting data because, even in those events where I thought we created quite an open discussion in what sounded like it was open, people were writing things on those postcards that they clearly couldn't say in the room. And so we were getting things on those postcards that said, I lie on my evaluations all the time. You know, I lie to get money, doesn't everybody? And or one of the postcards said, I hate doing participatory art practice, but it's the only thing I can get funding for. And that really stuck with me as well, because it just really showed how difficult it was for people to be in that space and to really talk honestly about failure, even when they were only with peers.
So when we thought we'd kind of dealt with the power relationships between the different parts. And I guess the flip side, though, is that one of the other things that we found once we moved into the interview stage, I mean, when we were talking to people one to one, is that everybody really wanted to talk about it with us. One to one you know it was a cathartic experience. Well, it was sort of an outpouring in some cases. And they sort of said, yeah, we really want to talk about this. You're absolutely onto the right thing, let's have this discussion. But then once again, there was an interesting layer in the interviews, which is although people said, I have no problem talking about failure yet, let's talk about it. Let's let's have this one on one. What they were actually comfortable about was talking about other people's failures. And so a lot of the interviews were well, let me tell you about them, and they failed or this funder's failed and this person's failed and this person over here failed even when there was all the explicit questions that will tell me about a failure that you've been involved in. It would get flipped, to actually let's talk about someone else's failures. And so it has been really interesting to see I kind of am not contradictory, but certainly complex relationship with this term whereby people have been both simultaneously attracted to talking about it, but find it very, very difficult.
ANNETTA: Yeah, it is an interesting topic, and you mentioned earlier, you know, the reason for kind of jumping into it is to look at what is working and what isn't working. That understanding of what people actually do and don't need. In the journey that you've both gone through, would you say these further research that needs to be done? What do you anticipate is the outcome of this body of work that you're both doing?
DAVID: And I mean, to a certain extent, probably the next stage is kind of action research to try and make use of some of the things that we've been developing. And so we have first of all, we've developed a model and we've developed a model which we've been titled The Wheel of Failure, which sounds like a kind of bad game show. But it's a very robust academic model. And it's a combination, both taking some preexisting theoretical work that's been done in policy studies literature, and then looking at the analysis of the interviews, the different ways in which people talk about failure. And so what we've done is we've created this model that has five facets of failure, which are purpose, participation and practice, process and profile. And what it says is that any project that's about cultural participation has five different areas in which people perceive it to succeed or fail. Within each of those areas, it can have degrees of success or failure. So on one end, there's outright failure and then it moves through a scale. So there's precarious, tolerable failure, there's been a conflicting success, resilient success and outright success.
And so the model encourages people at the beginning of the process with different stakeholders to talk about what would each of those degrees of success or failure look like at the end of this? And to agree to up front so that by the time you get to the end of the project, you then map it back against those different elements to say, well, actually, in terms of our purpose, this was a resilient success. We delivered all of our objectives, we said what we were going to do in terms of our profile, it was a precarious failure because actually nobody paid any attention to it and the media didn't pick up and actually the funders aren't going to fund us again. So actually, from that point of view, it failed in terms of participation. It was a conflict of success in that actually a lot of different people interacted, but they were all the same people that we always interact with. And so we didn't get anybody new. And so what it encourages is people to vote in advance, but then also to recognize a project isn't a success or failure is multifaceted, it's five different areas of success or failure, and in each of them, it's different degrees. So we designed this tool, we've also designed postcards of failure, which we encourage people to send postcards to people apologizing or just admitting about a failure that it's never been able to before. And we've also worked with a research artist, Lucy Wright. And she's worked with us all the way through. One of the things that came out was doing this double narrative. Everybody said we all knew this. We all knew that people are lying in their evaluations.
The funders, organizations know the artist. So everybody knows we all knew that projects are not going to be sustainable. We know when we get the funding and we say this is going to be our legacy. We all know it's not going to have a legacy. We all know that it's going to fold at the end of this. But what we were interested in was that dual narrative that actually, despite the fact that everybody told us that they knew that the common narrative was lying or was false, they didn't change. And so what we've done is what we find interesting. It kind of reminds us, as somebody said, this is a really simple story and we actually all know how it works. And so what we've created is a children's book. And so it's an illustrated children's book and it's called Welcome to the Cultural Desert. And it describes a kind of participation project within the world. And there's different sets of text. So one set of text is how we generally officially talk about it. But the other set of text, so each picture has to the other set of text is what we talk about ourselves and what it could be. And so the point of it is contrasting the images with these two ways of talking about it.
And so that's also available on the website. And we've also at the moment we are recording some vignettes taken directly out of our interviews, and so collectively what we're doing is creating our website and the website will have a range of different tools on it to try to encourage people to have workshops where we talk about failure, whether that's with the participants, whether that's with their funders. So I guess in answer to the question about what research is needed next, it's action research to go, OK, let's see what happens if we can start to have some of these conversations. Does it mean that we change what we do? Does it mean that we start to change how we fund, or what we fund? Or does it mean that we actually have a discussion with people and they say, do you know what, I am totally fine because I've got Netflix. So bash on with your theater. Good luck to you. You really don't need to worry about me. It's OK. It's all good. There is. There's no problem. Yeah, but actually let's have some of those discussions. So I think for me, I think it's a lacking in the cultural policy sector in general is a lack of action research. There is a sense in the culture sector that we have to prove everything first before we do anything, as opposed to saying let's change some stuff and then see what happens. And I think that that's what's needed.
ANNETTA: That is absolutely fantastic. I’m aware we're running out of time. So for you, what are the next steps? And, you know, in the wonderful academic world, you now becoming the children's author. In the next five years, what are your goals and dreams? I know that you're part of the Centre for Cultural Value, does that kind of weave into the next five years of your life. And just for our listeners, the Centre for Cultural Value is at the University of Leeds. And David is one of the directors of that. So in finishing off, what are your goals for the next five years? Where are you heading?
DAVID: And, gosh, what am I, I mean, I guess one of my goals is to get married. I should have got married this year. I think that needs to be top of the list. And my partner, Danny would never forgive me if that wasn't there.
So, but I think in terms of professionally, in terms of my research, I mean, you know, as an academic, as someone working at a university, you know, I fundamentally believe our role is to challenge and to be an objective eye is sometimes to be a fly in the ointment. And because actually people have jobs they have their lives and it's very difficult to ask awkward questions if your job depends on it. So continuing to ask those awkward questions, but I would like to see change fundamentally, there's a point at which you have to go.
You can shout about this for long enough, but nobody's paying attention. I have to start asking myself, am I feeling, you know, I have to turn my wheel on myself. Yeah. What would I like to see? There's a few things I'd like to see, I'd like to affect cultural policy in a way that we realize that rich cultural lives are the indication of a wider policy sphere working well. What I mean by that is for most of the time we've had any sort of cultural policy, we see cultural policy as serving other means. For example, we might see it as making people and be productive or making sure that people's well-being is looking good so that they're able to continue to work or making sure that they're contributing to the economy.
Fundamentally for me, it's about trying to put on [a person’s] head [thinking] to say, why do we want to make money? Why does a country want to make money? Why do I want to make money? Why do I want to have a house? Why do I want to be secure? Why do I need to have a job? Why do I want to be healthy? I want to be all those things because I want to be human, and part of being human is the ability to express myself culturally, to express what has value and meaning to me, and to engage in it fully and freely and to be able to do that in a way that I feel secure. And so for me, there's a real challenge in policy that says, not how can culture deliver for every other policy sector, but actually how can every other policy sector deliver for culture? So how does health policy plan for culture?
Is it enough to get someone healthy or well enough that they can go home, make a cup of tea and maybe kind of get back to the couch? Or actually, do we set the bar higher and say this person was a dancer? Or actually this person, they love to craft and actually getting them well means getting them back to that life. And if you look at someone's economics, if we look at the amount of money someone brings in for thinking about what the basic salary is, often you hear people talk about, you know, the basics that you need for living, things like milk and bread, various basic standards. And whenever somebody says something like, oh, you know, somebody spent their state support or the money they got from the government on a Netflix subscription, everybody sort of, there’s a media outroar that says, well, that's a waste. For me, we need to get to the point where we go. Actually, having a cultural life isn't a luxury, it's a basic standard. And actually if people's own security, people's own economic situation means that they cannot have a cultural life, then economic policy is failing.
So I think essentially what I've described and what I want to achieve in the next five years appears to be some sort of social revolution. But let's go back. Forget that, my aspiration for the next five years is to wholesale turn on its head, the reason that we enact policies in all the fields because actually I think a country that's doing it right has citizens who are culturally expressive. It's not a problem to be fixed, it's an indicator of our collective success as a democratic liberal societies.
ANNETTA: Thank you, David, and thank you for a fantastic interview. It was wonderful chatting to you. You gave us all so much to think about. It was an absolute pleasure. And thank you for your time.
DAVID: Not at all. And it's been very enjoyable. Thank you for inviting me.
Analysis
ANNETTA: Katrina, my interview with David was extraordinary. David and I go a long way back, but it's always amazing every time I interview him and talk to him about his work. I think one of the things that I really enjoyed what he mentioned about was when he was a shop assistant and learned all those audience engagement tools and how he's now using them. And it just reminds us all our skills are transferable. You know, we don't lose them just because the job title might change. And sometimes the stuff we learnt early on in our careers is actually even more important. Yeah, it was fascinating. David's work and what David talks about is absolutely fascinating.
KATRINA: Absolutely. I loved this interview, I loved listening to the two of you and what you're saying about transferable skills resonates with me because my original training is as a marketer. And so I really related to what David was saying about being driven by the market. And it's just this two way dialog, this dance that you have with your customers. And it was just really interesting to hear him talk about the novelty of this approach as it pertains to the cultural world, because, of course, in the world of retail and the world of product marketing, it's so natural. But then as he applies this into the cultural world, it has this novel aspect to it.
ANNETTA: Oh, yeah. And one of the things with the research that he's just currently doing around failure, I mean, I think that is just so significant and so huge. And, you know, as someone who's worked in the sector as a senior manager and had to fill in grant forms, you know, we certainly rounded up rather than rounded down, that's for sure, as I said in the interview. And it's just, how the fear that we have in the cultural sector to measure something. And go you know what, failures ok, we can learn from that, the fear we have, and that is extraordinary. So his research is incredibly interesting. And so for those of you that are more interested in this, he's actually written a paper and we'll put it on the Artful Conversations website. And so the link will be there.
KATRINA: That’s amazing, I made so many notes about this topic of failure and I had this image of him dropping the failure bomb at a cocktail party in academia and having it explode in the middle of this party, which I just thought was amazing. And the courage, you know, the courage needed to do that is huge. I also really like this line that he said. He said being an academic isn't about knowing everything about a subject, it’s about knowing how to explore a subject. And I love that comment. And I've really experienced that in my own work. And I think this is a great message for students. It's about following your curiosity, exploring something, even if you don't know anything about it right now, you're going to learn as you go. So I thought that was a fantastic message that David conveyed for us and for our students.
This show was created by Executive Producer and Host Annetta Latham; Co-host Katrina Ingram. Technical Producer Paul Johnston. Research Assistants involved were Caitlin McKinnon and MacEwan bachelor of music students.
Theme Music by Emily Darfur and cover art by Constanza Pacher. Special thanks to the Rose Foundation for their support and to our guests. Artful Conversations is a production of MacEwan University [and Assistant Professor Annetta Latham], all rights reserved.
Latham, A. (Executive Producer and Host). Regan-Ingram, K (Host). (2020, November 19) [Season 2: Episode 2]. David Stevenson. Podcast retrieved from: https://www.artfulconversations.com/season-2-1/2021/2/6/ep-12-david-stevenson