MU71041A Sector Overview: Music Audience Development and Fundraising

Student Number: 33260621

Does a concern with public value in the cultural sector mean all art should be
accessible to all?
January 29, 2014


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Public value is a concept that was developed as a result of research that focused on
adapting managerial methodology used in the private sector for its implementation in the
public sector. The purpose of this research was to offer public institutions an approach
that could help them enhance their performance as public servants. It is, in some ways
a response to the failings of the technocratic, target-driven practices of New Public
Management that can lead to unintended consequences, rigid bureaucracies and rule-
driven decision-making (Holden and Balt, 2012: 6). Researchers concluded that the
aim of the public sector should be to seek the generation of value for the society, a
public value.
While analysing ways to achieve public value, one of the main problems detected in the
public sector was that it failed to consider societys voice when establishing priorities.
And who could be better at pointing out the needs of society than society itself? Public
value hence is reached by a methodology that includes society as a key player, and that
focuses attention on the processed for achieving public value as much as in the value
itself.
Engaging with a public value perspective on culture represents many challenges. The
first one relates to the ethereal and complex essence of culture. How is culture, and the
value it can bring to society, to be defined and measured? Over the last few decades,
the British government has measured the value of culture exclusively with an
instrumentalist approach. This means it has measured what culture can accomplish in
economic terms, as well as in support of other political agendas. However, the problem
with this kind of assessment is that it leaves aside some of the most valuable features of
culture, the ones that refer to its intrinsic value. Intrinsic value refers to the value culture
has in and for itself, it relates to emotion, inspiration, aesthetic and intellectual issues
(among others), which normally relate to an individual experience and are hard to
measure and quantify.
In addition to this, the British cultural system suffers from huge fragmentation, which has
lead to a legitimacy crisis. There is an urge to create new bridges for all the parties
involved to communicate, understand and engage with each other, in order to support
the possibility of healthy cultural development and the achievement of public value.


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A public value perspective in culture means the society must be able to identify what it
considers valuable about culture. It means everyone should be involved in the definition
of that cultural value, and the way its sought. Although a concern with public value in the
cultural sector does not mean all art should be accessible to all, accessibility, when
involving an active participation of the wider audience, can support the legitimacy of the
cultural system, which is an indispensable step for achieving public value. For the
cultural professionals, the public represents a source of vast potential in the fight to
establish political and financial support: more people engage with the arts than
voteBut beyond that, only public support can provide the legitimacy for politics to fund
culture. (Holden, 2006: 41)
An implementation of a public value approach in the cultural system could lead, without
a shadow of a doubt, to not only a strong and cohesive cultural system, but also to a
flourishing of all the artistic potential within it. Committing to culture and its artistic
expression is the responsibility of all. In the end, every individual is inevitably touched
and inspired by art, it is art that nurtures our soul and fills our hearts
To start developing an understanding of the topic, this essay will begin by explaining
what public value refers to and what it implies. Subsequently, in order to give some
context, a brief history of UK cultural policy will be stated, in order to understand how a
public value perspective towards culture affects the common practices of the public
sector. Following that, the challenges of the different ways in which culture adds value
will be analysed, to be able to respond to the main question: in which ways can a public
value perspective be adopted within the cultural sector? To conclude, a chapter
concerning accessibility and legitimacy will address the question of accessibility in
relation to public value.

Introduction to public value
During the 1990s there was a growing emphasis in bodies such as the World Bank on
the importance of governance arrangements in increasing the legitimacy of governments
and quality of decision-making, as well as outcomes (Kelly and Muers, 2002: 5) This
concern developed and, as a result, public value was brought into being.


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Public value is the value added by government and the public sector in its widest sense
(Holden, 2004: 42). It is a concept that was developed when Kennedy School of
Government and Harvard Business School joined efforts in order to research how
managerial methodology used in the private sector could be suited for an application in
the public sector. A conclusion reached by this research was that, just as the goal of
private managers was to create private (economic) value, the goal of government
agencies was to create public (social) value (Moore and Khagram, 2004: 2). The
establishment of this statement gives society an important role within public sector
management. If generating public value is the goal for governmental institutions, then
the society itself should help establish the meaning of that value, especially because
society gives something up in return for it (Holden, 2004: 42). Understanding this,
researchers proposed a framework composed of three phases, in order to facilitate the
achievement of public value. That framework starts with a diagram they called the
strategic triangle. (Moore and Khagram, 2004: 3)
The strategic triangle establishes three main steps: public value, legitimacy and support,
and operational capabilities (Moore and Khagram, 2004: 3). In order to create public
value, an institution must start by clearly defining the value it aims to create. It is
important for the value to be consented upon by society and government. Moreover,
since that public institution works with resources generated by the society (i.e. taxation),
it is society itself that can legitimize and support the institutions goals and ways to
achieve them. Finally, managers should analyse their own institution operational
capacity and recognize what they are capable of doing (Moore and Khagram, 2004: 9),
How the organisation will need to conduct itself and be organised in order to achieve its
declared objectives; organisational capacity, corporate mores and leadership strength
are crucial in creating value (Holden, 2004: 43). The other two phases refer to mapping
the organisational processes that take place in the production of Public Value and
developing a performance grid an accountability framework that links organisational
activity from goals to outcomes. (Holden, 2004: 43)
Public value provides a broader measure than is conventionally used within the
new public management literature, covering outcomes, the means used to deliver
them as well as trust and legitimacy. It addresses issues such as equity, ethos
and accountability. Current public management practice sometimes fails to


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consider, understand or manage this full range of factors. (Kelly and Muers,
2002: 3)
If a clear definition of public value is the first step towards achieving it, as the strategic
triangle explains, then a public value approach to culture inevitably leads to questioning
how the value of culture is measured, since those will be the elements taken into
account for the funding of cultural projects, which will have an important impact on the
cultural development of any country. In the cultural sector, the complexity of measuring
and thus, being able to define cultural value, has lead governments, funding bodies and
cultural organizations to seek more integral assessment techniques.

Public value and culture
Measuring the value of culture background in UK Policy
Before engaging with the topic of how attempts have been made to measure the value of
culture, and despite the fact that there is actually no official definition of it, an idea of
what the term culture means is important. The word culture is hard to define. It has
been referred to as a general process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic
development (Storey, 2001: 1-2), also as a particular way of life, whether of a people, a
period or a group (Storey, 2001: 2), or as the works and practices of intellectual and
specially artistic activity (Storey, 2001: 1-2). In the twentieth century it was commonly
related to the high arts or to the practices and objects through which a society
expresses and understands itself. (Holden, 2008: 10). In this essay, the term will refer to
the artistic activity and cultural institutions supported by public funding.
To understand how a public value perspective on culture challenges the common
practices of government, its important to know what those practices refer to and where
they come from. The British states approach to culture has essentially been governed
by two principles, the first of which is regulation The second principle is utility.
(Hewison, 2003: 2) There are many examples of the application of these two principles
in British history. In his article Valuing Culture, Professor Robert Hewison (2003: 2-3)
points out the reluctance of government to fund what would become the British Museum,
which was finally funded by the Lottery. He also recalls the foundation of 19
th
Century


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museums and libraries, and how the free access to them was seen by government as a
way to regulate society, by keeping the working classes out of the pub. (Hewison, 2003:
3)
Later on, in 1940, the development of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and
Arts (which would later become the Arts Council as part of the welfare state) was
supported because it was seen as necessary, in wartime, to show people the
government cared about culture and the community. (Hewison, 2003: 3) In this case, it
was the utilitarian principle that defined governments actions.
In 1979, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher advocated what would later be called new
public management. This approach generated an important reduction in cultural funding,
which was also conditioned upon cultural organisations being able to prove the value of
their work in terms of economy, efficiency and effectiveness (Holden, 2004: 16).
Culture and arts were still measured exclusively by their instrumental value, meaning,
their economic value and their practical value as facilitators for achieving other priorities
on the governmental agenda.
Following that, the Department of National Heritage (which would later become the
Department for Culture, Media and Sport) and the National Lottery fund emerged, along
with new regulations. The government switched to resource-based accounting, which
made departments think much more like businesses, and the Treasury began to develop
the system of Public Service Agreements between itself and other departments
(Hewison, 2003: 4), which lead to the development of funding agreements between
funding bodies and the institutions they supported.
When looking back at British history, it is easy to recognize what Tessa Jowell (2004: 8)
affirms in her document Government and the Value of Culture, In political and public
discourse in this country we have avoided the more difficult approach of investigating,
questioning and celebrating what culture actually does in and of itself. (Jowell, 2004: 8)
Culture in the United Kingdom has historically been measured with an instrumentalist
approach, leaving aside the intrinsic value that defines it.




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The problem of an instrumentalist vision of culture
There is a conundrum at the heart of Britains cultural life: cultural activity, even
when defined narrowly as participation in the visual and performing arts or
attendance at concerts, museums, galleries, theatres and opera houses, has
rarely enjoyed a more central place in national life than it does today, almost
irrespective of the measure one chooses. Yet this flowering co-exists with deep
anxiety in the arts that the significance of what it has to contribute is somehow
misrepresented or simply missing in policy discussions about culture. (Ellis,
2003: 1)

With Tony Blair as Prime Minister and the arrival of New Labour, additional values of
culture were taken into consideration, ones more related to its intrinsic value. Still,
instrumental approaches remained the ultimate reason for cultural funding. As previously
mentioned, instrumental values refer to culture in terms of its economic value and its
possibility to support other social aims. This kind of value tends to be captured in
output, outcome and impact studies that document the economic and social
significance of investing in the arts (Holden, 2006: 16). The problem here is that, by
measuring culture only in an instrumentalist way, it loses its essence, one that cannot be
measured by statistics. This is because the main value of culture refers to one that exists
when culture is experienced; its personal (not everyone is affected the same way when
faced with a particular piece of work), its subjective, its fluid (in opposition to the
stiffness of instrumentalist assessment), and its influenced by an innumerable amount of
factors (which makes it not necessarily immediate) (Holden, 2004: 18). But what is most
disturbing about this, is that those things that [are] easy to measure tend to become
objectives, and those that [are not, are] downplayed or ignored. (Holden, 2004: 17)

The instrumentalist vision of culture has also generated (and continues to generate)
unhealthy practices between funders and professionals. Culture professionals feel
government bodies do not really understand the value of what they do. This is because
they, in opposition to governmental institutions, and by definition, understand and
cherish the intrinsic value of culture, and accept the fact that it has a value that cannot
be measured in numbers. On the contrary, the public sector remains alienated from the
projects it funds, because instead of engaging with them, it focuses on analysing data


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that does not give a broad scope of what the projects are about. Moreover, the data
these public institutions count with is neither precise nor concise. As Sara Selwood
points out, the data on the cultural sector are often incomplete, inaccurate or
unavailable. This means that policy decisions and government initiatives are rarely
based on an accurate picture of the sector, and little is known about their impact. (Ellis,
2003: 11)

In addition, the instrumental perspective forces culture professionals to focus their time
and attention not only on gathering the data the public sector demands in order to justify
public funding, but also, in adjusting their aims to those established by the utilitarian
agenda of the government (e.g. supporting social, equality and educational issues). This
not only affects culture professionals, but the whole audience they intend to reach and
cultural expression itself. This diverts culture from its original purpose, and thus
threatens the true essence of its existence. Moreover, these type of practices could lead,
as Holden says, to institutionalise cultural mediocrity by encouraging both funders and
funded to take safe bets, while the most successful applicants will be those best able to
work the system through the processes of lobbying and proposal-writing (Holden,
2004: 21).

The gathering of evidence about the impact of the sector has assumed centre
stage in the management of the subsidised cultural sector in England. It is
closely associated with an extension of government control over the sector, and
the tendency to value culture for its impact rather than its intrinsic value.
(Selwood in Holden, 2004: 14)


Public value in the cultural sector: the challenge of measuring intrinsic value

The discontent generated by this instrumentalist frenzy gave rise to the conference
Valuing Culture organized by the think tank Demos. The purpose of this conference was
to discuss the repercussions of this instrumentalist vision of culture; to try to answer the
question asked by Tessa Jowell (2004: 18): How, in going beyond targets, can we best
capture the value of culture? As previously stated, the main issues of the public sector


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techniques for measuring the value of culture are that they do not take into account
intrinsic values, and that the value of culture is pointed out by the government, instead of
being consented to by the people. As a result of this conference, a framework for
assessing the intrinsic value of culture and for rethinking the process of public funding
was developed.
The intrinsic value of culture refers to the intellectual, emotional and aesthetic individual
experience of art, the one that relates to the human spirit. The problem of measuring this
kind of value relies on the fact that its origin rests with the individual, so how is it to be
measured? How do we develop a consistent language to express intrinsic value? How
do personal experiences translate into social phenomena and political priorities?
(Holden, 2006: 14) As Tessa Jowell (2004: 9) explains, as a Culture Department we still
have to deliver the utilitarian agenda, and the measures of instrumentality that this
implies, but we must acknowledge that in supporting culture we are doing more than
that, and in doing more than that must find ways of expressing it.

The necessity to acknowledge the intrinsic value of culture when it comes to public
funding has been recognized by many. Still, the old art for arts sake rationale seems to
be out-dated, and conceived of as patronizing, exclusive and undemocratic! (Selwood,
et al, 2005: 116), even when throughout history understanding the decisive role culture
plays in the emotional and spiritual realization of human kind has been reason enough to
encourage the support of cultural development.

Short shift has been given to the arguments that historically played such a strong
role, both intuitively and explicitly, in the rationale for public funding of cultural
activity, such as the contribution of cultural sensibilities to the development of the
human spirit and of moral reasoning; and the value of cultivation of the human
mind and of aesthetic pleasure. (Ellis, 2003: 6)

In addition to this, intrinsic values imply other kinds of complications. Every cultural
organization is different and thus the values each one offers are quite varied. Their aims
differ which means their values also do. If we add to this equation the fact that the
experience of those values is individual, the sum of these factors turns into a rather


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subjective definition, which represents a complication for funding bodies in any
evaluation process. Still, a judgment of that value has to be made in order to grant
funding, which can easily lead to either cultural institutions or government bodies
defining what is valuable and what is not. When used as an argument for more funding,
or for less restricted funding, inherent value can appear as a form of defensiveness by
cultural institutions and their leaders; an attempt to assert the value of their own
judgement above that of others. (Holden, 2004: 24)

In Capturing Cultural Value, Holden (2004: 34-41) proposes the development of a new
language in order to explain, and thus to capture in a more specific way, the intrinsic
value of culture. According to Holden, this language could be developed by the
incorporation of concepts that are used in other disciplines that also deal with subjective
values, such as anthropology, environmentalism and accounting, into the cultural sector.
He affirms that intrinsic value is located in the encounter or interaction between
individualson the one hand, and an object or experience on the other. Intrinsic values
are better thought of then as the capacity and potential of culture to affect us, rather than
as measurable and fixed stocks of worth (Holden, 2006: 15) The result of this is a
framework that allows the assessment of the intrinsic values of culture, in order to
support a public value approach to cultural funding.

An additional value: institutional value
There is a third type of value in culture that is publicly funded, one that until recently was
insufficiently developed: Institutional value. This value refers to the different ways in
which cultural organizations relate wto their audience while generating value for them.
Once again, finding ways for engaging with society and allowing it to participate in the
definition of the value to be sought and the ways to obtain it, is a key element for
achieving value. (Holden, 2006: 17)
Institutional value sees the role of cultural organisations not simply as mediators
between politicians and the public, but as active agents in the creation or
destruction of what the public values it is through recognising these values, and,
crucially, deciding for itself how to generate them, that the moral purpose of an


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organisation becomes apparent, and where organisational rhetoric meets reality.
(Holden, 2006: 18)

Key Players: achieving cultural value
After analysing the different ways in which the value of culture can be measured, and the
challenges each one of them implies, it is possible to engage with the question that
inevitably follows: In which way can public value be achieved in the cultural sector? A
massive restructuration of practices in the cultural system is required to achieve it. To
begin with, an understanding is required of what should be valued in culture.
The term cultural value was adopted into the cultural sector in 2003, when as a result of
the conference Valuing Culture organized by the think-thank Demos, it was proposed as
the main principle that should underlie public funding of culture. Cultural value then:
- Recognizes the affective elements of cultural experience, practice and identity,
as well as the full range of quantifiable economic and numerical data.
- Seeks a forward-looking model for assessing the broad public value
- Adopts unchanging public goods such as equity and fairness, enhancing trust
in the public realm, health and prosperity, as long-term objectives, thereby
creating a context where more specific goals such as social inclusion and
diversity can be more easily understood
- Promotes a strong culture, confident in its own worth, instead of a weak
culture dedicated to the production of ancillary benefits
- Challenges policy-makers, cultural organisations and practitioners to adopt a
new concordat between funders, funded and the public
- Integrates culture with the rest of public policyculture is seen as an integral
and essential part of civil society. (Holden, 2004: 9-10)

The creation of cultural value requires the participation of three bodies: the public sector,
professionals, and society. What is it that each one of them value most about culture?
Politicians and policy-makers are primarily concerned with instrumental outcomes,
professionals are primarily concerned with intrinsic value and the public is primarily
concerned with intrinsic and institutional value (Holden, 2006: 32). This statement


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shows that clear communication and a common language are in order to develop an
understanding between all parties, along with a clear engagement between them. It is
not enough for policy makers, funding bodies and culture professionals to engage with
the public in order to know what it considers valuable, but must also involve it in the
process of achieving it. It is important for professionals and the public sector to
understand each other, in order to be able to work as a team in the pursuit of public
value.
For this to be achieved, it would be important to adopt new measures to take into
consideration additional values of culture, apart from the instrumentalist, into the scope
of the values taken into account for public funding. Limiting the value of culture to an
instrumental approach has severe repercussions. It is increasingly recognized that
crude transpositions of learning points and best practice from one context to another
often fail, and that the knowledge that needs to be garnered from projects is about
reflective and dynamic processes rather than about prescriptive methodologies (Holden,
2006: 19). Furthermore, the public sector should stop imposing its instrumentalist
agenda on cultural organizations and stop measuring their value only in economic terms.
On the contrary, they should support cultural organizations for the value they seek to
create, their quality and content. An excessive regulation of the public sector could
institutionalise cultural mediocrity by encouraging both funders and funded to take safe
bets, while the most successful applicants will be those best able to work the system.
(Holden, 2006: 21)
Moreover, professionals and the public sector should engage with the public in order to
set goals that really represent the needs and values the public demands. The public are
increasingly aware of, interested in and capable of shaping their own culture; it is up to
the professionals to harness the power of the public will in pursuit of the public good.
(Holden, 2006: 39) Parallel to this, professionals and the public sector should try to
integrate the framework proposed by Moore in relation to public value in their common
practices. To begin with, cultural organizations and the public sector should clearly
define the value they intend to seek, taking into account what society considers as
valuable, and they should commit to it. There should be a clear understanding between
funding bodies and culture professionals to support the achievement of public value. The


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public sector and culture professionals should care about their ways of achieving public
value the same way they care for the value itself. (Holden, 2004: 47)
In summary, organisations must articulate the broad themes of value that they
wish to encourage and create, and align their ethos, practices and processes to
meet those aspirations. They must then adopt ways of discovering from those
they deal with and those who are affected by their decisions what value has in
fact and in perception been created. The calculation of Cultural Value represents
a profound shift in underlying thinking, with far-reaching and by no means
predictable consequences. (Holden, 2004: 52)
In addition to this, the public sector would need to engage with new practices, such as
transparency about decision making processes, more public participation, greater
capacity for leadership in setting goals and maintaining an ethos, and a more overt
recognition of the public sectors role as social entrepreneurs. (Holden, 2004: 45) It
should also be remembered that legitimacy and trust are important elements to take into
consideration during this process. Those are factors that, as previously mentioned, are
reachable through the public. They are not only indispensable elements as a means to
achieving public value, but to maintain a constant support and funding of the cultural
sector. Funding bodies should then seek ways to transmit and make public knowledge
the way the audience values what they do and how they do it.
As Macnaught (Selwood, et al, 2005: 121), from the local government of Durham,
expresses while sharing his experience of proving the impact and value of what they do,
in order to avoid funding cuts and being able to maintain support;
If our argument is that cultural services in local government contribute to an
improved quality of life then the only important issue is whether or not local
people recognize an improvement as the result of what we do We need to
develop a more sophisticated process that captures the shift in value that local
people attribute to having a local cultural infrastructure and programme of events
and activities available. They are the ones who ultimately must place a value on
what we do. (Selwood, et al, 2005: 121)


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In Capturing Cultural Value, Holden (2004: 11-12) enlists some possible changes that
could take place as a result of a public value approach in the cultural sector. This list
gives a clear idea about the tremendous improvement that the application of this
methodology could generate in the cultural system. The list is the following:
- To create greater public engagement with the arts, the cultural sector would
recognise peoples needs.
- Towns might create one-stop culture shops in shopping centres to provide
information, friendly advice and ease of booking.
- Just as Village Design Statements influence planning decisions, a similar process
could be used to create Cultural Community Statements. These would be written
and developed by citizens with professional assistance, and would influence the
way that funders invest.
- Cultural organisations would demystify themselves. Education programmes
would be as much about cultural empowerment as about cultural content.
- Rather than marketing performances or venues, the cultural sector locally,
regionally and nationally might wish to market a generic cultural offer to the public.
- The Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the funding bodies and
Local Authorities would stop giving targets to institutions. Funders would respond
to the missions and visions of cultural organisations rather than setting their
agendas.
- Local Authorities and regional funders would invest in plurality, quality and
community. - Local provision would expand, mediocrity would not be supported,
and there would be a much richer dialogue between the public, cultural
organisations and funders.
- Funders would be more concerned with sustainability, meaning less short-term
project funding, and greater attention paid to building relationships.
- Evaluation would concentrate on improving performance rather than being used
as an advocacy tool to justify further funding. (Holden, 2004: 11-12)





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Public value, accessibility and legitimacy
Accessibility is the possibility of reaching or engaging with something. In relation to
culture and its artistic expressions, there are many ways in which this possibility can be
blocked from a large part of society. The idea of some culture professionals that
excellence is a synonym of exclusivity is one way in which art is often limited to a
specific sector of the society, leaving behind the mass of people who, in their view,
would threaten the quality of their artistic expression. Another type of exclusion can be
related to economic circumstances; not everybody can afford to spend equal amounts of
money engaging in cultural activities. A third kind of accessibility refers to the different
education levels in society, which can result in a misunderstanding or lack of
understanding from the audience. Even psychological issues can limit access to artistic
expressions; the fear of engaging with something new can be threatening to certain
people. Sometimes, it can just be a lack of knowledge of what the cultural panorama has
to offer. These are just some examples of the many factors that can limit access to
culture.
After analysing what a public value approach to culture implies, it is easy to understand
that it does not mean that all artistic and cultural expressions should be accessible to all.
As Holden (2006: 57) points out, it is not expected that every project the Commission
funds or undertakes will serve the entire public, nor must every grant or project deliver
broad and general public value. A public value approach to culture means the society
should take part in the definition of the cultural value and the way to achieve it. Despite
the fact that accessibility is not a concern directly related to public value, it could support
the process of legitimising cultural organizations, but only if its comes with the active
participation of that wider audience in the process of the definition and implementation of
cultural value.

For the cultural professionals, the public represents a source of vast potential in
the fight to establish political and financial support: more people engage with the
arts than vote But beyond that, only public support can provide the legitimacy for
politics to fund culture. (Holden, 2006: 41)



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Two issues that were strongly addressed by cultural policy after the war were to help to
ensure that public access to art forms is not discouraged by admission or ticketTo help
to break down "non-price! barriers to enjoyment of cultural activity by inculcating and
encouraging appreciation of or participation in particular art forms! (Ellis, 2003: 5), and
still with those efforts, the cultural system today faces a crisis of legitimacy (Holden,
2006: 9). In order to achieve public value, it is not enough to make culture and its artistic
expressions accessible to a wider audience if that audience does not play an active role
in the definition and development of that value. It is society in fact that can support the
legitimacy of the cultural system, and a wider audience could certainly imply more
support, but only if it comes with a commitment from the public sector and the
professionals of culture to engage with that audience.
Such legitimacy is a precondition for securing a larger, and more secure, place
for culture in our wider public life, and therefore in the priorities of democratically
elected governments. Creating such legitimacy will depend on institutional
innovation that engages the public in understanding and contributing to the
creation of cultural value. (Holden, 2006: 56)

Conclusion
Throughout the process of researching this essay, the need for a commitment with a
public value perspective on culture has become more than clear to me. Realising what
this country has been able to achieve in the cultural sector, even when facing
unfavourable circumstances within the system that embodies it, makes one wonder
about its potential to work in a united, collaborative way. A deep restructuration of the
UK cultural system is in order, if it aims to achieve a true and solid public value.
The world is much more connected than one could suspect, the research made in
relation to public and cultural value is a clear demonstration of that. From managerial
methodology, through environmentalism, anthropology and accounting, they have all
contributed in different ways to the development of frameworks and methodologies to
enhance the possibilities of a more cohesive cultural system. It is important for the public
sector to remember that, to constantly evaluate the ways of the cultural system, and to


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look beyond their own practice, to maintain the possibility of a constant improvement in
their role as public servants and culture funders.
The concept of public value provides a useful way of thinking about the goals and
performance of public policy. It provides a yardstick for assessing activities produced or
supported by government (including services funded by government) (Kelly and Muers,
2002: 3). The methodology is there. The public sector and cultural organizations, as
bodies that have a tremendous effect on the social sphere, are then responsible for
adopting that methodology and using it as a drive to restructure their common practices
in order to create a true value for society. Moreover, it is imperative for cultural
organizations and the public sector to start thinking about themselves as a collaborative
system, responsible for including and engaging with that factor that represents an
elemental part of what they are and what they do: Namely, the people.
Moreover, an integral restructuration of the public funding system is in order. Widening
the scope of assessment methodology used for public funding is crucial. The effects of
limiting the evaluation of cultural value to an instrumental approach are serious and must
not be undervalued. Funding bodies have a social responsibility and should enhance the
quality and support of cultural development, instead of blocking it or indulging in
practices that could give rise to mediocre standards. Funding bodies should also stop
imposing the external aims of the political agenda as values to be achieved by the
cultural organizations. The only way to achieve cultural value and to nurture substantial
cultural expression is by allowing culture professionals to commit to what they do. Public
funding should be based on other factors, more related to cultural value and legitimacy.
There are some elements that are essential for achieving cultural value. Awareness,
communication, recognition and engagement, from all the parties engaged in the cultural
system. There needs to be an awareness that each one of them are key players in the
same system, and thus they are all connected, and responsible in the quest for
achieving public value. They need to communicate, to know their needs and interests,
strengths and weaknesses, and what the aims are that they seek to achieve. They need
to recognize everyones interests in order to understand them. They need to engage with
each other in a common effort to seek the best they can achieve as a unified system
driven by collaboration and support.


18
Something similar applies to the relation between accessibility and public value. There
needs to be awareness that widening the scope of an audience is not enough to achieve
public value, an awareness that the audience must play an active role in the cultural
system and participate in it in order to seek public value. The public sector and the
cultural organizations should communicate with their audience, understand what their
interests are, what they value, to engage with them, and work together to achieve a
value that nurtures them all.



















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