The social impact of the arts

This short book is a great read, full of fascinating material, which will provide incendiary matter for debates about the arts in society. It results from a three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council of England funded project at the Centre for Cultural Policy Research (CCPR) at the University of Warwick, where the authors are based, “to develop rigorous procedures for a better understanding of the social impact of the arts”. The book, which is one of the main outputs of the project, describes the context of the research as constituted of: the orthodoxy amongst arts advocates that art can transform lives; the large scale of government investment in the arts and arts education; recent political commentary on the utility of the arts for the economy and national identity formation; the tainting of research on impacts by advocacy; and the recent “intrinsic versus instrumentalist” debate on the role of the arts in the UK. This is followed, in the first chapter, by an account of the epistemological foundation on which the authors base their exploration of the topic, taking into account recent cultural theory and the postmodern challenge to earlier certainties – notably the deconstruction of scientific history and the “renunciation of claims to truth and objectivity” (p. 23). They address the dangers of anachronism and Eurocentrism and, by adopting a “one past, many (true) histories” approach, aim to “demonstrate” that “accepted notions of the impacts . . . are based on dubious principles and beliefs”. They repeatedly emphasize the need for brevity and the impossibility of comprehensiveness, asserting that a “broader meta-narrative” or “totalizing scheme” would not in fact be desirable (p. 194). Nonetheless, they undertake to contextualize the texts they discuss (p. 37). The heart of the book is a series of chapters summarizing a “representative” sample of views about the impacts of the arts. These are arranged thematically: “corruption and distraction”; “catharsis”; “personal well-being”; “education and self-development”; “moral improvement and civilisation”; “political instrument”; “social stratification and identity construction”; and “autonomy of the arts and the rejection of instrumentality”. This “taxonomy of claims” is a rollercoaster ride through 2500 years of polemic, speculation and dispute in western cultural history, starting with Plato and Aristotle, on the origins of the positive and negative impact traditions. Belfiore and Bennett finish with a “number of interesting conclusions . . . which have implications for contemporary debates about the value of the arts in modern societies” (p. 191). Amongst these are: (1) the tradition maintaining that the arts have a bad influence is at least as strong as that which assumes a positive effect; (2) ancient concerns about the negative impact underlie contemporary phenomena such the censorship of films and the “narrative of beleaguerment” that pervades the arts sector; (3) the subject involves “some highly complex intellectual issues” with which public discussions fail to engage; (4) there has never been a time when discussions about the arts have not been heated and highly politicized; (5) “instrumentalism is . . . 2500 years old” and “the arts have been a tool to enforce and express power in social relations for as long as the arts themselves have been around”; and (6) everyone in the field should be more aware of this history.