The instrumental approach to using art and cultural projects to revitalise a sense of community has been around long enough for evaluations to be made. Those in favour of such a strategy emphasise outcomes that have enabled individuals to re-engage with their local community, create a community ethos, improve ‘social inclusiveness’ and generally promote cultural sustainability. However, even those endorsing instrumental strategies acknowledge that there is a difference between ‘good community arts practice’ and ‘shallow or inauthentic art practices’ as well as flaws in evaluation processes that need to be addressed for instrumental arts and cultural projects to be effective (Mulligan 2007: 25, 31). In fact, it is the perceived distinction between art and culture that undermines efforts by government to unify these terms. As community development advocate, Deborah Mills, laments:
Unfortunately these arguments [about cultural sustainability] do not appear to have been well understood; policy makers often use the terms art and culture synonymously. Perhaps they think that the term culture might have the broader appeal and help bring the arts in from the margins of government concern. At other times they appear to be using the term culture as a means of insisting on an opposition between prestige art and community culture. In practice, whatever the policy conception of culture, the actual application of cultural policy by governments is too often reduced to heritage and the subsidised arts. Perhaps this is because culture and its role in everyday life are not widely understood in government. (Mills 2007: 36; my italics)
Arguably, attempts to democratise the arts by weakening the bonds of exclusivity practiced by the elite have backfired. The past decade has witnessed a widening schism between ‘art’ and ‘culture’. This is irrespective of whether the policy environment is mired in the old politics of patronage or has promoted alternatives based on marketplace survival. The traditional arts have remained ensconced in a privileged but confined position – lacking in adaptability and administered by niche governmental bureaucracies in the form of specialist agencies (usually through customised cultural statutory authorities or/and government departments). Meanwhile, the rest of cultural policy has been absorbed within whole-of-government approaches across agencies.
Moreover, cultural policy has also become intimately tied up with cultural planning and cultural development (e.g. Florida 2002; Landry and Bianchini 1995; Matarasso 1997). Another advocate of cultural planning, Jon Hawkes (2001), has contributed the idea of culture as one of four pillars of sustainability, the others being economic, social and environmental development (cf. Gray 2004, 2006; West and Smith 2005; Merli 2002; Madden and Bloom 2004; Belfiore and Bennett 2006). For cultural development analysts, sustainable development and cultural development are co-dependent. Hawkes (2001: 2, 4) identifies three aspects of ‘culture’: values and aspirations which set the framework of a society’s raison d’être; practices and cultural media through which culture is actualised; and the visible manifestations and artefacts of cultural practice.
In this approach to the management of culture, cultural diversity and difference are part-and-parcel of a commitment to cultural sustainability. As part of reconciling cultural sustainability with the other pillars, cultural policy becomes annexed to what I have called elsewhere ‘lifestyle culture’ or ‘eco-culture’ (Craik 2005) where art and culture become core planks of cultural planning and everyday ‘lived’ cultural experiences. The idea of eco-culture encompasses the diverse, ecologically sensitive, globally aware, yet locally responsive culture that characterises everyday civility. Using Walter Benjamin’s term, the post-modern citizen is a ‘cultural flaneur’ in-so-far as s/he exhibits a greater sense of cultural competence and possesses the skills to negotiate complex, and diverse, cultural environments, experiences and forms. Opportunities to partake of cultural experiences have become the leitmotif of contemporary life in developed societies. Some commentators have coined the term ‘omnivores’ to characterise people whose cultural taste ‘ranges across genres and forms’ (Savage et al. 2005: 6). Should the percentage of cultural omnivores in a society markedly increase then the division between arts and culture and existing modes of supporting and representing art and culture might change significantly.