Christopher Gordon has worked in the arts/cultural policy professionally for 40 years. He is a freelance consultant, university teacher and writer/researcher. Having half-trained as a Classical archaeologist, changed direction into arts management and then policy development, implementation and evaluation. Some of his positions include working for the Arts Council England, for local governments and then leading the Regional Arts Boards in the UK. He is an expert with the Council of Europe for 25 years – e.g. on national cultural policy evaluations. He is also adviser to the European Parliament’s Culture Committee and to UNESCO.
1. What do you think are the main competences and traits which a young researcher in the field of cultural policy should obtain?
Start out from having passion and commitment about some aspect(s) of the arts and culture. It is not just another academic discipline. My advice is: don’t do it if you don’t care. All the really good researchers I have known during my working life in the field happen to have had a massive interest in, and commitment to music, the visual arts, dance, literature or heritage.
I have to admit that too many of the research papers I see by trained academic social scientists are tedious, badly written, jargon-laden, methodologically-obsessed and seem to fail to understand why the arts matter. Whether you come from a trained background in the humanities, economics, law, political or social sciences, inform yourself and remain aware of the actual real-life context and policy constraints within which the arts and artists/performers operate, their dynamics and interactions. If your analyses and interpretations fail to understand or reflect this, they are liable to miss the point and marginalise themselves as irrelevant abstractions. It may be no coincidence that the best four or five economically-based cultural researchers I know, and whose work I really respect, all happen to be keen and skilled musical amateurs or trained professional instrumental players!.
Skills can be taught/learned building on some degree of natural aptitude. To apply this successfully, you need a combination of curiosity, an open mind, scepticism and self-discipline. Read widely, see and hear lots of contemporary work and maintain a lively interest in the world around you. Be friend and talk to real live artists, performers and heritage professionals. The really interesting ideas and proposals often arrive in quite unforeseen ways.
2. Considering your own experience, what would be your main advice to the young researchers who plan to pursue a career in the field of cultural policy?
Follow your own cultural enthusiasms, get a wide range of varied practical experience early on – and go easy on the abstract career-path planning. I quite often these days read published pieces by young and mid-career cultural managers setting out how they say they are achieving their professional ambitions. These can be dull – and I tend not to believe them anyway. Real life is never as neat and ordered as that! My own career ‘choices’ regarding both jobs, levels of seniority and location were heavily influenced by external factors (e.g. marriage, parenthood, needing to have a ‘proper’ salary, quality of local schools for children etc.). So, my ‘progress’ – if that’s not too immodest a word – was always through sideways moves rather than vertically into the stratosphere, which I never reached (but nor did I want to!).
More often than not, the jobs in employment that I found to be most productive and satisfying were not the ones I thought I most wanted at the time (I often – usually, if I’m honest – failed to get those!). As John Lennon is alleged to have said ‘life is what happens to you while you make other plans’. Life is full of compromises and accidents – some of them really happy ones. Keep a reasonably open mind and take it as it comes. Always remain sensitive to the work-life balance. Obsessive careerists tend to live a lonely existence. They can, of course, be inspiring leaders, but often they make everyone else’s life hell around them.
3. You have published and disseminated many articles and research work on diverse issues relating to cultural policy. What would be your advice to the young people to start publishing and making their work more visible internationally, both online and offline?
The work has to be technically competent – of course – but at least as important is identifying some ‘niche’ where you have a genuine interest and some ‘hinterland’ (i.e. knowledge, enthusiasm, contacts, experience or genuine empathy). That doesn’t mean you have to become an obsessive. Then you can build some reputation for expertise, or at least sympathetic understanding, of particular relevance to the contemporary scene. Beat a path to the door of some of the cultural networks and offer to help in some of their activities. The networks are all poorly resourced but often working on vitally important current agendas. You may have some time and skill to offer that they couldn’t afford to buy in the market.
It also really helps if you write in a style that is readable. Avoid jargon: it’s a killer. Avoid “Eurospeak”. Above all avoid following academic or management fashion, or being lured into unwitting ‘path dependency’. Too often this only leads to a dead end. Be ‘authentic’ to yourself, your own interests and values. Fashion changes. And you don’t want to be stranded when the tide goes out – which it does.
Don’t try to impress through ludicrous referencing – dragging in clunky extraneous asides so that you can slip Bourdieu or Foucault into your Bibliography can be counter-productive. Their published work exists and has had a strong influence. We all know that – get over it! Nobody cares to be reminded for no compelling reason what Bourdieu had for breakfast for the nine millionth time – it’s tedious and you’ll only be thought to be trying to show off (unsuccessfully, so far as I am concerned) unless the justification for inclusion is absolutely necessary and genuine. Academics love this stuff and think it makes them look important: the rest of the world sees it for what it is.
4. What was the worst professional advice which someone might have given you during your career?
I’ll give you two examples.
- When I needed a more secure salary to support my growing young family, I thought of applying for arts jobs within UK local government. A senior official at the Arts Council told me ‘that would be terribly boring, don’t do it’. Wrong. Two of the most satisfying and productive jobs I ever had were with local authorities (14 years of my working life). Helping develop and implement cultural policy within a real political context can be more challenging and difficult than working in a dedicated ‘cultural’ agency or funding body, but the process is fascinating and – when you succeed – really fulfilling.
- While I was running the consortium of England’s Regional Arts Boards I happened upon documentation from a really interesting regional culture project being run by the Council of Europe (in the mid-1980s). I enquired of our Culture Ministry how to get involved. The head official advised me ‘Don’t – it’s a complete waste of time which is why Great Britain is not participating in it. And we have no regions anyway (sic!!!)’. I ignored the advice and made direct contact with Strasbourg – only to be welcomed as a real live individual from the UK who understood what the project was about and who could contribute. That single chance has led to numerous and fascinating ‘other things’ – still continuing.
5. What are the main motivating factors for you to continue your work as a researcher and educator?
Enthusiasm – still – for the topic. I am now at the stage where I see reorganisations and changes being made in response to political fashions, which are likely to repeat previous mistakes from which lessons have not been learned. History matters – and too many institutions and government agencies have lost any sense of that along with their own corporate memory. I still think there is value in having people around who actually do have memory and can record that, inflected into the contemporary, changing context.
Allied to the above is ‘missing’ history. For example – the late 1960s/1970s ‘community arts’ movement (animation socio-culturelle, Soziokultur etc) was very considerable and had a huge influence on broader social and cultural policy. Younger researchers these days are rediscovering this – but only ‘official’ sources seem to be accessible. The activists of the 1970s weren’t interested in recording their own history or trying to put a positive spin on how they were dealing with it (which is what the institutional record tries to do). People are getting it wrong through no fault of their own – it is simply disappearing history without sufficient record.
Working as a modest educator is great. I love the contact and sharing with clever and inquiring young minds. Very often students are asking the right questions which institutions and government agencies are too scared (or ignorant) to be asking. And with post-graduate MA courses and the like these days, the international mixture of students is wonderful and we all learn from each other’s different experience.
6. In your opinion, are there any errors or weaknesses in the way we teach cultural policy subject in the programmes curricula across Europe? Do you see any changes and new trends in our methodological approaches?
I can’t claim much authority on this, but see some of my rant at (3) above. As a result of the funding structures for Higher Education in European nation states, the way in which cultural policy is taught is ridiculously nationalistic and narrow. Two spectacular examples of this are situated on either side of the English Channel/La Manche. In my experience some of today’s courses which centre on the Creative Industries offer a much better reflection of, and preparation for, the real world of 2011. Getting some balance between theory and practical experience is key. And keeping a healthy perspective about the (limited) role of the European Union in cultural policy and support. The delusions and mendacious rhetoric around this continue to be mind-blowing.
7. In brief, what are your professional plans for the year 2011?
- Teaching cultural policy and management on two university courses (one in the UK, one in Italy)
- Continuing to track and contribute to an Inquiry of the UK Parliament into the future of Public Funding for the Arts and Heritage
- Supporting and Chairing the European Diploma in cultural management course (Fondation Marcel Hicter)
- Leading the Council of Europe’s Evaluation of Cultural Policy in Turkey (continuing…)
- Researching and writing – with Italian partners – a handbook for UNESCO’s statistical arm about cultural participation
- Maintaining contact with the ‘sharp end’ of the arts through active Board membership.
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