AI, a wicked problem for cultural policy? Pre-empting controversy and the crisis of cultural participation

ABSTRACT

This article explores the practice of pre-empting controversy as an example of the wicked problem of cultural participation in the digital media. Drawing on science and technology studies (STS), research into the history of cybernetics, artificial intelligence (AI), and policy studies, it argues that the ongoing digital transformation and the expansion of the algorithmic public sphere does not solve but amplifies the problem of cultural participation, challenging the ‘participatory turn’ in cultural policy, defined as cultural policy’s re-orientation to encourage participation of different stakeholders at different stages of policymaking. This process is analysed through two cases: the postponing of a retrospective exhibition of the painter Philip Guston in the United States and the pre-emptive ban of a public art project centred on a monument for the Soviet Lithuanian writer Petras Cvirka in Lithuania. In both cases, risk management through pre-emption backfired and revealed the lack of institutional preparedness to foresee and deal with the digital social.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural participation
• AI
• Philip Guston
• risk management
• digital audiences

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For instance, a Museum of English Rural Life’s tweet of an archival photograph of an Exmoor ram that went viral (DCMS 2019, 11).

2. Tate Modern suspended the curator Mark Godfrey, who argued against the postponement, causing further the controversy in the art world (O’Hagan 2021).

3. I thank David Wright for suggesting the term ‘the spectre of the mob.’

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [AH/W000253/1].

Notes on contributors

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology, the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, Kingston University London, the UK. She is the author of The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (Cornell University Press, 2016) and The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science (Cornell University Press, forthcoming). Dr Rindzevičiūtė is the Principal Investigator in two research projects funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, ‘Nuclear Cultural Heritage: From Knowledge to Practice’ (2018-2022) and ‘Nuclear Spaces: Communities, Locations and Materialities of Nuclear Cultural Heritage (NuSPACES)’ (2021-2024, funded as part of the European Union’s Joint Programming Initiative for Cultural Heritage).