Crisis, what’s a crisis? Some methodological reflections on evaluating the impact of Covid-19 on Australian arts and culture

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses a 2021 interview-based pilot project on the impact of COVID-19 on a cross-section of Southeast Queensland artists and cultural organisations. Though it engages with empirical data, it addresses conceptual concerns. Our interviews aimed at capturing the emotional as well as the objective costs of the pandemic on cultural practitioners. The essay considers the phrase ‘crisis of value’ and asks whether it should be used to describe the state of the Australian cultural sector during this time. Following the arguments of Will Davies in respect of the intellectual resources needed to justify a ‘neoliberal realist’ worldview, it explores the impact of COVID-19 on the cultural sector by reflecting on its evaluative methods. Digital analysis of the themes, sentiments, and keywords of 14 interview transcripts are presented and ten inferences drawn about practitioners’ underlying attitudes. Under what circumstances do performances of neoliberal calculations of benefit cease to be convincing and/or delivered in a convincing way? What factors constitute ‘a crisis of value’ in arts and culture? The conclusion argues that the methodic dimension of neoliberal evaluation is only one component of its social acceptability, and therefore only one factor in the perception of a state of crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• arts and culture
• Covid 19
• crisis
• value
• evaluation

Introduction

Confronted by contemporary neoliberal crisis, apparently rooted in economistic, or even nihilistic worldviews, the task for the [sociologist] is not simply to impose … critique from without, but to interpret critical events (crises) via the critical capacities (critique) of the actors involved.

Will Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism (p.19)

A signal observation in Will Davies’ book The Limits of Neoliberalism (2014) is that, given the way neoliberalism’s different schools of thought have historically developed, the task of evaluation is displaced into an uneasy and unstable methodological register. The concept of value is a cross-disciplinary one. It has moral, political, social, and cultural dimensions to it, and has been addressed by many Western social theorists (Anderson, 1993; Klamer, 1996, Holden, 2006, 1987; Mazzucato, 2017). It is a ‘gateway problem’, one necessary to consider en route to other problems: the problem of the good, of justice, of political order, and so forth. This is clear from Davies’ own account, where the trajectory of neoliberalism must be followed via a narrative of the elaboration of its evaluative methodologies and the professional authority needed to impose these as instruments of calculation, especially policy calculation.

The methodological register into which neoliberalism displaces value is that of neoclassical economics and its goal of ‘competitive efficiency’, thereby instrumentalising the concept and stripping it of other disciplinary dimensions (Yeatman, 2017). But this is not the crucial pivot. Davies describes a move in the 1960s away from the market idealism of early neoliberals such as Hayek, von Mises, and the ordoliberals of the German Freiburg School, towards the pugnacious, ‘neoliberal realism’ of theorists like Milton Friedman, Robert Coase, and Gary Becker. Neoliberal realism entails a switch of focus from the price mechanism to price theory, and the construction of a psychological genotype of the rational individual always-already pursuing their own interests, whether they are aware of it or not. Free market structures become less important than calculations of overall or aggregate benefit, based on real industries where transaction costs attach to all forms of regulation, including, counter intuitively, regulation designed to preserve markets as free. Davies calls this ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Davies 2017: 89). Its most conspicuous feature is its tolerance of monopoly capital formation.

This essay reflects on that scenario from the perspective of arts and culture. Our empirical referent is a set of 14 interviews conducted with Australian arts leaders in 2021, in the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the presentation of our data is geared to a conceptual end. We seek to discover what constitutes a crisis of value for arts and culture at the present time. A place to start is by talking to those who might feel they are in the middle of one, identifying traits to populate the category. We will then have sharpened for use a key idea for when neoliberalism starts to de-legitimate. We put forward no view of when this will happen or if it is happening now, or whether, as Wolfgang Streeck maintains, neoliberalism has entered a multi-morbidity phase and faces ‘a multiplicity of infirmities each of which will be all the more untreatable, as all will demand treatment at the same time’ (Streeck, 2016, p. 13). We seek only to investigate the phrase ‘crisis of value’ for further research purposes, and ask if we can apply it to what is happening in the Australian cultural sector now.

Two things emerge from neoliberal realism which instal themselves into the task of evaluation thereafter. First, what makes the switch from price mechanism to price theory thinkable is a flipping of competition from formal principle of market operation to ubiquitous feature of human life. We are all competing, all of the time, for everything. Second, to prevent this from collapsing into a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes, calculations of aggregate benefit become a vital disciplinary device. Without these, or more specifically without the ongoing performance of such calculations in a visible and authoritative way, the violence latent in total competition will get out of hand. The forces neoliberalism unleashes will lead not to Schumpeterian creative destruction, but to an excess of what Plato called ‘thymos’ (Plato, 2007), which today we associate with the narcissistic personality type (Manne, 2014).

This puts significant pressure on the task of evaluation. The moral, political, social, and cultural dimensions of value return to haunt economics as a Pepper’s ghost, faint in their formal presence, but influential as a set of background factors. This in turn forces more elaborate calculations of aggregate benefit to capture non-economistic dimensions of value. These are politically necessary, because a neoliberalism that sees market-like structures in all walks of life claims to evaluate any activity, however socially or ethically distinctive. In Gary Becker’s words, economics is ‘a comprehensive [approach] … applicable to all human behaviour, be it behaviour involving money prices or imputed shadow prices, repeated or infrequent decisions … emotional or mechanical ends, rich or poor persons, men or women, adults or children, brilliant or stupid persons … [Its remit is] as extensive as the scope of economics in the definition that emphasises scarce means and competing ends’ (quoted in MacRae, 1978, p. 8).

Davies identifies economists as the arbiters of a total competition society and the authoritative performers of the calculations of aggregate benefit needed to keep its latent violence under control. He argues that neoliberal realists radically underestimate the corruption arising from monopoly power given that they allow economistic thinking to over-determine other domains, especially corporate law and executive government (70–107). The corrupt behaviour associated with monopoly power promotes wider debasement of public life. If calculations of aggregate benefit cannot allow for background factors; if the forces unleashed by total competition pass the point of social control; if the concentration of economic wealth leads to a concentration in political power; and if economists are sucked into that concentration and corrupted by it; then neoliberalism will no longer ‘produce a reality that holds together’ (160). The problem of value is recast as a four-crossed knot: as a battery of techniques, an historical state of affairs, a political set of relations, and a moral dilemma, with the first dominant in a way that makes the task of evaluation at once codified, unpredictable, and terrifying. Under neoliberalism, evaluative methodologies are freighted with existential threat. As power concentrates across all domains, the number of people vulnerable to that threat increases. Sooner or later, the neoliberal worldview will face a crisis of legitimacy.

How might this occur? Davies is surely correct when he says that neoliberalism is not an ideology in the Marxist sense, a superstructure of beliefs distorting people’s perceptions of their true interests. It is a system of general compliance. We accept its authority even where we reject its precepts. But neoliberalism does not require affirmations of belief. What matters is that we participate in its performative calculations, its fraught attempts to demonstrate aggregate value (Alvarez et al., 2022; Belfiore, 2015).¹ If these methodologies cease to be convincing, or to be performed in a convincing way, then the social, political, and cultural dimensions of value held in check by economistic thinking will explode into the public domain. The problem of value will transform in a zone of pluralist dispute, with new demands, new voices, and new approaches, some controversial, some incompatible with others, seeking validation (Stark, 2011).

Davies gives no definition of the term ‘value’. This is reasonable given his focus is the explanatory resources needed when evaluation is displaced into an economistic register. Neoliberal concepts of value as they relate to arts and culture already have a significant research literature around them (Belfiore & Bennett, 2010; Belfiore, 2015; Meyrick & Barnett, 2017; Meyrick et al., 2018; Meyrick, 2016; Meyrick et al., 2019a; Meyrick et al., 2019b). The challenge is not to rehearse yet another external critique, but to investigate the internal factors at play when people submit to their methods, despite grave doubts about their meaning and efficacy (Lorenzini, 2018). Uncovering neoliberalism’s hallmark assumptions involves examination of the performative calculations it presents as neutral and objective from the perspective of those compelled to use them. If neoliberalism is, at root, driven by economics’ disenchantment with politics, what happens when there is disenchantment with that disenchantment? What occurs when evaluation methodologies stop making sense and become ‘a groundless mathematical babble’ (Davies 2017, 155)?²

The idea of crisis

In contrast to value, Davies advances a detailed understanding of the word ‘crisis’. This is just as well because the term has suffered the opposite semantic fate. If value has diminished in its associated meanings, crisis names a vast array of different relations and situations. In Holton (1987), R J Holton complained that ‘the idea of crisis has become so massively over-inflated with rhetorical significance, to have become de-valued in its analytical specificity. Once virtually everything is perceived to be in more or less unending crisis … we are losing the capacity to discriminate between social pathology of breakdown, on the one side, and social normality and social order on the other’ (503). It is an important caution, but does not lessen the need to treat crisis phenomena with utmost seriousness. As an example of how lack of clarity in a term should not be mistaken for absence of the forces it seeks to capture, we can consider Holton’s rejection of a crisis in Eastern bloc Communism just 18 months before the fall of the Berlin Wall (514).

Davies draws on Emmanuel Kant to frame crisis as a historical juncture when a collectively avowed rationality is assessed, amended, and, if necessary, superseded. He refers to a cycle of ‘certainty, doubt, crisis, judgement, resolution, certainty’ (Davies 2017, 169). Crisis has a heuristic function. A worldview is subject to a ‘reality test’ and critiqued for its adequacy to events. For neoliberalism, this has a methodological focus, and Davies’ account of the impact of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) and how neoliberalism helped preserve the concentration of power with which it was entangled, is one of corrupted measurement methods. He writes, ‘economic methodologies [lost] their aspiration to transcendental finality and serve[d] as instruments of more naked power struggles’ (151). There was a self-fulfilling quality to this intellectual failure. Given the centrality of evaluative methodologies to really existing neoliberalism, the negative consequences of the GFC were accelerated by the very techniques used to manage them.

What remains for neoliberalism post-GFC is a set of political rather than economic problems. The last chapters of The Limits of Neoliberalism are concerned with how these emerged in the austerity period, changing the arguments for neoliberalism normatively. It is a period we are living in still. The impact of Covid, and in the UK, Brexit, has only added to its ironies, contusions and acts of executive diktat. Davies calls this formation ‘contingent neoliberalism’ (160) and sees evasion of critique as essential to its survival. This fits with other contemporary understandings of crisis, such as Streeck’s ‘crisis sequence’ and Lauren Berlant’s ‘crisis ordinariness’. In the former, the crisis of neoliberalism is a ‘lasting interregnum … a prolonged period of social entropy or disorder [which produces a] de-institutionalised or under-institutionalised society, [where] expectations can be stabilised only for a short time by local improvisation, and which for this very reason is essentially ungovernable’ (Streeck 2016: 13–14 original emphasis). In the latter, crisis is more personal. Berlant writes, ‘amidst the rise and fall of quotidian intensities a situation arises that provokes the need to think and adjust… [W]hy do things feel on the verge of something (dissolving, snapping, wearing out, overwhelming, underwhelming, or just unpredictably different)?… To think is not especially joyful here … [It] emerges … as an ethics of mindfulness for a public intimate because they’re experiencing together a shift in atmosphere’ (2008: 5).

As contemporary thinkers grapple with how ‘crisis’ applies to twenty-first century capitalism, arts and culture present as a limit case for neoliberal evaluation. The fit between performative calculations of aggregate benefit and creative arts activity is a poor one and has always required a conceptual workaround (Beirne et al., 2017). In the past, this has taken the form of either claiming culture as an ‘exception’ to efficiency audits or as a question of ‘market failure’ (O’Brien, 2014). There is a third option, however, which matches the analyses offered by Davies, Streeck and Berlant. Indeed, it is a point on which they converge. Evaluative methodologies may have exhausted their efficacy, or more specifically, exhausted the people forced to apply them, but repetition substitutes for effectiveness, and compliance becomes a rite of administrative cohesion. They need not make sense. Their job is to prevent an emergent sense of crisis from converting into pluralist dispute and collective action. In this respect, Davies, Streeck and Berlant offer not theories of crisis, but arguments for why, though we may feel as if we are living through one, nothing seems to be changing.

This appears true of the most recent traumatic global event, the COVID-19 pandemic. While some theorists assert its transformative potential (e.g. Andreescu, 2021) following similar claims made about the GFC (see Houser, 2020), there is scant evidence of a major turn against the neoliberal hegemony. Pre-pandemic research into the attitudes and practices of the cultural sector shows ambivalence and contradiction towards its everyday manifestations. The interviews conducted by Brook et al. (2020) with UK cultural workers reveal a persistent belief in meritocracy in the face of evident geographical and demographic inequalities. The research of Beirne et al. (2017) into Scottish and Northern Irish community arts practitioners highlights how resistance to the instrumentalism of senior managers manifests itself in covert office struggles rather than open political challenge.

What can investigation of a ‘crisis of value’ in arts and culture contribute to this discussion? Historically, the emphasis in Anglo-Australian scholarship has been on the sector ‘demonstrating’ its benefits through a combination of narrative and metrical reporting, rather than confronting the ethos of neoliberal realism. Peak examples include, in the UK, the AHRC Cultural Value Project (Crossick & Kaszynska, 2016) and, in Australia, the quality metrics dashboard of Culture Counts (for discussion of the former see Meyrick & Barnett, 2021, for analysis of Culture Counts see Phiddian et al., 2017a & 2017b). The result is disconnection from wider discussion about value in political debate. As Justin O’Connor writes, ‘culture has been systemically removed from the forums in which these wider global challenges are discussed. Health, education, and gender rights are there, but very rarely culture … it lack[s] its own specific claims on public policy, its institutional presence barely visible’ (O’Connor 2024). The potential gain of addressing the idea of a crisis, therefore, is to lift consideration of culture out of the ‘lumpen empiricism’ into which it has fallen (St Pierre, 2014)––the generation of ever-more data sets with little conceptual depth––and endow the problem of its value with sharper critical significance. Such research can then, in Berlant’s words, ‘give shape amidst the unpeaceful, uninhabitable and unknowable state of crisis in which living on is also taking place’ (2008: 7).

The deeper story

Our interview-based research began in August 2020 and immediately faced a year of Covid-related delays. It was a pilot project with the modest aim to ‘investigate COVID-19 recovery strategies among select artists and cultural organisations in the Gold Coast and Brisbane area [and] generate and validate questions to equip further research into COVID recovery in the cultural sector’.³ Ethical approval was provided by Griffith University Human Research Ethics Committee (reference 2021/238). By the time interviews commenced, all reference to ‘recovery’ had been dropped, and the title amended to, ‘talking about the experience of COVID-19 in the arts’. A total of 14 interviews were conducted (20 minutes to 90 minutes each) from September to December 2021. The participants were primarily leaders (executive officers and artistic directors) of South East Queensland organisations, one based in Northern New South Wales, as set out in Table 1 below.

Table 1. Interview meta-data

For this pilot research, recruitment and sampling were a mix of purposive, seeking diversity in organisations and creative practices. Our sample includes participants in advertising and film production, music (classical, jazz and popular), performing arts, theatre and visual arts, as well as arts development organisations within these fields, and an arts media organisation. The range includes small-to-medium companies, major institutions, festivals, not-for-profit corporations, and privately-run businesses. In duration of operation they ranged from eight to 97 years old, in staff size from five to 100+ employees. Two were for-profit businesses, while others was supported by a mix of public and donor funding, sponsorship and commercial earnings. In these respects, there is varied representation in the sample. Given the severe restrictions the project faced during Covid, however, the project is also a convenience sample of practitioners we knew we could reach, who were institutionally embedded and who were willing share their views. This ruled out a significant proportion of the cultural sector made unemployed by the pandemic and, as discussed below, excluded from the federal government’s main income support program. The geographical scope of the project is proximate to the research team, and includes a metropolitan State capital, regional cities and smaller regional towns and rural areas (for further detail about the South East Queensland region see Appendix 1). While this limit might suggest place-based findings and comparisons, given our research aims, it provided a broadly typical sample of arts leaders in a contemporary, English-speaking, developed, (neo)liberal, capitalist economy and parliamentary democracy. All interviews used Microsoft Teams where participants responded in their workplace/home office. Transcripts were derived from interview recordings, sent to participants for checking, then cleaned and coded by a team of five researchers, each of whom has a background in the arts. The transcripts were then reviewed by a researcher who had not conducted the original interview, to mitigate coding bias.

Using interviews with cultural practitioners to critique key concepts is problematic in many ways. First, practitioners may not think or talk in conceptual terms (Liamputtong & Rumbold, 2008). Second, interviews capture one moment in time, so the views expressed may not hold beyond the immediate context. Third, interviewees may avoid telling the truth, using language they believe will protect them from a real or imagined threat. In Australia, that threat takes the form of denying grants to practitioners and cultural organisations. Over three successive federal Liberal-National Coalition (conservative) governments from 2013 to 2022, this threat was made explicit on a number of occasions (see, for example, Eltham, 2016 on the ‘Brandis arts cuts’). Finally, as mentioned, those we interviewed were in work, and however harried or depressed, earning an income and engaging in arts-related activities. We looked, therefore, for emotional undercurrents, patterns of words that expressed attitudes directly or indirectly reflective of a crisis of value. During the COVID-19 period, across commercial and non-commercial cultural organisations alike, the political correlative of this was attitudes to government.

The COVID-19 pandemic has left an indelible mark on cultural practitioners globally (UNESCO, 2022). The cultural sector was more affected than almost any other, but the cancellation of live events and the shut-down of venues and markets were particularly pronounced in Australia. Economic impacts included loss of income, rampant unemployment, company insolvencies, supply chain repercussions and a consumer pivot to digital products (Polonsky & Weber, 2022). Health restrictions included border closures and barriers to international touring (Pennington & Eltham, 2020). In 2016, the cultural and creative industries employed 645,000 people, or six per cent of the total workforce, of which approximately a quarter had jobs in the arts. In the March to June quarter of 2020 it declined by 19 per cent, the highest of any sector. The industry average was six per cent (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2020). Practitioners were forced to seek alternative types of work, but as the country went into lockdown, these opportunities disappeared.

The $90 million JobKeeper scheme, the Australian government’s most significant stimulus measure, was introduced on 30 March 2020. Though initially rejecting a ‘UK-style’ wage subsidy program, after several weeks of lobbying from the Opposition and the Australian Council of Trade Unions (Australian Council of Trade Unions, 2020), the government provided $1,500 fortnightly payments to Covid-impacted employees. By April, the scheme was supporting 850,000 organisations and paying 3.3 million Australians a wage in the absence of normal business conditions. Most of Australia’s 193,000 arts workers, however, were not eligible for JobKeeper payments. The government introduced two-tier criteria based on full-time, part-time or long-term casual employment history prior to the pandemic, as compared to the short-term and freelance contracts that proliferate in the sector. This resulted in a ‘tapering’ that excluded many cultural practitioners from support, compounding a decline in federal arts spending since 2007 (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020; Pennington & Eltham, 2020).

On 14 March, the Australian Performing Arts Market launched its ‘I Lost My Gig Australia’ survey, tracking loss of income from cancelled performances, technical services and performance-related hospitality. By 1 April, it was reporting lost income of $325 million. A national cross-industry survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (‘ABS’) between 16 and 23 March showed more than half of all arts and recreation businesses had ceased trading, the highest proportion of the 17 industries investigated. Arts practitioners talked about the JobKeeper exclusions as ‘the latest in a long line of arts-bashing’, saying they were ‘living in poverty now more than ever before’ (Commonwealth of Australia, 2020, p. 92).

There are many ways to frame the experience of COVID-19 for the Australian cultural sector, but from the perspective of this paper it is seen as a major disvaluation event. Loss of earnings, loss of activity and loss of policy visibility are a significant trifecta with no precedent in the nation’s history in the post-1945 period. There has been no single event more damaging to the sector, or one the government has handled so badly. If any ‘juncture’ qualifies as providing the historical conditions for crisis, then COVID-19 and its attendant restrictions, lasting from March 2020 to November 2021, with traumatic effects that are still being felt today, fits the category (Andreescu, 2021).

Given its status as a pilot project, no robust findings can be advanced from our research. However, one thing is clear: despite frequent talk of a ‘crisis’ in the media, and despite the catastrophic impact of the pandemic on the cultural sector, no paradigm shift in a Kuhn (1967) occurred. In a meta-analysis of research on the impact of COVID-19 in the UK creative industries, a tendency to under-examine pre-existing structural issues was observed (Comunian & England, 2020). This paper may shed light on why. The seeds of a crisis in the Australian cultural sector were certainly discernible in 2020–21, but, like Davies, Streeck and Berlant, explaining why one did not occur is part of clarifying the concept. There are a range of factors that might be explored. Our focus is on the task of evaluation. In our concluding remarks, we propose a framing of evaluative methodologies that sees them as embedded social practices with two distinct but interdependent dimensions: the rational and the normative. Only when there is a breakdown in both dimensions, we argue, do the conditions for a crisis of value appear.

The project involves computer analysis of keywords, topics and sentiments, alongside the close-reading of interview transcripts. As arts practitioners as well as researchers, we have personal experience of the lifeworld inhabited by our interviewees and we drew on this to interpret the meaning of what they said and, more importantly, did not say. There is another story behind the surface facts of the COVID-19 narrative. Our project aims to discern what that deeper story might be.

Tables and diagrams

In the interviews, a list of thirteen questions were asked (see Appendix 2). There we no supplementary questions, to make responses as comparable as possible. All questions were either simply descriptive or broadly thematic. Interviewees were provided with the list in advance and there was no attempt to surprise them or solicit information they were unwilling to give. No question contained ‘value’ or ‘evaluation’. If these words appeared in the transcripts, it was because interviewees chose to use them.

Table 1 is part of a meta-data table, showing the main categorical attributes of the interviews. Following mixed-method protocols in Braun and Clarke (2006) we aimed to identify semantic and latent themes by the cross-coding of each video recording and interview transcript. Concurrent with digital analysis of the interview transcripts, was ‘by eye’ assessment of what interviewees said, through reflexive thematic analysis by at least two members of the research team. This acted as a control on computer-generated results, and as a springboard for further interpretation. Each interview question was examined separately, to generate summative comments on how it was answered across the 14 interviews.

Table 2 presents the summary comments on questions 6 and 13, ones we identified as potentially value-related. The word ‘value’ appeared in the majority of responses to both questions.

Table 2. Summary of interview responses

Q6 Did you feel the government supported your organisation in dealing with the challenges of COVID-19? How did (do) the three levels of government – local, state and federal – compare in this respect?
Majority positive
flexibility and support
more listening than before
some more funding than before
Negative responses from private/commercial/small businesses (Abunai/Brad Weeks; Blank GC/Samantha Morris)
Typically one level of govt most helpful, other/s less so or nil or offensively unhelpful. But specific levels that were helpful/unhelpful varies with org and its nature/relationships. In a few cases, all positive.
Many tales of unsuccessful applications. Sense of muddling through, try everything, whatever sticks.
Criticisms relate to opacity, complexity, difficulty
Implicit theme of recognising own value – deserving - and wanting govt to recognise this with varied results. Returns more explicitly in final question 13.
Q13 Is there a particular action or intervention that the government or industry could make that you believe would significantly help your organisation in dealing with the challenges you’ve discussed?
More funding, fairer funding
Recognition/awareness of value (from govt and community) – comparisons to sport
Majority spoke to need for coordinated national cultural policy

Diagram 1

Diagram 1 is a computer-generated word cloud. It is impressionistic, since a semantic and sentiment context is absent. However, it suggests what is on the sector’s mind, namely ‘people’ and ‘work’ and, most probably, given the high unemployment rate at this time, the lack of a connection between them.

We return to the word ‘work’ below because we see it as key to why the pandemic did not prompt a crisis of value. The paradox is: if ‘work’ is central to the sector’s thinking, yet jobs are non-existent, to what does the term refer?

Diagram 2

Diagram 2 is a word frequency table. By reading along the x and y axes simultaneously, it shows how often, and in what combination, terms appear together. Terms were selected on the basis of a reflexive thematic analysis of transcripts as well as the research questions. The full table contains 40 terms along both axes while the one excerpted above contains 20. Of interest is the row of numbers alongside the word ‘value’. In the diagram, the deeper the red colour, the higher the number of times these words occur in combination with each other. Given that ‘value’ is not a term used in the interview questions, it is significant that it appears as one of moderate frequency in the responses to them.

Diagram 3

Diagram 3 is a latent semantic analysis (LSA). It shows the similarity and difference in language (tone and content) between the 14 interviews in terms of phrasing, grammar and style. A positive score up to 1.0, shown as red, means the interview is similar in language to the overall set. A negative score down to −1.0 indicates language difference (see adjacent legend). A key observation here is the convergence of rhetorical style across the 14 interviews. These are practitioners in different art forms, in different geographical regions of the country. Some might know each other, but most will not. Such convergence in language use is highly unusual among even a small sample. It indicates that the ways in which the impact of Covid was experienced in the sector had a strongly uniform quality to it.

Graph 1 is a sentiment analysis graph. The ‘6000’ at the end of the x-axis is the number of phrases analysed from the full set of interviews. The y-axis runs from a maximum 1.0 to a minimum −1.0. The standard divisions are positive, neutral and negative, though in practice it is hard to discern where negative stops and neutral begins. Between 0 and 1 ‘tends towards positive’, and between 0 and −1.0 ‘tends towards negative’. This diagram shows an average of 0.2, which is enough to say our interviews ‘tend towards positive’.

Table

From these tables, diagrams and graphs, we infer the following:

1. These practitioners were inclined to be positive in their responses to the pandemic.

2. These practitioners were strongly convergent in their responses to the pandemic.

3. These practitioners focused on ‘work’ as a keyword.

4. These practitioners were concerned with the concept of value, but in a latent rather than manifest way.

Table 3 is not part of the digital analysis, but reflects an approach taken to cultural policy documents on previous occasions (e.g. Meyrick, 2013). Transcripts are scrutinised for performatives. These are understood as basically ‘to do’ verbs. They do not function in the classic sense J L Austin identified as words that are also actions (e.g. ‘I do’ at a wedding ceremony) but they nevertheless carry an identifiable illocutionary force. For this project, we compiled a master list of all performatives across all 14 interviews. Table 3 is a sample of the results. We then fed all the results into Voyant, to get Diagram 4 below.

Table 3. Performatives

Diagram 4

 

This word cloud is different from the one generated by the digital analysis of the full transcripts because it is focused on the active verbs that appear in interview transcripts. ‘People’ diminishes as a topic. We might infer from this that they are an object of concern rather than a force to be mobilised. In its place, we have a series of ‘tending towards positive’ to-do verbs: ‘to develop’, ‘to make’, ‘to be able’, ‘to build’. To take this a step further, we inputted the term ‘work’––now active (i.e. ‘to work’)––back into the transcripts, to see how practitioners conceived ‘work’ at a time when jobs were severely restricted. The result is Diagram 5.

Diagram 5

The key term ‘work’ thus appears in the transcripts in two divergent ways, one relating to the core mission of an organisation (the work they do or want to do), the other relating to the work it took to survive the pandemic situation.

We infer from these tables and diagrams the following further six observations:

1. These practitioners did not expect much from government (or not the Australian federal government).

2. These practitioners did not look to government even when the government was the only active body to look to.

3. These practitioners did not contest government decisions, even in extreme situations (they complied).

4. These were practitioners for whom survival was a job in itself.

5. These were practitioners for whom the feeling of being disvalued was preferable to the feeling of being powerless.

6. These were practitioners who felt they had reached a ‘point of no return’, and not a ‘crisis’, and faced no alternatives, rather than paradigmatic choices.

Discussion of findings

The findings of our pilot project show that our sample of cultural practitioners were reluctant to admit the existence of a crisis and go through the Davies cycle of ‘certainty, doubt, crisis, judgement, resolution, certainty’ even in the face of the most adverse conditions. Register of perception shapes choice of social action. Holton observes, ‘only when members of a society experience structural alterations as critical for continued existence and feel their social identity threatened can we speak of “crisis” … [C]risis perceptions are necessarily manifest in cultural terms, and hence can never be simply read off from ostensibly objective indicators of economic breakdown (or any other structural trends’ (Holton 1987: 506 emphasis added).

A number of factors may explain the reluctance of cultural practitioners to admit crisis. The focus of our research is methodological. The question is: how do neoliberal evaluative methodologies continue to impose themselves when, performatively-speaking, belief in them no longer holds? As Davies says, ‘technical rationality and method do not simply advance by force of power … [T]here must be a shared sense that it is the right technique to use … and its results will be a legitimate basis for consensus’ (156). Fear is not a complete explanation for general compliance, nor is the seeking of advantage. In other Australian policy domains such as public health, Covid saw resolute and collectively-minded action that firmly rejected neoliberal calculative logic (e.g. O’Sullivan et al., 2020). But in arts and culture the task of evaluation continues to evade critique. Unsatisfactory though its neoliberal methods are, they are accepted without significant contestation. This suggests they are supportable for some other reason. It is important to ask what this might be. If those in the field cannot identify a crisis as a crisis it is meaningless to propose that one may occur.

We put now forward an argument that may explain why the pandemic for the Australian cultural sector did not convert into a demand for a paradigmatic shift. In doing so, we make a case rather than proving one. Our aim is to frame the term ‘crisis of value’ in a useful way for the purpose of further research. This is the conceptual contribution we seek to make, building on our empirical referents to illuminate the crypto-political environment in which arts and culture operate, but which often escapes notice because it presents as a ‘technical’ framing of its practices and benefits.

Evaluation methodologies are where the organisation of experience and the organisation of society meet at a delicate point. For the conjoining to work, a certain understanding must hold about the mapping of personal perceptions onto abstract categories of social order. The reality we see must seamlessly weave the reality we cannot, whose accreditation then elicits the required collective behaviour. The task of evaluation thus mobilises two languages, closely intertwined. The first is methodic and is focused on sense-making: are evaluative methodologies in arts and culture rational and do they adopt standards of evidence common to domains that consider themselves rationally-based? The second is normative and focused on justice: do evaluative methodologies produce results that are fair and acceptable according to the moral and social standards of the day?

These are the two key questions those who comply with evaluative methodologies must consider, and they are addressed in different ways. The first uses the specialised vocabulary that appends rationally-constructed calculative techniques. The second uses natural language and takes the form of an accompanying narrative, explaining or justifying the results. The language of method is empirical. It talks about what is found and measured, what is the case. The language of justice is prescriptive. It talks about what ought to be, what should be the case. However, the language of method is subtly suffused with ethical awareness. We talk about ‘forgiving’ a debt, or extending ‘grace’ on a loan (for detailed analysis see Gleeson-White, 2011).

Our argument is that these languages can, at times, substitute for each other. It is possible to view neoliberal performative calculations of aggregate benefit from two perspectives. It can be argued that though the results are unjust, the methods make sense and are valid. Alternatively, it can be maintained that though the methods are incoherent, the results are fair and acceptable. There are two coextensive ideas of ‘reason’ in play. One is the reason of calculation, the other the reason of morality. Given the broad remit neoliberal evaluation claims, it cannot avoid the double resonance of these twinned languages. But it also benefits from the semantic fudge involved. When the logic of evaluation attracts no serious believers, it can sustain itself if its outcomes are embedded in an accompanying narrative acceptable in normative terms. Put another way, when there isn’t a crisis, there is consensus about either meaningful starting premises and commensurability, or justifications of outcome inequality, or both. A crisis of value requires two things to cooccur: a breakdown in the sense of performative calculations, and a breakdown in the accompanying moral narrative. To state our argument more formally:

1. On the methodic side, evaluative methodologies must establish an initial equality among a miscellaneous range of cultural objects and relations to inscribe them onto a quantitative calculus. If they cannot do so, the claims of performative calculations of aggregate benefit will make no sense.

2. On the moral side, evaluative methodologies must ensure the availability of a normative value narrative. Without adequate explanations accompanying performative calculations of aggregate benefit, the production of outcome inequalities will be perceived as unjustified.

What ethical justification can possibly inform a positive explanatory narrative for Australian cultural practitioners at the worst of times? Here the experience of Covid is revealing, because it shows how far the Australian cultural sector has drifted from ‘public good’ arguments for the support of the arts that were common in the 1960s and 1970s (Craik, 2005; Pennington & Eltham, 2020). We propose that the ethical reasoning of the sector in its relation with government during the pandemic mobilised the category of ‘the deserving poor’, reflecting the moral outlook of C19th liberalism, and inherited by neoliberalism today. This is congruent with Tammy Houser’s (2020) observation that the concept of ‘empathy’ proliferating in public discourse after the 2008 GFC remained firmly within a neoliberal moral framework of individual obligation. Houser argues––in our view, correctly––that this narrative reinforces the dominant neoliberal paradigm and saps the transformative potential of a crisis of value.

When the methodic dimension of the task of evaluation fails, it is the accompanying moral narrative that must ensure compliance. Until this narrative is contested there can be no crisis. For policy activists interested in challenging neoliberal evaluation and encouraging those in the cultural sector to do likewise, demonstrating over and over that its performative calculations are senseless is unlikely to lead to change. Instead, an ethical critique must be mounted.

We finish with a brief example of how it is possible to contest evaluative methodologies without simply rejecting them out of hand, and laying ourselves open to the charge we are rejecting evaluation per se. It involves language use, and the deployment of alternative terms to shift the moral narrative around benefit calculations. It is habitual in the cultural sector to refer to ‘government funding’ when discussing support the state provides cultural practitioners and arts organisations. Fifty years ago, the usual term was ‘public assistance’, one with a different set of political connotations. As an operator of capture, ‘public assistance’ resonates with ‘public good’ arguments for arts and culture, which in the past were the dominant way their benefits were conceived. It also resonates with the notion of ‘public value’, which, as Mariana Mazzucato points out (Mazzucato 2017: 265) is a term waiting to be filled with categorical detail. Deploying the term ‘public assistance’ and ceasing to refer to ‘government funding’ is a useful step in creating a semantic economy where it is possible to seriously debate public good and public value as important normative concepts once more. The issue of how they should be calculated––which is the likely come-back from neoliberals––is, if not irrelevant, then secondary, given that methodic sense does not sustain evaluative methodologies currently.

Changing the way we talk is not the same as changing the world. But in the realm of evaluation, where benefit calculations freight a frightening power, it is a useful counter-action. Cultural practitioners should look to their language and make their words fit a different moral narrative, rather than producing mountains of data in the mistaken belief they are refining a debate. The struggle for a more meaningful and equitable conception of value lies entirely in another direction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Belfiore (2015) explores the acceptance of economic instrumentalism as a defensive strategy for a beleaguered arts and cultural sector, and further in (Belfiore, 2022a, 2022b). Alvarez et al. (2022) presents the UK creative industries sector as a case study in the compliance of individual and organisations with neoliberal discourses and measures in pursuit of institutionalised legitimacy, despite overtly misaligned values.

2. Davies’ approach, whose lead we follow, is drawn from pragmatic sociology, or convention theory, associated with the French sociologist Luc Boltanski. Its focus is on how social actors explain and justify their actions in normative terms, and assumes this is an on-going aspect of collective life at all levels. Pragmatic sociology may be linked intellectually to Chicago School sociology and Howard (Becker, 2008) whose later work involved collaboration with Boltanksi-influenced French researchers. Chicago School sociology embraces the use of case study, the symbolic interactionism of Erving Goffman and, more remotely, the ethnomethodology of Harold Garfinkel. All of these methodologies owe a debt to Weberian verstehen sociology. All reject the ‘dope’ theory of social action, where structural factors are seen to exclusively determine how social actors behave. Pragmatic sociology distinguishes itself from two other styles of critique of neoliberalism: empirically-driven research and critical theory. Pragmatic sociology investigates the resources of explanation and justification needed to sustain ‘applied neoliberalism’ (Davies 149), and what is involved when these resources fail.

3. This wording was used on all internal documents, and on the information sheet provided to project participants in seeking their informed consent to being interviewed.

Appendices Appendix 1:

South East Queensland

South East Queensland (SEQ) is a geographical area of roughly 35,000 square kms, with a population of slightly under 4 million (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022). Its three largest cities are Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast. The latter lies on the border of northern New South Wales. Most major arts organisations––orchestras, opera, ballet, galleries, theatres, and large entertainment venues–– reside in Brisbane and have been officially active since 1945. The Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast have developed their respective local and touring music scenes since the 1970s through a variety of informal club, casino and entertainment venues, while more formal artistic events are held at The Home of the Arts, a performing arts venue on the Gold Coast City, as well as at the Gold Coast Convention Centre. Independent and small-to-medium arts organisations, undertaking a mix of arts production, arts advocacy, arts services, and arts education, are located throughout SEQ. Arts graduates come from the larger tertiary education arts providers: the Queensland Conservatorium and Queensland College of Art Griffith University, the University of Queensland, the University of the Sunshine Coast, Aboriginal Centre for the Performing Arts; and Southern Cross University, Lismore New South Wales. Diversity and inclusion agendas have resulted in more engagement with First Nations Artists and artists-with-disability (Arts Queensland, 2022) reflected in arts festivals such as Brisbane Festival, Queensland Music Festival, Woodford Folk Festival, Caloundra Music Festival, and the Bleach* Festival.

Appendix 2:

Interview questions

1. Can you briefly describe your organisation and your role in it?

2. What was 2020 and 2021 like for you and your organisation overall? In the broadest terms, how did COVID-19 impact on you?

3. Was there a moment when you realised that COVID-19 was here to stay and going to have long term consequences for you and your organisation?

4. What strategies did you and your organisation put in place to deal with the consequences of COVID-19 in 2020? How have these strategies changed in 2021?

5. What has been your biggest professional challenge throughout the COVID-19 period?

6. Did you feel the government supported your organisation in dealing with the challenges of COVID-19? How did (do) the three levels of government – local, state and federal – compare in this respect?

7. Have there been other sources of support for your organisation, such as from other organisations or the community?

8. Do you feel that the experience of COVID-19 is permanently changing the way you and your organisation operate? Do you feel there will be a return to a pre-COVID normal?

9. Are there any lessons you have drawn from the COVID-19 experience that you will take with you into the future?

10. Looking back in 10 years’ time, what will be your abiding memory of the COVID-19 period?

11. What are your goals for the organisation over the next 10 years?

12. What do you see as the biggest challenge for the future of your organisation?

13. Are there particular actions or interventions that the government or industry could make that you believe would significantly help your organisation in dealing with the challenges you’ve discussed?