end of project report

We have now submitted our  draft report (see tate-cultvalue-fin report) to the AHRC. This doesn’t mean that we have stopped working on the project, but we have produced some results!

walking warmup as civil attention

Emily and I are now writing the report from the project. As we do so, we are of course thinking of new things. I’ve been struck this week by the utility of Erving Goffman’s notion of civil attention/inattention, in relation to the walking warm-up. Goffman suggested that in public places we get from A to…

a reflection on method

This is the text of a short paper we prepared for an AHRC cultural value programme workshop on arts and hermeneutic methods. Our project An internationally renowned choreographer ran a five-day dance workshop for volunteer youth. It was filmed by a professional film-maker and an edited selection of film given to the young people. They…

film as relic

Emily writes: The documentation, acquisition and conservation of live art practice is of increasing interest to art museums and has been the focus of an AHRC funded research network at Tate (Collecting the Performative). During a series of discussions as part of this programme, the issue of what constitutes the ‘work’ in relation to live…

our seminar

This coming Monday at Tate Britain at 2pm, more than 40 people will attend our project seminar. One of the young people will speak, as will Sarah Wookey. And we will present where we are up to in our thinking about what making and editing film can tell us about cultural value. We are looking…

fractality

In her book about scale, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern suggests that it is an error to assume that the small is less complex than the large. Strathern argues that the difference between small and large is not a question of complexity but rather one of fractality. Strathern draws on on the notion that in nature patterns…

value and function

Value is sometimes conflated with function. This is not the same as saying that an activity, event, practice or utterance can be valued because of its functionality but all things of value are not necessarily functional. Rather, value refers to the potential for something in an art object or experience, but this still has to…

access and the cultural broker

A common concern about projects such as ours is who gets access to them. It is often assumed that it is only white middle class young people for example who attend youth oriented art gallery events and programmes. This is not actually the case. The vast majority of museums and galleries are concerned about who attends…