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Interview Study reveals deep-seated inequality

Consuming culture can be bad for you in much the same way that producing culture can be, Mark Taylor tells MIKE QUILLE

The usual mainstream assumption is that culture is good for you — that it keeps you healthy, socially connected, inspiring, etc. So Culture is Bad For You is an interesting title for a book — can you tell us what you mean?

Culture can be good for you, depending on who you are. If you’re white, you’re not disabled, you’re a man, and you grew up in a household where there was at least one adult working in a well-paid high-status job, culture’s great. You probably grew up with positive examples of art, music, theatre, and so on all around you.

You might also have decided you wanted to work in the creative industries, and you had good contacts that meant you were pretty sure that a promising agent would come to one of your performances, and you could keep living in your parents’ house in London while you were putting this together.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone: not everyone who works in the creative industries fulfils the stereotype above, and it’s not as if every single wannabe actor with parental wealth ends up making it. But our research shows that this is the broad direction of travel.

There are exceptions, but overall we conclude that culture primarily reinforces existing inequalities. Culture is sometimes narrated as a place where anyone can make it and thrive; we show that it’s much easier for some people than it is for others. This isn’t a new phenomenon.

Negative aspects of cultural work that seem ubiquitous — for example, periods of working for free and navigating a freelance lifestyle — are in fact experienced very differently by different people. They can be seen as freeing and exciting for people who are better-resourced and fit the “somatic norm” of a white middle-class man, but crushing inevitabilities for people with less money to fall back on and those who don’t fit that stereotype.

So culture can be bad for you if you’re working in the cultural industries and you don’t fit that stereotype of a middle-class, white, male person. What about as consumers of culture, can culture be bad for you then?
 

Consuming culture can be bad for you in much the same way that producing culture can be. Patterns of attending different kinds of events, and patterns of people’s cultural tastes, are strongly associated with dimensions of social inequality, such as social class.

The activities which skew most heavily towards people in the most privileged positions also tend to be the ones which are heavily subsidised by organisations like the Arts Council

This means that the overall effect can be that when people from less privileged backgrounds attend these sorts of activities, they can feel uncomfortable and unwelcome. Several of our participants from historically marginalised groups reported feeling uncomfortable and marginalised as cultural consumers, just as they did as cultural producers.

OK so your research suggests that there are deep and enduring inequalities both in the production of culture, and in its consumption. Your book also suggests that these inequalities are “intersectional,” involving social class, gender and ethnic background. What does this mean, and what is the relationship between inequalities in the cultural sector and inequalities in wider society?

 

The intersectional experience is really important. Some of the people who’d had the most negative experiences working in culture were women of colour from working-class backgrounds. Of course, these experiences of working in culture reflect wider society. But we found that some of the informal structures of cultural work, such as people getting jobs through informal networks and a hostility from more senior people to what they see as bureaucracy, can make the situation worse.

If it’s true, as your research clearly seems to demonstrate, that class-based inequalities in cultural production and consumption mirror wider social and economic inequalities and class divisions, and that generally they reinforce and legitimise those inequalities, what should be done?

 

A lot of the kinds of policy interventions that would be most effective in confronting inequalities in the cultural sector are broader than the sector itself. A simple example is formally regulating (and almost certainly banning) unpaid internships: the consequences of unpaid internships are particularly visible in cultural work, but it’s just as important for think tanks and the policy research environment more broadly.

A more complicated example is housing: several of our interviewees reported spending large amounts of money on low-quality accommodation in London. A few different policies would get at this: regulation of the private-rented sector to look more like Germany; far more socially rented housing to look more like Austria; more homes being built so that housing is no longer such a scarce resource. This kind of transformation wouldn’t be targeted at the cultural sector, but for me it would be the most effective way to confront existing inequalities.

This doesn’t mean that the cultural sector is off the hook. It’s easy to blame broader structures for the inequalities in the sector, rather than taking responsibility. There are things that organisations like the Arts Council and DCMS could do, given the right support, such as committing amounts of money to black-led organisations.

Also, there are organisations operating in and around cultural work that are drawing attention to the inequalities in culture, and doing things about it.

People working in and around culture can support campaigning charities like Arts Emergency as individuals; they can also try to convince their organisations for an institutional commitment. We should also defend and extend workers’ rights and conditions through trade unions.

Beyond this, a radical approach to addressing these inequalities needs radical measures. We suggest that it’ll be necessary to bypass current modes of cultural production: big changes don’t start by transforming the Tate, but by starting something new. We suspect that this is likely to follow from new digital business models, driven and controlled by the marginalised themselves.

We demonstrate in the book that there’s an overwhelming belief in the power of culture: culture can change lives. This isn’t a marginal issue that we can deal with once we’ve confronted all the other inequalities and injustices in the world, it’s inextricably linked to them.

At the moment, the power of culture is often negative. If we want to transform that, everyone needs to do their part.

Mark Taylor is senior lecturer in Quantitative Social Sciences at Sheffield University.

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