Comprehending, creating and communicating value
Comprehending, creating and communicating value
By
John Holden
Tim Baker
SUMMARY
Considers how cultural sector business models will develop in response to the changing roles of the expert, the market and the public in the current cultural landscape. This article provides two viewpoints on the role that arts marketing professionals have in comprehending and delivering public value. John Holden explores the need to understand value from a range of different perspectives in order to start to square artistic vision with engaging audiences; Tim Baker explores how arts organisations can create and package relevant value in order to engage a diverse range of people with the arts.
The great cultural theorist, Raymond Williams as stated in ‘Keywords’ (1974), believed that culture meant either the high arts or it could have a more anthropological definition – all the things that give us meaning. These two things were oppositional. One applied to the individual, the other to the mass. There was a ‘natural’ hierarchy of quality.
Arts marketing was about giving as many people as possible ‘access’ to something that was ‘provided’ or delivered to them.
Now we need to have a very different idea of what culture means.
