Some more interesting comments coming through on the Culture Forum blog. Someone who works with community regeneration in Scotland echoed my comments about the need to get some quantitative fix on exactly what we mean when we say that art has “long-term” or “deep” benefits to a community. Short-term funding leads to short-term art projects, which have only short-term benefits. But long-term, sustained funding has long-term, sustained benefits, and we all know what those are – or do we?
Do we really have a good idea of what those long-term benefits are supposed to be? At a national level one can point to broad economic impacts such as tourism, art-tourism and art-commerce. But what about further down the ladder, at the level of small market towns? Can we measure – and thus demonstrate to funders – the positive impact of long-term, meaningfully-funded art projects? Yes, we can talk at great length about the probable impact on things like social cohesion, community identity, etc. – but can we really point to quantifiable benefits to health, crime, education and employment?
If so then perhaps we can genuinely talk about funding for the arts as an “investment” which produces a quantifiable “return”. If we can genuinely say: “every £1 invested in art projects reduces health/crime spending by £10”, or “every £10,000 invested in art projects creates 10 part-time and 2 full-time jobs” (or whatever), then we can make a robust argument for viewing spending on the arts as an investment that generates visible returns.
Unfortunately, it seems as if these sorts of statistics simply do not exist. For starters, it seems as if they are simply too difficult to measure. Can we really measure how much state or private investment is needed to create a new job? And what proportion of the job is created by what agency – education, vocational training, economic incentives, cultural expectations, etc.?
Perhaps we need to work from a micro-scale up. I have suggested for our Studio A1 project in Oswestry that over the course of our first year we track – to the penny – how much non-public revenue the project brings into the town per £100 of public funding. We are counting everything – parking fees, cups of coffee, pens, pencils, etc. that would have been purchased elsewhere had our project not existed. At the end of twelve months we will create an analysis treating our public funding as a publicly funded investment. Already, this is showing up some promising results – and hopefully the full analysis will demonstrate in a quantifiable manner how public spending on art projects can be legitimately viewed as an economic investment.
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