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Knut Ove Eliassen, Jan Fredrik Hovden and Øyvind Prytz (eds.) How is value negotiated in the arts and culture? What is quality? And what does it entail to talk about quality in an artistic and cultural context? The ten articles in Contested Qualities discuss such questions from a variety of perspectives. They reflect on the conceptual and historical background for the discussion about quality, they analyse quality from the perspective of critical theory, and they raise the question: On which grounds – if common grounds can be found – is aesthetic and cultural value evaluated today? The book does not offer any clear-cut definition of quality or waterproof methodology for the assessment of artistic or cultural value. In fact, many of the articles highlight and analyse situations where contrasting notions of quality collide, or seem to. Thus, the common ground for aesthetic and cultural evaluations seems to be the ongoing negotiations between conflicting notions of quality. It is precisely in the critical discourse about different artistic and cultural expressions, and in the negotiations between different perspectives on art and culture, that quality is established. Contested Qualities results from a research programme initiated by Arts Council Norway. The book’s articles are selected and translated from two anthologies published in Norwegian: Kvalitetsforståelser (Notions of Quality, CONTESTED QUALITIES CONTESTED 2016) and Kvalitetsforhandlinger (Negotiating Quality, 2018). Contested Qualities Negotiating Value in Arts and Culture Knut Ove Eliassen, Jan Fredrik Hovden and Øyvind Prytz (eds.) ISBN 978-82-450-2377-0 ,!7II2E5-acdhha! in cooperation with Fagbokforlaget Contested Qualities Husk at Kulturrådet i tillegg til trykk-pdf også skal ha en lavoppløst uten skjæremerker til nett. KNUT OVE ELIASSEN, JAN FREDRIK HOVDEN AND ØYVIND PRYTZ (EDS.) Contested Qualities Negotiating Value in Arts and Culture Copyright © 2018 Vigmostad & Bjørke AS All rights reserved ISBN: 978-82-450-2377-0 Translated from Norwegian by John Anthony, Douglas Ferguson (Allegro) and Anneli Olsbø (Allegro) Copy editors: Frank Azevedo and Shari Nilsen Graphic production: John Grieg, Bergen Cover design: Fagbokforlaget Cover photo: Joar Nango, European Everything, 2017, © Joar Nango Photo: Mathias Völzke Page layout: Bøk Oslo AS For further information about this book, contact Fagbokforlaget Kanalveien 51 5068 Bergen Norway Tel: 55 38 88 00 Email: [email protected] www.fagbokforlaget.no Published in cooperation with Norsk kulturråd www.kulturradet.no All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Table of contents 7 QUALITY MATTERS Knut Ove Eliassen, Jan Fredrik Hovden, and Øyvind Prytz 27 ‘ARE YOU NEW TO QUALITY?’ Knut Ove Eliassen 47 LITERARY QUALITY: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ##TOC - les meg!### Erik Bjerck Hagen, Christine Hamm, Frode Helmich Pedersen, Jørgen Magnus Sejersted and Eirik Vassenden Reguler høyden på steken etter lengden på innholds fortegnelsen. 75 QUALITY AND PARTICIPATION IN MUSEUMS Brita Brenna Dersom det ikke er kapittel- nummer / delnummer / vedleggs- 93 CULTURE, QUALITY, AND HUMAN TIME nummer i boka må det defineres Frederik Tygstrup inn en blanklinje over titlene. 105 ‘THAT WAS BLOODY GOOD!’ ON QUALITY Sett inn figure-space foran sidettall ASSESSMENTS IN ARTISTIC WORK PROCESSES under 10 Ingrid M. Tolstad Dersom det er tresiftede sidetall 127 THE EMERGENCE OF THE CURATOR IN må innrykksnivået tilpasses litt. NORWAY: DISCOURSE, TECHNIQUES AND THE Evt. kan den vertikale sterken CONTEMPORARY flyttes litt mot høyre. Eivind Røssaak 165 THE DRAMATURGY OF QUALITY CONCEPTS: FROM DESCRIBING TO PRESCRIBING (STAGE) ART Tore Vagn Lid 5 187 NOVEL, EXPRESSIVE AND SKILLED! Anne Danielsen 203 ON QUALITY JUDGEMENTS IN ART: A CONCEPTUAL INVESTIGATION Simo Säätelä 229 MEASURING THE QUALITY AND IMPACT OF ARTS AND CULTURE Trine Bille and Flemming Olsen 257 CONTRIBUTORS 6 Quality matters Knut Ove Eliassen, Jan Fredrik Hovden, and Øyvind Prytz ‘Quality assurance’ is the order of the day. More than a mere standardisa- tion procedure, it has become a general management principle for everything from car manufacturing to dietary regimes, from ecology to social services, from holiday resorts to postal delivery. Whatever the nature of the transac- tion, it is likely to prompt a questionnaire beginning with a greeting affirming how much the service provider values ‘your opinion’, asking for just a few minutes of ‘your precious time’ to answer some questions. In the neo-liberal paradigm of governance, where citizens are consumers, commitment to indi- vidual propensities is the new catechism and consumer feedback the accom- panying litany. Neither the world of art nor that of cultural policymaking has escaped the onslaught of the quality mantra and its protocols. In the Scandinavian countries, the widely shared idea that art is a soci- etal value was long the basic tenet of public support for art and of cultural policy, orientated by such guiding stars as ‘the common good’, ‘aesthetic education’, and ‘democratic values’. The works of a nation’s artists investi- gated, expressed, and celebrated the shared values and experiences of its culture – even, and maybe even more so, if the tone was critical. The old avant-garde notion that progress of the arts somehow prefigured progress of society was, in some form or another, generally held to be true. There was widespread consensus that even experimental works merited taxpayers’ money – despite the incongruences between the aesthetic preferences of the cultural elite – occasionally disparaged as an elitist caste of cultural bureau- crats, self-appointed criticasters, and eccentric artists – and the popular taste of common people, always a decisive factor in social-democratic governance. A pragmatic distinction between the two symmetrical notions of product quality and activity quality helped to mitigate latent tensions between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Introduced in the sixties, the two terms were associated with, respectively, the aesthetic products of the established arts and productions of popular culture. Referred to as ‘an expanded concept of culture’, this distinction established a truce between proponents of ‘elitist’ notions of aes- thetic value and supporters of a ‘democratic’ ethnographic one, and proved 7 C ONTESTED Qualities important for maintaining the shared Nordic Protestant credo of the bless- ings of a democratised culture. Over the last two decades, demands of ‘quality assurance’, ‘accountability’, and even ‘rentability’ have challenged both the principles and the practices of the well-established Scandinavian systems for public funding of art and culture. Reflecting the crises of the governing principles of the welfare state, new success criteria such as ‘user preferences’, ‘marketability’, and ‘ investment returns’ have been brought to the fore, supplementing and at times even supplanting the values of the previous regime of governance. ‘Arts and culture’, a formula once expressing self-evident values that were held to be the very building blocks of public consensus, seems to be dissolving into a multi- tude of activities whose social value is increasingly being determined by eco- nometric protocols. Thus, public funding is in growing need of new legitimi- sation in order to gauge the satisfaction of the tax-paying patron. Against this backdrop, the contributions of this collection analyse and discuss the effects of today’s ubiquitous quality concept for cultural politics, the arts, and aesthetic values in general. New infrastructures While the quality issue’s topical nature can be understood only by consider- ing the neo-liberal paradigm of governance’s emphasis on protocols of standardisation, risk management, and accountability, the current situation also results from more profound changes. Large societal processes such as globalisation (immigration and the waning of the nation state), informatisation (the social realities of new media and the algorithms that inform our new computational habitat), and capitalisation (public poverty and the end of Keynesianism) have redefined the fabric of society to which the arts owe their existence. The nature and structure of what is labelled ‘arts and culture’ are substantially different from what they were only a few decades ago. If art is, as French sociologist Emile Durkheim once suggested, the way in which society represents itself to itself, massive rearrangements of social infrastructure will necessarily lead to massive transformations of what we mean and do when we speak about, practise, and consume art and culture. Although art might often function as a mirror in which we recognise and scrutinise ourselves, it does not operate outside the social fabric, but is integral to the social bond, the transactions and obligations which bind us together in a community. Online user surveys and customer feedback services are the visible mani- festations of increasingly aggressive information gathering about consump- tion patterns today, undertaken to monitor and anticipate consumer trends and attitudes. Companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple – all 8 Eliassen, Hovden AND Prytz atop Forbes’ list of the world’s wealthiest companies in 2017 (with Facebook a respectable number 6!) – are not merely players in a rapidly changing arts and

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