Down in the art valley

A response to Mariana Mazzucato's paper on the public value of arts and culture

Oct 2025

A paper entitled ‘The public value of arts and culture’ dropped into my Inbox last month. Subtitled ‘Investing in Arts and Culture to Reimagine Economic Growth in the 21st Century’, it was written by Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London. The LinkedIn post trailing it also suggested input from Brian Eno. Surely, I thought, this is a dream team for creating a pathway to enter exciting new lands. However, as I read the paper I found myself falling into that uncanny valley2 where all the pieces looked good, but something wasn’t right.

I needed to dig myself out of the valley, so I returned to the paper a few weeks later with a more self-critical eye. Partly to see if I was just being reactionary, or whether there was a critique that might usefully be applied. Either way it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I wanted to champion this paper in a way I’d championed the previous work of Mazzucato - but I had made a promise on LinkedIn to look at it more closely - and there is of course no contract greater than a commitment made to a crowd, so here goes.

There are a number of things within the paper that I had concerns about, but there are two main issues for me and although they’re deeply intertwined, I’ll try to deal with them one at a time.

The first is the assumption that underpins the paper that culture is a moral good. That - as the paper says in its introduction - “Arts and culture, from visual arts to music and design, are the foundations for reimagining alternative futures, fostering civic identity, and mobilising collective action’. Yes, of course. Art and culture can be these things, but it can also be the opposite. The paper also says “We need to move away from viewing arts and culture as a cost and towards recognising them as an investment”. Yes, again, this is something I can mostly agree with - but it raises a tricky issue. Is that all arts and culture?, or just some bits that we think are particularly successful in achieving specific outcomes. Are we picking our investments here - if so, on what basis? If it’s only those which are successful in the terms of the first statement cited here it is particularly difficult, as it raises the question of what happens to the rest - and who determines this. What about the awkward, the challenging, the transgressive, the exploratory, the offensive. The problem with art is that often the bits that are most useful later on are those that are most problematic at the time of their creation. If we are - as the paper suggests - to see art and culture as an investment, when can we anticipate the return on our investment? - immediately, or in the centuries to come as we re-mine the lost avenues of creativity from the past which might reflect on today’s challenges. Is it an investment that is made as a gift, or one in which the contract states the expected return?

It’s also the case that I believe - and defend - the understanding that art and culture are essentially amoral, in that they are only reflections of who we are, with all our best and our worst attributes. Art and culture can be selfish, greedy, egotistical, perverse - and sometimes be any or all of these things without realising it. Art and culture are expressions of who we are - and that act of expression in itself is a public good - but unfortunately it’s not a public good that is always readily acknowledged by those who seek to assign it to a specific moral purpose. So while some cultural activity has the potential to be a moral good, it’s something that needs to be worked at, requiring a commitment to give something up - to accept a dominance of instrumentalisation in the act of creation.

The arguments of instrumentalisation versus intrinsic exhausted themselves some time ago, when it became apparent to most that all actions have both an instrumental and an intrinsic outcome, and it’s not a negative thing to aspire to be achieving both instrumental and intrinsic value in any work. The task being to know where we are on that balance at any time and to ensure we deliver what we set out to do (or perhaps what we were funded to do). There is much bad work that is dressed up as having instrumental worth because the creator or funder feels the need to acquire moral certitude, but participants/audiences can often just feel used by this work and alienated by the expressions of morality attached to the work.

The artist Suzanne Lacy sets out her own position on this in an interview with Frieze magazine from 2012. She says “On a social and communicative level, art is effective in bringing people together in ways that allow for new interactions. But if you’re referring to my art, I would say that it is not only, or necessarily, about effecting change. If this were my major interest I’d probably have become a politician. I make art for what some might consider quite romantic reasons: to invent, to give shape through imagination, to play (though it is quite hard work). I make art as a compulsion, really, as a necessity.”

It’s great for a economist to recognise the potential value of art and culture and to frame it within the processes that help to shape economies for flourishing and thriving societies. It’s also an important task to enable this to happen within a broader risk-embracing programme of state cultural investment (and to be honest, I think funding bodies do a pretty good job of navigating this already). The focus on public value is absolutely right, but public value is essentially determined by the public - and they are constantly changing who they are, what they think and what they see as representative of who they are - and that’s OK. But this mutability confounds rigid policy and paternalistic determination, and requires an authentic and well-tuned ear to make it work - and while we need to broaden those notions of authenticity and hearing that we apply, we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming it all just needs a framework of objective evaluation to ensure success.

So, onto the second point. This concerns the assumption that art and culture is largely a product of state investment. This is not an uncommon error, but if we are to examine our own cultural habits, it’s not hard to see that most of our own cultural experiences do not come from state-supported activity. This is not an argument to say that we need to step away from state investment - I would argue strongly for much more investment. It is an argument to say that we are in danger of creating a schism in the way we think about art and culture - especially when it comes to the defining of explicit influence for good - which is largely confined to the outcomes of public funding. Essentially, if the state wants to see certain kinds of art and culture sustained/protected/nurtured it tends to go out and buy it. However, the consequence of this is as if the only lever available to develop a positive and progressive cultural environment is to push it into the death spiral of market failure. There are other levers and we need to use them.

The paper also seems a little bit obsessed by Treasury Green Book cost-benefit analysis. I’m happy to confirm that in my experience this plays little or no role in the vast majority of decisions made around support for arts and culture. The only place Green Book assessments come up tends to be around UK Treasury funded projects like City/Region Growth Deals, but it’s rare that these are intensively and critically analysed in the way suggested in the paper. Although the Green Book process does allow for the expression of wider, softer, intentions, the arguments to support these outcomes are usually elsewhere in the process and always trump any cost/benefit analysis. It’s a green book red herring.

In the same vein, the recommendation in the paper to “Measure the public value of arts and culture: Move beyond static cost-benefit analysis to develop dynamic evaluation and appraisal tools that capture the economy-wide spillovers that cultural investments can create.” and the later statement “tools for evaluation such as cultural value frameworks, creative economy metrics, and participation indices can help arts organisations align their offering with mission outcomes and community goals.” are likely to be taken as inflammatory assertions to those hand-to-mouth creative and cultural organisations who are already struggling to provide effective justifications in the competition for funding. It is also being unlikely to have any traction with those (possibly the majority) who do not look to state funding to sustain their creation of art and culture. And while we’re on it - I was involved in a large EU-wide study about 10 years ago to look into the impacts of cultural spillovers. After reviewing around 100 reports the study could find no hard evidence one way of the other of the impacts of spillovers. It concluded that “Out of the library of 98 documents only two approach the standards needed for causality”. So while I think spillovers exist, like dark matter, I suspect the investment required to quantify them may not be the best use of scarce public money. Like much that relates to measurement in the realm of culture, I feel it’s best to look to inclusive subjective analysis rather than objective quantifiable analysis. I don’t think anyone who attempted to provide a quantitive analysis of their experience at a Taylor Swift concert would have had a particularly good time.

Understanding how art and culture can impact us and help define and shape the direction of economic growth requires us to allow it to function in its own space and not be the explicit servant of specific policy objectives - not because it is somehow above these, but because for it to be most effective it needs to have the freedom to follow its own path in the knowledge that public value is important as an outcome, but not a constraint on the process. That to act on a stage in which the outcomes are not always known in advance and may not even be fully known in retrospect is a vital part of arts and culture working out how it ‘does’ public value. There is absolutely a responsibility to articulate and express public value when activity is demanding public investment, but it is important to recognise that not all valuable activity will have received public investment and not all public investment will obviously produce public value. Artists and creators can focus on this outcome, but it should be done openly and not as a duplicitous route to achieve funding - and critically it should not be the only route to funding. Again, it’s boring, but it’s about balance. The risk needs to be managed and the biggest risk is getting stuck in the valley.

The act of intentionally reaching for causality in the outcomes of making art or culture is likely to tip the balance away from the things that actually make art-making worthwhile. We can work to amplify the consequential social and economic outcomes, and to maximise their impact, but we need to understand them as valuable aspirational consequences rather than core causes.