Thud

Another report

Aug 2025

A few years ago I was lucky enough to attend a talk by someone who had worked on some early design concepts for the Apple Macintosh user interface. One of these, long since abandoned, involved the use of a form of audio responses that would help a user better understand the size of a document or a folder. For example, a folder that contained a lot of documents would make a ‘full’ noise when you clicked on it, or a large email attachment would land with a thud when downloaded. In our current world I miss these clues and signals that the digital, weightless, environment does not provide. In the digital world you don’t see them coming and you don’t hear them land. The 90-page report that you weren’t expecting slips into your in-box and lurks there, offering you little scope to prepare yourself for its impact when you finally notice it.

For the arts administrator, there’s probably one of these arriving every day. Quietly insinuating its way into your in-box between bland circulars and meeting requests, keeping its weighty cargo invisible until you choose to open it. Some of these may be evaluation documents providing validation for something that has already happened and preparing the ground for the next funding application or proposal. Some will be academic papers, mining a particular seam of intellectual interest. Some will be a newer breed of reports built around some manner of sectoral boosterism, with pages padded out with spurious data to underpin the desired headline. Many (most?) are not read, but they contribute to raising a background hum which can easily drive the way policy and action are created.

Policy responses are often informed by little more that the notion that if someone has money to spend on this, it must be worth saying, rather than any rigorous analysis of the data and concepts contained. I have heard politicians citing statements from reports that are based on responses from self-selected groups who together represent less than one-thousandth of a particular constituency. I have also heard them citing statistics from boosterism reports that directly contradict the data produced by their own officials. Where these reports are read, it is often with a resigned air just to reassure oneself that the report doesn’t contain anything truly meaningful or of value that you might otherwise have missed. Perhaps I’m just adding to this malaise here, but I don’t want to contribute to the wasted effort that many of these reports represent, the hours spent creating and consuming these documents doesn’t come cheap.

When writing the first Creative Industry Strategy for Creative Scotland I quoted the economist John Kay from a piece he wrote for the Financial Times entitled ‘A good economist knows the true value of the arts’. In the original article, a coruscating attack on economic impact studies, he says: “I am sympathetic to the well-intentioned people who commission studies of economic benefit, though not to those who take money for carrying them out. They are responding to a climate in which philistine businessmen assert that the private sector company that manufactures pills is a wealth creator, but the public sector doctor who prescribes them is not.” He concludes the piece by saying: “We need to put out of our minds this widely held notion that there is such a thing as “the economy”, a monster outside the door that needs to be fed and propitiated and whose values conflict with things – such as sports, tourism and the arts – that make our lives agreeable and worthwhile. Activities that are good in themselves are good for the economy, and activities that are bad in themselves are bad for the economy. The only intelligible meaning of “benefit to the economy” is the contribution – direct or indirect – the activity makes to the welfare of ordinary citizens.”

In falling over ourselves to serve an economic benefit narrative, we in the world of creativity and culture have failed to acknowledge Kay’s position, seeking instead to cloak ourselves in the economic success narrative of the creative industries. There is clearly economic benefit to be gained in the creative industries, but if the only position we hold is defined by the regular drumbeat of disingenuous evaluations and sectoral boosterism, then we are only ensuring that the things that we value most dearly become hostage to the specious GVA arguments that we constantly repeat. It is as if our understanding of the concept of value has become closer to - what my mother would say - knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing.

But old lore is not necessarily an old argument and needs to be kept fresh. The scientist George Price died destitute in London in 1975 after spending the later part of his life attempting to find a mathematical rationale for to the concept of altruism (read the ‘The Price of Altruism’ by Oren Harman to find out more about this fascinating, but tragic story). In a similar, but less dramatic way, we in the world of creativity and culture are obsessing ourselves to death by trying to objectify the value of what we do. Trying to pin down the stock-in-trade that would allow us to trade more effectively with wider society to gain the currency to carry on doing more of what we want to do. In doing this we have spawned an ever growing cadre of spinners, some responsible for the original creative industries narrative, now sustained by bodies such as the Creative Industries Council and the ambitiously-titled Creative UK, others proposing things like the execrable contingent valuation methodology that crept onto DCMS stage a couple of years ago. (If you don’t know it, contingent evaluation is the cruellest of systemic property enclosures, in which something that is difficult to value - e.g. the Cairngorms National Park - is denied to you, until you can name the price you will pay to re-access it. As an exercise in promoting usury it is unparalleled in its noxiousness).

As I write this, Arts Professional is currently promoting something called the Creative Industries Property Summit, which, as my blood ran cold while reading the blurb, I tried to convince myself was a spoof. I need to find out more about it, but it states: “The Real Estate industry is increasingly recognising the need to co-create with the Creative Industries to maximise both its financial value and social impact, creating opportunities to benefit from the spaces, funding, and engagement within property portfolios”. I would like to read the report that untangles all that.

All those heavy reports, the industrial co-option of nauseous methodologies, the squads building careers out of insubstantial narratives, are all predicated on one thing - the notion that the value that resides in culture is capable of being objectified - or of being alienated into something else which might enable it to be part of a transaction. This needs careful challenging and I’ll try to return to this in a future post, but we do need to accept that there may be another way to look at this. What if, like the dark matter that makes up much (85%) of our universe, or the lost Apple user interface, the important things may be silent because we’ve lost the way to hear them.