Conclusion: where next for cultural intermediation?

Summary

An obvious response to the variety of perspectives presented in this book would be to conclude that cultural intermediaries play a vital role in connecting communities into creative economic activity but that, without additional public funding being unlocked, their work is under threat in the UK. Indeed, there would be some truth to this claim as the exigencies of austerity have bitten hard and, in spite of considerable commitment, organisations and individuals have found it impossible to continue with their established work. What this book and the research project it was based on have unveiled, however, is a somewhat more complex picture.

As scholars have extended Bourdieu's notion of the ‘cultural intermediary’ (1984), so the scope of intermediation activity has significantly widened, but in doing so it has become more diffuse and somewhat less coherent or specific (for a critique of this diffusion, see Hesmondhalgh 2006). Nonetheless, for Smith Maguire and Matthews (2012), it is a term that is ‘good to think with’, foregrounding as it does qualities of agency and power. As detailed across these chapters, intermediaries can be seen to negotiate a role as interpreters of policy and proselytisers of the values of art worlds and the imperatives of the creative economy, in pursuing funding, determining where their work might be best located and engaging audiences, while often required to capture the impact of that work and thus to determine its value. In so doing, any sense that the core concern of the work of intermediation is with ‘taste’, that is the aesthetics and pleasures of expression, is tempered by administrative, political and economic priorities.

While we are in no doubt that there always been such an aspect to the work of intermediation (consider the account of Vaughan Jones in Chapter fifteen in this volume, for instance), this condition has been exacerbated by recent developments. In order to argue for higher levels of public investment, there was strategic value in blurring together different elements of the creative economy, cultural industries, formalised arts sector and work undertaken with (socially excluded) communities. The political atmosphere behind this strategy and in which this research project was born, however, was very different to the situation today.