Live Issue Archive – Cultural Change and Future Matters

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Cultural Change and Future Matters

On March 6 2007 Tony Blair hailed Britain was living through a "golden age" of the arts. Arts funding has doubled over the past 10 years as has confidence in the transformative abilities of culture – culture and health, culture and regeneration, culture and social cohesion, culture and the economy, culture and education and the list goes on. However, with this increased faith in the potential of the sector to transform society has come an increased responsibility to engage broader audiences.

In the UK cultural experiences have traditionally primarily been delivered by non profit-organisations, often strongly dependent on public funding. This traditional landscape is changing. New technologies are emerging and creating new global communities and connections. The public is finding different ways of engaging and participating with arts and culture as consumers and producers. There are higher expectations of interactivity and individualisation of cultural products and provision and there may be a growing divergence between publicly funded culture and a growing global cultural phenomenon. How will cultural organisations have to adapt in order to ensure it takes advantage of emerging opportunities as well as responds to the changing needs of its audiences.

The publicly funded cultural sector has already begun to explore some of these issues. The Arts Council’s Arts Debate explores how people value the arts and how public money should be spent. Mission, Models, Money is an action research programme that addresses the challenges faced by individual arts and cultural organisations and their funders within this changing landscape of production, consumption and distribution of culture. They raise questions like "How can policy intervention best met with technology to achieve the aim of bringing about a more democratic culture?" and "What will be the role, opportunities and limitations of online culture in a rapidly changing world?"

Future Matters have been invited to help the Culture North East board to begin to unpick some of these issues. By building scenarios which speculate on the changing wants and needs of the individual in the future the Future Matters team will help the board to explore how these changing needs may impact on the role and requirements of cultural organisations. Examining methods of production and modes of consumption on the backdrop of changing technologies, global connections, changing funding situations and public policy the board will explore different conceptions of how the sector might operate in order to become more sustainable.