Artists and cultural workers in cultural policy and creative practice
From the big break narrative to mutual aid and collective care. Simone Wesner and Jane Woddis in conversation with Stephanie Taylor and Greig de Peuter

Abstract

Considering artists as decisive participants in policy and management processes that affect them illuminates the role of collective and individual agency in shaping policies as artists manage their careers and seek to influence their working conditions, their artforms and the cultural sector more widely. This is a relatively young field of cultural policy research. When we began working on it in the late 1990s there was little academic study of artists’ voices and activity around policy and management. Artists’ perspectives remained side-lined and under-represented in policymaking and arts management discourse. Yet the importance of expanding cultural policy studies to embrace the agency of artists and cultural workers began to be recognised, not least because artists are the progenitors of the cultural products and processes which are the subject of cultural policy and thereby of cultural policy research itself. And as has become increasingly evident from within the cultural sector, arts practitioners do engage in policy activity and act as narrators of their careers. Cultural policy studies miss an important part of the picture if these actors are omitted…