After all it's impossible to even get a common definition of what culture is, so how can we gauge what it means to different people at different times in their lives?
Last month, the thinktank Demos published a new report: Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy. Off-putting as the title may be to those with an aversion to the idea of 'contingent valuations' and the like, some of it makes interesting reading.
For the past decade or so, there has been increasing pressure to provide hard facts about what museums do. But getting consistent and comparable data has proved difficult. Take the national mus-eums, for example. They get huge chunks of public money, have Public Service Agreements that set clear targets, and are better placed than the average museum to gather data.
But until recently, they weren't even asking their visitors the same questions. The National Museum Directors' Conference has been grappling with this problem and, hopefully, from this month museums should begin collecting the same information. But this illustrates a real problem.
Gathering these statistics can sometimes seem like a distraction and it's often a thankless task. So, many in the sector will have been relieved to notice that lately there has been a move away from number crunching alone as a measure of worth.
The latest missive from Demos continues this trend, arguing that culture has a mix of values: intrinsic (the inspirational and uplifting quality); instrumental (how many visitors attended from what background); and institutional (the ethos of the organisation).
The report also raises the notion of public value. The idea being that the public values culture more than politicians think it does, so if you can somehow demonstrate this, politicians will pay up.
Fundamentally, it all comes down to the same thing - proving your worth to funders and politicians. But we shouldn't be under any illusions - politicians will not all have Damascene conversions on hearing a reasoned argument about how much the public likes culture.
We all know that when push comes to shove, at a local and national level, core services such as health and education are always going to get the lion's share and culture will be way down the list of priorities.
So is there any point to this introspection? Yes, because the report shifts the discussion about value up a notch and anything that moves museums away from the sometimes over-directive and constraining funding regimes of the recent past is a good thing.
A note of caution though - let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are a lot of good reasons for collecting data: we can use it to measure inclusivity, audience satisfaction and the use of collections to name a few.
So stats are OK, as long as we know why we're collecting them and we're not just churning them out to be left unanalysed in the corner of a darkened storeroom.
Last month, the thinktank Demos published a new report: Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy. Off-putting as the title may be to those with an aversion to the idea of 'contingent valuations' and the like, some of it makes interesting reading.
For the past decade or so, there has been increasing pressure to provide hard facts about what museums do. But getting consistent and comparable data has proved difficult. Take the national mus-eums, for example. They get huge chunks of public money, have Public Service Agreements that set clear targets, and are better placed than the average museum to gather data.
But until recently, they weren't even asking their visitors the same questions. The National Museum Directors' Conference has been grappling with this problem and, hopefully, from this month museums should begin collecting the same information. But this illustrates a real problem.
Gathering these statistics can sometimes seem like a distraction and it's often a thankless task. So, many in the sector will have been relieved to notice that lately there has been a move away from number crunching alone as a measure of worth.
The latest missive from Demos continues this trend, arguing that culture has a mix of values: intrinsic (the inspirational and uplifting quality); instrumental (how many visitors attended from what background); and institutional (the ethos of the organisation).
The report also raises the notion of public value. The idea being that the public values culture more than politicians think it does, so if you can somehow demonstrate this, politicians will pay up.
Fundamentally, it all comes down to the same thing - proving your worth to funders and politicians. But we shouldn't be under any illusions - politicians will not all have Damascene conversions on hearing a reasoned argument about how much the public likes culture.
We all know that when push comes to shove, at a local and national level, core services such as health and education are always going to get the lion's share and culture will be way down the list of priorities.
So is there any point to this introspection? Yes, because the report shifts the discussion about value up a notch and anything that moves museums away from the sometimes over-directive and constraining funding regimes of the recent past is a good thing.
A note of caution though - let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are a lot of good reasons for collecting data: we can use it to measure inclusivity, audience satisfaction and the use of collections to name a few.
So stats are OK, as long as we know why we're collecting them and we're not just churning them out to be left unanalysed in the corner of a darkened storeroom.
