speakers

John Holden

John Holden is an Associate at the think tank Demos, where he worked as Head of Culture from 2000-2008, and a Visiting Professor at City University. He holds Masters Degrees in Law (from Oxford) and in Design History (from Southampton). He has been involved in numerous major projects in the cultural sector across the spectrum; music, film, theatre heritage, museums and libraries, dealing with issues of leadership, workforce development and learning. He has worked with the Government, funding bodies, trusts and foundations, agencies, and many major cultural organizations, including the RSC, the British Museum, the Sage, Gateshead, V&A, and Tate. He is a member of the Strategy Board of the Clore Leadership Programme, a member of the Advisory Board of AHRC, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and worked for six years as the Chair of the Anvil concert hall. John has delivered many keynote speeches in the UK, Europe, Australia and Canada. His publications on cultural policy in the UK and beyond include Democratic Culture, Capturing Cultural Value, Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy, Culture Online, Creative Reading, Cultural Learning, Hitting the Right Note and Cultural Diplomacy. All of these can be downloaded free of charge from the Demos website at www.demos.uk

John Holden will look at the linkages and networks between publicly funded culture and the creative industries, arguing that we need to adopt a new model of what we mean by culture. The old model of culture poses an opposition between "high' and "popular' culture, between "the arts' and "the commercial', between individual appreciation and mass enjoyment. Holden will propose that for practical purposes there are now three deeply interrelated and networked spheres of culture - publicly funded, commercial and home-made. In the past thirty years there has been an explosive growth in home-made culture, fuelled by cheap musical instruments, digital publishing, camcorders, and most importantly, the internet. These new developments have created a fresh set of questions for cultural policy, presenting, across the board, a wealth of new opportunities (for example audiences; art forms; distribution channels) and questions (such as what to do about intellectual property; investment in technology; censorship). Cultural policy needs to understand how the three spheres of culture work together, and where policy interventions can be most effective. Examples will be given of how the spheres of culture interrelate. It will be suggested that policy interventions will need to take place across a much wider field than traditional cultural policy in order to address the changed circumstances.

Link:

www.demos.uk
www.city.ac.uk/cpm