11 minute read
Parks as Commons
from Making Common Cause
In a forthcoming report, A Blueprint for the Future: Supporting arts and cultural organisations in Northern Ireland to become more financially resilient, Margaret Bolton and I map out a programme of support for small and medium-sized arts organisations in Northern Ireland, that builds on capitalisation work by Creative Trust Working Capital for the Arts39 (Toronto, Canada). If participating organisations manage, through their own efforts, to reduce their deficits or increase their surpluses, the programme will match-fund by investing in their financial capital. Financially fragile organisations find it challenging to survive, never mind thrive and innovate. By strengthening their capital base, the programme will help to give our arts sector the breathing space to fly.
Liam Murphy
In a cultural sector which diverges massively around ownership - or simply ignores it - it is interesting that ‘the commons’ is increasingly in the vanguard of conversation. Before you can share though you have to understand what’s yours and what’s not. My focus in this article is on ‘digital cultural commons’. For simplicity, I’m referring here only to artistic production made, stored, distributed or represented digitally.
The objective of (digital) commoning is that content should be available to all equally - exploitable, but non-exclusive. Starting from a position of giving it all away is not going to lead to a common stock of anything. And neither is centralising ownership. Thinking about cultural products as common resources to build from - extensions of the knowledge-based commons - sends some hard-working artists into a miasmic fit of income loss induced panic. So first a few observations about how much we do and don’t own in terms of intellectual property (IP) and what the opportunities are for our digital commons in particular.
The IP system often claims to respect the ‘rights of authors’ but in fact, little protection or monetisation is possible until the rights we have as authors have been offered up to, usually, a publisher. Twitter, Facebook, Unsplash, etc., like most content management sites, have absolute waivers when it comes to remuneration or control of original work. Basically, they assume all rights and insist that authors relinquish them. Even where Creative Commons licenses are used for sharing (e.g., Flickr), commercial sales are not permitted - though links to websites are. Copyright is arguably a charter for the protection of publishers and owners of rights - rather than for the protection of content creators. But, as creators, we do have power - if we choose to exercise it.
The perception of copyright as a corporate or publishers’ tool for profit also creates a resistance among artists who do not view their original works as appropriate for reproduction, sharing or ‘trade’ worthiness. This reasonable antipathy also bolsters the ‘anti-copyright’ movement, which has found expression in alternative licenses. Not being ‘defined’ by market value alone is important for the arts. At the same
time, it’s clear that cultural creativity cannot be separated from the market. At the nub of it, who can afford not to profit? At some level, the arts are always reliant on the market for their existence. And yet they fail collectively to retain much of the value they create, resulting in centralisation - and globalisation - of resources. The arts have human value, aesthetically, morally and spiritually. They also create monetary value. Re-connecting the two functions is a goal for digital commoning.
‘CultureBanking’ in the UK, is a response to this need for a re-connection of the moral, spiritual and material imperatives for art and culture. It is also a movement to retain IP and re-connect the market with the commons, ‘banking’ our communal digital rights to re-fund cultural activity in localities and grow capital for future cultural investment. There are parallel initiatives bearing the same name around the world, all of which acknowledge that the way we fund local growth in arts and culture is flawed. In the USA Culturebank aims to create “a new paradigm in financing the arts by re-defining returns on investment”. At Culturebank in Sydney40 the model is equally re-distributive but uses crowdfunding methods, more akin to the SOUP model,41 like a modern potlatch42 system. The aim of ‘CultureBanking’ in the UK is to build locally sourced and rooted ‘banks’ of IP in communities which can hold their own in local national and international markets, channelling investment and income back to a real place with real benefits. Currently there are few media or market platforms performing this function. Importantly, it’s not disruptive: By taking control of the assets you create, you’re just saying: “We’re here - these are our terms, take them or leave them”.
Whilst licensing Creative Commons, CopyLeft, General Public Licenses, CopyFarLeft, Human Commons Licenses and user generated ‘culturebanked®’ commercial peer production licenses all represent attempts to revise the licensing of IP assets in order to create some kind of commons of digital ownership, what we need alongside is enabling technology in order to put it to use. The development of smart contracts43 based on distributed digital ledgers such as the Blockchain44 and distributed peer-to-peer initiatives such as Holochain45 are the beginnings of a decentralised approach that can support a more equitable system – offering artists, arts organisations, creative citizens and corporate rights-holders the possibility of ‘holding common ground’.
As Arthur Brock of Holochain puts it: “An equitable economy requires a composable grammar of the commons”. In addition, by developing processes and creating easily adoptable solutions for artists and arts organisations to take a commons-based approach to their IP, we can regenerate commons-based access to markets. As we make these changes, there is undoubtedly an ecosystem to protect. The everyday creative things that people do together, the publicly funded arts and the creative industries are what make up the ‘cultural sector’. Upsetting one may upset the whole ecology. But just because we shouldn’t upset something doesn’t mean it is working well. Indeed the ecosystem of cultural creativity is already upset in a few ways. For example, the Creative Industries Federation (CIF) recently quoted a value on the UK cultural sector of £92 Billion (the amount by which Facebook has grown in a year). If we compare this to Arts Council England’s planned annual budget for 2018-22 of £622 million and imagined a tax relationship between the two, it would show that the private arts and cultural sector is re-financing its public-sector counterpart at a rate of little more than half a percent (excluding gifts, trusts and endowments)! This leaves over 18% of that £92 billion to find to match the contribution expected of all of UK companies in tax (19%). Something in the region of £17 billion annually, therefore, is ‘missing’. Arguably, this is the current size of an annually accruing debt of the cultural ‘sector’ to its cultural ‘commons’.
Some handling of IP by the BBC also illustrates the extent to which there is, as yet, any substantial move towards supporting cultural commons for creators. Consider, for example, ‘The Voice’, which has broadly followed precisely the same format as purely commercial channels and sold out it’s right to ITV in 2015. A good indication of a ‘commons-led approach’ is whether or not ‘contestants’ create, own and disseminate their own intellectual property. Universally, in these shows, they do not. The IP remains with the show - not the acts - despite the ‘public broadcasting’ remit. A commons-led challenge to the BBC (and other cultural producers) is to commission programmes which add peer production licences. In this way, the BBC would be helping to create a genuinely diverse cultural economy of new, accessible work, and empowering artists creatively and materially.
Empowering culturally creative people to control their assets and re-financing the infrastructure that helped produce them is the cultural commons which many are looking for. What the commons has too little of are payment gateways to enable this two way relationship between civic roles and voluntary action (production) to happen. By hypothecating the financing of local creative economies using smart contracts and peer-to-peer micropayments to create a digital commons, we can encourage fairer ‘ownership’ and participation in cultural life. And the problems of ‘grass roots’ co-production, local collaboration and inter-sectoral working begin to look more like opportunities too.
What Does Cultural Democracy Mean?
Robert Livingstone
I believe passionately in the principles of Our Cultural Commons. Many disciplines - archaeology, anthropology, neurology, evolutionary psychology - combine to demonstrate how vital culture has been to our evolution as a species, to our personal sense of identity, and to our ability to act communally for the greater good. But, though culture is something shared by every community on the planet, in the West it is only in the last two centuries that we have seen a true democratisation of culture, making it possible for anyone, regardless of background, to share in experiences that were previously the exclusive provinces of the aristocracy and the church. This is a phenomenon so recent that artforms like opera, poetry, visual arts, even theatre, can still face challenges of being elitist, and therefore irrelevant to the wider population. Unfortunately, such views only lend weight to what I consider to be a sustained and damaging erosion of the concept of cultural democracy, an erosion that is fuelled by some of the same negative forces that are undermining our wider concepts of political democracy.
But what does ‘cultural democracy’ mean?46 For me, it is about being able to watch a new movie release, screened to the highest standards, on one of Orkney’s sparsely populated Outer Isles, in the Screen Machine mobile cinema (which I manage), thanks to support from local community development companies. Or enjoying a pianist of world-class ability playing in a community centre in Nairn, thanks to funding from Enterprise Music Scotland for a local voluntary promoting group. Or it means hearing, one recent New Year’s Day, a unique combination of traditional Gaelic singing and beat-boxing, in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, thanks to the Atlas team, supported by Creative Scotland, and their work with the creative community on Skye.
Those three examples are all illustrations of the fertile interaction between communities and the professional arts which are made possible by public funding. My life, like the lives of hundreds of thousands of others, has been enriched immeasurably by the cultural activities made possible by direct or indirect government funding. From my primary school days, when my class used to be taken across Glasgow every fortnight to the wonderful palace that is Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum to be thrilled by films, lectures and the chance to actually try on a suit of armour, through my entire professional life of more than forty years, I have been unendingly grateful for what public funding of the arts has made possible in Scotland. And I have had the pleasure of helping to disseminate the beneficial effects of that funding to many different parts of the country and in particular to rural communities across the Highlands and Islands.
In 2015 I was commissioned by Voluntary Arts Scotland to undertake an audit of community/voluntary arts in Perth and Kinross. What this fascinating exercise led me to understand is just how intricate the cultural ecology is. The publicly-funded and the voluntary, the amateur and the professional - these are not distinct and separate ‘sectors’. They are inextricably linked and interdependent. Weaken any one and the whole ecology is under threat.
Yet that is just what has been happening over the last decade. The steady erosion of public funding for the arts has put the health of our cultural democracy at risk. Much of this has been so gradual that, like frogs in a pot, we’ve not noticed the temperature until it’s come close to boiling. Consider visual art exhibitions, for a start. Ten years ago, the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh used to mount eight exhibitions a year. Now it’s four. Across the road, in the Council-run City Art Centre, whole floors lie empty for months at a time. Over in Glasgow, the Museum of Modern Art, GOMA, has individual exhibitions - some of very minority interest - that are running for a year or more.
There’s a similar picture in the performing arts. What used to be ‘producing’ theatres are often reduced to a heavy reliance on intermittent touring product, and may sit dark for several days at a time. In the late 90s I helped to set up the Promoters Arts Network in the Highlands and Islands, now the Touring Network. At that time, much of the touring product was exciting and imaginative theatre from companies based in the Highlands, in the rest of Scotland, and in England. Now local promoters’ programmes are dominated by music, and usually at the less demanding end of the spectrum.
It’s understandable that these diminutions have crept up on us cumulatively. It takes outright closure - as with the Inverleith House Gallery in Edinburgh - to get people exercised and the media interested. But it would be salutary and, I imagine, depressing to take a snapshot of the funded arts sector 20 years ago, and compare it with the current situation, thereby making visible just what has been lost.
I would argue that the situation is most acute and yet also least visible in many
