Infrastructure or industry: re-performing cultural statistics and the foundational economy

For the arts and culture to be regarded as components of overlooked, everyday and providential foundational economy we need to address the obstacle of how they are currently seen by policy. This paper explores how evidence-based policymaking (EBPM) uses statistical data analysis to narrate its understanding of cultural activity and appraise the policy interventions designed to enhance its value to society and to economy. Within dominant UK and Australian policy discourse, data are privileged where they can provide evidence of agglomeration of arts and cultural activities, taken as an indication of the benefits for their localities, known as ‘spillovers’ and ‘positive externalities’ and accompanied by metrics for economic output and productivity. Such measures comply with government frameworks for understanding the returns of public investment; however, we argue that the prioritisation of transactional and extractive properties of economies undermines how we might understand art and culture as infrastructure which is generative and foundational to everyday life and wellbeing. To test this and explore the possibilities for change, we use the idea of re-performance (Oman 2020; 2021) and perform a re-analysis of existing employment data organised by standard industrial classifications to look under the bonnet of these statistical lenses. The paper examines the implications of this exercise for creating heuristic empirics (Calafati & Froud, 2023) that move away from the constraints of orthodox economics which currently dominate cultural policy.