Everyday creativity and cultural policy

A considerable amount of attention has recently been paid – in academia, policy and the arts sector in the United Kingdom – to the idea of ‘everyday creativity’, yet the significance of everyday creativity for cultural policy has not been explored beyond a preliminary overview. Prompted by the question of how policymakers might engage with everyday creativity while retaining integrity and coherence, this article integrates theory and practice into a discussion of everyday creativity’s ‘policy interface’. We propose a twofold framework of everyday creativity as a phenomenon (something people voluntarily experience) before proceeding to discuss everyday creativity as a policy construct (something people are structurally encouraged to experience). We review the established scholarly literature on everyday creativity, alongside the recent efforts to identify policy incentives for organisations such as Arts Council England to support everyday creativity. In seeking to make sense of these developments by placing them in the broader theoretical framing of ‘everyday life’, we consider the wider historical, structural and ideological reasons as to why everyday creativity may be attractive to some political formations. We thereby offer a discussion of both everyday creativity in Arts Council England policy, and an attempt to critique the concept from a theoretical perspective. We suggest that everyday creativity remains ill-defined in research and incongruous as a policy construct and that this may be a source of its strength in resisting institutionalisation and operationalisation in cultural policymaking. We conclude by suggesting that recent interest in everyday creativity may prompt pragmatic policy suggestions about how existing cultural assets are used, and whether they could be better employed to support a wider array of activities. Crucially, we note the potential to move the discourse of cultural policy forward, beyond the repetitive and entrenched dichotomies of lived and objectified culture, and thereby bringing about a much-needed realisation that the institutionalised forms of culture and the ‘ordinary’ are inter-connected.