'It's just culture!' The Implications for Cultural Policy and Arts Management of Everyday Creativity

A considerable amount of attention has recently been paid – in both academia and the arts sector – to the idea of everyday creativity (Wright, 2022; Villnova and Cunha, 2020; Mansfield et al, 2022). Much like cultural democracy, care and wellbeing, the term has an intuitive appeal and is simultaneously innocuous and banal. What has become clear is that ‘everyday creatives’ have become a new target market for policymakers and funders because, as a recent article from The Audience Agency (2023) notes: “The demographic diversity of ‘everyday creatives’ changes across all these areas [from visual arts and craft, performance, music and film-making, movement, writing, to gardening, cooking, creative gaming, reading, make-up, and scavenger-hunts, with new ones emerging all the time]”. Reckwitz (2017) articulates how creativity has now become a universal model for culture and an imperative in many parts of society. In articulating the normalisation of the self as resource, he echoes the disintermediation of the professional artist/arts organisation within cultural democracy (Matarasso, 2019). Part of the concern here is the sense of the public sector legacies of the new managerialism being introduced to another area of cultural consumption, though this time one which might rightly be regarded as private, in opposition to the largely public formats and venues of arts attendance. As a response to these trends, this paper examines a specific facet of the discourse on everyday creativity: how does an organisation like Arts Council England (ACE) engage in processes of everyday creativity whilst retaining conceptual integrity and coherence as a policymaker and development agency for the arts? This question will be considered by reviewing recent work produced by ACE (64millionartists, 2016; ACE, 2020), academics and sector bodies which seeks to elucidate both a working definition of everyday creativity and a policy mechanism by which ACE might be seen to meaningfully engage in the developing discourse. The paper argues that finding a policy framework which enables resource and skills-sharing whilst avoiding any tendency toward activity appropriation or value/financial extraction will be key for any funder wishing to incorporate everyday creativity within their policy orbit.

References
64millionartists (2016) Everyday Creativity. https://www.docdroid.net/9HEVtmk/everyday-creativity-pdf

Arts Council England (2020) Let’s Create https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/lets-create

Mansfield, L., Daykin, N., Golding, A. & Ewbank, N. (2022) Understanding everyday creativity: a framework drawn from a qualitative evidence review of home-based arts, ANNALS OF LEISURE RESEARCH https://doi.org/10.1080/11745398.2022.2089183

Matarasso, F. (2019) A Restless Art: How participation won, and why it matters, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

Reckwitz, A, (2017) The Invention of Creativity: Modern Society and the Culture of the New, Polity.

The Audience Agency (2023) Everyday creativity - for everyone? https://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/article/everyday-creativity-everyone


Villanova, Ana Luisa Ilha and Miguel Pina e Cunha (2020) Everyday Creativity: A Systematic Literature Review, The Journal of Creative Behavior 55(1).

Wright, J. (2022) Research Digest: Everyday Creativity. Version 1, May 2022. Leeds: Centre
for Cultural Value.