How Might Aesthetic Experience Help us Diversify Cultural Value?

Here's a response to the Cultural Value workshop by our other guest blogger, Ana Baeza Ruiz. Thanks to Ana for her feedback from the day. 

As a collaborative doctoral student with the National Gallery (NG), I am often hit by a sense of stubborn resilience whenever I step into its cavernous galleries, still installed in pre-WIFI days (soon to be over!) and evocative of an unchanging display ethos. Perhaps for that reason one of the things that struck me the most in our workshop was the malleability of the Museum of Liverpool, as explained by its director David Fleming. However fascinating (and I have no doubt blogs by other colleagues will treat these subjects), I will not delve into questions about its advocacy for social justice or the thematic complexities that underscore recent projects such as House of Memories, the Unstraight Museum conference or the David Hockney show in the Walker Art Gallery. Rather, I admit to having been troubled when I caught the glimmer of a problem that was only too briefly discussed, namely that art galleries (and particularly national collections) have fewer prerogatives to accommodate transgressive curatorial gestures such as Fleming’s. This was partly attributed to the fact that they must meet the demands of an infinitely wider, indeed global audience, and are thus unable to appeal to and exploit local sensitivities.

In this way and by comparison to social history museums, the arts are perceived to be insufficient in their own right and must be displaced to justify their existence. To avoid rehearsing the well-trodden argument of instrumentalism as a proxy for cultural value, I am more interested in asking how might it be possible, in the context of art galleries and especially those like the NG, to articulate cultural values that engage with the aesthetic without falling into either a utilitarian agenda or a universalist and monolithic form of aesthetic consumption.

This has called to mind the awake and defiant mind of one community officer in a gallery in Leeds, Jude Woods, whose relentless endeavours to re-define art appreciation (a very contested term no doubt) is accruing enormous support from local organisations. Her greatest merit, and from which all of us can learn starting with the NG, passes through a grassroots and socially embedded programme to diversify aesthetic experience and in the process prompt debate and exchange across various communities. By inviting participants usually under-represented in the context of the art gallery to become tour guides and directly feed into initiatives in the gallery, the project is breaking the shackles that have kept art history fastened to its usual suspects. As art’s cultural value becomes split its provisional nature is highlighted: rather than instrumentalization of art, what we have is a reorganization of aesthetic experience based on the recognition that all of us can, in our individual ways, engage with an artwork in our own right, and not for art’s sake.