Content area
Full text
Public Servants - Art and the Crisis of the Common Good eds Johanna Burton, Shannon Jackson and Dominic Willsdon, MIT Press, 2016, 544pp, ?37.95, 978 0 262034 81 4.
In both the US and the UK, attacks on state funding of the arts have most often been interpreted by progressives as a backlash waged by the right against gains in visibility made by minorities and associated social movements. With their hands on public finances, the GOP and the Tory party see the cutting of funding for the arts as a relatively uncontroversial way of weakening the soft power of their opponents. This is, however, only part of the story. The withdrawal of financial support for culture and the arts must also be considered within a wider field of social restructuring where it takes its place alongside higher education, health and social services; a restructuring that demands of these sectors new narratives of legitimation. In the UK these narratives are generated, in the case of higher education, via the Research and Teaching Excellence Frameworks and, in healthcare, via patient referral and discharge targets. The very weakness of the public sphere means that such developments go relatively unchallenged.
As George Yudice has written, over the past two decades...