We should not just run down the road marked “evidence base” but should also make an argument base for the arts, one which is convincing independent of any measurable social goods. ACE’s chair Sir Peter Bazalgette points towards something like this when he looks to “articulate a new language of cultural value that will help all of us to understand better the essential contribution that the arts make to our lives.” He is right, and that new language is not the old bureaucratic language of economic and social impacts.
Blog post for Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield where I am Philosopher in Residence