Privatizing the public: Three rhetorics of art’s public good in ‘Third Way’ cultural policy

This article considers the development of cultural policy as part of New Labour’s Third Way governance and identifies three rhetorics of state-funded art: art as a form of cultural democracy; art as an economic driver; and art providing solutions for social amelioration. The text describes how the liberal conception of art and culture, i.e., having universal benefit as a public good, was extended to function within wider policy directives that were ultimately aimed at driving Third Way conceptions of public good. It provides a critique of the positivist claims for state-funded art as producing social transformation and instead points to how art commissioned as part of culture-led regeneration was instrumental and complicit with an agenda of privatization and marketization. It suggests that this has had negative consequences for democracy.