There’s a quiet but growing unease across the Western cultural sector internationally. It’s not the usual concern about funding cycles or audience numbers, but something more fundamental – a sense that the model itself may no longer fit the world it operates in.
Recent thinking from the UK, Canada and US sharpens that unease into something harder to ignore. What’s striking is not that these perspectives align neatly – they don’t – but that, taken together, they point to a deeper structural tension that no single strategy seems able to resolve.
What insights might these views provide about the future of the Australian cultural sector?
Cultural sector strategies – quick links
London calling: updating the arts sector’s operating system
David Reece, a cultural strategist writing from UK consultancy firm Baker Richards, takes perhaps the most uncompromising position. He challenges the sector’s ongoing obsession with ‘relevance’, suggesting the question itself is flawed. As he puts it, ‘what if it’s not about relevance at all, but about form – the operating system itself?’
It’s a blunt reframing.
Rather than seeing declining or uneven engagement as a failure of strategy – something to be solved through better audience data, sharper programming or more targeted pricing – Reece argues that the issue sits deeper. Cultural institutions, he suggests, are still operating according to logics developed in a fundamentally different era: one defined by scarcity, where access to culture was limited, authority was concentrated and institutions sat at the centre of cultural life.
That world has shifted. Dramatically.
We now operate in a landscape of cultural abundance – of content, of participation and of alternative platforms for meaning-making (if not direct investment). Yet many institutions continue to move at a different tempo, governed by inherited structures that assume a kind of centrality that no longer exists. The result is not just inefficiency, but misalignment.
In that environment, the persistent widening of engagement gaps – even as overall participation grows in a UK context – becomes less surprising. As Reece notes, ‘more effort, more resource, wider gap. At some point optimisation stops being the answer and starts being the question.’ As such, the issue appears structural.
Oh Canada: avoiding risk aversion
From Canada, Alex Sarian, in his book The Audacity of Relevance, a manifesto of sorts on the state of the non-profit arts sector, arrives at a similar sense of dissatisfaction albeit seen through a different lens.
For Sarian, the issue is not primarily structural but behavioural. He is less interested in the architecture of institutions than in how they are being led – and what he sees, broadly, is a failure of nerve.
In Sarian’s framing, the sector has become overly cautious, overly deferential and overly concerned with justification. In trying to demonstrate value – socially, economically, politically – organisations risk smoothing out the very qualities that make the arts distinctive in the first place.
His provocation is direct: relevance is not something that can be engineered through incremental improvement. It is something that is claimed – through clarity, conviction and a willingness to take risks.
Or, more pointedly, the problem may not be that institutions can’t be relevant, but that they are too reluctant to make the kinds of choices that relevance demands.
A US state of mind: eroding trust
Then, from the United States, where the sector is being destabilised by the way government is increasingly intervening in cultural life, Lisa Richards Toney, President and CEO of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals shifts the frame again – and in doing so, arguably gets closer to the underlying condition both Reece and Sarian are circling.
Her focus is trust.
In her recent writing, Toney describes the arts not as a sector to be defended or a product to be optimised, but as a form of civic infrastructure – something that enables shared experience, holds complexity and contributes to the health of democratic life. But this role, she argues, is contingent. It depends on a set of relationships that cannot be assumed.
‘Trust is the work,’ she writes. And it is work that is becoming harder.
When institutions over-manage, over-explain or attempt to control the terms of engagement – whether in response to political pressure, funding requirements or internal risk aversion – they begin to erode that trust. What remains may still be competent, even well-attended, but it loses something more fundamental: its capacity to resonate, to challenge, to matter.
In that sense, what Reece describes as structural misalignment, and what Sarian frames as a lack of courage, Toney recasts as a breakdown in the conditions that make cultural exchange meaningful in the first place.
Placed side by side, these perspectives don’t resolve into a single answer. Instead, they form a kind of triangulation.
Reece points to systems that no longer fit their context.
Sarian calls out leadership that has become too cautious within those systems.
Toney asks whether, as a result, the public still trusts what those systems produce.
Together, they suggest a feedback loop that is difficult to interrupt.
Outdated structures constrain behaviour.
Constrained behaviour reinforces caution.
Caution erodes trust. And diminished trust, in turn, drives further attempts at control, optimisation and justification.
Great Southern Land: rethinking the model
In Australia, these dynamics feel uncomfortably familiar.
The cultural ecology here is, in many ways, highly institutionalised – shaped by public funding frameworks, policy alignment and governance models that prioritise accountability, compliance and stability. These are not inherently problematic; indeed, they have enabled a relatively robust and distributed sector.
But they also produce predictable effects.
Risk is carefully managed.
Programming decisions are often shaped as much by compliance as by conviction. Value is necessarily articulated in terms that align with government priorities such as social cohesion, wellbeing and economic impact.
All of which makes sense. And all of which, taken together, potentially narrows the space for uncertainty and the kind of exploratory exchange that makes us look up.
ArtsHub: Building a new National Cultural Policy – Burke talks to ArtsHub
At the same time, participation patterns remain stubbornly uneven. Engagement continues to correlate strongly with education, geography and socio-economic status – despite sustained efforts to improve access. This mirrors the patterns Reece identifies in the UK, and raises similar questions about whether the issue is not simply who is invited in, but how the invitation is structured.
Alongside this, there is a growing visibility of cultural activity happening outside formal institutions: community-led practice, digitally native forms, informal and incidental participation. These are not marginal; they are central to the ways many people now experience culture, and to meeting people where they are.
Similarly, the wholesale renaming of ‘arts and culture’ to creative industries, while welcome in its inclusivity (and contribution to GDP), comes at a cost to the very essence of art, akin to reducing ‘love’ to the ‘relationship economy’.
Which brings Toney’s point into sharper focus.
If trust is shifting – not disappearing, but relocating – then the question is not how institutions can regain their former position but how they locate themselves within a broader, more complex ecosystem. And more broadly, how the sector at large might need to reposition itself in the minds of government, private and corporate investors and particularly the general public, to appropriately influence policy in ways that affect more than just the sustainability of the sector.
So where does this leave us?
Not with a clear solution.
Reece’s call for structural change is compelling but difficult to enact within existing constraints. Sarian’s emphasis on courage is necessary but insufficient, particularly in an Australian context, if the consequences of risk mitigation remain dominant. Toney’s insistence on trust is foundational but rebuilding it requires shifts that are both systemic and behavioural.
What these perspectives do offer, collectively, is a more honest framing of the challenge.
Not as a problem of relevance to be solved through better strategy. But as a question of alignment – between institutions, their operating models and the world they now inhabit.
Or, put more simply: not how to make the current model work better, but whether it is still the right model at all.
That is a more difficult question. But it may also be the only one worth asking as we breach the next wave of cultural consultation.
