In this episode, François Matarasso argues that “The values and practices of contemporary European culture are still defined by ideas that emerged during the Enlightenment, and the period of industrialisation and imperialism with which it is associated. There are older influences, of course: opera emerged in Renaissance Italy, which itself took inspiration from the Classical past. But it is the Enlightenment’s invention of the Fine Arts that implicitly (and carelessly) relegated most human culture to a subordinate position as the ‘not-fine arts’, defined by adjectives such as amateur, traditional, folk or popular arts, as well as new concepts like craft and entertainment.”
He discusses the alternative views of community based arts and concludes that “ to judge from Arts Council England’s strategy document, neither tradition seems to be properly understood by those making cultural policy. Nor do they have an alternative political theory to offer. We are left with no more than good intentions in the place of the democratically accountable exercise of power.”
François Matarasso originally wrote the essay from which this episode springs in 2021 as part of ‘Opera Co-creation and performance’ for the Traction Project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. It was published on the Traction website in May 2021. This version was published on 5 August 2022 on ParliamentofDreams.com under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence.

On months that have a fifth Friday we break from our normal schedule and produce something else related in one way or another to cultural democracy. In 2022 we delve into radio archives to bring back some historical examples of serials and comedies that let us hear unfiltered aspects of the world as it seemed to our grandparents.
In this episode we go back to June 21, 1950 to listen to episode 15 of the science fiction series Two Thousand Plus. The series aired over the Mutual network from the spring of 1950 until very early in 1952. Nearly 100 30-minute episodes were produced although fewer than 20 survive as recordings.
These stories reflect the times in which they were written, and they provide a glimpse of the way mainstream media in the middle of the twentieth century viewed what they regarded as the future, and we regard as the present. Their version of the future reflects all the assumptions, biases, and prejudices of conventional nineteen fifties thinking. As such it offers us a way of understanding how we got here, and the baggage we brought with us.

A Common Practice episode.
In this episode we delve into the ever-expanding Miaaw archives to catch Sophie Hope in June 2019, talking with Sally Labern, an artist and activist living and working in north London.
They have a long and detailed discussion about the specificities of cultural organising.
They both live in the London Borough of Walthamstow, and they have both worked locally - separately and together - and they reflect on the processes they have used, the people they have encountered, the way alliances, collectives and friendships form, the problems they have encountered and the struggles they have had, and what they have learned from their work.

Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with David Ramy and Bruno Homem of SAMP in Portugal about co-creating original opera with incarcerated youth.
This episode focuses on one of three projects that are part of Traction, “opera co-creation for social transformation.” David Ramy and Bruno Homem work with SAMP, The Sociedade Artística Musical dos Pousos, an independent music school in Leiria, central Portugal. They tell us how they worked with young inmates, their families, the cutting-edge technology of the Co-Creation Stage, and a great range of artistic collaborators to make a powerful new community opera, and what may come from it.

This episode concludes a four-part series within a series. This began in Episode 16 of A Genuine Inquiry when Owen Kelly inquired into a key question that has hovered over every one of our podcasts: what might we mean when we talk about cultural democracy? Why might people need the term, and what can they do with it? He drew upon the work of Rachel Davis DuBois to suggest that cultural democracy forms one part of a triad that includes economic and political democracy.
In Episode 17 he looked at how culture and community relate to each other, In Episode 18 he looked at how culture and economics relate to each other, and spoke about the need for rethinking the idea of universal basic income.
In this episode he looks at some aspects of the relationships between cultural democracy and politics: the problems that occur when “politician” becomes a career choice; about alternatives including those proposed by the Guild Socialists; and about the democratic need to reinstate the importance of the local. He finishes by looking into the importance of the idea of a “democracy of species” that moves culture away from the Western idea of “Man vs Nature” and towards a cultural democracy that grows from the earth.
You will find a reading list and a set of useful links for this essay on the page for this podcast at miaaw.net.

In this episode François Matarasso asks “Why is our childhood not a good guide to our children’s?” He notes that, growing up in the 1960s, he had only ”two television channels, offering just an hour or two of
children’s programmes a day, our window on the world was small and closely controlled. And the future seemed equally straightforward: there were jobs and professions to choose from and you could picture yourself living a life much like that of your parents, only better”.
He argues that for the children of the 2020s this picture no longer holds. He then looks at what children gain from the arts and the ways in which politicians have contrived to limit this access and the amount of stimulation it can provide. He ends with a plea for increased involvement, but on children’s own terms.

According to their website, the Antwerp-based group “wpZimmer is an international workspace for the arts, with a focus on performance, dance and hybrid artistic practices. The organisation revolves around the needs of the artists, their desire to research or create and the development of their skills and practices”.
They “believe that shared governance addresses the systemic questions dominating our society. It’s looking for a new sustainable way to be together and to become inclusive. It’s an act of listening and sensing, rather than a process of claiming. We’re not there yet. It’s evolving and unfinished by nature… Rethinking the way we live and work together is a collective practice, shared between artists, institutions and others. We gather around the question what can we do together that we can not do alone? Can the power of collective action move mountains?”
In this episode Owen Kelly talks to two members of the collective, Helga Baert and Dušica Dražić, about wpZimmer and the project Topoi 2022, which they have both co-curated and runs throughout June.

How and why should we evaluate community-based arts projects? In this episode, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso offer their own answers and explore many of the ways current practice misses the mark.
They ask what has gone wrong with “best practices?” What role does risk aversion play in funding? They look at how nonprofit funding has become distorted by corporate models; the underlying class biases that shape funding; and how these problems are structural, affecting the sector regardless of how conscientious and well-intentioned the individuals running programs may be.
Arlene and François don’t always agree and you may disagree with both of them!