‘The instrumentalisation of our arts and culture reduces our culture to money – to economic outcomes, cost benefit analyses, jobs created by the “creative industries” (Adorno turns in his grave), etc.; and to numbers – people and places are counted and analysed, their individuality, their cultural differences, their collective identities, their very humanity turned into dots and lines on graphs and pins and coloured segments on maps.’

Taken from the blog: ART, ACTIVISM & POLITICS IN THE PLACE WHERE WE LIVE by Dr Stephen Pritchard

http://colouringinculture.org/blog/inmybeginningismyend - for full article

This is culture-by-numbers. A dot-to-dot culture. A culture of imposed uniformity, categorisation, stereotyping and exclusion. A new system that meets the insatiable demands of neoliberalism based upon an old system of elitism, power, wealth, property, manipulation, and control.

Instrumentalism reproduces and reinforces our subjugation, our suppression, our exploitation, our oppression. When our arts and our cultures are instrumentalised (both directly and indirectly) by governments and government agencies (central and local alike), corporations, NGOs, and other third sector organisations alike, as they clearly are today, they become vehicles for “outcomes” which are inherently political and economic in nature. “ (Pritchard, 2018)