Rethinking cultural

capital and community-

based arts
Rimi Khan
University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract
This article examines the contemporary field of Australian community-based
arts in light of Bourdieus work on cultural capital. It considers how questions
of ethnicity have complicated the field of community-based arts and informed
the experience of artists and participants. These questions have implications
for what it is that these organisations seek to do; specifically, the sorts of
capital they impart to participants in their programs, and what the significance
of such capital is. Articulating a critical notion of cultural capital and one that
can accommodate the knowledges and competences that are relevant to the
contemporary Australian context can contribute to a more nuanced
understanding of the role such arts organisations have in redefining or
contesting the hierarchies of value that inform the art field.
Keywords: community-based arts, cultural capital, cultural value,
mainstream, multicultural arts

This article examines the contemporary field of Australian community-

based arts in light of Bourdieus work on cultural capital. It emerges from
a dissatisfaction with prevailing descriptions of community-based arts,
which are unable to account for the sorts competences that participation in
such activity might cultivate, and the role of such competences in shifting
hierarchies of value within the art field. I want to consider how questions
of ethnicity have complicated the field of community-based arts and
informed the experience of artists and participants. These questions have
implications for what it is that these organisations seek to do; specifically,
the sorts of capital they impart to participants in their programs, and what
the significance of such capital is. I draw from research I have undertaken

Journal of Sociology 2013 The Australian Sociological Association, Volume 49(2-3): 357372
DOI:10.1177/1440783313481745 www.sagepublications.com
358 Journal of Sociology 49(2-3)

with staff and artists at Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV), an organisation

based in Melbourne, Australia which is concerned with reflecting cultural
diversity in a range of forms of artistic activity. The experiences of one artist
in particular, reveal the sorts of knowledges required for him to participate
in the mainstream (as opposed to multicultural or community-based) art
field. This raises the issue of what the role of a community-based arts
organisation might be and how such an organisation should position itself
in relation to this perceived mainstream.
I begin this article by situating MAV within the broader history of
community-based arts, and the emergence of multicultural arts as a
distinct policy category. It is because this sphere of arts patronage has been
defined in terms of its relative marginality that MAV seeks to demonstrate
the value of its artists and programs to mainstream funders, venues and
audiences. I go on to look more closely at the experience of one artist. His
involvement with MAV encourages him to develop an identity as an artist,
but also equips him with the ability to navigate arts funding norms and
mobilise official knowledges to access relevant opportunities. These
knowledges and competences are not aesthetic dispositions and may not
qualify as cultural capital in Bourdieus sense. But thinking about these
capacities in the framework of Bourdieus thought provides a clearer sense
of how the work of a community-based or multicultural arts organisation
might work to shift the structures of value that inform the art field.
In recent years, a number of arts organisations have addressed the
question of ethnicity by attempting to demonstrate the excellence,
professionalism or mainstream currency of the work of their culturally
diverse artists. I consider this agenda to mainstream multicultural arts and
argue that the notion of an artistic mainstream, defined by a dominant
hierarchy of artistic value, is difficult to maintain in the current institutional
context. However, the distinctly aspirational orientation of these arts
organisations means that their potentially exclusionary effects should be
noted. I conclude by looking briefly at how cultural capital has been
deployed within analyses of community-based arts. I suggest that there is a
tendency to characterise cultural capital as a communal and static property,
overlooking its relational quality and Bourdieus critical agenda. This is
especially the case given recent policy interest in cultural measurement, and
such developments highlight the continuing importance of maintaining this
critical notion of cultural capital.

On the margins? Situating Multicultural

Arts Victoria
While the parameters of the term community-based arts are difficult to
define with any precision, I use it to refer to a range of artistic practices,
events, texts and cultural economies that, in Australia at least, have
 Khan: Rethinking cultural capital and community-based arts 359

historically been made possible by official cultural policies seeking to

democratise the arts field. They constitute an effort to contest the elitist
politics associated with the art world by bringing the arts out of exclusionary
spaces and within reach of the community. This has largely involved
supporting artistic practice that privileges process over product; where
the artistic outcome or text is less important than the kinds of personal and
interpersonal development cultivated through participation in this activity.
Such participation is seen to have transformative effects; community-based
arts programs are asked to do a range of things, including address social
exclusion, build community capacity, increase personal wellbeing,
revitalise public space and contribute to a creative economy (Adams and
Goldbard, 2002; Barraket and Kaiser, 2007; Landry et al., 1993; Matarasso,
1997; Mills and Brown, 2004; Williams, 1996). This terminology draws
from broader cultural policy rhetoric that seeks to define, and account for,
the value of cultural participation and consumption. These policy imperatives
have also led to an increasing push for the measurement of these outcomes,
the implications of which I will return briefly to below.
Community-based arts might also be defined as a field of cultural
activity, in Bourdieus sense. In Bourdieus work, a field is made up of
players with various interests which are relative and changing. The relations
between these actors set the terms on which community-based arts activity
takes place, defining the value that these arts programs are perceived to
have. These relations may involve, for example, the varying interests of arts
administrators, artists, policy-makers and community arts participants, all
competing for resources or prestige. In the community-based arts sector, this
may translate to being awarded funding or recognition, but it may also
relate to the perceived credibility of an arts project which engages
successfully with community members, or has significant social impact.
Importantly, according to Bourdieu (1993: 30), the relations which define
the cultural field are continually shifting; it is a field of forces or a field of
struggles. Recent shifts and redefinitions that have taken place in the field
of community-based arts might be understood as a result of these changing
dynamics. The case study I draw from in this article exemplifies these
shifting relations, particularly the way that the strategies used by MAV to
respond to cultural difference involve aligning the organisation with the
mainstream or professional art world.
In order to understand these redefinitions it is worth tracing a very brief
history of community-based arts and situating MAV within this history. In
Australia, community arts movements increased in prominence in the
1970s, and were primarily aimed at bringing arts to the working classes.
The community arts sector was primarily constituted by the Community
Arts Program of the Australia Council, the countrys peak federal arts
funding body, in 1973. The sector has been subjected to a number of
institutional shifts in subsequent decades, largely as a result of changing
360 Journal of Sociology 49(2-3)

policy agendas and funding priorities defined by the Australia Council. For
example, the community arts sector was redefined by the Australia Council
as community cultural development in 1987. The Community Cultural
Development Board was then dissolved and replaced by the Community
Partnerships Program in 2005. I use the term community-based arts here
in order to capture the organisations and activities that exist outside of the
official frameworks that have historically circumscribed community arts in
Australia, or which do not define their activity as community art.
Since the mid 1970s, the issue of ethnicity has complicated the field of
community-based art. Multicultural or ethnic arts,1 as far as they were
promoted and supported by government, came under the broad rubric of
community arts. As Hawkins (1993: 31) has pointed out, the community
in community arts became a convenient category with which to group
constituencies, such as ethnic minorities, that were otherwise marginalised
by the arts establishment. This resulted in a more pluralist understanding
of government arts funding reflected in the Australia Council since the
early 1980s, and which today is most explicitly articulated in the councils
Arts for a Multicultural Australia policy (Gibson, 2001: 112). In this
respect, the history of what is known in Australia as multicultural arts is
tied up with the field of community-based arts.
However, this affiliation with community art has raised problems for
arts organisations and advocates focused on cultural diversity. MAV, for
example, does not define itself as a community arts organisation but began
as an annual festival for local ethnic communities in inner-city Melbourne
in the early 1970s. These festivals involved showcasing the folkloric
cultural activity of these ethnic communities to the broader public, with an
emphasis on traditional forms of ethnic song, dance and costume. While
the multicultural festival is now a familiar genre in Australian public
spaces, participants who were involved in these early years recall what they
considered to be the novelty of the event at the time.2 The festival grew in
size and profile and in 1983 the organisation was incorporated into MAV.
Similar organisations also emerged in other Australian states during this
period3 and it is in this way that the question of ethnicity became formalised
and institutionalised within the government-funded arts sector in Australia.
Today, MAV operates more like an advocacy organisation for
multicultural arts. It is responsible for an array of festivals, events, training
and cultural development programs, as well as advocacy services for
multicultural artists and communities in Melbourne. The agency does not
define what is meant by multicultural arts or the sorts of criteria that
determine inclusion and exclusion from the organisations sphere of
responsibility. At a policy level it is unclear whether multicultural refers to
the biography of the artist, the text (the themes or form of the artwork) or
the context of reception (the audience).4 Unofficially, however, MAV is
concerned primarily with artists of non-Anglo Australian background.
 Khan: Rethinking cultural capital and community-based arts 361

MAV mentors these artists to help them navigate the arts funding system,
provides them with various forms of training, as well as access to a range
of exhibition and promotional opportunities.
Importantly, the rationale for these services emerges from the perceived
marginality of multicultural arts and artists. Services are provided in order
to situate these artists on equal terms with the professional or mainstream
art world. This agenda has long informed the self-definition of community-
based arts; as Hawkins (1993: 32) argues in her history of the sector, the
notion of community invoked marginality and disadvantage, which was
situated in opposition to an arts establishment. However, the very desire
on the part of these arts movements for inclusion in dominant systems of
arts patronage has been argued by some to reinforce community-based arts
position on the margins. Justin Lewis, for example, suggests that Far from
challenging or storming the citadels, it has remained a harmless and
irrelevant skirmishing on the sidelines (1990: 113). This marginal
positioning has created considerable tensions in the field of multicultural
arts. As a number of critics have written, there has long been a concern that
the sectors association with community art characterises it as amateur
art, and highlights its marginality (Blonski, 1994; Grostal and Harrison,
1994; Papastergiadis et al., 1994). Bilmoria writes that there has long been
a concern among agencies promoting multicultural art that it is perceived
by others to be for ethnic community consumption only and not necessarily
engaged in the achievement of excellence or high professional quality on
a par with parallel mainstream arts (1994: 120).
This notion of the mainstream has thus been central in defining the
agenda of agencies involved in producing and promoting multicultural
arts. Certainly, this desire to make multicultural arts more mainstream
continues to be an important objective for MAV. In my interviews with
MAVs executive officer Jill Morgan, she reiterated this effort to move away
from the previous undervaluing of multicultural arts, where its worthiness
is emphasised over the quality of the art itself. For her, the mainstreaming
of multicultural art means that it carries the same sort of symbolic value
and perceptions of quality as other art forms and arts activity.
Weve changed from the victim mentality to being proactive, and saying we are
fantastic and we are professional, instead of that welfare mentality of we
deserve this. And thats why working with flagship organisations such as the
Arts Centre5 and ABC Radio National6 is absolutely critical. I think its about
diversifying the mainstream. We are mainstream but were diversifying the
mainstream.
For MAV, being acknowledged as an equal participant in these artistic
arenas has involved a deliberate strategy of highlighting the professionalism
of the organisations artists as well as its appeal to a broad art-going public,
rather than niche ethnic audiences. There is a perception of a hierarchy of
cultural value which multicultural art is both seeking to climb and, as
362 Journal of Sociology 49(2-3)

Morgan notes, diversify. I will return to the vexed question of what the
artistic mainstream is later. For now I want to consider how MAV attempts
to help multicultural artists join this imagined mainstream. What are the
competences, literacies or forms of capital that enable artists to do so? And
to what degree might these literacies be considered cultural capital in
Bourdieus sense?

Becoming an artist, learning new kinds of capital

One artist who has received support from MAV is Befekir, a 29-year-old
photographer of Ethiopian background who has been living in Melbourne
for 11 years. He lives with his mother, sister and brother and is finishing a
Masters degree in journalism. When I spoke to Befekir he mentioned that
he had not previously identified as an artist and his interest in photogra-
phy actually stems from his ambition to become a journalist. As well as
various photography projects, he maintains a blog and has made a number
of short films, all of which seek to capture the everyday life of Melbournes
Ethiopian community. He says that these endeavours are part of an effort
to more accurately represent Ethiopian culture to non-Ethiopians in
Australia. As he states:
I came to Australia with with some interest in photos of Ethiopia which show the
land, the people, the culture, the history, and that sort of thing. But although we
have a very small community in Australia its a very small community they
practise their culture very regularly. So I wanted to capture Ethiopians practising
their culture in Melbourne in different ways and show it back to the Australian
community, the wider Australian community to facilitate better understanding of
the [Ethiopian] community.

It is in these educational terms that is, to raise awareness or to facilitate

understanding rather than as art, that Befekir describes his work. He
goes on to describe how it is only through his relationship with MAV that
he has begun to define himself as an artist and imagine a personal
trajectory involving a future as an artist. With the help of MAV he has
participated in a number of exhibitions, including a high-profile show at the
Melbourne gallery, fortyfivedownstairs. However, he regards his potential
future as an artist an uncertain one. Befekir describes the risks and
compromises involved in pursuing a career as an artist; he is unsure about
how his work might be received, the milieu in which his work will circulate,
how this might translate to economic value, and how he will negotiate
pressure from his family to have a stable job. Being able to take on a self-
definition as an artist requires him to overcome these uncertainties through
the acquisition of distinct forms of knowledge or capital.
It is worth thinking about these required competences in terms of
Bourdieus notion of cultural capital. Bourdieus work on cultural capital
comes out of a broader concern with the social conditions of the production,
 Khan: Rethinking cultural capital and community-based arts 363

circulation and consumption of symbolic goods. Cultural capital is linked

to the possession of an aesthetic disposition towards high cultural forms
which grants individuals status or prestige and, in this way, is implicated in
relations of social inequity (Harrington, 2004: 94; Karim, 2005: 146).
Bourdieu draws attention to the ways in which discussions of art are bound
up with questions of taste that legitimise the preferences of the middle-
classes and enable them to differentiate and distance themselves from the
lower classes. Artistic value is bestowed upon cultural forms which require
specific cultural competences or cultural capital to be understood.
Contemporary community-based arts movements have tried to remedy
the exclusionary tendency of the art field in two ways. On the one hand,
community-based arts programs seek to expand the aesthetic realm, by
arguing for the value of a wide range of previously discredited or
undervalued cultural forms. Morgans comments about seeking to diversify
the mainstream, by placing multicultural art in high-profile arts venues
and institutions, are an example of such strategies. What Morgan refers to
as the artistic mainstream may not be straightforwardly equated to
Bourdieus interpretation of the aesthetic. However, she uses the term to
refer to the privileging of certain art forms and the unequal consecration of
value within the art field. So Morgan is concerned to diversify the sorts of
artistic expression considered to be legitimate or endowed with cultural
value, and in this way to redefine the mainstream. The second tactic for
remedying the unequal distribution of cultural capital in the contemporary
art field is by attempting to more equitably confer competences that will
enable culturally marginal groups to benefit from existing, narrowly
defined sources of aesthetic value. We could describe this strategy as
helping marginal groups to join the artistic mainstream. The issue is;
which of these strategies is the most effective in democratising and
diversifying the art field?
For now, I want to focus on the second of these propositions; that a more
equitable art field might come about if artists from diverse cultural
backgrounds are better equipped to join the mainstream. What sorts of
capital or competences are required for this to take place? In Bourdieus
writing on cultural capital, he uses the notion to refer to the formation of a
certain disposition that enables one to benefit from aesthetic value. He
delineates between whether the distribution of such capital takes place via
ones class habitus (embodied capital), whether it is through the transmission
of material forms of cultural expression (objectified capital) or through
formal learning and education (institutionalised capital) (Bourdieu, 1994).
For Befekir, the relevant question is how he might situate himself as an
artist, or be ascribed legitimacy, given his position as a marginal,
ethnically marked subject. It could be argued that this takes place through
the acquisition of embodied capital, or a shift in Befekirs self-perception
that might enable him to identify as an artist. In this respect, entering the
364 Journal of Sociology 49(2-3)

mainstream arts world evidently requires not just a particular aesthetic

disposition but a certain ethical demeanour. Precisely how this might be
developed is not clear; Befekir expresses some uncertainty about pursuing
a career as an artist, but also speaks assuredly of the success of his recent
exhibitions and his proficiency as a photographer and filmmaker.
Cultivating an identity as an artist might be the result of a range of such
experiences; exposure to the local art gallery scene and continuing
involvement with arts organisations such as MAV, which encourage him to
describe his pursuits as creative or expressive ones rather than, say,
simply educational ones.
But being recognised as an artist within this field also requires a
practical, and perhaps vocational reorientation. Befekir describes the
process of applying for funding for one recent exhibition:
I had to write what I wanted to do, what the exhibition was about, why we
wanted to do it, and why it was relevant to the City of Melbourne, because it
was to be funded by the City of Melbourne. So the City of Melbourne had its
own requirements that it had to be relevant to what they are interested in.
To be honest I dont think I could have done it without them [MAV]. It is very,
very difficult. I could do it now, because theyve showed me how to do it. But
even then its very hard because theyve got all the contacts, and they know
what to do.

It is through Befekirs association with MAV, then, that he is adopting forms

of knowledge including, for example, learning how to negotiate grant
application processes, making relevant industry contacts, dealing with
gallery owners, and understanding other norms of art circulation and
promotion.
Acquiring these practical knowledges also entails developing a literacy in
arts and cultural policy rhetoric. For example, Befekir is regularly described
both in promotional material surrounding his exhibitions and in the
funding applications he writes as an emerging artist.7 The term is used
to contrast the experience of newer migrants with those from relatively
more established or older migrant communities. Within this policy context,
the usefulness of the term emerging is strategic; those from emerging
communities are cast as having particular, or more urgent, service needs
than those from established communities. Importantly, the term also
signals Befekirs position as an amateur or aspiring artist, rather than a
professional one. Of course, like the category of multicultural artist, or
community-based artist, the term could also serve to reinforce his
marginality within the broader art field. Nonetheless, it is a descriptor that
Befekir mobilises to access funds, services and other opportunities.
Whether such forms of knowledge could be regarded as cultural capital
within Bourdieus schema is debatable. Certainly, when Bourdieu writes
about the forms of prestige and value that are differentially distributed
within the art field he does not consider the role of arts policy in attributing
 Khan: Rethinking cultural capital and community-based arts 365

value to particular individuals or art forms. These official and technical

systems of categorisation and consecration may have had less influence in
1960s France than the contemporary Australian arts sector. Having a
degree of policy literacy may not be institutional capital in Bourdieus
sense, but it is a form of knowledge that could be accommodated in a broad
reading of cultural capital. It is such a literacy that provides Befekir with
the potential to participate in the mainstream art field, and benefit from
the forms of recognition and prestige associated with this. By providing a
practical and institutional pathway to becoming a professional artist, it
also allows him to potentially benefit from the economic value associated
with such recognition.

Problematising the mainstream

The political implications of Befekirs experience, and of MAVs activity
more generally, are complicated by uncertainty about what a more equitable
art field might look like. The binary implicit in the notion of the emerging
(as opposed to established) artist or community brings us back to the
problematic notion of the mainstream. It raises the question of what it
actually means to join a White or established artistic mainstream.
Underpinning MAVs activity is the problem of whether creating a more
equitable landscape of arts funding and production should be oriented
towards the inclusion of minority groups into an existing cultural canon or
mainstream, or whether it involves using the arts to shift the grounds of
cultural legitimacy themselves. The former what I described earlier as
joining the mainstream implies a civilising agenda and a preservation of
existing hierarchies, and in some ways is a closer approximation of
Bourdieus own position. Bourdieu argued for the redistribution of cultural
capital so that marginal groups could have access to these existing sources
of power, rather than changing the relations that produce these differential
relations of power in the first place. This is underscored by an enduring
belief in the universal value of various forms of high or legitimate culture.
As Bennett and Silva suggest (2006: 90), Bourdieu argued that affirming the
cultural tastes of the working classes merely confined the inner-city poor to
their class destinies.
But Befekirs experience draws attention to the problems involved in
even invoking the notion of legitimate culture or an artistic mainstream.
The most prominent exhibition in which Befekir has been involved was an
event at fortyfivedownstairs, an inner-city gallery in Melbourne. This
exhibition, called The Journey: From Ancient Ethiopia to Contemporary
Melbourne, showcased Befekirs photography of Melbournes Ethiopian
community. It included two other artists painters Sutueal Bekele and
Tamirat Gebremariam also concerned with the migration and settlement
of Ethiopians in Melbourne. The exhibition received significant promotion
366 Journal of Sociology 49(2-3)

in the press, including an article in Melbournes broadsheet, The Age, and

was targeted at what Befekir describes as the wider Australian community
(Stephens, 2008). The exhibition was visited by approximately 200 people
a day for its two-week duration. In these terms, the exhibition was a
success as Befekir suggests, It did exactly what we were trying to do.
Significantly, fortyfivedownstairs is not a community arts venue but
describes itself as a space for showcasing independent, experimental and
thought-provoking art (fortyfivedownstairs, 2011). It is situated in what is
colloquially known as the Paris end of the Melbourne central business
district, surrounded by hotels, upmarket boutiques and restaurants. Its
location also positions it close to Melbournes central art precinct and has
been described in the arts press as a cultural destination for cutting-edge
artists and their audiences (ArtsHub, 2012). Its aesthetic preferences are
not informed by its community or multicultural affiliations or agendas
but by its self-definition as an independent arts space which encourages
innovation, new ideas and hybrid art forms (fortyfivedownstairs, 2011).
Artists promoted by the venue are drawn from the community-based as
well as professional arts fields. These sorts of characterisations as
independent but cutting-edge, experimental but quality complicate
the relations between the margins and the mainstream, and reveal the
complexity of the structures of value which inform the contemporary art
field. Given this uncertainty surrounding the notion of the artistic
mainstream it becomes even less clear whether community-based arts
organisations should be oriented towards trying to join, contest or redefine
this mainstream. The experiences of the artists at MAV suggest that all of
these strategies are interrelated.
The choice between either disrupting dominant regimes of cultural value,
or perpetuating them, may be a false one. In this example at least, the
former seems to facilitate the latter. Enabling marginalised individuals to
perform to mainstream audiences, and to gain recognition or financial
recompense from this experience, potentially has the long-term effect of
shifting these mainstream cultural tastes, as well as the terms on which
processes of cultural exchange take place. The processes by which
individuals are trained to participate in the mainstream might also be the
same ones which enable them to exploit their own cultural production
eventually on their own terms, or to intervene in existing hierarchies of
cultural production and use.
These issues have been heightened in the current arts funding climate, in
which the exclusionary benchmark of artistic excellence continues to be a
key criterion for support, even in programs whose aims are specifically to
democratise the arts. Elsewhere I have written about the ways in which this
has prompted the Australian community-based arts sector to redefine itself
by privileging artistic outcomes of excellence and the economic value
associated with these outcomes (Khan, 2010). For organisations like MAV
it is has been necessary to emphasise the quality or excellence of its
 Khan: Rethinking cultural capital and community-based arts 367

artistic activity to satisfy government funding bodies of their potential to

attract wider audiences for their work. These agendas have informed the
organisations efforts to work with elite arts organisations such as the Arts
Centre and the Melbourne Festival. Of course, these sorts of manoeuvres
may mean privileging the aesthetic preferences of artistically literate White
or mainstream audiences. But because these patterns of exclusion
potentially assist the reorientation of the organisations practices towards
the cultural mainstream, they can go unacknowledged by the artists,
artsworkers, and administrators involved in these programs. It is these
tendencies which highlight the continuing importance of a critical notion of
cultural capital one that can account for the unequal access to the benefits
of cultural participation.

Conclusions
I want to conclude this article by thinking about the importance of this
critical notion of cultural capital. As I mentioned at the outset, discussions
about community-based arts tend to focus on a range of its supposed
impacts and outcomes. In a number of prominent studies on community-
based arts, the emphasis is on evaluating the success or otherwise of these
programs in terms of these impacts (Barraket and Kaiser, 2007; Guetzkow,
2002; Holden, 2004; Jowell, 2004; Landry et al., 1993; Matarasso, 1997;
McCarthy et al., 2004; Mills and Brown, 2004; Williams, 1996). Some have
argued that there has been a resulting tendency to oversimplify (and
overclaim) the causal link between these arts activities and their supposed
social and economic outcomes (Belfiore and Bennett, 2008; Merli, 2002). It
has meant little critical interrogation of the sorts of cultural participation
that are facilitated, and their relation to regimes of cultural value. It is to
this end that closer attention to relations of cultural capital is helpful.
However, considerations of cultural capital rarely take place in accounts
of community-based arts. When they do, it is in the context of broader
cultural policy frameworks such as that of cultural or urban planning8
and it is without Bourdieus concern for the cultural production of social
status. In these policy discourses the development of cultural capital is
regarded as a generally worthy strategy, but it is defined as a discrete and
measurable asset. Cultural economist, David Throsby, for example,
conceives cultural capital as the stock of cultural value embodied in an
asset (1999: 6). The value referred to here is largely economic value;
cultural capital derives its currency from theories about human capital.
As Stevenson argues, the current economic climate has refigured cultural
planning discourse so that:
Culture and creativity have become currencies, forms of capital that supposedly
can be measured, developed, and then traded in an international marketplace
comprised of cities eager to compete with each other on the basis of image,
amenity, liveability and visitability. (2004: 1201)
368 Journal of Sociology 49(2-3)

It is this insistence on the measurability of cultural capital that is

problematic; a problem that is heightened because of the prevailing policy
concern with measuring the outcomes of community-based arts activity.
Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in cultural measurement, and
a range of frameworks and indexes have been developed by government
and non-government agencies for measuring cultures contribution to the
economy, patterns of participation and attendance at cultural institutions,
and levels of creativity in a city or community (Cultural Ministers Council
Statistics Working Group, 2010; Jackson and Herranz, 2002; Ministry for
Culture and Heritage, 2009; UNESCO, 2010). However, in making these
assessments none of these frameworks seek to capture the relational quality
of cultural capital.
While there have been some important and rigorous studies examining
cultural capital and cultural participation (Bennett et al., 1999, 2009), these
studies are rather circumspect about the relationship between cultural
participation and the accumulation of cultural capital. They do not seek to
measure changes in cultural capital, attribute these changes to specific
cultural programs, and then draw conclusions about the effects of such
programs on levels and relations of cultural capital. In the context of
community-based arts evaluation, it is not clear what a longitudinal study
of the cultural capital outcomes of a program might look like, or indeed
whether a Bourdieusian version of cultural capital is something that could
be subject to such analysis.
This belief in the measurability of cultural capital is also related to its
conception as a communal property; that is, as a set of capacities that
belong to a collectivity, such as a community or a city. There is an
assumption at work here that more culture, and more cultural participation,
are themselves positive policy outcomes. Louise Johnson, for example,
describes the interconnected processes by which the arts generate cultural
capital in the form of confidence, image, individual well-being, social
cohesion and economic viability (2006: 296). We can also find traces of
this line of thinking in the work of Richard Florida (2002), in his framework
for quantifying the creative stock of a city. In his critique of such misuses
of cultural capital, Gary Bridge argues that the reinterpretation of cultural
capital as a communal resource encompasses both Floridas description of
culture as a lifestyle asset, and the use of culture as a participatory tool
for achieving social outcomes (2006: 719). But Bridge reminds us that
cultural capital is not a homogeneous asset that can be captured by some
static audit of cultural resources within a neighbourhood (2006: 728).
Rather, he suggests that a consideration of the critical, Bourdieusian version
of cultural capital requires an account of the times and spaces of the
deployments of cultural capital to be traced, as well as their possible
hierarchical effects (2006: 729). Without this perspective culture is
conceived as a type of capital that benefits the community at large rather
 Khan: Rethinking cultural capital and community-based arts 369

than something which requires capital, or distinct forms of knowledge, in

order to access.
Catherine Murrays account of cultural capital and cultural participation
offers a more nuanced position. She argues that for policies concerned with
cultural participation to be meaningful it is not sufficient to simply
encourage any kind of cultural activity. Rather, peoples differential
capacities to participate culturally must be acknowledged (2005: 44). To
this end she broadens the notion of cultural capital to include a range of
knowledges and competences, perhaps bringing us closer to my earlier
description of Befekirs experience.
There is a need, then, to broaden Bourdieus notion of cultural capital.
Community-based arts is no longer defined by a clear delineation in the arts
field between low and high culture in relation to which community-based
arts is inevitably situated as marginal. As studies such as the Cultural
Capital and Social Exclusion project have shown, distinctions between
high and low culture are increasingly difficult to make, and complicated
by other regimes of cultural value; for example, by discourses of the
popular (Bennett et al., 2009). Moreover, the cultural and historical
context in which Bourdieu wrote precluded him from acknowledging the
interests, agendas and diverse governmental calculations involved in
cultural policy-making today. He also does not address the issue of ethnicity
and the range of sites for the accumulation of cultural capital outside of the
education system (such as participation in community-based arts). In this
respect, contemporary discussions about cultural capital as they relate to
community-based arts could concern a range of literacies and forms of
cultural knowledge not considered by Bourdieu.
The field of community-based arts today is complicated by questions
of ethnicity and economy. These two factors inform attempts to join or
engage with the mainstream art world. However, as we have seen, such
strategies lack clarity about how to do this, are uncertain about what
constitutes the mainstream and struggle to articulate what the benefits
of participation in this artistic mainstream might be. Given the
complicated relations which define the contemporary art field, the means
by which inequalities are produced and perpetuated are far from
straightforward. However, greater attention to the range of cultural,
practical and technical competences that are at play in these processes
could tell us what a redistribution of such capacities might look like, and
what role community-based arts participation might have in such a
redistribution.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, com-
mercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
370 Journal of Sociology 49(2-3)

Notes
1 In 1975, the Australia Council established an Ethnic Arts Committee, as part of
the councils existing Community Arts Board.
2 As the festivals first chairperson, Mike Zafiropoulos, stated in an interview, I
think we were a catalyst in those early days in thinking that diversity could be of
interest to the wider Australian community.
3 A number of similar organisations were established in various states around
Australia during this period. MAV and Kulcha (in Western Australia) were estab-
lished in 1983, followed by a Queensland-based multicultural arts organisation,
BEMAC, in 1987.
4 The current policy of the Australia Council, Arts in a Multicultural Australia
(Australia Council 2006), seems to deliberately leave this question open, and
accommodate a range of different strategies for supporting cultural diversity in
the arts.
5 Melbournes Arts Centre is a major state-funded arts and cultural institution and
regarded as a flagship venue in Melbournes central arts precinct.
6 A radio station of the government-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
7 The exhibition at fortyfivedownstairs in which his work was included was part
of the MAV supported Emerge festival.
8 The discourse of cultural planning can encompass a range of policy strategies
and initiatives, including establishing cultural precincts, encouraging creative
activity and cultural diversity, as well as revitalising public space through the
provision of cultural infrastructure.

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Biographical note
Rimi Khan is a Research Fellow in Cultural Studies at the University of
Melbourne. Her research interests include critical cultural policy, multicul-
turalism and cultural sustainability. She is currently involved in an
Australian Research Council-funded project which seeks to develop cultural
indicators for local, state and federal government cultural agencies.
Address: University of Melbourne, Room 216, West Tower, John Medley
Building, Parkville 3010 VIC, Australia. [email: rpkhan@unimelb.edu.au]