Cultural diversity policy Essay Example For Students

Cultural diversity policy Essay Another coordinator of a cultural diversity project said it had helped to foster a realisation, understanding and sense of self. Existing collections are employed to similar ends. In this case, artefacts are treated as a kind of mirror into which visitors gaze in order to see themselves. Rajiv Anand, cultural diversity development officer for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, ran a project in West Yorkshire with 16- to 25-year-olds, working with the museums South Asian collection. The aim was not to appreciate South Asian art. Instead, the project was called Who am I? , and it aimed to use the collections to explore the young peoples sense of identity. The group produced a video talking about how they bridged the cultural differences between school and home life, and whether they felt British or Asian. The aim, said Anand, was for the group to see themselves reflected in various artefacts (18). Although many of these projects target ethnic minorities, the issue is not really about ethnicity. Instead, the focus is on peoples private sense of self. The same kinds of project could apply for visitors from all backgrounds. So why the focus on minorities? One reason is opportunism. Minority groups are seen as the most vulnerable and excluded, and in most need of public recognition. Another reason is guilt. Because cultural institutions no longer believe in cultural value, their collections of Rembrandt and Constable look shamefully narrow and exclusive. By collecting the most everyday things from the most marginalised in society, museums are engaging in self-admonishment, castigating themselves for once being so high and mighty. Because this policy sees every object in terms of personal identity, it is blind to imaginative or well-crafted paintings, interesting or rare historical artefacts. It is indifferent to form, colour or pattern. Cultural diversity officers must barely glance at the paintings they are putting on their walls, or the Asian art they use in their discussions about identity. Everything is judged by the amount of personal meaning invested in it. The illumination that art can bring is lost. In actual fact, it is the painting, not the artists emotion, that is the valuable thing. As the New York art critic Jed Perl has written: What counts is that whatever the artist is thinking or feeling is absorbed into the look, the character, the intricacies of the work. The painting, the sculpture makes its own terms, and we judge what we see. (19) Strong private emotions are no guarantee of art that can be understood and appreciated by others. Similarly, self-obsession can limit our enjoyment of art: we can gain satisfaction by examining the paintings texture, colour and form, rather than by glorying in our reflection in the glass. One museum director described the process of entering into the world of the painting as unselfing, giving up self-centred defences and concerns (20). Moreover, it is only by examining art as an object, as something that exists outside of us, that we might hope to judge it by cultural standards of value. As the critic Lionel Trilling put it: Objectivity, we might say, is the respect we give to the object as object, as it exists apart from us. (21) Cultural diversity policy makes historical artefacts similarly dumb. Chinese paintings, Greek brooches, and Egyptian mummies provide a glimpse into another time and place. They can take us out of our own lives, and give us an insight into other societies worldview and way of life. Fragments of pot can speak of a long-dead civilisations myths, social structure, economy and diet. Study of these artefacts in turn helps us to put our own society in perspective: seeing it as the latest step in the march of human history, rather than as the only possible way of living. If historical artefacts are viewed in personal terms, they stop telling us anything. Instead of learning about human diversity, then, we end up stuck in our present-day lives. This policy also has a low view of its visitors. The assumption is that visitors are uninterested in or unable to learn about the world. On the Road Essay PaperThe artefacts of different cultures are judged in terms of the colour of the faces that they bring in. Meanwhile, some of humanitys greatest artistic achievements, in European art from the Renaissance onwards, are sidelined for attracting the wrong kinds of people which is a loss for everyone, regardless of ethnic background. Diversity targets view ethnic minorities as uniform members of a group, rather than as intelligent and curious individuals with a range of interests. They are often assumed to be only interested in art relating to their particular culture, which is why cultural institutions try to attract the Chinese community with exhibitions about Chinese culture or the Afro-Caribbean community with exhibitions about slavery. The effect of this approach is to institutionalise cultural divisions. A black artist is marked out as different from other artists, a minority-ethnic individual as different to other museum workers, and a British-Chinese museum-goer different to other museum-goers. The possibility of an open and universal public culture, in which each person can develop their own capabilities and learn from others, is placed yet further away. * Measuring up to the past Cultural diversity policy is founded upon the collapse of traditional cultural policy. The celebration of diversity for its own sake expresses the disorientation of the cultural elite, once belief in standards of cultural value had waned. But the same policy is also a response to this disorientation, providing a new logic and role for cultural institutions. Todays cultural policy justifies itself through a critique of the past. According to contemporary wisdom, traditional cultural policy was merely an extension of the worldview of particular individuals. People such as Matthew Arnold and John Maynard Keynes were trying to foist their taste and values upon everyone. All that talk about sweetness and light was just sugar for the pill. Given that cultural values are merely cover for individual identity, goes the argument, how much better to allow as many different people to express their preferences as possible. Why should Turner be given so much room to represent his sea voyages in the National Gallery why not allow more people to portray their travelling experiences? In fact, todays diversity officers are foisting their cultural assumptions upon the past. The past is judged by the limited horizons of the present, and the present gets to pat itself on the back. The traditional British elites cultural policy was, to some degree at least, true to its rhetoric. Although cultural institutions were set up for ideological reasons, they were much more than ideology. Museums and galleries really were a separate sphere, where art and history could be studied for their own sake. These institutions aesthetic and intellectual judgements cannot be reduced to cultural, political or personal identity. After all, we must remember that it was cultures lofty aspirations that attracted the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in the first place. Those lofty aspirations should be defended. Todays cultural policy actually has much in common with the nineteenth century brand of bourgeois philistinism that the men of culture were rebelling against. According to the philistines, the only standard of cultural value was the amount of pleasure it gave to the individual. On this basis, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham decided that: Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry. (25) Another trademark of the philistines was the celebration of everyone having their own opinion. Matthew Arnold satirised this doing as one likes, as he called it: the aspirations of culture, he said, are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying (26). In Benthams pleasure principle, we can see something of cultural diversity policys emphasis on making visitors feel valued; in doing as one likes, we can see the celebration of diversity. The common assumption is that culture is merely about individual preferences and pleasure. This is not a question of whether ethnic minorities should go to museums, or whether museums should show exhibitions about immigrant history or Islamic art.