Going ‘mainstream’: evaluating the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts

Abstract

This paper considers how debates over the instrumentalisation of the arts have informed the cultural production of an Australian arts organisation – Multicultural Arts Victoria (MAV). In an effort to make multicultural arts more ‘mainstream’, MAV has increasingly adopted market‐based rationales for its work – particularly the use of ‘audience development’ policy frameworks. It is easy to evaluate this marketisation of multicultural arts negatively as an acceptance of neoliberal policy agendas and as a weakening of its commitment to ‘cultural development’ goals. This paper suggests, however, via a critique of Ghassan Hage’s analysis of multiculturalism, that such accounts do not consider how economic rationales actually sit in practice with MAV’s other (cultural development) agendas. Such critiques, therefore, preclude an affirmative reading of the instrumentalisation of multicultural arts. An alternative analytical framework is proposed – one which can more readily account for multicultural arts as a set of practices informed by diverse agendas, and which acknowledges how such practices might both contest and converge with official government policies.