There is a phrase that the cultural sphere repeats about itself with a conviction that is rarely examined: art transforms lives, culture is a driver of social change, mediation includes, unites, and repairs. I have said it myself. It is, in other words, in the mission statement of the foundation I chair. And precisely for that reason, it seems to me that someone from within should dare to ask aloud what truth there is in it, rather than repeating it until it sounds like truth through sheer repetition.

The question is neither rhetorical nor comfortable: does cultural mediation transform anything, or does it primarily tell itself that it transforms?

It is worth starting with what the evidence does support, because it is more than a sceptic would concede. There is a broad body of research—the review that the World Health Organization published in 2019 tracked hundreds of publications and thousands of studies—that documents real effects of artistic participation on health, well-being, mood, bonds, and the sense of belonging. Singing in a group, participating in a workshop, entering a museum with someone who knows how to guide the gaze: none of that is smoke. It leaves a mark on people, and sometimes a measurable one.

The problem arises one step further up. It is one thing to assert that culture improves the well-being of those who participate, and quite another to assert that it transforms entire communities, reduces structural exclusion, or produces lasting political change. That leap—from documented individual effect to proclaimed social transformation—is where the evidence thins and the discourse widens. And it is precisely there that the cultural sector tends to settle, because it is the register that opens doors to those who provide funding.

I do not say this out of suspicion, but rather from a critical literature that has been pointing this out for decades. Since the foundational work in the 1990s that sought to measure the social impact of artistic participation, various researchers have been warning of the same thing: that attributing social change causally to a cultural programme is devilishly difficult; that evaluations rely too heavily on self-reporting, good feelings, and short timeframes; and that “social impact” has frequently become the rhetoric with which the sector legitimises itself before governments and sponsors. One measures what can be counted, one counts what is convenient, and the narrative ends up preceding the facts.

Acknowledging this is not to demolish anything. It is the opposite. A sector that promises what it cannot guarantee ends up paying for it in two ways, and both are serious.

The first is one of credibility. Every time culture attributes to itself powers it does not possess, it provides ammunition to those who wish to cut its funding as soon as results fail to appear. An inflated promise does not protect art: it leaves it exposed.

The second is deeper, and it matters more to me. When we say that art, by itself, includes or unites or repairs, we are offloading onto a workshop or an exhibition a responsibility that belongs to others: to housing, to employment, to schools, to public policy. Over-promising from within the cultural sector is, unintentionally, a form of alibi for those who hold the structural levers to avoid moving them. If art fixes it, why bother with the rest? That is a trap into which an honest foundation should not fall, regardless of how much the language of impact is what secures funding.

So, what does cultural mediation do, if not what we say it does? It does something more modest and more truthful: it opens conditions. It creates the occasion for an encounter that would not have existed, a bond, access, a moment of well-being, a conversation that reorganises—even if only slightly—the field of what someone perceives as possible. It is not the sufficient cause of any transformation; it is the condition that makes it slightly more probable. A device of possibility, not a machine of change. Whether that step from possibility to transformation occurs depends on resources, continuity, institutions, and political will that far exceed what any cultural programme controls.

And here is what I am interested in defending, precisely from within a foundation: that this more modest role is not a lesser one. Opening a crack in the possible is exactly what culture knows how to do, and almost nothing else does it the same way. It does not need to disguise itself as social policy to have value. On the contrary: it defends itself better when it tells the truth about its reach—when it promises what it can deliver and honestly names what it cannot. Acknowledging the limit does not weaken the promise. It is the only thing that makes it credible.

On open conversation

This text opens my sub-series Art and Society, which looks directly, and from within the sector itself, at what culture can and cannot do for society; here, the distance between the effect that cultural mediation documents and the transformation it proclaims. If anyone wishes to intervene from the perspective of cultural programme evaluation, the sociology of culture, or cultural policy, the notebook remains open.

Sources

Fancourt, Daisy and Saoirse Finn. What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review. Copenhagen: WHO Regional Office for Europe, Health Evidence Network synthesis report 67, 2019.

Belfiore, Eleonora and Oliver Bennett. The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.

Matarasso, François. Use or Ornament? The Social Impact of Participation in the Arts. Comedia, 1997.

Merli, Paola. “Evaluating the social impact of participation in arts activities”. International Journal of Cultural Policy 8, no. 1 (2002): 107-118.

Galloway, Susan. “Theory-based evaluation and the social impact of the arts”. Cultural Trends 18, no. 2 (2009): 125-148.