‘Measuring’ or ‘capturing’ cultural value is a key endeavour for those who seek
to justify the provision of public investment in arts and cultural activities. This
approach is commonly manifested in the literature exploring the ‘impact’ of arts
festivals, emphasising their transactional ‘benefit’ to individuals and host cities.
In this thesis, I explore an alternative approach to value, analysing it as a
meaning-making process in the context of the world’s largest arts festival: the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Using Randall Collins’ (2004) theory of Interaction
Ritual Chains (IRCs) as a theoretical framework, I examine data collected
through ethnographic observations, researcher reflections, documentary
analysis, and two-stage focus groups with 18 small groups (production
companies and community groups). Grounded in this fieldwork, the study
argues that groups are able to derive meaning from Fringe experiences when
they align with a shared morality, such as believing in the intrinsic value of art
objects and the importance of preserving the Fringe as an ‘open access’
festival. For groups who share this morality, the Fringe acts as a ‘sacred site’
at which to annually ‘perform’ and reaffirm shared beliefs in a public setting,
and where meaning is cultivated before and continues after the period of
attendance. Further, an emotional contagion effect for ‘believers’ within and
across groups is created through successful IRCs, which buttresses and
maintains the sacred status of the Fringe.
The thesis concludes that the cultural policy focus on ‘capturing’ cultural value
is fruitless because there is no ‘objective’ cultural value. Rather, meaning-making is an on-going and interactive process that extends outwards from art
objects and is connected to shared emotions, morality, and beliefs. The major
implication of this research for arts organisations and policymakers is that this
new way of approaching value can be used to explain why one-off
transactional encounters with art objects have only short-term effects. The
thesis recommends a shift in focus from individual transactions to group
processes, and from short-term funding models to ones that have the potential
to facilitate deeper engagement with meaning-making across time and
contexts
