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Eleonora REDAELLI, Invisible Cultural Policy in America: How Public Administration Shapes Culture

Michael Rushton
Bibliographical reference

Redaelli, Eleonora, Invisible Cultural Policy in America: How Public Administration Shapes Culture. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2025. ISBN: 978 1 0353 3023 2 (ebook).

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1There is an old joke: An American tourist is visiting Oxford for the first time, and on his first morning signs up for a guided walking tour. The group sees the Ashmolean Museum, the Bodleian Library, the beautiful college quadrangles, and they pass beneath the Bridge of Sighs, before finally going for a pub lunch at the Lamb & Flag. At lunch the tourist asks the guide: but when will we get to see the University?

2American cultural policy is something like our tourist’s experience. Despite observing the various publicly funded granting agencies, charitable foundations, individual donors who receive tax-preferred status, tax credit schemes to promote commercial film and television production and music recording, and local investments in cultural infrastructure, we are still left asking: but where is the cultural policy?

3Eleonora Redaelli is a professor in the School of Planning, Public Policy, and Management at the University of Oregon, having previously taught at many universities around the world. She is widely recognized as one of the top contemporary scholars of cultural policy in the United States and her new book will be welcomed across the field. In Invisible Cultural Policy in America, she seeks to solve the problem of where exactly an observer can discern the nature of American cultural policy and why it is, for the most part, “invisible.” This book will be of interest to scholars of cultural policy in the United States and elsewhere and will serve as reading material for advanced students in cultural policy classes.

4To claim that something is “invisible” is also to claim that it actually exists. One could look at the various government institutions in the United States with programs in culture-related fields and conclude that there is no coherent cultural policy at all; instead, various organizations are muddling through with different policies that serve each agency’s own goals without an overarching policy that holds it all together. However, Redaelli claims that it would be wrong to make this somewhat negative assumption. There is a coherent cultural policy in America, but because the country is so large and diverse, the policy is necessarily decentralized, making it difficult to see clearly. The primary task of her book is to bring this invisible cultural policy to light.

5Redaelli considers invisible cultural policy through three domains: the arts, the humanities, and historic preservation, devoting a separate chapter to each domain. This is unusual for a book on cultural policy, which typically focuses on the arts, but this choice makes sense because these three areas jointly affect the cultural lives of Americans, whether they know it or not. The key policy documents that set America’s cultural policy in motion were the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965, and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. Much has changed in the past 60 years, but it was these acts that created the bureaucracies that have endured and continue to serve as the foundation for cultural policy. Redaelli holds that state-level policy is overlooked relative to federal and local governments. To support her thesis, she examines four states from different regions: Oregon, Minnesota, Maryland, and New Mexico.

6For Redaelli, the core of America’s invisible cultural policy is “public value”, or what the diverse American public wants in terms of policies towards the arts, humanities, and historic preservation. This concept explains the decentralization of agencies and policies across these domains, as well as some specific features. I will illustrate with two examples. In a few places in the book, Redaelli talks about the “culture wars” that arose from public funding being tied to artworks that some members of the public found deeply offensive. She also discusses advocacy for and reactions against multiculturalism in the study of the humanities. One consequence of the “culture wars” was the National Endowment for the Arts adoption of a provision in its grant making process stating that, “artistic excellence and artistic merit are the criteria by which [grant] applications are judged, taking into consideration general standards of decency and respect for the diverse beliefs and values of the American public.” This provision was challenged on free speech grounds in court by a group of artists whose grant applications were turned down on this basis, but in National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley (1998) the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the provision. The provision has remained in place to this day, and one could plausibly speculate that, had the NEA lost that case, it could have quickly led to legislation killing the agency. The American public’s support for free speech does not extend to being forced to fund art they find offensive through tax dollars. A second example relates to President Obama’s choice for NEA chair, theatre producer Rocco Landesman. Soon after his appointment, Landesman stated that NEA ought to shift its focus to supporting excellence in the arts, even if it meant that funds would not be distributed equally across the country. For example, theatres in Chicago were more likely to warrant funding than theatres in Peoria. This provoked a swift backlash, apologies from Landesman, and the maintenance of the NEA policy of widely distributed grants. As a rule (though not unanimously held), the American public values the local over the universally excellent and the non-offensive over the offensive. And that is what is delivered.

7The grounds for the public value approach can take different forms. A liberal, whose core value is that individuals must themselves develop and pursue what is valuable and meaningful in their lives, could say that wide possibilities for participation in the arts, humanities, and historic preservation gives all Americans the cultural foundation needed to develop those values. Ronald Dworkin (1985) uses this argument to justify state support for the arts, as does Will Kymlicka (1989) with regard to the recognition of multiculturalism in cultural policy. More prosaically, the public value approach may simply stem from Americans’ perception of the government as an entity that should not set values or give the public what a Minister of Culture deems appropriate, but rather reflect their preferences as they stand: de gustibus non est disputandum. For better or worse, the “public value” approach to cultural policy does not strive for any notion of greatness in art or artists, nor for works of exceptional national or international worth. Contemporary discourse in American cultural policy, in various forums and foundation initiatives, is entirely focused on “community.”

8Redaelli could not have foreseen the actions of the second Trump administration which, at least for the time being, upend the norms of cultural policy of the past 30 years or so. Its policy priorities are quite visible and openly stated: to end “wokeness” in the arts and museums, at least those under federal control; and, to bypass the cultural bureaucracy through executive orders and the firing and replacement of public officials who do not sufficiently support the President’s priorities. This does not diminish the importance of this book. The changes being wrought will provide excellent fodder for classroom discussion.

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Bibliography

Dworkin, R. (1985). Can a Liberal State Support the Arts? In A Matter of Principle. Harvard University Press.

Kymlicka, W. (1989). Liberalism, Community and Culture. Oxford University Press.

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References

Electronic reference

Michael Rushton, Eleonora REDAELLI, Invisible Cultural Policy in America: How Public Administration Shapes CultureInternational Review of Public Policy [Online], 8:1 | 2026, Online since 01 February 2026, connection on 11 April 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/irpp/5971; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/15t8t

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About the author

Michael Rushton

Indiana University Bloomington

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