Academia in Culture 3.0: a Crime story of Death and Rebirth (but also of Curation, Innovation and Sector Mash-ups)

Over recent years, the curation of new knowledge has become an important area of concern within UK Higher Education. There is a renewed call for public/academia interaction where the engagement with innovation is designed into the research process right from the start. Simultaneously and specifically within the arts, there has been an increasing momentum in, and a public appetite for, process (rather than product), and the 21st century has witnessed a new phenomenon, that which Pierre Luigi Sacco (2015) has labeled Culture 3.0, characterized by the use of open platforms, democratic systems, ubiquitously available production tools and individuals constantly shifting and renegotiating their roles between producing and consuming content. Sacco furthermore suggests that Europe is hung up on Culture 1.0, characterized by a distinction of high-brow vs low-brow, arts patronage, gatekeepers and value absorption. This article will attempt to contextualize these concepts as part of the need to create curated interfaces between communities of practice and the wider society. The intentional act of curation can thus be a sense-making creative process. Taking the Manchester Metropolitan University?s Axis Arts Centre as case study, what becomes evident is the need for a deeper understanding of the cultural relativity of arts-related practices and the roles that universities play to facilitate various cultural co-produced interfaces between arts and society.