ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the notion of culture and how arts education might relate to it, and addresses the question of cultural rights, and arts education as a right. It examines cultural citizenship, and the implications for arts education. Culture is more than just the arts, but the arts are integral to it. They offer a wide range of media, platforms, genre, heritages and practices for the processes of making meanings. The arts are concerned with the social and semiotic; arts education both produces and reproduces cultures. Following Gaztambide-Fernandez’s argument about arts as cultural production leads to the argument that arts education contributes to cultural rights in two ways—as everyday cultural production, and as a long-term contribution to out-of-school life. The right to participate in arts based social meaning-making is integral to citizenship; thus the equitable provision of arts education is vital for all young people regardless of who or where they are.
