The Cultural Economy

”The application forms for European Structural Funds, regional development funds and local authority funds demand a justification for our activity in a language better suited to the creation of a business park, requiring us to present art not as an intrinsic cultural expression but as a measurement of economic activity”.

Clymene Christoforou writes the reflection in the new volume of The Cultures and Globalization series, The Cultural Economy. She is director of ISIS Art, a visual arts organisation in the North of England, and ends her short comment with ”(–) I wonder what new languages we will need to learn to create a space for art in the future”.

In the second volume of the series the editors Helmut Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar is addressing cultural economy and have asked people from mainly academia but also practitioners, up comers and artists, to address a set of critical questions following the topic. The result is over six hundred pages with twenty-eight contributions from different perspectives and contexts together with an ambitious part of ”Indicator suites” with figures in different diagrams. In the very beginning Stuart Cunninghan, John Banks and Jason Potts line out four models of the relation of culture and the economy in the chapter ”Cultural Economy: The shape of the field”. The welfare model, the competitive model, the growth model, and the innovation model suggest an interesting analytical framework for anyone who would like to try to understand the area of art, creative economy, cultural economy, creativity, innovation and the relation with the economy as a whole.

How does cultural economy relate to the rest of the economy? Is it at all discussed outside the cultural field? Last weekend world leaders from the twenty most significant economies in the world met in Washington to discuss the financial crises. The Swedish journalist Erik Ohlsson noted in his article in the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter that the outcome of the meeting was perhaps not so thrilling, but still it was historical. It showed the beginning of a new era, where the western society countries have to move aside and give place to their former colonies, now countries with growing economies. Perhaps culture could have a more significant place in this new economic order?

The series is published by Sage Publications. Find the first volume of The Cultures and Globalization series Conflicts and Tensions at Civil Society Center at UCLA or at Sage Publications.

Washington Post look on the economic development in the world and write about the outcome of the G20 meeting in Washington last weekend here.