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on Cultural Economics |
| By: | David Galenson |
| Abstract: | The back story of twentieth-century art concerns the changing intellectual, economic, and technological setting that would cause the art of the past century to be fundamentally different from that of all earlier times. The single most important change involved the structure of the market for advanced art. Innovation had always been the hallmark of important art, but since the Renaissance nearly all artists were constrained in the degree to which they could innovate by the need to satisfy powerful individual patrons or institutions. The overthrow of the Salon monopoly of the art market in Paris and the rise of a competitive market for art in the late nineteenth century removed this constraint, and gave advanced artists an unprecedented freedom to innovate. Conspicuous innovation subsequently became necessary for important modern art. All artists recognized the increased demand for innovation, but it would be conceptual artists who could take advantage of it more quickly than their experimental counterparts. Early in the twentieth century Pablo Picasso became the prototype of the conceptual innovator who maximized the economic value of his inventiveness in the new market setting, and during the remainder of the century, a series of young conceptual artists followed him in producing more radical innovations, and engaging in more extreme new forms of behavior, than had ever existed before, making this an era of revolutionary artistic change. |
| JEL: | J01 |
| Date: | 2008–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:14066&r=cul |
| By: | Freeman, Alan |
| Abstract: | This report is a pre-final version of a report published by the Greater London Authority and the London Development Agency in March 2008. It benchmarks London’s cultural offer against four other world cities: Paris, New York, Tokyo and Shanghai and is the first comprehensive such undertaking compiled according to international standards. The final printed version can be downloaded from http://www.london.gov.uk/mayor/culture/docs/cultural-audit.pdf The printed version includes full acknowledgement to the several contributors to research into this project, without whom it would not have been possible |
| Keywords: | cultural economics; creative industries; London; World Cities |
| JEL: | Z1 O18 |
| Date: | 2008–03–19 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:9008&r=cul |
| By: | Freeman, Alan |
| Abstract: | bstract This unpublished paper was submitted to the May 22-23 conference on IPR at Birkbeck College, London. It analyses the distinct economic roles of culture, creation, and innovation in the Creative Industries by assessing the fitness for purpose of their statistical definitions. On this basis it proposes a method for studying the relation between creative labour and innovation. Lax usage has made the term ‘Creative Industries’ a synonym for three distinct things: creativity, culture and intellectual alienability. I use the term Cultural and Creative Sector (CCS). My aim is to distinguish Creative Labour, of which the sector is a specialist user, from Cultural Outputs, which the sector produces. These are found combined in the CCS in an advanced form, but they also exist separately outside it. In order to understand their wider economic impact – in particular, their relation to innovation and Intellectual Property – it is necessary to distinguish them. I begin from the empirical reality of the Creative Industries as currently defined which, I argue, establishes it as an ‘industrial sector’, in the economically meaningful sense that it is a specialised branch of the division of labour. Its definition, however, has yet to be aligned with this reality. This sector’s specialism is that it employs creative labour to produce cultural products. Its emergence is the outcome of two processes: a separation of mechanical from creative labour, which we inherit from the age of machines, and a revolution in service sector productivity, arising from the age of the internet. Creative labour is a general economic resource, employed both inside and outside the CCS. The CCS is the starting point of an adequate definition, because in it, creative labour is found in its most advanced and specialised form, and because in it, this kind of labour has applied to maximum effect the new service technologies which have emerged with the internet age. However, in order properly to assess its wider impact, creative labour has to be defined independent of the assumption that it only produces cultural products. This paper proposes such a definition. It outlines, on the basis of this definition, how the economic contribution of creative labour to service sector growth might be assessed. |
| Keywords: | cultural economics; creative industries; innovation; internet |
| JEL: | Z1 O3 J2 |
| Date: | 2008–05–23 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pra:mprapa:9007&r=cul |