History of schools of economic thought on arts and culture information

The contemporary economics of culture most often takes as its starting point Baumol and Bowen's^[1] seminal work on the performing arts, which argues that reflection on the arts has been part of the history of economic thought since the birth of modern economics in the seventeenth century.

Until then, the arts had an ambivalent image. They were morally condemned as expensive activities that offered little benefit to society and were associated with the sins of pride and laziness. If they had any merit, it was in their educational value, or in their ability to prevent the rich from wasting their resources on even more harmful activities.

In the eighteenth century, Hume and Turgot helped to give a more positive image to cultural activities, presenting them as useful incentives for enrichment, and therefore for economic growth. For his part, Adam Smith highlighted the particularities of the supply and demand of cultural goods, which were to form part of the basis of the cultural economics research program.

Nineteenth-century economics sought to express general laws in the same way as the exact sciences. As a result, neither the authors of classical political economy nor the marginalists paid much attention to the specific features of the economics of culture in their research programs, even though several of them (Alfred Marshall, William Stanley Jevons) were individually sensitive to questions about the role of the arts in an industrialized economy. Reflection on the economic role of the arts and the economic conditions of their production thus came from intellectuals who integrated economic dimensions into an essentially political or aesthetic approach (Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin, and William Morris).

From the mid-twentieth century onwards, important figures such as Galbraith began to take an interest in these questions, but he failed to generate interest among both artists and his fellow economists. Similarly, although Keynes had a decisive influence on the actions of the Bloomsbury Group, which led to the United Kingdom setting up an institutional structure to support the arts (the British Arts Council), he did not directly devote any personal research work to the subject.

It was during the 1960s that the economics of culture emerged as a close disciplinary field, under the impetus of the work of Baumol and Bowen as well as work emanating from the analysis of addictive goods (Gary Becker) and the theory of public choice. Initially conceived as a crossroads between several disciplines, cultural economics has had a specialized journal since 1977, and achieved full academic recognition in 1993 with the publication of a literature review in the Journal of Economic Literature and two reference manuals.

^ William Baumol, William Bowen, Performing Arts-The Economic Dilemma : A Study of Problems Common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance, Ashgate Publishing, 1966, 582 p. (ISBN 978-0-7512-0106-2)

[William_Baumol_1966-1] William Baumol, William Bowen, Performing Arts-The Economic Dilemma : A Study of Problems Common to Theater, Opera, Music and Dance, Ashgate Publishing, 1966, 582 p. (ISBN 978-0-7512-0106-2)

History of schools of economic thought on arts and culture information

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