Author: Troub, Roger M.

Publication Year: 1979

Media Type: Book

Summary:

Paper presented at First International Conference on Arts and Economics, sponsored by the Association for Cultural Economics, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 8-10, 1979.

Abstract:

Paper presented at First International Conference on Arts and Economics, sponsored by the Association for Cultural Economics, held in Edinburgh, Scotland, August 8-10, 1979.

The arts have provided conventional economics and institutional economics with almost as much difficulty as has religion. The trouble, however, does not permit rejection, for art obviously falls within the goods and services category and therefore should be encompassed by economics. Still, art seems different. It just doesn't neatly comport with the categories of consumer and producer behavior theory, the national income accounts, or the American Economic Association's topic classification system. The A section in the index to the classification schedule of The Journal of Economic Literature contains entries for accounting, advertising , agriculture, air transportation, aircraft manufacture, aluminum industry, atomic energy, and automobile manufacturing - but none for art. Perhaps this treatment, or rather the lack of it, results from too great a diffusion in the activities which might be included within an arts category; perhaps the arts are too patently dissimilar to be considered as an industry; perhaps economists just have not known what to do with the arts or have not deemed them important.

Efforts in recent years to establish and sustain economic analysis of matters associated with the arts, as represented by work found in the Journal of Cultural Economics, appear largely to follow the lead of Baumol and Bowen by applying conceptual and analytic tools from the inventory provided by conventional economics (Baumol and Bowen 1966). Important insights have been and can continue to be secured from this approach.

Institutional economics can also provide an understanding of cultural phenomena and the circumstances of the arts in the economy, but it too has difficulty addressing the arts satisfactorily. In some of the work of neoinstitutionalists (Kenneth Boulding's revolutionary theory of societal processes, in particular) conceptions of man and society are being redefined and articulated in a manner which suggests different perspectives on the problems encountered in both conventional and institutional economics. The neoinstitutionalists have not adequately addressed the arts either, but the work of Boulding contains ideas which appear promising in their potential for a different, but complementary, approach to gaining insights into the arts in the economy and in the larger context of society.

Here, then, is an illustrative and necessarily incomplete survey of the treatment of the arts in conventional economics, American institutional economics, and neoinstitutional economics and some suggestions for possible associations among them as complementary research programs investigating the arts in the economy. (p. 7-8).

CONTENTS
Some preliminary observations: Art and The Arts.
Conventional perspectives.
American Institutionalism.
Perspectives of neoinstitutionalism.
Economics and the arts: Complementary research programs?
Notes.
References [bibliography].

Arts & Intersections:

Categories: Creative Economies