Values of Culture; Eploring the Field of Cultural Economics

Interest in the cultural structuring of economic processes is growing rapidly. The arts and sciences are also cultural industries, structured by various strategies of credit. Taste, fashion, value, utility, and consumer behavior are constructed in a push and pull of economic and cultural processes. Recent research by economists and economic historians explores how cultural activities engender and shape economic values and practices, analyzing the ethics of consumerism, the creation of commodities and capital, cultural management and marketing strategies, or the importance of knowledge and knowledge networks for trade. In the humanities, (art/cultural) historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists are increasingly interested in the economics of culture, art markets, the representation of finance, the exchange of art and gifts, or the socio-economic life of things. Work on material culture problematizes the very distinction between economy on the one hand and culture on the other, arguing that notions of economic value are always already culturally constituted. Values of Culture will investigate the impact of cultural processes on economic processes and vice versa.

About the Workshop

In this workshop we explore the field of cultural economics through a series of short presentations by scholars from either the economic discipline or from various humanities background. Scholars will give a short presentation about their own work, placing this in the recently fast growing field of ‘cultural economics’. Presentations will cover topics such as urban creative industries, bourgeois virtues, moral economies or the ethic of finance, patronages, cultural production and exchanges, the history of finance, and economic imagination or concepts such as ‘credit’ or ‘value’. In the workshop we will seek for common grounds, exploring the possibilities of the formation of a text book on the subject.

About the Participants

The workshop Values of Culture is organised by Arjo Klamer, Professor of the Economics of Art and Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam and NIAS Fellow 2011/2012, and Inger Leemans, Professor of  Cultural History at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Workshop participants include:

• Frans Blom, Assistant Professor, Dutch Language and Literature, University of Amsterdam
• Anne Goldgar, Reader in Early Modern European History, King’s College London
• Kazuko Goto, Professor of Economics, Saitama University
• Michael Hutter, Director of the Department ‘Kulturelle Quellen von Neuheit’ Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)
• Helleke van den Braber, Assistant Professor, Literary and Cultural Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen          
• Robert Kloosterman, Professor of Economic Geography and Planning, University of Amsterdam
• Deirdre McCloskey, Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English and Communication at University of Illinois at Chicago & Professor of Economic History, Gothenburg University, Sweden
• Claudia Swan, Associate Professor of Art History, Northwestern University Chicago
• Philip Vermeylen, Associate Professor, Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication

About NIAS Workshops

To stimulate innovative (Dutch) top research within the Humanities and the Social Sciences, NIAS facilitates and finances small-scale, international research workshops, initiated by NIAS Fellows, Researchers at KNAW Institutes or Researchers at Dutch Universities. Workshops take place at the NIAS Conference Building and are for invited participants only. More information on organising a workshop at NIAS can be found here.