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Arts and Culture

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Handbook of Cliometrics

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Abstract

The economic history of the arts includes both “high culture” – like the fine arts, theater, and classical music – and popular culture, such as pop music, movies, and newspapers. This chapter focuses primarily on the high arts but also provides a cursory description of the literature addressing more popular cultural production. The four sections of this chapter correspond to four key areas of inquiry in the economic history of the arts: what are relevant data about the arts and how to capture them, how market forces encourage the consumption and supply of culture, how artistic production is linked to geography and clustering, and what drives creative output. This chapter surveys scholars’ engagements with these questions across a wide range of art forms and time periods. It concludes with a discussion of why the study of the economic history of the arts represents unique opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and is particularly relevant to present-day service economies.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, in “The Dictionary of Composers and Their Music” (1979 & 1993), the two musicologists Gilder and Port provide information about who wrote what, and when. The dictionary is a recognized survey of the most influential classical compositions and served often as a source for composer’s output (e.g., Borowiecki 2013).

  2. 2.

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3200/HMTS.38.3.118-125

  3. 3.

    Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Oxford: Routledge, 1984), xxv.

  4. 4.

    Ibid.

  5. 5.

    The category of “influential compositions” is recorded by the the musicologists (experts’ selection) in Gilder and Port (1993).

  6. 6.

    These numbers for the United States are available from Federal Reserve Economics Data (FRED) (n.d.). URL: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CES7071000001

  7. 7.

    The conference was organized by one of the authors of the underlying chapter and attended by the other, and if it was not for that event, this chapter would probably not have been written.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark

    Karol Jan Borowiecki

  2. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA

    Diana Seave Greenwald

Authors
  1. Karol Jan Borowiecki
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  2. Diana Seave Greenwald
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Correspondence to Karol Jan Borowiecki .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. BETA/CNRS, University of Strasbourg, Institute for Advanced Study, Strasbourg, France

    Claude Diebolt

  2. University of Wisconsin – La Crosse, La Crosse, WI, USA

    Michael Haupert

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Borowiecki, K.J., Greenwald, D.S. (2024). Arts and Culture. In: Diebolt, C., Haupert, M. (eds) Handbook of Cliometrics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35583-7_31

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