The British Council and the University of Edinburgh have teamed up to prepare an empirical analysis of the actual effects of soft power (my introduction on soft power and the arts is here). How does this work? The idea is to take measures of different assets of a country that we think might contribute to its soft power, and to take measures of outcomes that we think might be influenced by soft power, to see if there's any actual evidence of impact. The report has a lengthy, careful review of what we know and don't know about soft power, the … [Read more...]

This week saw the release of two major studies in the UK on culture and soft power: Soft Power Today from the British Council and the University of Edinburgh, and The Art of Soft Power from King's College London. There's a lot of depth to each of the reports, and I'll write about each of them in subsequent posts. I'm relatively new to this aspect of cultural policy, so consider this introduction my own attempt to get a few things sorted out, and some preliminary questions. I began with Joseph Nye's seminal article from 1990. That was a time … [Read more...]

I've been away from the blog for a while, but I just can't keep myself away from economic impact studies of the arts. The latest is from Arts Council England - you can read the report here. Three things: First, the goals of the study are not clear. Britain's Office of National Statistics conducts an annual business survey from which estimates can be derived of Gross Value Added from different sectors, and these figures form the basis of the (2015) arts-sector estimates contained in this report. In other words, we can look up the size of the … [Read more...]

Two recent publications derive indices to rank different cities according to their cultural vibrancy - from the National Center for Arts Research in the United States, and the European Commission for European cities. They have the same fundamental problem. In each report, a selection of data series applying to cities' cultural ecosystems is chosen. These are then weighted. The US study makes a ranking of cities according to different measures, then applies weights to how the city ranked - you can see the method on page 7 here: measures of … [Read more...]

At Time magazine, Alex Melamid suggests it can, that the infantilism found in (some) works of modern art has led us, in the end, to an infantile president of the United States: Whatever the intelligentsia nurtures and celebrates in our galleries and academic journals is bound to flow eventually into the nation’s cinemas, through its ballot boxes and toward the swamp of Washington, D.C. The last few months have proven that Trump is not out to drain that swamp. He is its progeny, and we on the left — the artists, the people of culture — have … [Read more...]

Barry's Blog has thoughts on this. He points out, correctly I think, that while individual airline companies - Delta, Virgin, Qantas - try to create a brand image of their own, there is also in the public mind an idea of the airline sector as a whole. When one airline treats a customer badly, it does not just reflect on that one airline, but also affects the public perception of airline travel on the whole. And so he asks: What is the Arts Brand - not that of any individual arts organization - but the whole of the arts? I admire his taking … [Read more...]

In my last post I wrote about cost disease, the powerful analysis of economic shifts that results from labor-saving technological change occurring at different speeds in different sectors of the economy. This is an addendum: cost disease explains some changes in costs and prices, but not all of them. It explains why school districts struggle to attract teachers and balance budgets, but it doesn't explain why it costs so much to attend Wellesley. It explains why it's hard for high schools to find bands they can afford to perform at school … [Read more...]

Professor William Baumol, one of the greatest living economists, has died at the age of 95. Alan Krueger did an interview with him here, and Tyler Cowen has written often about him, here. Readers of artsjournal.com know him best for his conception of cost disease, done jointly with William Bowen. Here is a nice concise presentation from 1965. In a nutshell, there is the idea that wages in the live performing arts will be pressed ever upwards even though there are few labor-saving technologies available to arts organizations to keep costs in … [Read more...]

The New York Times reported that the Metropolitan Museum of Art is looking at options to make its "suggested" entry fee into something a little stronger than a hint, at least for people who live outside the city or state. A few years ago Derek Thompson reported that about six out of ten visitors do not pay the full suggested fee, and so the numbers at stake are large. What can we say about this? It's a bit over the top to refer to charging those visitors who reside outside the local tax base that supports the museum, but not residents, as … [Read more...]