Responding to Steve Kates: more zombie shuffles

RMIT economics lecturer and weird Australian defender of the Romney 47%-thesis Steve Kates has a new blog up called Law of Markets, which is unsurprisingly devoted to Kates’ laissez faire economics and far-right political opinions.

You might recall that I wrote a post a few years back entitled “Don’t study economics at RMIT”, a rather tongue-in-cheek critique of Kates’ baroque views about economics, and the apparent concentration of libertarian economists at that institution.

The original post was in reaction to an op-ed by Kates in the Australian Financial Review, in which he argued that Labor government’s 2009 stimulus package was crowding out private business activity, and therefore causing inflation:

The RBA is continuing to raise rates because the government is taking up domestic savings more rapidly than we are able to generate those savings through productive activity.

In this economy at this time it is the government that is the single most important cause of rising rates. The RBA is only doing what it can to ensure the resources available for investment are properly priced.

As I argued in my original post, Kates’ ideas are highly neoclassical. Dr Kates is a well-known proponent arguing for the resurrection of Say’s Law, a largely discredited economic theory that suggests that demand and supply, by definition, are essentially always in equilibrium.

I criticised it at the time by pointing out that:

One of the implications of Say’s Law is the crowding-out theory of investment, namely, that government investment necessarily diverts the investment in productive capacity of an economy away from private firms. This is why Kates argues that “it is the government that is absorbing our national savings and raising the cost of capital.”

I further argued that there didn’t seem to be much evidence that the government was raising the cost of capital. I pointed out that the government was largely borrowing foreign money through sovereign bond issues, and that Australian firms were having no problems getting access to foreign capital via their own bond issues. So we should expect inflation and therefore interest rates to stay low.

So let’s just fast-forward and ask ourselves: has government stimulus in Australia crowded out private savings and raised the cost of capital?

No. Since Kates’ article, and since my response, Australian inflation has stayed remarkably contained, and interest rates have been lowered, not raised.

But how does Kates react to this reality? By denying it.

Here is his argument:

For me, schooled in the classics as I am, it was as obvious as a cloudless day that the stimulus could never achieve its ends. For virtually the rest of the profession it was not. Why the difference? I base my understanding on the classical theory of the cycle; they base their understanding on Keynes. That’s it. Nothing else.

Kates is so reflexively anti-Keynes that he simply can’t admit that a) stimulus can stimulate, and b) austerity can contract. This means he keeps getting things wrong. In 2010, for instance, he thought stimulus must lead to higher inflation and interest rates. Of course, it didn’t. Now, he believes that austerity is not really contractionary. Of course, it is.

It would be pretty funny, really, if it wasn’t so serious. Basic textbook IS-LM has been remarkably predictive in the current crisis. Pre-Keynesian neoclassical theory has been remarkably useless.

I tried to respond to Kates’ blog post, by the way. He binned my comment in moderation. Classy.

New art is popular

This article appeared in Crikey on April 8th.

Celeste Boursier-Mougenot "From here to ear (v. 13) 2010". Mixed media, exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. Image: Queensland Art Gallery.

Your correspondent was in Brisbane last weekend, where he was able to spend a couple of afternoons at the Gallery of Modern Art’s latest contemporary art exhibition, 21st Century: Art in the First Decade.

The gallery was filled with people from across the demographic spectrum: young hipster couples, tourists, senior Australians, and families. So many families. This is an exhibition that seems to to capture the imagination of kids, as well as those who refuse to grow up.

And who can blame them? This particular vision of art in the 21st century could be criticised for many things (some have even used that most devastating of artworld barbs: “safe”), but one thing you can’t fault is its sense of sheer, innocent joy. GOMA’s take on the art of the past decade is filled with the interactive, the relational and the funny, from Martin Creed’s room filled full of purple balloons (Work No. 965: Half the air in a given space (purple)) to Carsten Holler’s signature slippery dip Test site, and from Rikrit Tiravanija’s key relational work — a Thai meal for four — to Olafur Eliasson’s giant Lego play pen, The cubic structural evolution project.

Martin Creed, "Work No. 956" (2008), exhibited at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. Image: Queensland Art Gallery / Natasha Harth

Of these, Holler’s Test site is something of a signature work of the show, dominating the gallery hall over two levels as visitors enter the space. Crikey’s correspondent was struck by the long stretching lines of kids queuing to go on the slides.

Two of the most popular works at the show were interactive and tinged with a sophisticated play of emotions: Rivane Neuenschwander’s wall of ribbons with wishes printed on them, I wish your wish, and the indoor finch aviary of Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s From here to ear (v.13). Neuenschwander’s work knowingly winked at the unattainability of so many of our hopes and dreams (Crikey particularly enjoyed “I wish I was a famous cricket player”), while Boursier-Mougenot’s work echoes some of the best installation work of the past two decades, such as Hirst’s 1000 Years, and takes it in a sadder, quieter and more sublime direction.

The exhibition certainly has several potential flaws. As a show substantially built up from the gallery’s own collection, it has an unashamedly Asia-Pacific focus; many of the works chosen to represent important artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Julian Opie and Chris Ofili are far from the best examples of their ouevre. On the other hand, this Asia-Pacific collection is the gallery’s obvious strength, and has taken on a chilling importance with the recent imprisonment of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, whose Painted vases are a part of the show.

A show such as this is something of a risk for a big gallery — or at least once might have thought to have been — especially in comparison to tried and tested blockbuster exhibitions of old masters. Hence, it must be gratifying for the gallery to mount such a well-attended show, despite the devastating floods of summer. Brisbane’s Gallery Of Modern Art/Queensland Art Gallery complex is now themost popular art gallery in the country, according to recently released figures.

It’s indeed interesting that two of the most exciting recent exhibitions in contemporary art in this country have occurred at Brisbane’s GOMA and in Hobart, where the Museum of Old and New Art, or MOMA, continues to wow Australian contemporary art lovers with a collection whose breadth and vision is unmatched in the country (for a recap, have a look at Andrew Frost’s episode of Artscape for ABC-TV).

According to Queensland Art Gallery director Tony Elwood, speaking on a panel discussion as part of 21st Century’s talks program: “We are a soft target because we are innovative and because we are in Brisbane. We work twice as hard to get half the recognition because we are in Brisbane.”

Pointing to criticisms that the exhibition is something of a “fun park”,  he answers: “It’s just disappointing that … by demonstrating just how much we want to reach out to whole ranges of audiences, that we then become a target. Contemporary art is always going to be the most critiqued and the most misunderstood of all the different art histories.”

As a result, Elwood says the gallery worked particularly hard on the ancillary aspects of the exhibition: its didactic panels, itscomprehensive blog and the handsome catalogue. The catalogue is notable for a typically clever essay on the theory of contemporary art by the inimitable Rex Butler, who canvasses the Duchampian nature of the exhibition in a few stylish paragraphs, before declaring, in a wonderful double movement, that “the new motto for art in the 21st century should be ‘Please don’t touch’.”

He means that, as art “increasingly heads towards a condition of total immersion, of a psychedelic or even neurological model”, it also embodies a contradiction: “It would be something of the hand … in an age of digitality.”

Of course, you don’t need to understand the history of modern art to enjoy 21st Century — and that’s precisely the point. In its large-scale installations for children, in particular, the exhibition demonstrates just how vibrant and enjoyable a commitment to new art can be. This really is living art.

 

Elif Batuman on the double-entry book-keeping of writing

Elif Batuman. Image: ecu essays.

I must be the very last person in the literary world to discover the complex delight of reading Elif Batuman, but this piece of writing by her really did my head in.

It’s the first chapter of her doctoral dissertation, and it’s quite possibly the most erudite, dextrous and fleet-footed jaunt through the literary theory of the modern novel I’ve read since … well, since Borges:

The time of writing is not problematic for all novelists; only for 1) professional, full-time writers, who 2) maintain a strict allegiance to the raw material of lived experience.  The time of writing is not problematic for Casanova, because he takes up writing only in his retirement: far from scribbling his memoirs in the fear that he would die before completing his work, he actually tried to draw out his writing as long as possible, to fill his remaining years.  At the opposite end of the spectrum, metaliterary gamesters like Sterne or Diderot feel no epistemological responsibility to base their works on real experiences; to the contrary, epistemological self-sufficiency becomes for them a point of pride.  A much-cited passage from Tristram Shandy, for instance, testifies equally to a vivid awareness of the time of writing and a complete indifference towards “research”:

I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve-month; and having got… almost into the middle of my fourth volume—and no farther than to my first day’s life—’tis demonstrative that I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write… so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work… I am just thrown so many volumes back.

Shandy delights precisely in his own ability to keep writing with no new material at all.  Life does not interrupt Shandy’s writing; Shandy interrupts his own writing, congratulating himself on the inexhaustible nature of his new amusement (“I shall lead a fine life out of this self-same life of mine”), and on its capability to stimulate the “manufactures of paper.”  He is not battling an inescapable condition, but inventing a gratuitous obstacle, protracting his “Life” with digressions, deferrals and ruptures.  That Shandy himself  sees these obstacles as voluntary is borne out by his claim that they were “never applicable before to any one biographical writer since the creation of the world,” and would “never hold good to any other, until its final destruction” (198): engaged in willful play, he has no idea of having stumbled onto an inherent novelistic problem.  In similar fashion, Diderot gleefully protracts the story of Jacques’s loves:  “What is there to prevent me from marrying off the master and having him cuckolded?  Or sending Jacques off to the Indies?  And leading his master there?  And bringing them both back to France on the same vessel?  How easy it is to make up stories!”37  “Qu’il est facile de faire des contes”: for Cervantes or Boswell or Proust, it is not so easy.  The artificial hurdle becomes, in their works, an organic barrier.  Play becomes work—or at least a more arduous game, with a stringent new rule: the epistemological obligation to “make up” stories from something, some real material.  “Faire des contes” becomes, in this way, “faire des comptes”: each narrative element—each obstacle, separation and reunion—is a debit which must be balanced, in the credit column, with some experiential knowledge.  To introduce the central metaphor of this dissertation, I propose that this balance can be construed as such an account in the style of double-entry bookkeeping:

 

Debit	Credit
The time of research, lived experience	The time of writing
Material for a book	Unhappiness, knowledge, experience
Ginés’s crimes	Ginés’s terms in the galley
Marcel’s experiences; the dinner invitation	Marcel’s solitude; the writing notebook

If in this light we reconsider Boswell’s metaphor of reaping no more than he can sow—living no more than he can record—we see that it is essentially an economical one: if his experiences are too numerous to write about in the remaining time, Boswell will have misspent his life.

A major new talent.

Arts journalism is in a sorry state … which is no surprise

The following post appeared in Crikey on January 21st

Crikey recently carried an article by Lucinda Strahan on the dire state of Australian arts journalism. Strahan reported that “a two-week sample of arts journalism in Melbourne newspapers The Ageand the Herald Sun found public relations activity at 97% in The Ageand 98% in the Herald Sun”.

The shoddy state of the profession is disappointing, but hardly surprising for those who have actually worked as arts journalists. Arts journalists — and let’s throw in their even more neglected brothers and sisters, the critics — are a motley crew, to say the least. But what they generally share are precarious, insecure and lowly paid working conditions.

Indeed, it’s getting harder and harder to be an arts journalist in this country, in the sense that you can be a political journalist or a business reporter. The troubles faced by newspapers are felt most keenly in sections such as the arts pages, which are routinely cut back in hard times (probably justifiably, as they are not stellar performers when it comes to advertising revenue). Australia’s arts and creative industries are growing, but are still minnows compared to the giants of banking and mining. In any case, who wants to read about the back office when you can read about Cate Blanchett? The cultural sector contains stars and celebrities, and this is about whom audiences want to read. The only true creative industries reporter in the country is the Financial Review’s Katrina Strickland, and the Australian media is scarcely rushing to provide her with competitors.

For most arts writers, a gig at a daily newspaper is an unachievable dream. The struggling freelancers, which is most of us, have to make do with street press coverage for $40 a pop, or internet copy, which might not pay much better. Several years back I wrote about contemporary music for the worthy-but-impoverished Mess + Noise. Most articles received a remuneration of $10. There are quality critics such as Mel Campbell out there who still write a lot of their copy for peanuts. If you can pay the rent as an arts writer or critic in this country, you’re among a lucky handful.

Small wonder, then, that the people who end up writing about arts and culture do it for the love. They’d be pretty stupid if they did if for the money. Nor should we be surprised that arts writers have jobs outside journalism, often in the same industry they cover. As Strahan noted,  “subjective and even crusading advocacy … is considered proper practice in coverage of the arts, something that flies in the face of the cool impartiality of the fourth estate”.

If arts journalism is tough, criticism is even tougher. As a series of talks demonstrated last year at the Wheeler Centre, knowledgeable and passionate criticism again has become an essentially amateur phenomenon. It  flourishes in the blogosphere, for free.

Part of the problem is that no one really likes a good critic in the first place. Artists who pour their heart and soul into a performance get understandably miffed when a critic pronounces their latest masterpiece a dud. This can make the work of a critic lonely and unrewarding. And Australia’s cultural institutions are largely run by arts administrators and former artists, most of whom get quite uncomfortable whenever a critic gets, well, critical.

Nor is there much funding to be an arts writer. While the federal and state governments, through their funded cultural institutions, directly employ thousands of dancers, actors, singers, musicians, administrators and crew — even publicists — there is vanishingly little support for critics or journalists to write about culture and the arts.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t expect the highest standards of investigative reporting and critical appraisal from our arts writers. Realistically, though, we’re not going to get it as often as we’d like.

All of which sounds like a bit of whinge. But it’s not. Despite the adversity, quality writing about arts and culture continues to thrive in Australia: in blogs, in the small press, and in online publications … such as this one.

The comments at the bottom of my original Crikey piece are well worth a read too.

 

Ben Davis on the rise of art news and the crisis of art criticism

Clement Greenberg. Image: Chicago Art Criticism

At ArtInfo.com, Ben Davis has a thoughtful and I think largely accurate description of the rise and rise of news media about the visual arts industry over the past decade – at the expense of art criticism:

The expanding market for “art news” coincided with the ballooning of the more commercial side of the art world in the ’00s: the explosion of art fairs (Art Basel Miami Beach debuted in 2002, Frieze in 2003), the rise of the “ego-seum,” the hunger of corporations to tap high-culture cachet (Takashi Murakami’s team-up with Louis Vuitton was in 2003), the triumph of art-as-investment, and the “emerging artist” wave that saw galleries harvest kids fresh out of school (Alex McQuilken’s “Fucked,” a video of the 19-year-old artist having sex made while she was at NYU, famously sold out at the 2002 Armory Show). But everything about “theory-crit” requires the reader to buy the idea that the academy is the most important tastemaking center. Thus, the commercial explosion created a space where all the stuff about the market and the social scene, institutional moves and their political ramifications, actually feels more relevant than the most “serious” criticism.

And there’s the rub, of course. Art news is more relevant than art criticism in the year 2011, because almost no-one reads or takes art criticism seriously. What mattes in the art world nowadays is the money, in the way that what matters in publishing and in Hollywood are best-sellers and blockbusters. Critics will remain interesting, insightful and even incisive, but the days when a powerful critic such as Clement Greenberg could effectively ignite and then police an entire art movement are, at least for the foreseeable future, probably over.

The heritage wars heat up

The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra plays Mahler in 2007. Source: Victoria Anderson

Well well, who would have thought an essay about cultural policy would generate so much heat?

A book chapter for the Centre for Policy Development by Marcus Westbury and myself has started to gain some serious attention in the high arts in Australia. I’ve already covered Richard Mills’ reaction to it here. But today in The Australian, there is a long article from Rosemary Sorensen about the debate, which includes the first formal response from Australia Council CEO Kathy Keele:

Australia Council chief executive Kathy Keele agrees that the dichotomy is unhelpful. “It’s not either-or,” she says, “it’s about doing it all.”

While she welcomes the debate, Keele does say that Westbury, who has created festival events under the Australia Council’s banner and also helped write one of its arts guides, has not done his homework well enough.

“He’s talking about an Australia Council that does not exist,” she says. “This whole conversation about heritage is not relevant: it’s really that we need more funding for the arts across the board.”

Keele laughs off the idea that an orchestra playing Bach or a theatre company performing Shakespeare is somehow out of date because the composer or the playwright is no longer with us.

“The people going to see it are not dead,” she says.

“Those performances are still about today.”

Of course, regular readers of this blog will know that this is in turn a misrepresentation of Marcus’ arguments, and I humbly suggest Keele should have a careful read of our essay. In it, we don’t actually say that Shakespeare or Bach are “out of date” because they are “no longer with us”, but we do point out the Australia Council’s overwhelming funding bias towards a small number of cultural organisations and a narrow range of cultural expressions.

As we point out in the essay, while there is substantial funding for organisations to perform works by Bach or Shakespeare (including funding for an entire company devoted to Shakespeare), only 2% of Australia Council music funding goes to contemporary music, only 5% of the arts funding in this country is devoted to living artists making new work, and the Australia Council gives five times as much funding to one opera company as it does to its entire Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board.

The debate is set to continue, so stay tuned.

Richard Mills tries to defend the heritage arts; fails

I couldn’t let this one go … distinguished composer and WA Opera Director Richard Mills had a wonderful defence of the heritage arts in The Age last week. Sounding like a critic trampled in the riot on the first night of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Mills thunders on about the new media arts in a tone that would be shocking if it were not so risible:

Some recently emerging mumbles in the national conversation appear to advocate a radical reallocation of government funding to various enterprises seen as exemplifying greater diversity of engagement, relevance (to whom or what is never stated) and, of course, innovation. I suppose I should begin by nailing my colours to the mast through making this confession.

I was a member of the Australia Council for the Arts in the 1990s when the New Media Fund was set up. I opposed it vehemently – and in vain – as it seemed to me just another example of meretricious, self-serving claptrap, which confused content with process, masquerading to the weak-minded as new, with a healthy sense of entitlement to whatever funds might happen to drop from the perch of government.

To educate and enlighten my misguided ways, I was taken to an office in Melbourne by an earnest, believing colleague. This office was the hub of revolutionary “new media” enterprise. I was ushered in and shown, in an atmosphere of hushed reverence, some examples of “new media” which, so far as I could tell, consisted of pictures of yellow flowers changing and moving about a bit on a TV screen.

“Humbug,” I exclaimed, “this belongs to the visual arts” – only to be howled down by the entire clutch of councillors of the day (except, if my memory serves me correctly, Christopher Pearson).

Thankfully, this nonsense, and other things like it, were recognised in their true colours some years later when my esteemed colleague Jonathan Mills (no relation) encouraged the abolition of the New Media Fund with enthusiasm – and final success.

Apart from the important new revelation that we can sheet home some responsibility for the abolition of the New Media Arts Board to Jonathan Mills, the article is an amazingly short-sighted defence. I’ve responded over at Inside Story:

Like the best satire, Mills’s essay skates close to the ridiculous. (When was the last time someone cried “humbug” in a policy discussion?) As spoof, Mills’s essay is a near-masterpiece. As sincere argument, it’s a train wreck. Mills gloats over the destruction of the Australia Council’s New Media Arts Board in 2004, as though it were some victory in the culture wars. He advances factually wrong statements – for instance, that grassroots music depends on musicians trained by symphony orchestras for the supply of expert teachers. He makes frankly embarrassing comments about jewellery and computer programming. More generally, in his rage against the dying of a light, he reveals himself to be as reactionary and ill-informed about other artforms as he is proficient in his own.

Mills’s essay is destined to become an important source document for those studying the current shape of Australian cultural policy. Sadly, one of Australia’s finest living composers has shown himself to possess a narrow critical mind. But Mills has also done us a favour, because he has been honest enough to reveal a widespread attitude among influential decision-makers in the Australian arts: the attitude that some forms of art, particularly their own, are more meritorious than others.

David Mitchell

David Mitchell. Source: New York Times.

David Mitchell is amongst the handful of living novelists at the very top of their game right now. Many will know Cloud Atlas, a dizzyingly brilliant meditation on the darkness of the human soul; Mitchell’s latest novel, his fifth, is The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and returns to his peerless writing about Japan that we last saw in Number 9 Dream (my favourite).

Now the New York Times has a handsome feature profile on Mitchell:

“About 30 pages into the manuscript of ‘Cloud Atlas,’ ” David Ebershoff, Mitchell’s American editor, told me in his office in Manhattan this spring, “I came to a page that ends in the middle of a sentence. At the time I had an unreliableassistant, and I thought: She can’t even make a decent photocopy — she messed up the pagination! I was out of town for the weekend, and I really wanted to read it, and I figured I’d work out what was missing. And so I kept going and,” Ebershoff said, laughing, “I saw what he was doing.”

What Mitchell was doing was writing a novel not quite like any that had come before it, and one that defeats tidy summary. “Cloud Atlas” consists of five false starts, a sequence of unfinished novellas, each set in a different place and time, each with a distinct form: the South Pacific in the 1850s, through the travel journal of a notary out of Melville; Belgium in 1931, in a composer’s letters to a lover as if by Christopher Isherwood; California in the 1970s, via a detective story told in the styleless style of an airport thriller; England of the present day, in the voice of a crass publisher who wouldn’t be a stranger to a Martin Amisnovel; and, in a nameless state in a dystopic future, a transcript of testimony given by a most unusual slave. As the five narratives unfold chronologically — each a story of betrayal and theft, of manipulation and deceit, of human opportunism in its most base and basic forms — each breaks off at some brittle, cliffhanging, character-revealing moment, whereupon the next novella begins, until it, too, breaks off, and then the next. . . .

This is an excellent first introduction to Mitchell’s work. Read it, but better still, read him.

Spotify and Lady GaGa

Lady GaGa leaves her London hotel, March 2010. Image: Rolling Stone

I don’t think I’m alone in the world in expressing my sincere admiration for the sheer artistic commitment of Stefani Germanotta, better known to her millions of fans as Lady GaGa.

While an in-depth critical dissection of the songwriting, performance and (perhaps most notably) entrepreneurial talents of contemporary music’s hottest new star are outside the scope of this blog, I will probably post something about this fascinating artist from a musicological perspective down the track. (Just one thing that intrigues me: GaGa’s Italian-American ethnicity and the clear inspiration she seems to have taken from another Italian-American, Madonna).

But GaGa’s relationship to the changing economics of the music industry certainly is a topic of this blog. And that’s been much in the news lately, with the revelation that Spotify, the hit new streaming wesbite based in Sweden, paid GaGa only US$167 for more than 1 million downloads.

The news quickly spread around global media, as horrified musicians and collection agencies mobilised to fight the latest threat to artistic livelihoods. Sam Leith has weighed in at The Guardian, as have a number of other commentators.

So, is this more evidence of the internet destroying recorded music as we know it? Well … no, actually, as Steve Lawson points out:

[The original report about the Spotify royalty] does mention that she’s had 20 million paid downloads. 20 MILLION paid downloads. (that warrants a Dr Evil pinky-in-the-corner-of-the-mouth pose).

Yup, that’s not the headline, that her digital strategy that includes Spotify has lead to her selling 20 MILLION downloads – in an age when any of those 20 million sales could’ve been grabbed from a file sharing service or copied from a friend (I’m taking a wild guess that Lady Gaga fans run in packs – she doesn’t strike me as the kind of artist that appeals to the friendless reclusive goth kid with the idiosyncratic taste).

Lawson concludes that even if Spotify only functions as a streaming radio service, the artists are still winning.

In fact, Spotify has since responded to the criticism by saying that the $167 figure was only a small part of GaGa’s royalty earnings. According to Paul brown of Spotify, quoted in Billboard,

“This figure is over 15 months out of date and relates to a short period of time, just after Spotify had launched back in late 2008 and is not an accurate or current reflection of the total royalties paid out to an artist and composer like Lady Gaga. It also only relates to royalties due from STIM (the Swedish collecting society) in respect of plays in Sweden ONLY and none of the other markets.”

On the other hand, there is no doubt that the revenue streams once available to artists from music sales are far less than they hay-days of the 1980s and 90s, as Peter Kafka points out in this post:

Remember when people used to predict that digital music sales would make up for the disappearing CD? That’s officially over now: Last quarter, for the first time ever, the number of digital songs sold in the U.S. declined.

More on Spotify: Information Is Beautiful has a typically impressive post about this very point, and the Guardian’s Charles Arthur has an excellent post breaking down the known information underlying Spotify’s business model.

What’s new in the International Journal of Cultural Policy? The IJCP’s special book review issue

A classic cover of Raymond Williams' classic study, Culture and Society 1780-1950.

The first issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy for 2010 is a refreshing departure from its more typical, research-0based fare: an issue of book reviews by some of the leading thinkers in the field – many of whom I’ve discussed on this blog.

So, for instance, there is Jeremy Ahearne on Michael de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life,  Franco Bianchini on Peter Hall’s Cities in Civilisation, Bennett himself on Raymond Williams’ classic Culture and Society, and Eleonora Belfiore on  Janet Minihan’s The Nationalization of Culture: the development of state subsidies to the arts in Great Britain. Interestingly, given the strident debate that has developed about the “neo-liberalism” of the creative industries school, Stuart Cunningham has opted to review that capitalist classic, Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

Editor Oliver Bennett writes that:

This special issue gathers together some personal reflections on the intellectual influences of many of those that have contributed to the development of cultural policy as a field of academic enquiry. Each contributor was invited to write a short review essay on one book that had influenced his/her thinking and which s/he would want new students of cultural policy to read.

The collection thus serves a twofold purpose: it offers a fascinating insight into the intellectual force fields within which the study of cultural policy has grown up; at the same time, it provides a valuable resource for teachers of cultural policy, their students and all those with a general interest in the field.

For breadth and diversity, it’s one of the best issues of the IJCP for some time.