Arts, market and the state: Cultural policies in introspect

Abstract

The field of cultural policies is novel and burgeoning; it harbors diverse and even contradictory approaches, with no universally recognizable principles; it has no common language of its own nor any unified theoretical perspective. The field is fragmented and heterogeneous in nature and bound to the interaction of multiple actors in different institutional settings. Although it began initially as a western academic and institutional endeavor, and developed mostly in the U.S. and Western Europe, cultural policies has turned out to be a common good for the entire world both as an academic discipline and as a bureaucratic and institutional enterprise.