Arts and Culture

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.