IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/103146.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The art world’s response to the challenge of inequality

Author

Listed:
  • Kolbe, Kristina
  • Upton-Hansen, Chris
  • Savage, Mike
  • Lacey, Nicola
  • Cant, Sarah

Abstract

This paper considers the challenges which rising economic inequality poses to the art world with a special focus on museums and galleries in the UK. Based on interviews with artists, curators and managers of leading art institutions in London, we discuss how issues of economic inequality are reflected in their thinking about cultural work and how these relate to questions of spatial power, post-colonial sensibilities and diversity issues. We show how increasing economic inequality brings about deep-seated, systematic and sustained challenges which extend well beyond public funding cuts associated with austerity politics to a wider re-positioning of the arts away from its location in a distinctive public sphere and towards elite private privilege. Against this backdrop, we put forward the term ‘the artistic politics of regionalism’ and suggest that the most promising approaches to addressing contemporary inequalities lie in institutions’ reconsideration of spatial dynamics which can link concerns with decolonisation and representation to a recognition of how economic inequality takes a highly spatialised form.

Suggested Citation

  • Kolbe, Kristina & Upton-Hansen, Chris & Savage, Mike & Lacey, Nicola & Cant, Sarah, 2020. "The art world’s response to the challenge of inequality," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103146, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:103146
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/103146/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Lucien Karpik, 2010. "Valuing the Unique: The Economics of Singularities," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 9215.
    2. Frey, Bruno S. & Meier, Stephan, 2006. "The Economics of Museums," Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, in: V.A. Ginsburgh & D. Throsby (ed.), Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 29, pages 1017-1047, Elsevier.
    3. Eve Chiapello & Luc Boltanski, 2005. "The New Spirit of Capitalism," Post-Print hal-00680089, HAL.
    4. Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez, 2003. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 118(1), pages 1-41.
    5. Eve Chiapello & Luc Boltanski, 2005. "The New Spirit of Capitalism," Post-Print hal-00678024, HAL.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Hutter, Michael, 2021. "Three Modes of Valuation Practices in Art Games," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 8(1), pages 85-119.
    2. Vigvári, Gábor, 2022. "Transzformáció és a populizmus a visegrádi országokban [Transformation and populism in the V4 countries]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(3), pages 339-366.
    3. Louis Moreno, 2012. "Looking backward," City, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 16(3), pages 345-354, June.
    4. Stéphane Debenedetti & Isabelle Huault & Véronique Perret, 2015. "Resisting the power of organizations in Modern Times : May we all be Charlot? [Résister au pouvoir des organisations dans les Temps Modernes : Peut-on tous être Charlot ?]," Post-Print hal-01525807, HAL.
    5. Sikka, Prem, 2015. "The corrosive effects of neoliberalism on the UK financial crises and auditing practices: A dead-end for reforms," Accounting forum, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 1-18.
    6. Milena I. Kremakova, 2014. "Trust, Access and Sensitive Boundaries between ‘Public’ and ‘Private’: A Returning Insider's Experience of Research in Bulgaria," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 19(4), pages 148-161, December.
    7. Luppi, Roberto, 2023. "Die Einsamkeit des Prekariats und die Bedürfnisse des "Wir": Warum es notwendig ist, das Konzept der gemeinsamen Bedürfnisse in die Definition des Prekariats aufzunehmen," Discussion Papers 01/23, Europa-Kolleg Hamburg, Institute for European Integration.
    8. Münnich, Sascha, 2016. "Note from the editor: Economic sociology and capitalism," economic sociology. perspectives and conversations, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, vol. 18(1), pages 2-5.
    9. Antonio ALOISI & Valerio DE STEFANO, 2020. "Regulation and the future of work: The employment relationship as an innovation facilitator," International Labour Review, International Labour Organization, vol. 159(1), pages 47-69, March.
    10. Lutter, Mark, 2014. "Creative success and network embeddedness: Explaining critical recognition of film directors in Hollywood, 1900-2010," MPIfG Discussion Paper 14/11, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies.
    11. Rob Shields, 2008. "The Urban Question as Cargo Cult: Opportunities for a New Urban Pedagogy," International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 32(3), pages 712-718, September.
    12. Stefano Dughera, 2020. "Skills, preferences and rights: evolutionary complementarities in labor organization," Journal of Evolutionary Economics, Springer, vol. 30(3), pages 843-866, July.
    13. Guéorguieva-Bringuier, Laura & Ottaviani, Fiona, 2018. "Opposition and Isomorphism with the Neoliberal Logic in Community Exchange Systems," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 149(C), pages 88-97.
    14. Imre Kovách & Boldizsár Gergely Megyesi & Angela Barthes & Hasan Volkan Oral & Marija Smederevac-Lalic, 2021. "Knowledge Use in Education for Environmental Citizenship—Results of Four Case Studies in Europe (France, Hungary, Serbia, Turkey)," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 13(19), pages 1-17, October.
    15. Wolf, Marcus, 2018. "Ain't misbehaving: Behavioral economics and the making of financial literacy," economic sociology. perspectives and conversations, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, vol. 19(2), pages 10-18.
    16. Davis, Reade, 2015. "‘All in’: Snow crab, capitalization, and the future of small-scale fisheries in Newfoundland," Marine Policy, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 323-330.
    17. Ionut Jianu, 2020. "The impact of government health and education expenditure on income inequality in European Union," Papers 2007.11409, arXiv.org.
    18. Guillet de Monthoux, Pierre, 2015. "Art, Philosophy, and Business: turns to speculative realism in European management scholarship," European Management Journal, Elsevier, vol. 33(3), pages 161-167.
    19. Jonathan S Davies, 2012. "Network Governance Theory: A Gramscian Critique," Environment and Planning A, , vol. 44(11), pages 2687-2704, November.
    20. Marie LEMAIRE, 2018. ""It's a Bible!" Unexpected use, misuse and non-use of CSR standards among "activist" workers," Working Papers of LaRGE Research Center 2018-08, Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie (LaRGE), Université de Strasbourg.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    economic; inequality; colonial; art; privilege;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D31 - Microeconomics - - Distribution - - - Personal Income and Wealth Distribution

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:103146. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.