Report explores the value we place in arts and culture

Professor Mark Banks (pictured) from the Department of Media and Communication has written a report for the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Cultural Value Project – a two-year project exploring how we think about the value of arts and culture to individuals and to society.

The report suggests that the cultural industries workplace is a significant source of cultural value, but that the value we place in culture can vary. For example, a craft good is valued intrinsically as a product made by a person, which accretes its external value; and a song produced by an autonomous artist is regarded as having a different value to an engineered corporate hit.  

The cultural value of an object, the report suggests, can be related to the conditions and intentions of the labour invested in them – not just their price.

A link to Professor Banks’s report ‘Cultural Industries, Work and Values’ can be accessed here: https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/media/people/professor-mark-banks/mark-banks-ahrc-cultural-value-project

The AHRC will be publishing a final report on the Cultural Value Project in the near future which will bring together a number of reports into the cultural industries from academics.