Public choice in the tertiary art market

InMaking the Mummies Dance, Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, articulates a blistering defense of his, admittedly minority, view; namely, that trading directly with dealers when selling deaccessioned works of art or adding to museum collections is preferable to buying and selling in the open auction market (Hoving, 1992). Hoving has been severely criticized for his trades during his tenure at the Metropolitan, as well as for his assessment of the market for fine arts, which runs counter to the prevailing views held by many American public officials, professional art critics and museum boards. We shall present a theoretical model in support of Hoving's argument that trades made at auctions may not serve the public interest. We shall also statistically investigate the stochastic processes which characterize the tertiary art market.     

Determinants of Public Cultural Expenditures: An Exploratory Time Series Analysis for Austria

Austria calls itself a ``cultural nation' as the arts, the performing arts (theaters) and museums, in particular, play an important role in public debate. However, the question arises as to whether public cultural expenditures as an indication of the significance of cultural policy are really as important when compared to other policy fields as political parties and the government try to suggest. A time series of public cultural expenditures for the period from 1967 to 1998 is taken as a basis for testing econometrically whether public expenditures (measured primarily as the ratio to GDP) follow a growth path. Based on tests for the stationarity of the time series of cultural expenditures in Austria, there are empirical indications that cultural expenditures, gross domestic product (GDP) and the relative price index (GDP and government expenditures) are cointegrated. Further econometric estimations (error-correction models) show that cultural expenditures increase with growing GDP but are vulnerable to short term fluctuations. Additionally, ``Baumol's cost disease' adds to the long-term growth of cultural expenditures. In the past the growth path of cultural expenditures has been stable and independent of the ideology of ruling parties, the form of government and political business cycles.     

ART-SCIENCE

In this paper we examine the emergent field of art-science, part of a heterogeneous space of overlapping interdisciplinary practices at the intersection of the arts, sciences and technologies. Art-science is often thought to exemplify Nowotny et al.'s (2001) ‘mode-2’ knowledge production; indeed the institutions supporting art-science invariably claim that art-science contributes to the ‘contextualization of science’ by rendering scientific and technical knowledge more accessible and accountable to its publics. Our argument, however, is that this approach fails to capture the ways in which art-science exhibits its own complex trajectories, which cannot be grasped in terms of an epochal transition in the mode of knowledge production. Drawing on ethnographic research on art-science practitioners and institutions in the USA, UK and Australia, our first aim is to indicate the heterogeneity of art-science by contrasting distinctive forms and genealogies of art-science. A second aim follows. Rather than simply multiplying the connections between science and its publics, we suggest that art-science is instructive in highlighting radically divergent conceptions and practices of publicness, and point to two such forms. We examine, first, the relations between science, art and the public in the UK from C. P. Snow's ‘two cultures’ essay to the activities of the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. In these developments, art that is in dialogue with science is conceived primarily as a means by which the (absent) public for science can be interpellated: science is understood as complete, and as needing only to be communicated or applied, while art provides the means through which the public can be assembled and mobilized on behalf of science. We contrast this with a novel institutional programme in art-science pedagogy at the University of California, Irvine: the Masters programme in Arts, Computation and Engineering (ACE). Through the contents of the ACE teaching programme and the case of an art-science project concerned with the measurement of air pollution by ACE faculty member Beatriz da Costa, and with reference to the work of Hannah Arendt and Barbara Cassin, we suggest that art-science can act not so much as a way of assembling a public for science, but as a public experiment.     

Valuing the Benefits of Cleaning Lincoln Cathedral

This paper summarises a contingent valuation study of willingness to pay forcleaning Lincoln Cathedral. A randomsample of the inhabitants of the city of Lincoln and the surrounding area wasquestioned as to their willingness topay for a change in the frequency of a hypothetical cleaning cycle from 40years to 10 years. This change wasillustrated by photographs which showed the same aspects of the Cathedralhalf-way through the two cleaning cycles.Individuals were also asked questions regarding their attitudes towards airpollution in general and its impact on theCathedral in particular. It was found that household willingness to pay isbest predicted by disposable income anda variable indicating distance from the site. Estimates of mean willingnessto pay range from £ 15 to £ 23 perhousehold per annum for those living Lincolnshire. Aggregating these valuesover the number of households inLincolnshire suggests that the annual damage inflicted by air pollution on theappearance of the building so far assoiling is concerned is valued between £ 0.4 m and £ 0.6 m.Different solutions to the problem of starting point biaswere explored and are shown to yield similar estimates of willingness to pay.     

Valuing the Arts: A Contingent Valuation Approach

Government funding of the arts has received considerable attention in the United States in recent years. Efforts to cut funding to the National Endowment for the Arts and declining budgets for state arts agencies have raised questions about how much individuals value the arts. This paper applies the contingent valuation method to assess this value, using surveys of random households and of arts patrons. Our analysis estimated a mean willingness to pay (WTP) among all Kentucky households from $6 to$27, depending on the estimation technique used and on whether the scenario discussed is to increase arts performances by 25 per cent, or to avoid a 25per cent or 50 per cent decrease in the number of performances. Among arts patron households, the mean WTP ranges from $61 to $132.Consumer demand for arts performances in large part follows a predictable pattern. The likelihood of respondents agreeing to make the donation that is requested rises as the size of the donation decreases. The likelihood is higher to avoid a 50 per cent decline in performances than to avoid a 25 percent decline in performances. The mean WTP rises with income, and arts patron households have a much higher WTP than all households. WTP rises with on-site use factors such as frequency of attendance. The WTP also rises for arts patrons households with off-site use such as watching arts events on television or reading about the arts in newspapers and magazines.     

The welfare and equity implications of competition in television broadcasting: the role of viewer tastes

This paper studies the behavior of commercial television broadcasters in markets where the distribution of viewer tastes varies. Our results show that a highly “clustered” market enables the broadcaster to offer a program of a popular type but with lower quality (i.e., lower production values) than is the case when viewers have more diffused tastes. We find that viewer equity in the television market (i.e., the percentage of all potential viewers who have at least one program they consider worth watching) and viewer welfare (i.e., total consumer surplus) may not coincide. Depending upon the distribution of viewer tastes and the cost of providing quality programming, the number of broadcasters required to fully cover the market to avoid market failure may be greater than the number of broadcasters that produce greater viewer welfare. The study suggests that regulatory bodies need to pay attention to the distribution pattern of viewer tastes and the broadcasters' desire for return on programming investments, since both factors have important implications for competitive outcomes and viewer well-being.     

Reputational capital in ‘the PR University’: public relations and market rationalities

Drawing on empirical data, this article identifies the emergence of the ‘PR University’ as an assemblage. Using a case study of university press officers’ work, I analyse how this form of media relations PR stages competition between UK universities through the media. A key form of this competition centres on the accumulation and circulation of what I term ‘reputational capital’. I focus on one core element of reputational capital – media stories about HE research and the circulation of research metrics. I argue that the assemblage of the public relations (PR) University pulls the HE sector into dialogue with PR principles and practices in the context of recent shifts towards market rationalities. But this relationship is not a simple cause and effect model in which increasing HE ‘marketisation’ creates a boom in universities’ PR practices, or intensifying investment in PR by universities merely amplifies or legitimises existing market tendencies in the sector. I argue that the PR University as assemblage starts generating its own logics around which actors in the field must orient themselves. More broadly, the PR University operates not only to promote an individual university’s market position, but also acts upon public debates about the social role, legitimacy and financing of UK Higher Education.     

Broadway productions and the value of a Tony Award

This article investigates the effect of a Tony nomination or win on the demand facing a Broadway production using a panel of weekly revenues for Broadway productions from 1996 to 2007. Our results indicate that the effect of a nomination or win is positive in the week of the announcement and gradually increases in successive weeks, presumably due to publicity and word-of-mouth. Winners experience an increase in demand as late as 1 year later when awards are publicized for the following season. Moreover, nominees that do not win the award are penalized heavily in the weeks following the Award announcements. We find that winning a Tony Award increases a production’s revenues by 12% in the week immediately following the Awards.

A discrete choice model of consumption of cultural goods: the case of music

In this article we present an empirical analysis of the ‘patterns of cultural choice’ in the musical domain in Italy. The main goal of the article is to verify whether musical tastes in Italy are diversified, with the presence of a group of ‘cultural omnivores’. Our study is based on the theoretical model of the demand for cultural goods proposed by Lévy-Garboua and Montmarquette (1996). In the empirical analysis we simultaneously evaluate the probability of choosing different musical genres. Through the specification of the set of alternatives into three groupings of musical genres —“only classical music”, “only popular music” and “all music”—we were able to detect the relative impact of several socio-economic characteristics on the probability of having “univorous” or “omnivorous” musical likings. In addition, our approach allows us to verify the existence of different patterns of music consumption by testing the significance of differences among the estimated coefficients of the probability functions related to the three groupings of musical genres. We find that age, gender and education are important predictors of an omnivorous taste.

超大城市中的公共空间生活意象 ——夜市从纯商业向文创活力方向发展研究

中国城市的公共空间中一直存在群众自发形成商业活动的传统.在超大城市拥挤且有限的公共空间里,如何创造群众自发参与的公共空间,形成积极的城市生活意象,是值得深入思考的问题.中国有很多"草根夜市",是大城市作为"不夜城"的重要组成部分.但随着城市的发展,传统的夜市形式逐渐被取缔.以上海、武汉等超大城市为研究对象,调研夜市发展...     

国家制度改革下的我国城市规划适应逻辑与路径

制度改革反映了公共部门与私人部门在城市建设事务中的角色与作用,继而影响城市规划技术与政策的制定。基于对国家制度改革进程的特征研究,分析了我国制度改革下的城市规划适应逻辑,认为国家制度差异下的中西方城市规划之间存在较大差异性。为适应"十九大"后新构建的国土空间规划体系,我国城市规划只有具备发展观、合作观与制度观,才能扮演好城乡建设中的公共服务与公共政策职能,高效推进城乡一体化统筹。     

The Impact of the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States: Institutional and Sectoral Effects on Private Funding

This paper examines the impact of the National Endowment for the Arts on private donations to the arts. The aim of the analysis is to assess whether public funding generates a crowding effect on private giving. We distinguish between institutional and sectoral crowding phenomena and discuss their possible implications.We used both a qualitative approach and an econometric model to estimate the effect of NEA introduction and appropriations on donations. Our results suggest that at the institutional level NEA grants do not generally induce donations to recipients while at the sectoral level appropriations and private giving are independent. The introduction of the agency appears to have caused a decrease in donations.     

Can People Value the Aesthetic and Use Services of Urban Sites? Evidence from a Survey of Belfast Residents

This study explores the potential of conjoint choice experiments for planning decisions on urban sites. We elicit people's preferences for regeneration projects that change the aesthetic and use character of specified urban sites. We use a split-sample design with two sets of regeneration projects. The first entails hypothetical transformations of an actual square with an important cultural and historical dimension. The other consists of hypothetical transformations of an abstract square which we try to make as close as possible to the former in all respects, except for its cultural and historical dimension. Each regeneration project is defined by aesthetic and use attributes. Our results suggest that individual choices are explained by the attributes, andthat the marginal utilities are significantly different across projects forthe actual and the abstract square.     

城市中央文化区集聚度研究--以江苏省13市公共文化空间为例

"中央文化区"作为城市的大型公共文化设施的集聚中心,对于城市文化活力的增强,城市人文品质的提升有着重要意义。通过对江苏省13个地市城市公共文化空间集聚度的空间分布调查,认为,城市公共文化设施空间的集聚度和集聚数量,与城市能级正相关;城市公共文化空间的集聚性与城市文化能级正相关;城市公共文化设施的集聚性也与城市规划的理念有着直接关联。     

中国历史文化名城保护公益诉讼研究 ——以北京市为例

保护以北京为代表的国家历史文化名城需要与时俱进,如何以法治思维和法治方式对历史文化名城的保护工作固本强基,是当下面临的一项重要使命与重大课题.近年来全国多地的实践结果显示,公益诉讼为将历史文化名城保护纳入法治轨道提供了有效抓手,其不仅有利于激发社会公众的参与热情,而且也有助于发挥司法机关的监督力量.然而,将公益诉讼机制...