Cultural goods creation, cultural capital formation, provision of cultural services and cultural atmosphere accumulation

The cultural atmosphere in a society is accumulated over time through the consumption of cultural services and is diminished through depreciation. Using cultural capital (e.g., cultural heritage, paintings, music scores), cultural services are provided by the cultural-services industry (e.g., museums, opera houses); cultural capital is enlarged by new cultural goods created by individuals. Individuals’ utilities are positively affected by the cultural services they consume, by the cultural goods they create and by the cultural atmosphere and the cultural capital accumulated in society. In a laissez-faire economy, individuals tend to ignore the positive external effects of their cultural-services consumption and creation of cultural goods on other individuals via accumulating cultural atmosphere and cultural capital. Consequently, suboptimally little cultural atmosphere and cultural capital will be accumulated. The efficient intertemporal allocation can be restored by introducing an appropriate subsidy that not only stimulates consumers’ demand for cultural services and the creation of new cultural goods but also enhances the accumulation of cultural atmosphere and cultural capital.

Municipal elections and cultural expenditure

The aim of this paper is to analyze the effect of electoral timing on municipal public cultural spending. We use a panel sample of all municipalities from the Spanish Region of Murcia for 1995–2008. Our results reveal that mayors adopt an opportunistic behavior, increasing cultural spending in the election year and reducing it in the second year after the election. We also investigate whether the electoral cycle in cultural spending is influenced by mayors’ ideology, political strength, willingness to run for re-election, and electoral competitiveness. In this regard, our study shows that when mayors expect close elections, political budget cycles’ size is greater. Concerning political leadership, the magnitude of the electoral cycle is influenced by mayors’ political ideology rather than mayors’ political strength and re-election willingness. Additionally, we seek to shed some light on the determinants of public cultural spending. We find that income and upper-level governments’ transfers have a positive impact on cultural spending. Finally, unemployment, young people’s proportion and elderly people’s proportion negatively influence cultural spending.     

A cultural approach to patriotism

This study explores an under-researched phenomenon of how African Americans communicate about patriotism via ordinary political conversation. We conducted two studies that offer a critical-qualitative analysis of how patriotism is colloquially articulated among African Americans. In study one, focus group interviews were conducted, transcribed, and analyzed using constant comparative method. In study two, we conducted a quantitative content analysis. The findings from study one revealed that there are three relational conceptualizations that help characterize one’s orientation to their nation (i.e., community: subordinate, guardian, and tumultuous). Participants expressed having an attachment to, identification with, and commitment to their communities.     

3D digitizing of cultural heritage

In this paper, the authors briefly review the state of the art of the 3D acquisition and digitizing techniques applied to heritage. The main focus is on motivations, issues and technical specification of the 3D digitizing of heritage artworks. Different digitizing technologies currently available for this specific application have been evaluated and tested, with application to a pair of case studies, showing that 3D digitizing technologies are sufficiently developed for extensive application in the field of cultural heritage.     

Local government allocation of cultural services

In the present paper, we analyse the allocation process for cultural services in Norwegian municipalities. The cultural sector at this administrative level is decomposed into the following eight subcategories: children’s and youth activities, libraries, cinemas, museums, arts dissemination, cultural heritage, cultural schools, and other cultural services. By means of budget shares for these eight cultural services and a residual sector consisting of all other municipal services, we estimate a system of demand relations which are interdependently linked to each other by a budget restriction. Our analyses are based on data from 409 out of 429 Norwegian municipalities during the period 2002–2010. In the empirical analyses, we mainly focus on the effects of income variation for the cultural services. We estimate effects of free income, matching grants to each sector, and user fees and other sector-specific income for each sector. We also estimate crowding-out effects for the cultural sectors of demographic variables indicating higher demand for services such as education, childcare, and health services. Our results confirm previous results. There are interesting differences within the group of cultural services, and these are partly related to different levels of national standardisation and regulation among the cultural services.     

Revisiting tax subsidies for cultural institutions

This paper was presented at the symposium dedicated to the 25th anniversary of the publication of Patrons Despite Themselves: Taxpayers and Arts Policy (Feld et al. 1983), held by the Association for Cultural Economics International, Boston, June 2008. Patrons Despite Themselves raised and tried to answer a number of important questions of policy concerning indirect government support for the arts. These questions have continued salience for what we see in our museums and hear in our concert halls. The primary source of federal indirect aid in the U.S. continues to derive from the deduction in the federal income tax for contributions to not-for-profit cultural institutions. On the other hand, there has been a series of recent challenges to the tax-exempt status of charitable institutions.

Learning cultural heritage by serious games

Immersive technologies such as virtual environments and augmented reality have a clear potential to support the experiencing of cultural heritage by the large public, complementing the current tools and practices based on tangible goods such as museums, exhibitions, books and visual content. Serious games – videogames designed for educational objectives – appear as a new tool to learn cultural content in an engaging way. In this paper, we will provide an extensive portrait of the current proposition of serious games in the cultural sector, highlighting the educational objectives of games in this domain and analysing the complex relations between genre, context of use, technological solutions and learning effectiveness. We finally identify and discuss the most significant challenges in the design and adoption of educational games in cultural heritage.     

Generation of virtual models of cultural heritage

Different techniques and tools currently exist to generate three-dimensional models of small elements, buildings and cities. Apart from being easier to interpret than two-dimensional drawings, these models facilitate data necessary for reconstruction projects, preservation or rehabilitation of the architectural or archaeological heritage. Traditional surveying only enables us to obtain discrete information of the characteristic lines that define each surface, edge, slope change etc. whereas work with massive capture techniques allows us to obtain continuous points of the surfaces. Photogrammetry or laser scanning combined with conventional photography provides information of the building in addition to its geometry. We carried out a review of the different techniques showing the advantages and disadvantages of each technique as well as the information that can be obtained by applying these techniques to the survey of the great Gate of Antioch in the town of Aleppo, declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1986, in Syria.     

The coastal cultural heritage facing coastal management

This paper is concerned with the role of cultural heritage in coastal areas, including land belts and coastal marine waters in the prospect of operating sustainable development-aimed strategies. It is a part of the investigations carried out in the framework of the Progetto Finalizzato Beni Culturali (Special Project Safeguard of Cultural Heritage) convened by the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR, the Italian National Research Council). Essentially, it aims at contributing to the discussion on how the mise-en-valeur of the coastal cultural heritage may be framed within integrated coastal management programmes. In this view, the discourse on the coastal cultural heritage runs along this pathway: (i) global (climatic) change and globalisation are assumed to be the key components of the external environment with which the coastal area interacts; (ii) the conceptual framework of coastal management, as it can be deduced by the background guidelines from Agenda 21 (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, UNCED), is considered; (iii) the legal framework, which the coastal area is characterised by, is taken into account by focusing on its implications on the management patterns. At this point, attention is concentrated on the role of cultural heritage in the framework of integrated coastal management approaches. It is considered, how this pivotal component of the coastal area has been dealt with bythe intergovernmental organisations. Special consideration is attributed to the European Code of Conduct for Coastal Management Zones, since it considers the ecological patrimony and cultural heritage as giving shape to a unique ethically-endowed reality, which materialised through landscapes and seascapes. The final step consists of the design of a tentative Code of Conduct for Coastal Cultural Heritage consisting of some background and operational principles.