Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics, and the Arts

How do we place a value on a painting, or a piece of music, or a traditional ritual? The market can determine a price in monetary terms for a variety of cultural phenomena, but how much does that tell us about the real value of these things? This book explores the tensions between economic and cultural value from a range of disciplinary viewpoints and provides many new insights into how value is constructed in contemporary society.

Michael Hutter is Director of the Research Unit "Cultural Sources of Newness" at the Social Science Research Center Berlin and holds a Research Professorship at the Institute for Sociology of the Technical University Berlin. David Throsby is Professor of Economics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He has published widely on the economics of the arts and culture, including most recently The Economics of Cultural Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2010).