Ruth Towse: A textbook of cultural economics

Julia F. Lowell 0 1 0 J. F. Lowell RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA, USA 1 J. F. Lowell (&) University of California , Santa Barbara, CA, USA What would a really good undergraduate textbook for a course on the economics of the arts and culture look like? One that was aimed at students of arts administration, business, management, and economics? There are probably more answers to this question than there are instructors who teach such courses, but most would agree on the following: (1) it would cover a wide range of topics and be international in scope; (2) it would draw upon the most up-to-date research; (3) it would present material clearly and logically, with later chapters building on concepts introduced in earlier chapters; (4) it would be targeted toward students with minimal training in economics; and (5) it would be easy to navigate and visually appealing. Ideally, it would also provide pedagogical tools such as end-of-chapter critical thinking questions and exercises (though this is perhaps less necessary for third- and fourthyear students), as well as plenty of bibliographic references. It is clear simply from looking at their titles and publication dates that most existing texts do not meet the first two of these criteria: they are either too limited in their coverage or too dated or both. David Throsby and Glenn Withers' The Economics of the Performing Arts, for example, was published more than 30 years ago and, as its title suggests, is limited to analyses of the performing arts. Richard Caves' Creative Industries: Contracts Between Art and Commerce dates from 2000 and deals primarily with the industrial organization of for-profit culture in the United States. James Heilbrun and Charles Gray's The Economics of Arts and Culture (second edition), last published in 2001, is heavily oriented toward the United States and does not address the for-profit sector. The seventh edition of Harold Vogel's Entertainment Industry Economics: A Guide for Financial Analysis - is up-to-date, but is largely descriptive rather than analytical, and more oriented to the needs of industry analysts than to those of college students. It was therefore very good news to hear that a new textbook on the economics of the arts and culture has come out, one aimed at students of arts administration, business, management, and economics. The author, Ruth Towse, has done important work on the economics of copyright and on artists labour markets. She is very well versed on the latest research in cultural economics, having served as joint editor of The Journal of Cultural Economics from 1992 to 2002, and as president of the Association for Cultural Economics International from 2006 to 2008. Towses broad knowledge of the field is reflected in the book, which covers a tremendous amount of ground in its 552 pages. Traditional topics for research on the artsarts participation and consumer demand, production in the live performing arts, the economics of art museums, government policies toward the arts and culture, etc.have been expanded to include topics such as copyright, the organization of the film, music, and book-publishing industries, and the economics of festivals, heritage, and cultural tourism. Many of the longer discussions focus on Britain and the Netherlands, but examples are drawn from all over the world, ranging from Nigerias film industry to French artists unemployment insurance to remuneration of Japanese musicians to book-borrowing preferences in Australia. Towse has packed all of this material into a text consisting of twenty chapters organized into five parts, titled General issues in cultural economics, The traditional economics of the arts and heritage, Artists labour markets and copyright, The creative industries, and Conclusion and exercises and problems. Part I, which has seven chapters, provides an overview of the field of cultural economics, laying out some of the theories and concepts that have been used in economic analyses of the arts and culture, and briefly describing the economic organization of the creative industries. The second and third parts, each consisting of three chapters, look at the economics of the performing arts, the economics of cultural heritage, and the evaluation of cultural policy (part II), and at artists labour markets and the economics of copyright (part III). The fourth part consists of a chapter on the economics of the creative industries as a whole, plus five chapters on the music, film, broadcasting, and book-publishing industries and on the economics of festivals and cultural tourism. Part V concludes. Each chapter has its own bibliography, and at the end of the book, there is a small set of exercises and problems. The material presented in these chapters runs the gamut from early work on the division of labour (Adam Smith) to very recent research on the impact of free entry on visits to UK museums (Department of Culture, Media and Sport, 2008). Towse does a particularly (...truncated)