The Cultural Economy [antikvár]

FOREWORD POLITICIZING THE NEW ECONOMY Gilberto Gil This book is an opportunity to get to know and analyse the blossoming of a new and stimulating terrain in global politics. The notion of a 'cultural economy' has developed over the last few decades, but I believe that today we can formulate and understand the significance of this novelty. Cultural policy is on the contemporary agenda for many reasons: judging from my own experience and from what I have seen around the world, I believe cultural policy as it has recently returned to the forefront offers a promising new axis for the rehabilitation of political life in general, as an agenda for the necessary transformation of institutional practices. The premise of the 'right to culture' is at the heart of this transformation, both as a symbolic system and as an economic activity. The latter is the specific focus of this volume. The perspectives of the different authors allow us to see how the economic, conceptual, institutional, technological and legal issues mesh. To enter into the pages of this book is to dive headfirst into one of the most captivating debates of our time: on the role of culture at the center of our development strategies. The volume arrives at an opportune moment to update the debate on public policies for culture and to reveal how far we have reached at the start of this millennium in consolidating thought and coordinated action for this purpose at the international level. From the heated debates in post-war Europe about the presence of Hollywood movies to similar discussions in our own time, we have evolved both institutionally and politically in constructing a world culture policy that favors cultural diversity. In our countries and in the United Nations System, a complex institutional design has been created that is the result of more progress than steps backward - and the volume provides in-depth analysis of the political reasons for both. It shows how we have constructed not only defences and protections, but proactive strategies and agendas to promote diversity as the heritage of humanity. As the co-editors invite us to do, we can already look back to a history of struggle, of both defeats and victories in the defense of a public responsibility. This book recounts the most recent pages of that recent history, yet the gaze of the authors looks also to the future. While we have indeed taken great steps forward, the journey ahead of us will be very long. Here the challenges we stil face are clearly highlighted by revealing numbers and comparisons. On one hand, the figures show that culture produces wealth like never before. We have celebrated and pragmatically used such information to broaden the space for culture in our development models, probably much more than most economists expected. The book also reveals the many forms of economic expression of culture, its extraordinary diversity from one region to another. All this data will help governments and societies to believe that their economies depend on a policy for cultural diversity even more closely today than in the past. On the other hand, the same figures show that we are producing not just considerable wealth but considerable inequities as well. They show how poorly this cultural wealth is distributed. They show that instead of culturally developed countries, there are nations that know how to make property rights the fountainhead of a dominant economy and technology. They show that some countries were quicker than others to consolidate a global position. How can we transform this picture in the future, in search of fair trade and the balanced