The State Arts Agency Policy Environment
It will surely be a useful endeavor to “unveil” state-level cultural policy – to reveal the many forms it takes, to understand its origination and encourage the transfer of useful ideas from state to state. But an inventory of state cultural policy may lead to a series of additional questions: Why does a particular policy look the way it does? What led it its inception at that time, as opposed to a decade earlier or later? Why was strategy “X” put in place in one state, while strategy “Y” evolved next door?
A New Institutional Economics Approach to the Organization of State and Provincial Arts Councils
The field of cultural economics has had as a central concern the question of public funding of the arts. In general there have been two streams of analysis, which I will call the welfare economics approach and the public choice approach.
The State Arts Agency: An Overview of Cultural Federalism in the United States
This essay is a brief summary of the history of state arts councils (SAAs) of the United States. The overall finding is that the revision in the relative resources of the national and subnational levels of government for funding the arts requires a reconfiguration of policymaking roles and responsibilities.
Why Hollywood Rules the World, and Whether We Should Care
International trade has made Hollywood the world center for expensive movies with an international audience. The degree of clustering has reached such an extreme, and Hollywood movies have become so publicly visible, as to occasion charges of American cultural imperialism. Many individuals claim that global culture is a threat rather than a promise, when it comes to the world of cinema. What lies behind these charges?
Information Sources for State-Level Arts Policy: Current Resources and Future Needs
What is the current status of information on state-level arts policy, in particular? What data and resources are available, and what gaps are still apparent? In the process of exploring some answers to these questions, I hope to stimulate thinking about the development and coordination of data platforms that can foster informed state-level arts policy in the future.