ABSTRACT
As previous chapters have suggested, the emergence and adoption of a social welfare rationale for public arts and cultural provision which built on the notions of civic culture and national glorification and the support of an industrial, urbanised workforce, cannot be entirely divorced from continuing and changing forms of popular culture, commercial entertainment and trade in cultural goods and services. The pattern of state control over cultural expression and popular pleasure has seen both a response in legitimated forms and places of cultural consumption, and the entrepreneurial efforts of impresarios, avant-garde/alternative art movements and a growing commercial entertainment world already exhibiting signs of globalisation. As Scott and others have noted: ‘From their earliest origins, cities have exhibited a conspicuous capacity both to generate culture in the form of art, ideas, styles and ways of life, and to induce high levels of economic innovation and growth’ (2000:2). Whether the ‘cultural is embedded in the economic’, or vice versa: ‘It is becoming more and more difficult to determine where the cultural economy begins and the rest of the capitalist economic order ends, for just as culture is increasingly subject to commodification, so one of the prevalent features of contemporary capitalism is its tendency to infuse an ever widening range of outputs with aesthetic and semiotic content’ (ibid.: x). This is not however a contemporary phenomenon, as globalisation and cultural imperial processes and effective hegemonies have proven in earlier cosmopolitan societies.
