ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces cultural producers and their products as intermediaries and mediators in assembling as well as reproducing creative cities and Golden Ages. It examines the relationship between such cultural products and the fashioning of Amsterdam as being a 'smart and creative' city. The chapter focuses on the foundations through a qualitative approach that emphasises the role of culture in market exchange. Sociologists and anthropologists have long emphasised how cultural norms and values both enable and restrain market actors. Similarly, it can be hypothesised that networks of cultural producers, consumers, products and their associated values are shaped by and actively shape a city's image and status. The chapter explains this kind of reciprocal relationship between the city of Amsterdam and its cultural industries is explored by means of an analysis of changing product conventions and concepts of value in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
