ABSTRACT
That culture has become a commodity of some sort is undeniable. Yet there is also a widespread belief that there is something so special about cultural products and events (be they in the arts, theater, music, cinema, architecture or more broadly in localized ways of life, heritage, collective memories and affective communities) as to set them apart from ordinary commodities like shirts and shoes. It may be, of course, that we set them apart simply because we cannot bear to think of them as anything other than different, existing on some higher plane of human creativity and meaning than that located in the factories of mass production and consumption. Yet even when we strip away all residues of wishful thinking (often backed by powerful ideologies) we are still left with something very special about those products designated as 'cultural'. How, then, can the commodity status of so many of these phenomena be reconciled with their special character? The relation between culture and capital evidently calls for careful probing and nuanced scrutiny.
