ABSTRACT
Economic impact studies and talking about “arts and cultural industries” are viewed as the marker where government policy shifted from embracing their intrinsic value to those that required instrumental values to be at the forefront. But at that time in South Australia, the idea of measuring the economic value of the arts was seen as just another way of supporting a positive cultural policy. The defensible arguments for public funding of the arts according to mainstream economists are the result of stock market failures. For the most part, arts and cultural goods are described by economists as “mixed” goods. To use an example from D. Throsby, a painting by Van Gogh can be bought and sold as an art object whose private-good value accrues only to those who own or see it; at the same time the painting as an element in the history of art brings wide public-good benefits to historians, art-lovers and the general public.
