How can culture be understood as a market activity? This course introduces students to ways of thinking about - and research tools for empirically determining - how cultural goods are shaped by the conditions of a market economy. We will focus on three case-studies, each of which provides an opportunity for qualitative and quantitative analysis. First, we focus on culture as industry, using the music industry, and in particular, Chicago's music industry, as our case. Questions to be considered include: how is the music industry organized? why does it take the shape it does? how does the industrialization of music affect the music being produced? And how could this system be affected by policies? Next, we turn to cases in which the cultural goods are more complex, the market processes more obscure, and the policy considerations more pressing: the market for antiquities (both licit and illicit), in which cultural patrimony is threatened; and the market for cultural experiences, or scenes, in which urban development is promised.
