Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Value and Valuation in Art and Culture: Introduction and Overview
- PART ONE ORIGINS OF MEANING
- PART TWO THE CREATION OF VALUE IN ARTISTIC WORK
- PART THREE CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION
- PART FOUR APPRECIATION AND RANKING
- 11 Quantitative Approaches to Valuation in the Arts, with an Application to Movies
- 12 Confluences of Value: Three Historical Moments
- 13 The Intrinsic Value of a Work of Art: Masaccio and the Chapmans
- 14 Time and Preferences in Cultural Consumption
- PART FIVE CULTURAL POLICIES
- Index
- Plate section
- Plate section
- References
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
14 - Time and Preferences in Cultural Consumption
from PART FOUR - APPRECIATION AND RANKING
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- 1 Value and Valuation in Art and Culture: Introduction and Overview
- PART ONE ORIGINS OF MEANING
- PART TWO THE CREATION OF VALUE IN ARTISTIC WORK
- PART THREE CONTINUITY AND INNOVATION
- PART FOUR APPRECIATION AND RANKING
- 11 Quantitative Approaches to Valuation in the Arts, with an Application to Movies
- 12 Confluences of Value: Three Historical Moments
- 13 The Intrinsic Value of a Work of Art: Masaccio and the Chapmans
- 14 Time and Preferences in Cultural Consumption
- PART FIVE CULTURAL POLICIES
- Index
- Plate section
- Plate section
- References
Summary
Introduction
Only recently has economic theory started to address the problem of cultural value and valuation when consumers' choices are involved. One reason for this lack of analysis is the ambiguity that surrounds, in economics, the relationship between the use-value and exchange-value, or price, of goods. This may sound a bit paradoxical, since in economics use-value, in the form of utility and preferences, has occupied a central role in explaining the determination of prices, inverting the previous paradigm of cost-based determination. Yet, since use-values imply an inextricable interaction of objective and subjective attributes of goods, analyzing them proved to be problematic and was left outside economics, in the realm of psychology, sociology, or medicine. For economists, choices freely made reveal the individual's reservation price and subjective utility with no need for further investigation, since basic preferences are deemed to be coherent and stable over time.
Utility, then, remains the main goal individual choices are intended to maximize, but, emptied of any real meaning, it bears no explanatory power in solving the complex interplay that runs between individual desires and constraints. Yet how use-values are created and modified in consumption, and how they interact with exchange-values, cannot be lost sight of if actual choices are to be understood. This is especially true when cultural values are at stake.
Recent analyses both within and outside economics have started to fill this gap, recovering an earlier forgotten tradition, in which use-value and individual motivations were central to choice; this is the eighteenth-century philosophical tradition of David Hume and Adam Smith.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Beyond PriceValue in Culture, Economics, and the Arts, pp. 236 - 258Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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