Culture and Commerce
Art and business are often described as worlds apart, even diametric opposites. And yet, these realms are close cousins in creative industries where firms bring cultural goods to market, attaching price tags to music, paintings, theater, literature, film, and fashion.
Building on theories of value construction and cultural production, Culture and Commerce details the processes by which artistic worth is decoded, translated, and converted to economic value. Mukti Khaire introduces readers to three industry players: creators, producers (who bring to market and distribute cultural goods), and intermediaries (who critique and rave about them). Case studies of firms from Chanel and Penguin to tastemakers like the Pritzker Prize and The Sundance Institute illuminate how these professionals construct a vital value chain. Highlighting the role of "pioneer entrepreneurs"—who carve out space for radical, new product categories—Khaire illustrates how creative professionals influence our sense of value, shifting consumer behavior and our culture in deep, surprising ways.
"Full of fascinating cases that span art, food, and fashion, this book teaches us how creative industries tick. With measured analysis, Khaire lucidly lays bare the cultural value chain, demonstrating how entrepreneurship thrives—even in the notoriously unpredictable realm of art."—Ashley Mears, Boston University, author of Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model
"Culture and Commerce speaks in particular to the field's interest in 'valuation' and the role of 'market intermediaries' in creative industries. Khaire gives us profound insight into these markets—their particularities, structures, dynamics, and processes."—Jesper Strandgaard, Copenhagen Business School, co-editor of Negotiating Values in the Creative Industries
"In this wonderful and intellectually ambitious book, Mukti Khaire re-thinks culture at the intersection of economics and sociology. With carefully instantiated case studies, she leavens our understanding of how art and culture have worked, should work, and will work."—Rohit Deshpande, Harvard Business School
"This remarkable book bridges the gap between art and business. It lucidly and convincingly reveals the structure and functioning of creativity in the marketplace. Probing key notions like artistic value, innovation, and circulation, Khaire throws light on how novelty is accepted and made intelligible."—Diana Sorensen, Harvard University
"[C]lever examples illustrate important lessons about effective market organization, particularly for students of both entrepreneurship and creativity. This book will be a useful pedagogical guide for these topics across audiences and broader course themes....[S]cholars of creative industries will find the book full of great examples of how some fundamental themes play out in the contemporary digital world."—Stephen Mezias, Administrative Science Quarterly
"The strength of the book is in its careful delineation of different categories of intermediaries and producers. This allows an impressive array of illustrative examples from across the diversity of the creative industries....[This book] is likely to be of use to students in applied social scientific, business-oriented forms of inquiry in outlining the persistent tensions between culture and commerce in artistic production. It also provides a useful reminder that the sociology of culture has some well-developed tools for, and an important role in, elaborating and deepening our understanding of these tensions."—David Wright, American Journal of Sociology
