Show latest news, more from October 2008.
The Social Impact of the Art: An intellectual history
A new book has just been published by Palgrave-Macmillan, authored by Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett, entitled The Social Impact of the Art: An intellectual history.
The book traces an intellectual history of the development of contrasting ideas around the power of the arts to bring about personal and societal change - for the better and for the worse. It taps into current debates in cultural policy concerning the value of art and public funding across a range of Western countries. It presents a survey of thinking on the arts over the past 2,500 years, from Plato to today, and relates contemporary policymaking to a 'history of ideas'. It aims to establish an informed and appropriate conceptual framework for discussing what the social impact of the arts might mean, including an account of suggested 'negative' impacts.
Sir Christopher Frayling, Chairman, Arts Council England, and Rector, Royal College of Art, has endorsed the book with the following comments:
"'The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History starts with today's heated public debate about the 'intrinsic' and the 'instrumental' in the arts, and then locates this debate within a history of ideas that goes back over two thousand years to classical Greece - Plato's Republic and Aristotle on catharsis. In tracing this history and revealing that there is nothing new under the sun in arguments about the arts, the authors show how the meanings of some key concepts - among them, "the transforming power of the arts", "art for art's sake", "the arts are good for you", "the arts and cultural identities" - have evolved over time, as parts of a very long-standing argument. The aims of this book are ambitious: to nourish public debate, to reconnect us all with a rich tradition of thinking, to show how certain ideas turned into commonplace beliefs, and in the end to encourage "a more nuanced understanding of how the arts can affect people". This is a much-needed study, believe me, and a timely one as well: an examination of what lies behind the rhetoric, it fills a surprising gap in the fast-expanding literature on cultural policy".
The international who's who in cultural policy, planning and research >