Gökbulut Özdemir, Ö. (2020). Art in Society: Co-Creation of Cultural Value in Alternative Cultural Frames, EXPLORING CULTURAL VALUE: CONTEMPORARY ISSUES FOR THEORY AND PRACTICE, EMERALD (Editors: Kim Lehman, Ian Fillis & Mark Wickham)
ABSTRACT
While the social side of the business is gaining more acceptance in recent years, ‘the study of Economics as if People Mattered’ has been debated since 1970s. Schumacher (1973) stressed the ‘production problem’ and that people mattered, and society mattered was discussed in “Small is Beautiful”. “Why do the arts and culture matter?” is the main question of the AHRC’s cultural value project (Crossick and Kaszynska, 2016) that can be linked with the expression: “people matter”.
In this perspective, art is a promising area that focuses on “human creation” rather than “mass production” which is mentioned by Lehman et. al. (2018) as “creative ouput” instead of the materialistic association of the ‘product’ concept. Art can be considered as a sustainable way of a sophisticated construction of “cultural value” besides the utilitarian and economic values of the market economy. “Value” is constructed by the cultural frames and “cultural value” is constituted by society through the integration of different actors. Here “co-creation” occurs in helping to understand cultural value.
The aim of the study is to contribute to the extended body of literature on the different forms of cultural engagement through cases from Turkey. The cultural engagement areas of art and society are focused here in three different fields: Nature, Science and Business.