Art and Value is the first comprehensive analysis of art's political economy to be found in classical, neoclassical and Marxist economics. It provides a critical-historical survey of the theories of art's economic exceptionalism, of art as a merit good, and of the theories of art's commodification, the culture industry and real subsumption.

Key debates on the economics of art, from the high prices artworks fetch at auction, to the controversies over public subsidy of the arts, the 'cost disease' of artistic production,...

This book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of taste in the wake of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of taste. It brings curators together with sociologists and art theorists and artists with design historians, art historians and cultural historians, with the common aim of developing rigorous and relevant ways to approach the practice of taste. The contributors to this book engage with the practice of taste as this relates to encounters with art, engagements with cultural institutions and the practices of everyday life in national and transnational contexts. While taking account of...