ВИСНОВКИ 271
ABSTRACT 274

The research focused on the economics of culture requires a combination of both: the adapted empirical methods and revision of theoretical concepts. The widespread concepts in cultural theory largely engage in the analysis of phenomena and contextually examine the processes preceding or following them. Instead, the dynamics of culture, the cultural process, remain a minor collateral subject of research, not more than the socio-cultural background.

Similar to Thorstein Veblen’s notion on the lack of methods in the economic theory in 1890-ies to approach the core processes — dynamics that cause regression, progress, crisis or stagnation or other fluctuations of “phenomena” and economic life in general, it can be noted that the theory of culture examines the cultural process as a set of phenomena rather than the process impacting the emergence or decline of some cultural phenomenon. This may be traced in the majority of theoretical concepts, such a method may be seen as an object-based approach. This approach partially anonymizes the subjects and relations in the cultural process and formalises the methods, separating the specific phenomenon from the wider social, economic and cultural scope.

On the contrary a subject-based or process-based approach in cultural research could expand the understanding about processes (social, cultural and economic) and strengthen the prognostic capacities of the theory of culture as a discipline, focused on the research of the “living evidence of culture” (Ruth Benedict): their inherent processes, behaviour of agents, prerequisites for their development or decline. Modern economics of culture as a research field develops a methodology adjusting the worlds of art and economy. The latest studies in the economics of culture have made significant progress in understanding the processes and logic of the agents of the cultural process, in particular, by developing data analysis’ methods in culture, adapting and implementing cost-benefit analysis’ model, confirming the economic impact of culture and its social resourcefulness (welfare economics, sustainability).

Increasing governmental awareness for Ukrainian culture as a component in national security’s strategy, as a resource for societal and economic recovery legitimates the investigation of cultural processes, fulfilled through the socio-economic impact and historical significance. The mosaic structure of this paper, i.e. the focus on two main agents, whose behavior both determines and subjected to the cultural and social process, infers formation of the hypothesis: the crucial point for the cultural production dynamics depends on the intersection of interests and possibilities to maintain access of cultural producer and cultural consumer.

The process-based approach highlights the access to cultural products or audiences, sharing the common ideas, or resisting the established cultural order. Accordingly, the creative resource in this paper is seen not as a list of objects (monuments, cultural products, services or locations), but as a source of cultural opportunities, a power resource for the future generations, the current economy and society. While the access to cultural goods can be guaranteed, moderated by the state or through appropriate authorised institutions in the terms of a social agreement, the modern world requires the same dynamic adjustment of administrative approaches, the relevant models of economic analysis of culture provide a wide selection of methods.

The subject field of this paper corresponds to the main issues, addressed in the theory of culture, yet defined simultaneously as an economic process. Ruth Towse rightfully lists demand, participation and consumption of arts and heritage, supply, costs and subsidies of production, cultural employment and art-markets, the economic organisational structure of creative industries and legislation (in particular and especially — copyright) (Towse, 2014). Examining all above mentioned contributes to the understanding of the sociocultural process.

The economic impact of culture as production seems to be difficult to be met without reference to industries either cultural or creative, creative economy. Since creativity is a determinant of the new economy, it constitutes the basis of the IT sphere, education, politics, industrial design, promotion of goods and services, and third wave entrepreneurship as a whole. One or another statisticians tend to include the indicators of impact for all the “creatives” into a common group of “creative economy” as a single resource of creativity. Yet this corresponds to the general idea declared by the world community as evolution towards sustainability in production and consumption, focused directly on the resourcefulness and impact of creativity, intellectuality and environmental friendliness as new drivers of economic process. However, this also gives rise to significant contradictions in classification of values, correlated by agents’ behavior and social role and estimation of material and immaterial benefits and results.

When it comes to cultural goods and works of art as a “product of creativity”, the definition of unprejudiced economic macro and micro data becomes problematic, shaky, unstructured and invisible in the massive amount of data of the creative wave. Moreover, a cultural product or a piece of art differs in spatial-time dimension of value: it can be impacting the consumer or social process in long-term perspective (public benefit theory), yet first being a market failure or maintaining economically unprofitable results. If the social benefit prevails over the economic one, sometimes the influences on and changes the usual cultural context that almost any bureaucratic structure sees as inappropriate challenges and threats. Another paradox is political (administrative) inertia in the development of cultural policy strategies, which continues to consider the creative and economic impact of the culture of the production process in the uncertainty of the operating conditions, and therefore impedes a proper assessment of the impact.

In the above-mentioned subject field of cultural economics, Ruth Towse emphasises the importance of empirical research as the “backbone” to provide any theory with evidence and confirmation.

Nonetheless it constitutes the research within the pattern of the object-based approach, the aim of this study is different — to imply the process-based approach where the resource of culture is revealed in the balance between access to cultural good and proactive participation in the cultural process.

By distinguishing cultural production as the subject to this research we thereby narrow the boundaries of “creativity” to the processes related to the production of cultural products (art pieces, performances, films, novels/books, exhibitions/museum activities), since the cultural production meets the criteria “creativity generating the new creativity, which implies further interpretation, and, therefore, creates conditions for the following development of creative expression” (according to Gielen). Similar exclusivity — more precisely, the autovalue and self-sufficiency of creativity can still be developed in other “creative productions”, albeit the cultural and artistic space sets creativity as the main focus, not as a method meeting other targets as is in others creatives’ (in IT — new software or optimization, in education — process’ improvement to transfer of knowledge, training, in politics — in an idealized democratic society — to improve the well-being of the community). Cultural production, nonetheless pursuing or not the commercial conjunctural opportunism, inevitably produces the symbolic artefact primarily.

If one prescinds the existing dichotomous constancy of categories and criteria, the study of cultural production in our case seeks to reveal the subjectivity in the cultural space: the subjectivity of those who create cultural goods, the subjectivity of those who seek access to the cultural and their relationships. The paper focuses on the intersection of cultural studies and the economics of culture, in which the main question of the cultural space is posed — the constraints limiting the artist’s access to the audiences and barriers limiting the audiences’ access to the cultural good.

The relationship and distinction between culture, art and creativity is not revised as a subject in this paper, relying on the definition of a complex ornament of the interpretation of their interrelationships given by the Belgian sociologist of culture Pascal Gielen: “Creativity is a mediator between art, that strives for non-standard, and culture, that tends to standards (opposition of standard and non-standard is a challenge, a test of the usual traditional cultural and social space with artistic novelty, reactionary revolution, etc.), and creative industry: prudent calculation of economic and market competitiveness and the attraction of standards for potential technological and/ or organizational innovations inherent in creative industries, which, like art, strive for non-standards, but unlike art, follow the algorithms, invariably gravitate towards relatively predictable standards (Gielen, 2023, p. 34). Yet art and creative industry are not identical, but neither should they be completely separated or opposed (as a hierarchical approach tends to). Definitely, in the context of politics, the thesis is rational — artistic projects should remain outside the category of creative industries: in qualifications, in financing, but the opposite issue is that the gap between an industrial cultural product and an artistic work at least within the limits of one cultural space may not abruptly split the society into different cultural worlds.

Anyhow, individuals involved in the creation of cultural goods of various kinds use a shared thesaurus, a categorical apparatus, share common behavioral codes, partake the same discourses, and are in a shared social space, thus forming a shared cultural infrastructure. Therefore, striving to stay away from the discourses and antitheses of culture (elitist-mass, high-low, aesthetic-material), the main focus remains on the valuable cultural, social and economic context, the role of the creator and his or her audience. In other words, the research is designed not to neglect the value of aesthetic value in favor of economic efficiency, instead it warns against evaluating the submission of creativity to the standards of economic indicators in cultural products. In cultural products and works of art, the creativity of the creator, artist, producer, manufacturer is laid as a foundation — a person, group or collective of people who perform social and economic roles and who have their own social and economic needs. In addition, in the study, cultural production is considered beyond the evaluation of the qualities of the result of the creation of a cultural product, and the specifics of the process of its creation (organisational, economic, social and cultural context), which, in fact, is largely predetermined by socialisation, subjectivation and qualification and is oriented towards a certain recipient, a viewer, a listener, an appreciator, a consumer — a person, group of people or a community that also fulfils certain social and economic roles and has needs. The discussion about the undermining of aesthetic value — the economic benefit of the study is addressed in the chapters related to the social role of the artist, artistic taste and perception of the marketability and commodification of the cultural products, however, the general hypothesis of the paper prioritises the relations between participants, the processes of interaction with the audience, with infrastructure, with society.

The research has two aims. The first one is more theoretical and focused on overcoming terminological barriers in the study of the economic impact of cultural production. Examining the processes of cultural production and consumption, the paper is subjected to reveal therefore and to redefine the social function of cultural production and consumption aside from the logical demarcation of the incompatibility of aesthetic experience and everyday life. Unfortunately, John Dewey’s observation remains true:

“the ideas, which place art on a distant pedestal are so widespread and so subtly convincing, that many people would feel rather overwhelmed if they were told that they derive pleasure from their everyday leisure activities partly due to aesthetic the quality of these entertainments. Today, the most viable art for the average person is things that he does not consider to be art…” (Gumbrecht, 2023, 74).

Today, individual experience is tested by numerous constructs and hypotheses of post- and meta modernity, post-truth undermines canons and scientific objectivity, virtuality and anonymity exert pressure on the autonomy of creativity, social media change the idea of socialisation, qualification and subjectivation and change ethics both in a cultural production and in consumption.

The second aim (more practical and addressed to the Ukrainian unique cultural processes) refers to determining the methodology of research of cultural infrastructure (production, consumption and state administration) through the institutionalisation of cultural space (spaces). The basis of the paper remains the hypothesis of culture as a process of interaction between the artist and the consumer, who, due to the search for the optimal methodology for the study of cultural production, receive a targeted response to the restrictions of free access. In the research, we are trying to verify the transition towards intercultural discourse: cultural processes coexisting simultaneously in the same society at the same time (in space and time) constitute the different parts of the whole, and when the “subject” perception is consolidated, they are united by shared features, social and economic prerequisites and crisis.

The interdisciplinary method of the paper as well as of the cultural economics features of the socio-cultural sphere, inseparably connected with a number of theoretical and practical issues, the justification and solution of which are the reason for controversies between the theorists and historians of culture, economists, philosophers and sociologists, and, in fact, producers and consumers of culture. The combination of theories is a specific feature of humanities, since the end of the 19th century they obtain the axiomatic status, albeit the prospect of the institutional and self-organizing aspects of the cultural space covers the wider cultural dimension and practical context rather than the one, constrained by philosophical, sociological or economic authority. Simultaneously, the theoretical development and variety of approaches to economic research is a source for the emergence of sophistic concepts of culture. It is impossible — and this is in no way the purpose of research in the economics of culture — to statistically calculate or predict the birth of a “new genius”, the creation of a masterpiece, however, to improve an analytic methods of existing economic regularities, processes, constraints and improve the methodology in “spiritual” or “cultural” production’s studies is not another task, but a real challenge for theoretics. Ruth Towse notes that the main advantage of the economics of culture as a field of study is that this discipline serves as a justification for the importance of culture and art in the structure of the economy (Towse, 2014, 15), is decisive for state cultural policy and gives cultural production and art a completely different status in the socioeconomic system. Culture is no longer perceived as a secondary industry, an industry of subsidies and non-returnable expenses.

Since the middle of the 20th century, the riskiness of any generalisations in methodological approaches to the analysis of the production and organisational patterns in culture and arts has become definitively clear: the variety of sociocultural tendencies, the diversity of cultural phenomena in types, in cultural labour forms, in institutionalisation basics, technical complexity and substantive variability make it almost impossible to explain the economy of culture as a homogeneous whole system. Andreas Huyssen in “After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism” traces the history of the confrontation between “modernism” and mass culture, begins with a warning: “If against the background of the general depoliticization of culture, researchers of the cultural context will not abandon the despotic mechanisms of hierarchical discourse “high versus popular”, “art versus politics”, “truth versus ideology” and at the same time, if the literary and artistic context is not considered within broader sociohistorical boundaries, any proponent of the “new idea” will be locked in a circle of futile opposition to the sirens of cultural decline is a confrontation that to this day causes only a feeling of déjà vu” (Huyssen, 1986, p. 4) Thus the economic background of cultural production may consider a unite socioeconomic system of cultural space without delineating exclusively creative industries or “real” arts, a system built on the creation and reproduction of ideas, values and identity of society. Ruth Towse notes that modern state politicians see creative industries as a significant resource for the employment market and economic growth (Towse, 2014, 13), although the entire cultural infrastructure is to be a strategically important system, impacting equally economic and security policies. Cultural and creative industries, according to Ruth Towse, are no longer limited exclusively to the industrial organisational form in cultural production, and include arts intellectual labour. The basics of cultural economics as a discipline in Ukraine nevertheless urges for the advancement in the methods of impact analysis.

Based on the concept of David Throsby, highlighted in his work “Economics and Culture”, the first thing that needs to be cited and applied in the methodology of assessing the economic potential of cultural production is the non-trivial definitions of cultural value and cultural capital, different tithe ones of cultural theory, sociology and philosophy. However, we refer to the conceptualization of “cultural capital” in this paper two-sidedly: citing and examining the arguments and conclusions of researchers in accordance with the subject field of discussion. While the sociology of cultural capital is perceived inseparable from Pierre Bourdieu’s hypotheses and subsequent interpretations to explain cultural consumption, the economics of culture discloses another, no less important context substantiated by David Throsby.

The first chapter focuses on the methods and approaches for cultural production’s research. Assigned to analyse the human-centeredness of the processes of cultural production, the methods introduct the cultural employment, basics of POC and cultural economics. Production of culture is revised as the method for cultural infrastructure’s research, relying on the scope of prerequisites of the production environment (technology, legislation, industry, markets, employment and consumption). The economics of culture provides the exclusive review for the public benefit and the concept of value, proceeding to the revision of cultural capital in from the economic perspective. Non-less important is the cultural employment’s and cultural labour’s theoretic research. Confusing intersection of labour markets and art-markets in terms of cultural economics is the consequence of production’s exceptional dependency on the particular professionals (artists), thus the consumer’s demand impacts the labour market.

Issues presented in the second chapter present both agents of cultural production dealing with a common denominator: the opposition of various phenomena of cultural development that arose as a result of social and economic transformations of the 19th–20th centuries that democratised and liberalised the access to cultural production and consumption, but simultaneously grounded a number of stereotypes to the discourse for cultural and artistic. Some theses have already lost initial, original meaning, yet still predetermine public perception of arts and culture, and nourish the narratives, anonymizing and distancing access to cultural goods. The chapter discloses the discourse of commodification of culture and arts, the prerequisites of aesthetic tastes and the agency of artists, including constraints in theorising cultural labour and art markets issues. The purpose, set for 2nd chapter, is to suggest the expansion of research methods, which explain the phenomena of culture, to the scope of related cultural, social and economic processes, so that the approach could reflect the dependencies and constraints.

The third chapter of the paper discloses the theoretic concepts for cultural consumption as the one that impacts on cultural production via demand and public benefit. Cultural practices and consumption reveal the most vividly the societal values and individual ones, consequently their intersection: identity, traditions, collective memory, tolerance, innovation. While socialisation, creative expression, and cultural identification are core priorities and cultural functions, in economic side of “cultural consumption” finances, evaluates and actualizes the cultural product, thereby it also constitutes the economic context of cultural production.

On the individual level cultural consumption implies personal qualities, educates individually and collectively, enables cultural capital, maintains a barely perceptible connection of an individual with the society of past, and the probable influence on the society of the future, still determines identity and social affiliation, in other cases cultural consumption isolates, frustrates and disorients when it is reduced to filling the emptiness of everyday life with a background.

As a social issue, cultural consumption is an indicator of well-being, otherwise it may cause a social crisis. Controversial, based on vague definitions, focused on the elite-mass dichotomy, used to criticise the commodification of cultural goods or to defend the autonomy of art — cultural consumption is a significant part of social and economic process. Yet interpreting culture as a provider of meanings both at the formal level and at the existential level, human interaction with cultural goods is a defining process of social development. “Culture is not a collection of artefacts, culture is shaped by individuals’ actions” (Gielen, 2023, p. 18). Cultural consumption is a complex process, often equated with further production cycles involving the usage of what was previously produced, but these two processes are deeply strongly intertwined. The complexity of cultural consumption is based on its diffuse and chaotic: every single individual consumes one or other cultural product under a variety of circumstances either as own choice or as an automatic one (Meyer, 2008, p. 68).

In this paper, the concept of cultural consumption is seen as individual and collective access to cultural goods: both physical access, which involves the opportunities to visit galleries, performances, cinema, read, watch television, commercials, serials and talk shows, and the ability to choose a cultural product independently; and cognitive access, which relies on the ability to interpret the content of a cultural product and to identify with the values, advocated in cultural product, and the motivation to choose the cultural product independently. Just as in the production of a cultural product, cultural consumption, beyond both economic indicators and theoretical concepts, is reduced to a personality’s experience, needs, behaviour, attitudes and choices as an individual and a member of a group or society. Individual experience determines the choice, and in combination with the experience of the community influences the behaviour of the producer of culture, thereby changing the cultural space.

The agency of the consumer in cultural production influences on the dynamics of culture, depending on the kind of consumption — direct, indirect or hidden, conscious or subconscious, active (participation) or passive. Excessive cultural consumption supports socialisation and inculturation of an individual. Lacking attachment to a culture (whether with limited access to cultural goods in general or personal difficulties) may result in existential crysis, as Pascal Gielen and Thijs Lijster write: “There is no greater drama than the inability to define yourself when your meaning in life is denied or simply ignored”, and regardless of social status (from an illegal to a hard-working freelancer), “the senseless life is followed by depression and suicidal despair as individual behavior, or vandalism and violence — as collective one” (Gielen, 2023, p. 74).

The variability of concepts, vagueness and subjectivity of definitions and subsequent hypotheses and the context, related to cultural consumption, remain broader than the production cycle of a definite cultural product or in cultural industry, mainly due to the influence that the cultural consumption derive on personality, inculturation and socialisation, prompts the accuracy in definition of an cultural consumer’s agency. Therefore, the purpose for cultural consumption’s theoretic concern in this paper subjects as well as limits the classification of methods and approaches to cultural consumption research, while the impact (positive or negative) of various forms of cultural consumption on the dynamics of culture is still to be conceptualised.

Local cultural production and cultural consumption considered to be the backbone for the local economy, however, it is not limited to the direct economic impact: public benefit, social value, which in the economics of culture and the economics of cultural policy commonly treated in terms of well-being theory, creative cities’ concept, today goes beyond the limits as cultural infrastructure is called a critical sphere, basics for the national security’s strategy of the country. “Safety culture” reflects the experience of the community in creating a “safe” environment, its transformation during disasters or wars urges the practice-based methods for cultural support to recovery and resilience. Cultural space soaks up collective traumas, frustration, and reflects the social challenges. At the same time, cultural infrastructure saturates society’s resources, prevents further cultural and economic expansion, and provides diversity and public benefit.

Fourth chapter illustrates the impact scope of cultural production, especially regarded as cultural entrepreneurship, and the specifics of interaction between authorities and cultural initiatives.

To sum up, let’s focus on the further research of cultural infrastructure as cultural statistics and local economic impact of cultural production. The range of econometric and sociologic methods testified and applied to study the cultural statistics require scrupulous approbation and authorities awareness.