speakers

Michael Hutter

Michael Hutter was born in Munich, Germany, in 1948. He studied mathematics and economics in Germany and the U.S and held positions at Munich University and at Claremont McKenna College, CA. From 1987-2008, he held the chair for economic theory at Witten/Herdecke University. He was invited as a visiting scholar by the Rockefeller Foundation, Bellagio (2000), the University of California at Berkeley (2002) and the Getty Research Institute (2003 and 2007). Since March 2008, he is research professor at Technical University Berlin, and research director at the Social Science Research Center Berlin (WZB), where he heads the unit ?Cultural Sources of Newness?. His research interests and publications lie in the area of economic and social theory, monetary history, media economics, economics of the creative industries, and the interdependence of economy and art. His most recent publication is ?Beyond Price: Value in Culture, Economics and the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 2008), edited together with David Throsby.

Do artworks really contribute to social prosperity, and is there any way to prove it? 

There is a widespread intuition that ?The Arts? contribute to the prosperity of larger cultures, even nations. Artworks seem to generate a richer social life, and they seem to have an impact on the economic productivity of the society in which they are created and appreciated. But is there any ?hard evidence? of such enrichment, and what does ?hard? mean in this kind of a process? The intervention reports on empirical evidence for the impact of artworks on productive changes in organizational routines, and on changes in individual and collective desires. It discusses the methods available to capture the ?eeting effects of artistic practices and their artefacts. It concludes with some policy implications.

Link:

www.wzb.eu