Cultural capital - Robert Hewison

Britain began the twenty-first century
convinced of its creativity. Throughout the New Labour era, the visual
and performing arts, museums and galleries, were ceaselessly promoted as
a stimulus to national economic revival, a post-industrial revolution
where spending on culture would solve everything, from national decline
to crime. Tony Blair heralded it a "golden age." Yet despite huge
investment, the audience for the arts remained a privileged minority. So
what went wrong?
In Cultural Capital, leading historian
Robert Hewison gives an in-depth account of how creative Britain lost
its way. From Cool Britannia and the Millennium Dome to the Olympics and
beyond, he shows how culture became a commodity, and how
target-obsessed managerialism stifled creativity. In response to the
failures of New Labour and the austerity measures of the Coalition
government, Hewison argues for a new relationship between politics and
the arts.