Special Issue: Marketing of the Arts and Public Affairs: Value from different perspectives

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1662
• Author: Anjali Bal,Leyland Pitt
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Date: 01 May 2018

EDITORIAL

Special Issue: Marketing of the Arts and Public Affairs: Value

from different perspectives

To the casual observer, it would seem that marketing, art, and value are

distinctly different concepts—perhaps so different as to be difficult to

fit together in a journal such as JPA, with its mission of addressing

issues in the fields of government relations, public affairs, and political

marketing. To most people—most people being neither marketing

scholars nor marketing practitioners—marketing is understood to be

the advertising and selling, mostly, of consumer goods. The definition

of what makes something art, on the other hand, has perplexed

philosophers since the days of Thales of Miletus and his followers,

more than 2,700 years ago. This lack of consensus has not been helped

by observations like those of former New York City mayor Rudy

Giuliani, who said, “If I can do it, it's not art.”Finally, while value has

been defined as the “regard that something is held to deserve; the

importance, worth, or usefulness of something,”that value can be

financial, cultural, or aesthetic. So bringing together work that

addresses marketing, art, and value in one special issue of a journal that

usually deals with government, public affairs, and political marketing

might seem a task that is unlikely to be fulfilled. We believe that we

have succeeded in achieving this task in this special issue of JPA.

Marketing is a magpie discipline. It borrows and steals from

economics, psychology, and sociology at will. So any consideration of

marketing, art, and value might want to begin by examining the

perspectives those disciplines bring to art and value. Their views are

disparate but insightful. Economists have taken the view that people

value art because it represents an investment. They have rigorously

studied the financial valuation of art and financial appreciation over

time (cf. Agnello, 2002; Goetzmann, 1993; Mei & Moses, 2002;

Pesado, 1993; Pesado & Shum, 1999; Worthington & Higgs, 2004) in

order to determine whether fine art—and, indeed, specific genres of

fine art—provide better long‐term investment returns than do stocks

and bonds markets. The results have been, to say the least, mixed.

Economists have less to say about other art forms, such as the theatre,

music, or dance. Psychologists have approached art mostly from the

perspectives of aesthetic experience, a mental state that is induced

through the contemplation of visual objects or performances (Kubovy,

2000). Art and aesthetics cannot be separated by virtue of the

experiential interaction individuals have with a works of art, because

art is ephemeral and experiential (Venkatesh & Meamber, 2006). In

other words, the value of art extends past the physical and visual

objects or performances to the experience induced by the art (Reber,

Schwartz, & Winkielman, 2004). Sociologists such as Bourdieu (1985)

argue that art provides value, or cultural capital, for individuals on a

cultural level, in an objectified state, or as a physical good, such as

pictures, books, paintings, and performances. Capital in the objectified

form can then be exchanged for other kinds of capital, meaning money

of course, but also social capital in the form of status and friendship.

The role of government in art is another perplexing issue. Recent

political support of the arts has been dwindling, and many nations have

proposed massive budget cuts to public funds benefiting artists and

their work. President Trump recently proposed the idea of completely

defunding the National Endowment for the Art (NEA) as a means of

cutting government expenditure in the United States. Should

government—at any level, be it national or local—fund and support

art in all its forms? Is it right that a country finance a national art

museum when many of its citizens are unemployed and children

receive inadequate education due to a lack of funding? Should a city

keep a struggling opera company whose performances are attended

mostly by older, wealthier citizens, on life support when that city's

police department is under‐resourced and its hospital wards are closed

due to financial constraints? These are questions that face a multitude

of stakeholders, including artists, audiences, donors, and public

administrators. The issues range from fundamental philosophical

questions such as “What is art?”to “What is the value of art?”to “Is

art equally valuable to everyone?”These quandaries are heightened

in light of an observation by British writer Jeanette Winterson, who

writes, “Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think

it familiar. We have to realize that the language of art, all art, is not our

mother tongue.”

The papers in this special issue span a wide range of topics and

issues, yet all of them are concerned with art and its value, however

these may be defined. They also address questions about how market-

ing relates to the arts, and a number of them consider the role of

government and the public purse in funding and supporting the arts.

Some papers are conceptual, while others use a variety of research

techniques, both quantitative and qualitative, to shed light on arts

marketing quandaries.

The first paper, by Omar Sheyryar, Kelly Weidner, and Dan

Moshavi, takes an interdisciplinary approach to addressing the lack of

public support for the arts. Using an acquisition and transaction value

approach from marketing and economic theory, it identifies four differ-

ent market segments according to how individuals conceive of value

and support the arts. The work proposes the use of better communica-

tion strategies to match the processing styles of the four potential

target segments in order to garner greater public support for the arts.

DOI: 10.1002/pa.1662

J Public Affairs. 2018;18:e1662.

https://doi.org/10.1002/pa.1662

Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/pa 1of2