Cultural capital : the rise and fall of creative Britain

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Cultural capital : the rise and fall of creative Britain

Robert Hewison

Verso, 2014

  • : pbk

Available at  / 7 libraries

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Summary: "What was "Creative Britain"? Was it the "golden age" that Tony Blair vaunted in 2007, or a neoliberal nirvana? In the twenty-first century, culture--the visual and performing arts, museums and galleries, the creative industries--have become ever more important to governments, to the economy, and to how people live. Cultural historian Robert Hewison shows how, from Cool Britannia and the Millennium Dome to the Olympics and beyond, Creative Britain rose from the desert of Thatcherism only to fall into the slough of New Labour's managerialism"--Provided by publisher

Bibliography: p. [251]-265

Includes index

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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.

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