The overview of the economics of art and culture that is presented in this chapter has been intended to provide both an interpretation of the principal concerns of the field of cultural economics, as well as an introduction to the various chapters in this volume. Several chapters in this volume begin with the meaning of the words like art and culture. These are foundational questions in disciplines, such as art history, art theory, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, and anthropology. By and large contributors to this volume accept in the first instance a broad-ranging view of culture as comprising or being defined by a set of attitudes, beliefs, or values common to a group that somehow identifies and binds the group together. Thus, it is possible to speak of a national culture, a religious culture, a corporate culture and so on. Culture is defined in a more functional sense in the book to indicate the practices and products of cultural activity, including especially the arts. Within this meaning the terms high culture and low culture are frequently used to refer to the serious and popular arts, respectively. The arts as a whole are sometimes divided into the performing arts and the initial creative arts though there are obvious overlaps between these categories. According to these definitions the arts comprise a subset of culture more broadly defined.
