Assessing the Value of Art in the Culture Society

Nowadays it is widely recognized that due to the great expansion of the arts sphere during the XXth century and the concomitant increase of the influence that the art paradigm exerts into other fields of practice culture and the arts have taken on a central strategic role in contemporary society. This is particularly visible in big cities today, to the extent that there we can speak of a culture society in the making, a new social configuration structurally dominated by culture (Rodriguez Morato 2012). As a result of these changes, since the late nineties and during the first decade of the new century the idea of creativity, which is closely linked to the arts from its origin, has gained a lot of prominence in the urban discourse, both political and academical, all over the world. From different perspectives and through different concepts, such as creative city, creative economy, creative class, or creative cluster, this attention to creativity has implied a new view on the relationship between the arts and society, and at the same time a renewed interest in assessing the value(s) of art for society. In this paper we will consider the ways in which this assessment is currently being carried out, through the aforementioned concepts and others, as well as through specific analytical strategies used in the grey and academic literatures, and the data, statistical or otherwise, produced for that matter.