Free”:1 The Dire Straits of Contemporary Cultural Policy Analysis?

The real-life burdens borne by cultural policy have shifted in recent decades from the neo-Arnoldian discourses about civilization and high culture of, say, the Massey Commis-sion of the early 1950s, to the recent unveiling of the Canadian-led International Instru-ment for Cultural Diversity in late 2002. Rather than being a site for the evocation of cultural “motherhood ” ideas, cultural policy seems to have become more of a locus in which to attempt an end-run around the strictures imposed by international trade agreements upon the circulation of cultural “goods and services. ” In such a light, it is well worth looking further at recent thinking about cultural policy, as represented here by the 53 or so essays in the three collections under review. T