Russell Keat, Market Boundaries and the Commodification of Culture

- insights of everyday wisdom: there are things that money can't buy (93)
- misdirected audience-chasing (94)
- transforming museums into part of the leisure industry ... put at risk the proper purpose of their collections (94)

... one of the key reasons for the support of non-market cultural institutions will turn out to be their critical role in challenging the self-promotion of the market through advertising and related forms of 'cultuiral' production which ... can generally be relied upon to misrepresent the relationship between consumer goods and human well-being.(95)

For even in those areas of one's life where the availability and use of commodities plays an important part, it is typically also the case that their contribution to human well-being depends upon relationships, attitudes, motivations, etc. which are quite at odds with those required or fostered by the market itself. ... Their{Consumer goods'} value is realized not within the market, but outside it, through an array of social activities whose character is antithetical to that of market-governed transactions. ...
But the non-market character of these activities is increasingly put at risk by the self-promotional culture of the market, which encourages us both to see the value of such activities as residing in the opportunities they provide for the deployment of consumer goods, rather than the reverse, and also to adopt, in our conduct of these activities, the attitudes and motivations which belong to the market domain.(107)

notes 24: As I tried to suggest throughout, 'critical reflection' is neither an abstract theoretical process nor something which relies solely on generic intellectual capacities; it takes place through engagement with cultural practices which often processs a concrete rather than abstract character. (110)