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1st Public Lecture Symbolic Capital, Cultural Capital, Human Capital: Room 4.36, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, May 29, 5:00 p.m. Hegel argued that the arts of a nation allow posterity to discern its contributions to world historical progress.This elaborate philosophical account of national cultural capital has informed official projects of national cultural development ranging from the Goethe Institute to attempts by postcolonial nations to cultivate a national literature or aesthetics. The tacit assumption of these projects is that national arts have a causal relation to a nation’s progress because they symbolically express the level of progress attained and also help to stimulate further progress. This paper examines how this model of cultural capital has been radically transformed in contemporary globalization where the cultural capital of a nation is no longer primarily located in its artistic production but rather in its ability to accumulate works of art with a global significance and the promotion of the arts on a global stage. It suggests that these strategies of purchasing (as opposed to producing) artistic capital are fundamentally connected to the accumulation and cultivation of human capital through transnational migration. |