Culture Is Bad for You: Inequality in the Cultural and Creative Industries, Revised and Updated Edition

The revised and updated edition of this popular title shines a light on the precarious situation of art workers today.

Culture keeps you fit and healthy. Culture brings communities together. Culture improves your education. This is the message endlessly repeated by the government and arts organisations. But as this ground-breaking book explains, we need to be cautious about culture.

Culture is bad for you presents an unflinching portrait of the cultural landscape in the UK today. It reveals how women, people of colour and those from working-class backgrounds are systematically excluded, despite the claims of cultural institutions and businesses. Updated to provide a report on the situation after COVID, this edition reveals that despite grand promises from those at the top, exclusion and precarity remain the norm.

While inequalities of workforce and audience remain unaddressed, the positive contribution culture makes to society can never be fully realised. This book offers a powerful call to transform cultural and creative industries.

Orian Brook is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Social Policy at the University of Edinburgh
Dave O’Brien is a Professor of Cultural and Creative Industries at the University of Sheffield
Mark Taylor is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods at the University of Sheffield