Recent discussions on the value of art and culture and political economy published in the Green European Journal suggest the need for sustained and systematic engagement with the question of how art and culture influence the direction, purpose, and social organisation of economic life and, crucially, how they shape what our future economies might become. This raises a set of prior questions: how can this happen? Through what mechanisms do art and culture orient collective expectations and possibilities for action?

These questions are cogent at a moment when growth – understood as socially extractive and environmentally damaging expansion – can no longer be assumed as a norm.

Animal spirits, expectations, and norms    

Recent debates suggest that the value of art and culture to the economy lies not simply in their contribution to economic output, but in their capacity to shape how economies develop. For instance, Mariana Mazzucato argues that cultural practices influence the direction and patterns of participation and support through which economic life is organised. The key question is therefore not whether art and culture affect the size of the economy, but how they configure its shape.

One straightforward answer is that art and culture drive change through inspiring. At a basic level, cultural experience operates affectively: through aesthetic and expressive registers, it influences moods, dispositions, confidence to act. This is perhaps in line with acting on Keynes’s “animal spirits” – a term the economist introduced to capture the emotional, instinctive, and psychological forces that drive economic behaviour including investment, consumption, and risk-taking. Yet this affective account is limited. If art and culture merely stir impulses, their economic relevance risks appearing shallow as a knee-jerk reaction.

Affects matter, but should not be understood in isolation from beliefs. In this sense, art and culture play a role in shaping expectations. Narratives, images, and symbolic forms provide frameworks through which people interpret economic change, coordinate behaviour, and commit to long-term projects despite incomplete knowledge. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller argues in his Narrative Economics, widely circulating stories – about technological change, financial crises, or speculative booms – spread through societies in ways analogous to epidemics. These narratives influence how people behave; moreover, these shared stories do not simply reflect economic realities – they actively constitute them by rendering certain futures imaginable.

The key question is not whether art and culture affect the size of the economy, but how they configure its shape.

In this context, sociologist Jens Beckert claims that economic actions depend on what he terms “fictional expectations”: collectively shared narratives that make future-oriented commitments possible despite the absence of reliable knowledge.

This all happens in the context where, as economist and philosopher Amartya Sen has emphasised, culture shapes what can happen by influencing both the identification of our ends and the recognition of plausible and acceptable instruments to achieve those ends in the broadest possible sense. Economic action, especially where futures are uncertain, depends not only on incentives but on shared understandings of what is plausible, desirable, and worth pursuing.

Seen from this perspective, art and culture help orient collective action and decision-making: they shape how societies identify their goals and recognise what counts as acceptable means of achieving them. They shape the horizons within which economic choices are made.

While this characterisation is voiced here by economists, it would likely resonate with artists, creatives, and people working in the arts and humanities. This raises a somewhat uncomfortable question whether similar claims, when advanced in cultural or creative contexts, would enjoy the same credibility or be dismissed as “a plethora of anecdotes that do not add up to evidence”.   

Setting this aside, what matters here is whether these claims are true, valid, and warranted independently of their disciplinary provenance. Notably, economists do not have a way to demonstrate that they are true in causal terms, and the so-called “theory of change” for how these processes unfold is still pending in their accounts.

Making the virtual real    

It is a big claim that art and culture matter because they shape expectations, norms, and actions. Recent critical social theory offers a way of thinking about this claimed transformation that avoids both abstract speculation and narrow instrumentalism. Rather than imagining change as a leap from vision to implementation, these approaches focus on immanent alternatives: ways of organising social life that are not yet dominant, nor even actual, but signalled or imagined and, in this way, exerting influence on the present while pointing towards different futures.

Writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher uses the term “effective virtualities” to describe scenarios that are not yet realised but nonetheless shape perception and, possibly, future actions. He argues that what currently is the case – “the real” – forecloses alternatives by making existing arrangements appear inevitable and immutable: something neatly summed up in Margaret Thatcher’s TINA quip: “there is no alternative”. For Fisher, the virtual is not unreal but a field of latent possibilities. Art and culture matter because they can reactivate suppressed possibilities, making alternative futures experientially present and thereby loosening the grip of the TINA disaffection. But how?

Sociologist Erik Olin Wright’s concept of “real utopias” is helpful here. He focuses less on cultural perception and more on institutional experimentation such as participatory budgeting, worker cooperatives, and universal basic income and, as it were, fills in a missing link between what art and culture make visible and what is actionable. For Wright, social transformation proceeds through practices and arrangements that embody alternative values, even while remaining workable within existing systems. There is no big rupture, no total revolution, nor a sudden ideological rift. These initiatives matter not because they offer blueprints for a final state, but because they shift expectations about what is feasible. By demonstrating that different ways of organising economic and social life can function in practice, they create openings for change and the impetus to make the virtual real.

What unites these perspectives is an understanding of transformation as neither purely symbolic nor purely structural. Change occurs when shared practices are reconfigured – when the background understandings that organise everyday action are made visible, contested, and gradually revised.

On this view and as Charles Spinosa, Fernando Flores, and Hubert L. Dreyfus argue in Disclosing New Worlds, transformation unfolds in concrete sites where meanings, norms, and material arrangements are gradually realigned. Narratives, images, and symbolic forms, when part of collective experimentation, play a critical role here as triggers through which new forms of coordination take hold. In this sense, art and culture contribute to transformation not by prescribing outcomes, but by catalysing world disclosures.

From imagination to imaginaries

What the preceding discussion highlights is the role of art and culture in sustaining imagination – not as free-floating fantasy or some art-for-art’s-sake projection, but as a socially grounded capacity. This brings us to the concept of imaginaries.

As defined by philosopher Charles Taylor, an imaginary is a shared horizon of meanings and assumptions through which a group understands how the world is and how it could or should be. Taylor distinguishes imaginaries from imagination in three key ways. First, an imaginary is collective, not an individual mental faculty. Second, it is practical – it shapes everyday action and coordination rather than offering escapism, solipsism and so on. Third, it is normative – it carries implicit ideas about what is right and legitimate and not merely reflecting some individual predilections.

The Apollo programme, the United States human spaceflight program led by NASA, offers an illustration of how such imaginaries take shape in relation to art and culture. Long before rockets were engineered or missions authorised, art and culture had already rendered lunar travel imaginable and meaningful. Literary works by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, along with popular visual culture such as Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune, Segundo de Chomón’s Excursion dans la lune, Walter R. Booth’s The Airship Destroyer or The Aerial Submarine, not to mention Chesley Bonestell’s magazine art, widely used by NASA, familiarised audiences with the idea of leaving Earth and encountering space as a realm of exploration rather than pure fantasy.

These cultural forms did not predict the Moon landing in any technical sense; rather, they normalised the aspiration itself, embedding it within narratives of technological progress, collective endeavour, and human curiosity. By the time the Apollo missions were politically proposed, space travel was already publicly legible as a worthwhile undertaking. Art and culture thus played a generative role in assembling an imaginary that made massive public investment, political mobilisation, and collective identification with the project possible.

That was over half a century ago. What we are seeing now is that the value of art and culture is itself framed through an imaginary that, in contrast, puts a cap on the open-endedness and curiosity-driven nature of cultural engagement. As cultural policy and economy researcher Justin O’Connor notes, the notion of “creative industries” is deeply implicated in shaping our contemporary imaginary of what art and culture can do.

The creative industries framework does more than identify a sector or justify particular policy interventions; it actively organises how the value of art and culture is perceived, experienced, and pursued. By aligning cultural activity with innovation, competitiveness, and economic growth, this imaginary shapes which forms of cultural labour are recognised as legitimate, what kinds of public support appear reasonable, and which futures for art and culture seem plausible or desirable. In doing so, it narrows the horizon of cultural policy and practice, marginalising alternative imaginaries in which art and culture function less as engines of growth and more as an infrastructure supporting meaning-making, exploration and experimentation, reflection, and critique.

The foreclosure of alternatives is getting worse, not better, with the onset of AI. As O’Connor notes, “If the cultural sector agreed to self-identify as ‘industry’ as a condition of state funding, it is now being asked by the UK government to give up its collective IP to the AI tech bros in order to boost productivity – for the greater national good. In the face of this, the cultural sector stands mute, as years of industrial and impact metrics have hollowed out its sense of value.”

Seen in this light, imaginaries – good and bad – form the basic analytical concept of world-disclosure mechanisms. They are the background structures through which imagination is oriented, agency is enabled, and practical horizons are reshaped through the transformation of social practices.

Given the striking success of the imaginaries associated with space exploration and the creative industries, the pressing question is why similarly compelling imaginaries have proven harder to establish around democratic renewal or post-growth futures. If imaginaries, to take hold, depend on specific material and institutional conditions as much as ideas and meanings, then this question is not just for artists but also for politicians, policymakers, and funders who shape the conditions under which art and culture are produced and circulated.

Seen in this light, imaginaries – good and bad – form the basic analytical concept of world-disclosure mechanisms.

Reorienting economic life    

For a long time, the central challenge for those seeking to improve how the value of art and culture is understood – and, by extension, the quality of cultural policymaking in contexts shaped by evidence-based decision-making and public management – was framed as a problem of measurement. Many within the cultural sector itself embraced the false hope that better tools, better data, and more evidence of the right kind would finally allow art and culture to prove their worth in the competition for public resources. One upshot of this was, as Eleonora Belfiore argued, that art and culture were valued primarily in terms of their effectiveness in delivering other, non-cultural policy agendas. Unsurprisingly, this rarely worked in culture’s favour: building a car factory, providing a gardening allotment, or organising a football tournament would typically appear more effective in delivering regional development, health, or a sense of belonging when compared to the open-ended and diffused effects of cultural engagement.      

This instrumentalist approach has backfired because it reflects a misunderstanding of how art and culture create value. It only helped entrench the unhelpful opposition between intrinsic and instrumental value, with parts of the cultural sector reactively rejecting the idea that art and culture might have social, economic, or environmental effects at all. In doing so, it arguably undercut the possibility explored in this article: that dreaming feeds into disclosing new worlds, and that imagination can support the emergence of new social imaginaries.

While measurement remains important – and there is now strong work demonstrating how GDP systematically misrepresents not just cultural value but what matters to social welfare as such – the primary challenge today is one of articulation. Moving beyond GDP is necessary but insufficient; we must also move towards beyond-growth language. The urgent task is to cogently show how art and culture can be effective in triggering beyond-growth imaginaries. This is not to prescribe a single pathway – whether degrowth, post-growth, or green growth –  but to insist that alternative imaginaries are required if unsustainable growth is no longer to serve as the default organising principle of collective life.

There are at least three reasons why this matters. First, from a pragmatic perspective, continued growth may no longer be viable for regions such as Europe. The structural drivers that historically underpinned growth are weakening, while climate breakdown and extreme inequality mean that even when growth occurs, it fails to deliver broad-based prosperity. Second, there is the question of whether we should want the traditional model of growth. Recent geopolitical developments have starkly revealed how certain growth imaginaries remain entangled with histories of colonialisation and domination, might-is-right scenarios, and modern-day piracy. These realities underscore the ethical and political limits of existing models and point to the need for alternative visions of how to live together. Third, we are beginning to have a clearer, cross-disciplinary understanding of where the distinctive value of art and culture lies and how it operates in practice through world disclosure and by giving rise to new social imaginaries.

The significance of art and culture, then, lies in their capacity to imagine alternatives, orient collective expectations, and indicate possibilities for action, helping to shape the direction and purpose of economic life precisely when growth as usual can no longer be assumed as its organising norm.