The call for papers for this special issue on the political economy of art (published in the Winter 2002 issue of the Review) stressed the role of art in creating culture and pointed out that artistic production, consumption, aesthetics and its social significance, public funding, and legislation all contribute to society's cultural reproduction. Political economy is concerned with the ways in which a society provides for its needs, including the need for art as cultural expression. 1 These concerns lead us to question what art is and how it is created, produced, and distributed. Political economists' concerns may also focus on state art, commercial art, outsider art, and anti-art. Radical political economists also study the tendency for capitalist markets to avoid high art and, instead, derive profit from popular culture items on which markets tend to focus. Yet in some societies, high art can also be consistent with the development of capitalism, and there is a dialectical interplay between art and capital. 2 There is also increasing concern about the ways in which globalization changes cultures and how culture becomes contested domain. Art, however, may also give expression to radical social commentary and contribute to the creation of heterotopic spaces-those particular social spaces that exist within or together with other social spaces but have different or even opposite functions (Foucault 1986).Mainstream neoclassical economics has traditionally reserved a small niche for art in the domain of price theory, where the market price and quantity of a piece of art is treated as a special case because a piece of art is considered unique, and there is a major difference between the original and its reproductions. In thinking about this special case, economists have tended to focus on visual fine arts-in particular, oil paintings executed by great masters (e.g., a Monet, or a Picasso). Stated plainly, there was an attempt to see art as a commodity, albeit endowed with special attributes, that is produced by means of human labor and thus has an exchange value. Moreover, it can be purchased, sold in markets, distributed, and so on.