Culture is big business. When Arthur Frommer, the world's foremost travel expert, spoke at Marketing the Michigan Experience, a conference in Grand Rapids last November hosted by the Michigan Museums Association and its statewide cultural partners, he began by placing culture squarely in the middle of travel activity. Culture is at the center of Frommer's vacations, as it is for most people. As important as shopping and golf are in his travel guides, they play a supporting role, in footnotes, to the experience of culture and place. Culture is an enhanced way of life, driving consumer attitudes and purchases.
Studies reveal the essential value of local cultural activity in individual and community life.
Communities that have it are rich. Those that don't have it are bankrupt. A scarcity of goods and services in communities defines material impoverishment. A scarcity of culture defines spiritual impoverishment. The scarcity of both defines bankrupt communities, in both senses of the word.