Reading and enjoying Peter Langmar‘s masters thesis Cultural Sphere and Public Interest: Combining Free and Participatory Culture, Cultural Democracy and Critiques of Value Regimes to Rethink Policy, Artistic and Institutional Practices

Here is part of the abstract:

The thesis aims at a holistic and multidisciplinary redefinition of public interest in the cultural sphere, contextualised in the democratic and cosmopolitan era. The thesis reveals various problems and weaknesses of the cultural sphere by combining a wide variety of concepts and discourses such as critiques of: high and mass culture, aesthetics, monopolistic competition, hegemonic value and copyrights regimes. In other words the thesis merges the critiques of the oligopolistic actors, of the hegemonic copyright and value regimes of the cultural sphere.

Peter’s work is theoretically a bit heavy – it even includes a section on future research in the form of a PhD research proposal – but its highly readable and is well worth the time. So far I am most pleased with the ways in which he connects free culture, cultural democracy and participatory culture.

As it’s licensed under Creative Commons BY NC SA I have added it to the texts of interests in my growing open licensed collection of works of interest.