Justin O’Connor, Culture Is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common Good. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024. 304pp. £85.00 hbk. £14.99 pbk. £14.99 eBook.

New Labour's 1990s rebranding of arts and culture as part of the broad and amorphous 'creative industries' is the jumping-off point for Justin O'Connor's book Culture Is Not an Industry.The illusory promise of the creative industries was that culture could transform Britain's economic prospects in a globalized world.O'Connor argues that in the light of its failure, as evidenced by the current funding crisis in cultural organizations, the insecure working conditions of cultural workers and the rise of a monocultural global tech industry, we need to radically rethink our ideas about culture.He proposes that not only is culture important for its own sake, but through it we can also collectively imagine and bring about alternative, equitable and sustainable futures.Building on recent work by the Foundational Economy Collective calling for an economy prioritizing basic material and social requirements, his contribution is to articulate the centrality of culture to this project.The book makes a convincing case for moving culture out of industrial policy to take up its place alongside, for example, health and educationthat is, as culture for the public good.This is a book about the future of cultural and economic policy, but it also stresses the need to build on the past, borrowing architects Lacaton and Vassal's concept of 'adaptive reuse' (p.23).Woven through the book, therefore, is an account of arts and cultural policy in Britain since World War II, tracing its shifting relationship with the economy, industry and urban regeneration.The first part of the book critiques and contextualizes New Labour's 'creative industries' policy, announced by Chris Smith in 1998, through examining its relationship with the 'cultural industries' of the 1970s, which, in turn, emanated from an evolving relationship between art and popular culture over the preceding decades.Key moments include: the founding of the Arts Council in 1945, where art and culture became the subject of welfare state policy and were democratized through public art in neighbourhoods and shopping centres and publicly funded cultural buildings; the Greater London Council's 'cultural industries' experiment of 1979-86, where culture was identified as a distinct area of economic focus and highlighted the risks of privatization on cultural consumption and democracy; and the Thatcher government's absorption of culture into the neoliberal consumer economy, with metrics used to back up the claim that one-off events such as Glasgow's City of Culture stimulated local economies, while slashing public subsidies for cultural institutions.In the second part of the book, O'Connor builds a case for a cultural infrastructure approach that differentiates 'libraries and galleries, subsidised cultural services, and