In recent decades one of the legitimising arguments of cultural policies has been that culture has become an economic resource, so often in the face of the intrinsic difficulty of debating the relevance, goodness or effectiveness of cultural policies economic discourse becomes the definitive argument that drives them. It is certainly right to attribute to the economic perspective the fact that we are moving away from hermeneutic approaches to culture, which made any social debate impossible outside the enlightened experts and therefore allowed for the clear rationalisation of public intervention in the field of culture.