Culture is bad for you : inequality and the cultural and creative industries / Orian Brook, Dave O'Brien, and Mark Taylor.

Art and culture are supposed to bring society together. 'Culture is bad for you' challenges the received wisdom that culture is good for us. It does this by demonstrating how who makes culture, and who consumes it, are marked by significant inequality and social division. The book combines the first large-scale study of social mobility into cultural and creative jobs with hundreds of interviews of creative workers and a national public engagement project. Addressing the intersections between social mobility, ethnicity and gender, the book argues that, as currently organised, the creative sector damages us all as it strengthens the structural inequalities that it imagines it tears down. The book demonstrates that cultural jobs are the preserve of the most privileged, a 'creative class' in society, and always have been - there was no golden age for social mobility in culture. 'Culture is bad for you' is a powerful call to radically transform who gets in and who gets on in Britain's creative class.