Artworks are conceived and crafted with creative intuitions fuelled by expressive urgencies. Once produced, their life crosses many stages where their narrative intentions are interpreted, strengthened and made eloquent by further creative interventions (from staging an opera to curating an exhibition, or translating a novel). This trail generates the cultural value chain: from creative intuitions to market outcomes, the value is subjectively perceived and evaluated, acknowledged in a wide range of critical interpretations and formal assessments, transformed in monetary dimensions and aimed at exerting a unique impact upon the economy and society. Along such a complex trail many markets are activated, involving semantic, technological and symbolic ‘containers’. The cultural value chain grows along a ‘vertical’ sequence of agents, organisations and institutions, within a network of exchanges and synergies. Its material and economic solidity is supported by market exchanges, whose level and density are almost never able to grant financial autonomy: in the light of the multiplicity of cultural value, and considering the crucial importance of culture within an adult society, the ‘horizontal’ dimension of the network is given by the interactions between cultural agents and organisations on the one hand, and public institutions, nonprofit organisations and private companies on the other: the material and monetary exchanges among them is regulated by various criteria, constraints and evaluations, whose structure exerts a visible impact upon the dynamics of the cultural eco-system.