Creating Culture

How to cultivate the arts when the old rules need not apply.

Nick Gillespie, Jesse Walker, Brian Doherty, Charles Paul Freund, Charles Oliver & Frederick Turner from the December 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

Jesse Walker is writing a history of the micro-radio movement and its historical predecessors.

Frederick Turner

Good art and bad art really exist; and there really is a faculty by which human beings can recognize the difference. Moreover, a life surrounded by good music, books, visual art, performance, and architecture is a better life than one that is not.

Taste is the word we use to refer to the faculty by which we recognize good cultural productions. True taste has nothing to do with snobbery, as true goodness has nothing to do with hypocritical moralism. Taste is no more mysterious than the subtle ability of a good sports scout to recognize baseball talent in the rough; but like a sports eye, it takes cultivation.

The conventional wisdom on culture is that, while the free associations of a market society can generate wealth, they cannot generate taste. Left to itself, the market creates only schlock and kitsch. Even good artists can be ruined by "selling out" to "commercialism." Thus the government must assure that the populace is culturally educated and that good artists are commissioned even if their works would not make it on the free market.

There is enough truth in this argument to make it a serious challenge. The burden of proof is on those who believe as I do, that a reasonably prosperous and stable free society, experiencing the economic progress and accumulation of wealth that the free market provides, will eventually create by itself the civil institutions of education and patronage that it needs for the production of culture.

Some might argue that institutions for the cultivation of taste, even nongovernmental ones, are unnecessary. But the problematic assumptions of this position are revealed by the new academic fashions of "cultural studies" and "popular culture" that celebrate the collapse of traditional canons of taste, reducing all works of human expression to the same level, and that offer only political correctness and gender/ethnic/class identity as ways to choose one artwork over another. Throw out the devil of the bureaucratic state and seven worse devils rush in, it seems.

The key recognition, it seems to me, is that cultural value and economic value ought to be connected--wealth over time creates taste, good taste can make someone wealthy, good art should be expensive, and the rich should become patrons of the arts.

The great cultural savants of the 19th century have given us some fine books--Friedrich Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, the cultural theory of Goethe, Hegel, Pater, Ruskin. They tell us much that is valuable about the amazing powers of art, the genuine reality of taste, the wonderful combination of the moral, the intellectual, and the aesthetic that characterizes high culture. But all their work presupposes the state, the politically centralized cultural nation. None of them realized that true political democracy would degrade the power of its elites and spend the grease of its cultural taxes on the squeakiest wheels of ethnic/gender/disadvantaged grievance. Nor did they see that government-sponsored elites could themselves stunt and limit the culture they serve, like the Académie Française and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Thus, the best I can do is recommend cautiously some books that at least outline the minimum requirements for the development of taste.

The first is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929). Its value in this context is to show what Shakespeare's brilliant sister would have needed in the way of social encouragement, patronage, and education in order to contribute her genius to the culture at large.

The second is Victor W. Turner's classic work of comparative social anthropology, The Ritual Process (1966), which shows how the fundamental spiritual and aesthetic roots of culture are necessarily outside the realm of the official power structure.

The third is the complete works of Shakespeare, who is for me, with such figures as Verdi, Rembrandt, Dickens, Robert Frost, and J.S. Bach, and certain contemporary filmmakers, a touchstone for how great art that is popular and lucrative can emerge by demand from relatively free-market societies.

Contributing Editor Frederick Turner is an internationally known poet and Founders professor of arts and humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. His ninth book of poetry, Hadean Eclogues, will be published by Story Line Press next year.

Nathan Shedroff