Buying Into Culture

How commerce cultivates art

Charles Paul Freund from the June 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 5)

But at the postmodern extreme that has gained widespread institutional ascendancy, some theorists and their disciples have displaced creators and enthroned themselves as the last possible self-expressive seers, at extraordinary cost to their own fields. Much literary and film criticism, for example, is no longer accessible to general readers, and is of no interest to them. Worse, a number of these cultural critics have pronounced history and the soft social sciences--and in some cases the hard sciences, too--to be literary in nature, and therefore ultimately without objective value. Such academic theorizing has become a kind of black hole of human knowledge and achievement, with the result that some vulnerable fields--especially in the social sciences--have approached a state of intellectual collapse.

Even so, the Journal is correct, though its view is, unsurprisingly, skewed to the right. "American culture," reads its manifesto, "is at something of a crux," and the paper pauses to welcome signs of what it takes to be a "reassessment" of values. Given the Journal's cultural conservatism, the signs it perceives point toward traditionalist cultural authority; important matters, the Journal predicts, are going to turn on matters of "taste." But the cultural future belongs neither to conservative nor liberal authoritarians. A culture driven by personal choice is flourishing, indifferent to elites and divorced from taste hierarchies and the traditional concepts of status and authority that supported them; its proliferating, ever-subdividing groupings are overwhelming the very idea of a cultural mainstream over which the old left and right continue to struggle. These are ultimately the cultural forces that crushed the Soviets, and they are everywhere at work.

In recent years, an array of voices has begun to converge from such fields as art, economics, history, and anthropology to re-examine the origins and functions of culture. A number of researchers are, like Jardine, taking a fresh look at so malevolent a pair of concepts as "commercialization" and "consumption," and reapplying them to cultural activity in unexpected ways.

These thinkers do not constitute a "school" of thought, and do not necessarily agree on many specifics--they do not necessarily admire capitalism, much less commercialism. But they share a significant concern: assessing culture within its material context, especially the use to which individuals may put that context for self-renewal and even self-creation.

CENTRAL TO THIS emerging concept is a line of thought being developed by Canadian anthropologist Grant McCracken, who has been studying the increasing differentiation in "styles of life." For example, McCracken has noted that only a few years ago there were one or two kinds of "youth culture"; now, as a trip to any large mall will reveal, there are over a dozen (including, at the time he studied them, "goths," "punks," "b-boys," etc.), marked by fashion, hairstyle, body language, music preferences, and an array of other personal choices. Much the same is true, he says, for the elderly, who are far more diverse in type and style than they have ever been; it is true for such gender groups as gays, who used to adhere to a small number of behavioral types, and who have now proliferated into numerous sub-sub-groupings; it is true, he says, for everyone. Music cultures, sports cultures, tech cultures, fan cultures, online cultures, a panoply of long- and short-lived ways of thinking and living are all continually springing into being.

McCracken is right. Numerous areas of cultural activity that until recently had gatekeeper-controlled "mainstreams"--popular music, TV, fashion, reading, etc.--have split into a sometimes bewildering variety of subgenres. In his 1997 work, Plenitude, McCracken argues that the cultural "fecundity" and "speciation" he is observing is made possible by capitalism. A culture rich in choices is both anti-conformist and liberationist, because it is rich in personal possibilities. People can remake themselves, and experiment with their self-images. "Capitalism has endured, enabled, perhaps provoked the speciation we see around us....It doesn't care what it does. It doesn't care what we do." Capitalism, he writes, "is nothing if not transformational."

McCracken and Jardine are actually telling the same story, though each is describing a different stage of its development. His focus on the present transformational possibilities of capitalism is not only very much related to what Jardine is getting at in her own discussion of Renaissance "acquisitiveness" and "consumerism," it is in fact the end result (so far) of a cultural process that first appears with the Renaissance.

Not only was expanding material well-being a major subject of the art of both 15th- and 16th-century Italy, Jardine argues, it was an essential component of the new Renaissance mentality behind that art. Of course, the growing well-being of the Renaissance is limited to a few classes in a highly stratified world, and is expressing itself in luxuries. But the point is the same: What made the imagery important to those who originally commissioned and displayed it was not only the revolutionary artistry that was developing, but that, ultimately, that imagery was a reflection and a celebration of their new material world, their new worldly interests, and their emerging, individualized selves.

Indeed, an essential point about Renaissance art is that after centuries in which visual imagery was devoted to religious themes in styles and forms specifically dictated by the Church (at the Second Council of Nicaea in the eighth century), art turns its attention to the secular world and begins to invent its own terms. Individual artists begin to be celebrated, and their work demanded. As the German art scholar Hans Belting has put it, this shift is actually the beginning of art as we understand the idea. And that art, which is so greatly admired, would not have existed without the "consumerism," which is so greatly disparaged.

This was not a unique historical coincidence. Though the world of artistic culture exists today on its own terms, with its own tradition and an established discourse that is often very far removed from--and opposed to--material concerns, its anti-material mystification is a modern conceit.

Commercialization and, worse, "commodification" are considered by the contemporary cultural establishment to be the mortal enemies of art, and the antithesis of its spirit. But the fact is that art's great historic opportunities have frequently arisen from intensely commercialized periods, and have often been accompanied--if not set in motion--by periods of explosive acquisitiveness. There is an inescapable connection between the rise of an acquisitive public and the expansion of an audience interested in expressive art, and it is out of that nexus that the recognition of the expressive creator as a visionary artist has developed.

THE CONVERGENCE OF commerce, wealth, and cultural achievement can also be observed in the famous case of 17th-century Holland. The Dutch of that period were extremely innovative shipbuilders, dyers, and farmers, as well as innovative traders, and the result was that their society became immensely rich. What had once been items of luxury, noted Michael North last year in Art and Commerce in the Dutch Golden Age, became everyday goods.

Market forces and the innovation they unleashed, argues North, a German economic historian, had a huge impact on that society's art. For one thing, the traditional relationship between artists and patrons was broken: Instead, "paintings were marketable goods which competed for the attention of the buyer." Art dealers appeared, buying painters' works and commissioning them to do more. In addition, the Dutch invention of tonal painting drove down the costs of producing art and made paintings available to an ever greater proportion of a suddenly art-hungry public.

"[F]or the first time in European history," writes North, "the middle classes also demanded works of art." Whereas the Dutch nobility had often commissioned religious images and allegorical paintings, the recently wealthy middle class had an interest in secular subjects, including themselves, their possessions, their buildings, and the painterly transformation of their familiar landscapes (a secular shift further encouraged by Calvinist iconoclasm). Art spread throughout Dutch society; even peasants had hanging on their walls the work of painters whom we regard today as Dutch Masters.

This same phenomenon played out yet again in 18th-century England, the time and place where our current cultural world was built. Augustan England saw a revolution in the arts. Cultural activity, until that time, had been centered in Europe's aristocratic courts, and shaped by contemplative aristocratic taste. Few artists enjoyed much status, and they performed whatever creative work was commissioned by their noble patrons.