Buying Into Culture

How commerce cultivates art

Charles Paul Freund from the June 1998 issue

(Page 4 of 5)

All of this has grown out of the historical materialist theories advanced by Marx himself, which have shaped the intellectual understanding of the material world's effects on cultural activity. In 1846, Marx and Engels asserted that a society's cultural "superstructure" was dependent on its economic "base" (though many current thinkers "informed by Marx" regard that formulation as "vulgar"). The culture produced by those in material control of society was designed, according to the Marxist tradition, to maintain the ruling ideology. Culture was a tool of control and oppression.

THE RISE OF a materialist counter-vision that sees the opportunity for individual liberation in the nexus of culture and commerce is not so much a challenge to the left's long-dominant analysis as it is a reappropriation of the subject. The first such voices were raised centuries ago.

"All the arts seem to have been companions, if not the produce, of successful commerce," wrote the English music historian Charles Burney in 1776, "and they will, in general, be found to have pursued the same course...that is, like commerce, they will be found, upon enquiry, to have appeared first in Italy, then in the Hanseatic towns, next in the Netherlands."

Burney's judgment reflected a view widely held during the Enlightenment: Liberty encourages commerce, while commerce encourages culture. The writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were particularly drawn to the connection as they saw it played out in the Italian Renaissance. John Miller of Glasgow explored the connection between Florence's commerce and that city's leading cultural role. Adam Ferguson concurred, writing that "the progress of fine arts has generally made a part in the history of prosperous nations." Adam Smith himself intended to write a book on the matter, as historian Peter Burke notes in a brief discussion of the Scots. Smith never got around to it, but part three of The Wealth of Nations does include an aside on markets and art. (The foremost American voice on the matter was Tom Paine, whose concern was with commerce as a civilizing force.)

The most obvious objection to the direct relationship of liberty, commerce, and culture was noted by art historian Herbert Weisinger in a 1950 review of the Scots' work (in which he mistakes these Scots, of all people, for proto-Marxists). The problem is that the Renaissance makes for a poor case in point; many Renaissance city-states were actually petty despotisms. Philosopher David Hume and historian Edward Gibbon, among others, noted even at the time that art has also been a successful tool for tyranny.

But the English and Scottish cultural materialists celebrated the Renaissance not because they thought it to be a blossoming of freedom; as Weisinger notes, they were committed to the idea of progress, and the Renaissance was an advance over the Medieval period from any point of view. As it turns out, the Scots' notions of commerce, liberty, and culture have been borne out within the very framework of historical development to which they were committed; they would likely have read the Journal's manifesto of culture with no surprise.

The Scots were looking backward to make their cultural case; in fact, they actually had a much better example available to them to prove that culture expresses liberty, though they couldn't see that example because they were a part of it. At the very historical moment they were advancing their thesis, 18th-century commercialization was driving a sweeping transformation of the very idea of culture, and liberating not only the cultural audience, but the artist, too.

JOHN BREWER'S 1997 work, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century, is a detailed account of how a new cultural world was built in the midst of increasing plenty. A former Harvard professor of history and literature who now teaches in Florence, Brewer is an old London Enlightenment hand who well understands the relationship between ideas and the material context in which they grow. His 1982 essay on "Commercialization and Politics" examines the changes in the period's political consciousness that emerged from the increasing commercialization of social activities, and demonstrates how those changes translated into growing demands for liberty (particularly as applied to the John Wilkes affair).

In Pleasures, Brewer is again concerned with commercialization, this time with its shaping of art culture. His book is a panorama of the period's fine arts, and the story he tells is of culture's entry into the urban marketplace. There, subject to greed, exploitation, tastelessness, and professionalization, as well as to the interaction of innovative creators and the demands of an ever-more interested and knowledgeable audience, cultural forms began to flourish in unprecedented ways.

His account of the growth of London's literary culture is worth pausing over. At the outset of the period, writing was largely a dilettante's pastime. So was reading, which was done mostly for edification, and rarely with the ludic, emotional involvement that was soon to emerge. Noblemen often wrote for their own amusement. (Horace Walpole, creator of the gothic novel, printed his own books in his basement.) However, theirs was a "liberal" calling, and it was beneath their station to accept money. "Writing for money," notes Brewer, "not only reduced authorship to a mechanical trade but subverted the value of the work." Literature for pay was venal.

As cultural activity intensified in Augustan London, however, there was a good deal of money to be made at writing, though not by writers. Most of the money went into the pockets of bookseller-publishers, who were anxious to meet the increasing demands of a literate public in the throes of revolutionary consumerism, and in the midst of a fiction-reading frenzy that owed much to the liberating opportunities of increasing wealth. These pioneering commercial publishers were not, in the main, men who loved books, as the current book trade likes to imagine them; they were out for a profit. Their ruthless treatment of writers was often appalling; they set writers to work in the literary sweatshops of Grub Street, paying them as little as possible while retaining publishing rights for as long as possible.

Brewer identifies two factors that established the professional author familiar today. The first was legal: Writers were able to establish property rights to the work they were creating. The second was intellectual, and has had far-reaching consequences. It was the assertion of creative genius.

The leading voice on behalf of writerly genius was author and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (for artists, the case was best made by William Blake). Johnson's best-remembered quote about writing is that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money," a remark that is believed today to express literary cynicism. In fact, Johnson's powerful arguments on behalf of writers as wielders of creative genius were made in defense of writers as money-making professionals.

Eighteenth-century aristocratic taste dismissed the work of the new literary marketplace as pandering, manufactured trash. Johnson answered this position definitively by asserting originality, and praising those writers who "produce new ideas...
[and] gratify the imagination with any uncommon train of images or contexture of events." Literature was not a disinterested effort to uncover "natural" truths by persons of "taste," as the aristocrats held; it was a matter of individual ingenuity. Such writers deserved to be paid, and to be respected as well. "[T]he association of creative genius with originality had never been made so forcefully," writes Brewer. Johnson and his allies won their debate.

It was the most important turning point in the history of modern letters. Creative genius was established as a cultural fact in defense of professionalization, just as literature was being thoroughly commercialized. The effect, of course, was to set writers free. Their social status (along with that of other artists), soared; the legitimacy of their creative vision was validated. Armed with law and status, artists could present their work in a market and hope to attract a like-minded audience.

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