Buying Into Culture

How commerce cultivates art

Charles Paul Freund from the June 1998 issue

(Page 5 of 5)

One result was the flowering of English literature. Similar changes in the perception of creative artistry throughout Europe set the stage for a succession of Western artist-centered movements--literary, visual, musical, etc.--that still continues.

Another consequence, however, was the conviction developed by writers and artists in the course of the 19th century that they themselves constituted a kind of aristocracy--a nobility of the spirit--and that they too were above a marketplace that, by its nature, manufactured trash and sullied their own imaginative creativity. The role of the visionary artist, though the very concept emerged from the marketplace, was to become not merely mystified, but sacralized. The achievements of the creative imagination, past as well as present, were set in a place so rarified that the material world was nowhere in sight. Soon, men could stand before a centuries-old picture of a recumbent nude woman in a salacious pose, and see in it harmonious amour, Dionysiac triumph, or the themes of Latin poetry expressed in symbols.

IN 1837, A melancholy young poet gathered his verses, his sketches for yet-unwritten novels, and the notes for a creative life that would go unlived, and set fire to it all. His Romantic spirit was emerging from a crisis of the soul, and the fire he lit was meant as a cleansing. For days on end, he later wrote to his father, "I had been unable to think." The poetry he was destroying was filled with "broad and shapeless expressions of unnatural feeling." In his struggle with art, "Everything grew vague, and all that is vague lacks boundaries." Art for him was now at an end. He resolved to take up philosophy, where he could find "our mental nature to be just as determined, concrete, and firmly established as our physical."

Too bad he didn't like his verses more. The sorrowful young poet was Karl Marx, and the existence of a few more throbbing Romantic German poems--had he continued writing them--would have been a very small price to pay in exchange for the collectivist grotesque of the 20th century. That poet's search for "boundaries"--the antithesis of the variation that has proceeded from the market--is an effort worth pondering.

So is the fact that the very last believers in Marx's principles to have any influence are those concerned with culture. The last question that will be asked by the last Marxist will not be about modes of production or the proletariat; it will be about why people do any of the things they do. Why do they buy what they buy? Watch what they watch? Read what they read? Marxists have arrived at many answers to these questions, an indication that even they seem to know that all of them have been wrong.

Their answers, in their very profusion, make for a revealing chorus: Because the ruling bourgeoisie propagandized them, goes one answer. Because they have been forced to have "false needs," goes another. Because they've been hegemonized, goes a third. Because of the work of the consciousness industry, goes one more. The Marxist tradition has been so frustrated by history's refusals that it has developed an even greater contempt for its "masses" than it ever had for the demon bourgeoisie.

One answer of interest has recently come from the Marxist-influenced "Birmingham School" of cultural studies in England. It is almost the last possible Marxist answer: People watch what they watch, this school has concluded, because they take pleasure in the act. What pleasure? The pleasure, it unfortunately turns out, of "subversion." The viewing audience enjoys substituting its own subversive meanings for the intended meanings of corporate creators. Culture remains oppression in this school, but personal pleasure, and even a contorted version of personal choice, have at least gotten in the schoolhouse door. A little more homework, perhaps, and the scholars will arrive at the answer which the audience itself found long ago.

That answer is that people are enthusiastic participants in marketplace culture because, rather than being victimized and oppressed by it, they find in it opportunities for the liberation and satisfaction of their senses and their intellect: It is a place of potential fulfillment. What some people do with their opportunities may be shallow; what others do may be creatively expressive. Not everyone succeeds: Each person, in such a culture, is always balancing the risks that stem from his or her decisions against the personal satisfactions they hope for. In a culture shaped by liberty, people do the things they do for the very reason the 18th-century Scottish thinkers understood: because they are free to express their individuality.

We still have a handful of Karl Marx's poems. In one that he dedicated to his fiancee, he wrote turbulently that, "Ich stürme ohne Rast." I storm without cease. A truer line was never written by any better poet. But even his tempest has passed at last, and one more Prospero must drown his book.