Cultivating Culture

Nick Gillespie from the October 1998 issue

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The real effect of the shift from patron to marketplace, however, was not the degradation of literature but a more diverse world of print. "The decline of the patronage system," Cowen writes, "gave women writers their foothold. Men, who held superior political and social connections, had received nearly all of the patronage support. Women writers could compete on an equal footing only when readers were the primary source of income." It was not, of course, only women (both as authors and readers), who had been shut out by the patronage system.

The same sort of process undergirds the tremendous--and continuing--boom in the publishing industry. In 1947, for instance, there were 85,000 books in print in the United States; 50 years later, the total was 1.3 million. The number of U.S. publishers has similarly skyrocketed over the same period, from 357 to more than 49,000. Perhaps more important than sheer numbers is the breadth of enterprise: "Most of these presses," writes Cowen, are independent small presses or university presses, rather than corporate giants. Many have a life mission of finding neglected works that have been passed over by the larger houses. Editors [at small houses] often work out of creative motives, rather than a desire for cash....The decentralization provided by these alternative outlets flourishes most strongly in a wealthy, commercial society."

Cowen maps analogous developments in markets for the visual arts and music, always paying careful attention to the specific characteristics of different media. Where books are easily--and perfectly--reproduced (and hence more likely to develop mass markets), most paintings and sculptures "cannot be reproduced without a significant decline in the value of subsequent units." As a result, "most renowned artists support themselves by selling unique creations to the wealthy, rather than by selling reproductions to the masses."

Beginning with Renaissance Florence and moving through 17th-century Amsterdam, late-19th-century Paris, and postwar New York, Cowen traces various market-related phenomena that have contributed to "creativity" in the visual arts. These range from skills transferred from related fields such as textile manufacturing to the development of cheaper, more durable materials to the creation of the modern art gallery (essentially created by disgruntled 19th-century French artists seeking to bypass government-sanctioned outlets). The story he tells is one of increasing artistic freedom and consumer choice. As Renaissance patrons bid for the time and effort of figures such as Cellini, Donatello, and Michelangelo, they had to increasingly cede power to the artist (and pay ever-higher sums). At the same time, the development of more efficient distribution networks--including brokers and dealers--has helped to bring more and varied art to the attention of buyers.

In his discussion of music, Cowen again starts with the Renaissance, but focuses on the gradual shift in emphasis from the composer to the performer, an evolution that roughly follows the development of recording techniques. Where pessimists such as Robert Frank and Phillip Cook, authors of The Winner-Take-All Society, argue that the ability to reproduce and sell work by superstar artists to massive audiences moves consumers to cease buying work by lesser-known musicians, Cowen convincingly makes the opposite case. He charts the "rise of Western music" with reference to major figures such as Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, exploring how the growth of public concerts (as opposed to court performances) and the gradual development of the sheet music industry (itself a byproduct of better print and paper technologies) gave composers an extra source of income and, hence, the ability to work more on their own terms.

Recording technology, invented in the late 19th century, furthered this process. The beneficiaries, of course, are not only, or even primarily, musicians. Listeners benefit from an immense and ever-growing catalog of works, both old and new (Cowen astutely notes that preserving art from the past is usually one of the first orders of business in a market order.) As in publishing, while a few major firms stand out, the industry nonetheless supports all sorts of producers offering alternative fare. Cowen's discussions of small but highly influential labels such as Sun, Stax, and Chess; the jukebox's role as an alternative musical outlet; and "how payola promoted cultural diversity" (by giving acts with no major-label backing access to radio) are filled with interesting insights. He notes, for instance, that between 1948 and 1955, the four largest record companies (Columbia, Capitol, Decca, and RCA Victor) accounted for 78 percent of the records on the Billboard Hit Parade. By 1959, after rock and rhythm and blues had stormed the scene (largely on indie labels), the big four's share had tumbled to 34 percent.

Where cultural pessimists typically bemoan the supplanting of symphonic music by rock and rap, Cowen writes, "classical music--of both the older and newer sorts--is by no means dead. The sound of classical music flourishes like never before." That's partly because of market incentives: Rather than record another version of a well-known piece such as the Brandenburg Concerti (of which dozens of versions already exist), companies look for something new to sell. While the works of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven "have never been more accessible," the works of "obscure composers--such as Aho, Pousseur, and Scelsi--are now for sale in stores in American suburbs, supposedly an arid wasteland for culture."

By documenting the sheer profusion of cultural products available and by outlining the market-based mechanisms that promote such plenitude, In Praise of Commercial Culture fully succeeds in its basic goal of presenting "the capitalist market economy [as] a vital...institutional framework for supporting a plurality of coexisting artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the eclipsed past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it." This is an impressive achievement, one underwritten by Cowen's careful, thoughtful analysis.

Yet, as I suggested earlier, In Praise of Commercial Culture presents an incomplete case against contemporary variants of cultural pessimism, which are generally less concerned with the quantity of cultural offerings than with issues of its "quality" (only the most reality-challenged critics--who do exist, I might add--argue that there is actually less stuff out there to choose from). Indeed, the pessimists are pessimistic precisely because Cowen is undeniably correct that "market wealth supports creative artworks of many different kinds" and that "market exchange and capitalism produce diverse art, rather than art that appeals to one particular set of tastes."

From the cultural pessimists' point of view, this proliferation of cultural tastes is the problem with today's scene. Right-wing and left-wing pessimists both tend to view culture as didactic and instrumental, as a means to an end. Those ends differ, of course: Right-wingers want art that will inculcate proper conservative values, while left-wingers prize culture that unmasks power relations and foments the need for radical, systemic change. (There is, further, a more purely aesthetic cultural pessimism which mistakes the decline of a particular artistic form or movement for the abandonment of all standards--as when, say, "classic rock" fans decry rap as "crap.") But both agree that culture must be controlled to further a particular worldview.

If Cowen is correct in arguing that culture "consists of a continual dialogue between producer and consumer...[that] helps both parties decide what they want" and that markets facilitate such conversations, then the roots of cultural pessimism are fully exposed. Indeed, when one adds that producing and consuming culture helps people decide not just what they want but to express and explore who they are, the problem for pessimists is virtually insoluble.

It has never been easy to control culture, in the sense of enforcing a single, or even dominant, standard. Increases in wealth, education, and leisure time, along with technological advances that make culture ever cheaper to produce and consume has only made this task that much more difficult. After all, who can control music when every garage in the country can become a rehearsal hall? Who can control literature when anyone with Web access can distribute his or her work?

In such a situation, pessimists, as Cowen himself recognizes, will never be convinced by the argument that the sort of culture they like is alive among other forms, any more than conservatives are comforted by the fact that heterosexual relationships flourish among homosexual ones or leftists are heartened that some companies are employee-owned "collectives." The impasse between optimists, who celebrate an endlessly prolific culture, and pessimists, who lament such a reality as a fall from grace, is unlikely to be bridged any time soon (if ever). But by contextualizing pessimism within a larger dynamic of cultural growth and by showing the beneficial effects of markets on art, In Praise of Commercial Culture remaps the debate in a way that should greatly inform all future arguments.