Has There Ever Been a Better Patron of the Arts than the CIA?

I’m sure that if you look hard enough you can always find a silver lining to allowing private forces to control a whole mountain of silver.

Up next: everyone killed in the bombing of Guernica would have died by now anyway, but Picasso’s Guernica is immortal. Why won’t people take a more honest look at the benefits of the Spanish Civil War as well as the bad parts?!

And U.S. universities and colleges would not exist without the wealth produced by slaves. Therefore….

“stocks of wealth stimulated invention by liberating creators from the immediate demands of the marketplace and allowing them to explore their fancies, enriching generations to come.”

Unless I’m missing something, isn’t this pretty much the case for the universal basic income, or mass public investment in education, R&D etc ? Cowen doesn’t think that competitive markets best incentivise technological advancement, but idleness ? Perhaps this *is* Cowen’s general position (I don’t know, I don’t read him enough..)

Ronan(rf): ““stocks of wealth stimulated invention by liberating creators from the immediate demands of the marketplace. . .”

Yeah, this is what made my head hurt. Innovation requires *liberation* from market discipline now?

Conservatives will say ANYTHING.

This is taken from Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, I think.

Looking at the big picture, it appears that Foreign Affairs is turning into the Style section of the New York Times.

“Up next: everyone killed in the bombing of Guernica would have died by now anyway, but Picasso’s Guernica is immortal. Why won’t people take a more honest look at the benefits of the Spanish Civil War as well as the bad parts?!”

And we have a winner.
/your prize is one complete internet.

I can remember being lambasted by my then girlfriend in the seventies. I argued that the late renaissance was largely funded by very rich people, who could provide funds for scientists/engineers/mathematiians etc. If we had had perfect economic equality, no one would have had any time/energy available to advance the culture. But, such anti-communist thinking was anathema.

Shift the context slightly and this would be derided as an instance of the glazier’s fallacy.

Laugh at Cowen all you want, but this isn’t the first time he’s praised freedom from the market, not just in the Hayekian sense either.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/08/what_is_valid_i.html

In the Piketty review, he calls for sovereign wealth funds as a sort of basic wealth guarantee. Cowen gets that distribution and welfare of the great masses are the great questions, just don’t throw the baby out with the productive bathwater.

Now about Garret Jones…

http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/26/living-with-inequality

F*** that guy.

Consider the empirical results accompanying the increasing inequality of the last 30-40 years: No additional economic growth over what was expected anyway (in fact less). The innovation was seeded by university and gov’t programs in science, computers and internet. Most of the private investment chased stocks, real estate and mortgage derivatives, and we know what happened next. The arts, very far from being great in most anyone’s estimation, have rocketed into the toilet.

It is worth noting that I discuss this case at length in my book *Good & Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding*.

No, actually this is pretty fucking awesome.

David@5 – “Did I miss the pivot point where conservatives stopped arguing that wealth inequality was imaginary”

Good question. Do Cowen and his ilk now accept that wealth inequality is a thing ? That would in itself be remarkable.

Krugman wrote about this, a couple of years ago maybe (a quick Google search isn’t yielding the desired results). I think PK’s post may specifically have been about decline in social mobility, but he argued that you’re seeing the same switch in conservative positions as you did with regard to climate change (in some quarters) — from denial to arguing that it’s actually a good thing (warm winters in Buffalo!).

Sometimes those of us who spend a lot of time with “great art” wonder, too, sine qua non? I think Homer answers this with Eumaios the swineherd, the best art critic ever (after Penelope — well, they rely on each other, so let’s not rank them).

Ah, that reference flew way over my head. Sorry.

I don’t think you need a pivot. The right can simultaneously argue that inequality hasn’t gone up, that it doesn’t matter because what counts is social mobility, that income and wealth inequality doesn’t matter because what counts is consumption inequality, that the rise in inequality is because of unstoppable technological forces that it would be folly to tamper with, that talking about the subject is the real evil because it just foments class envy, that we shouldn’t listen to anything the left says about inequality because they’re the real elitists, that inequality doesn’t matter because the job-creators deserve everything they get, and that inequality is a good thing because our betters are benevolent philanthropists.

Some of those arguments are consistent with each other and some aren’t, but that doesn’t really matter. There’s nothing that makes it impossible for all of them to be employed simultaneously. (Sometimes even honestly. The right isn’t a homogeneous group, after all, and different rightists believe different things.)

“Cowen’s argument has a long history, but it’s not clear to me why he believes it’s dispositive.”
Can someone explain the meaning of ‘dispositive’ in that sentence. Google defines the term as “relating to or bringing about the settlement of an issue or the disposition of property”.

What about Melville ? The merchant navy gave us his greater works, and the gov’mnt his lesser ones, so there’s a smashing proof of Cowen’s theory.

Ah, but madness and poverty have given us more great art than any political or economic institution ever has.

Hi-yo-silver-lining! Humane levels of unemployment pay (pre-Thatcher) gave a generation of young Britons the leisure to develop guitar-skills that dazzled their US contemporaries and sucked top-dollar into the public purse.

I think I prefer it in the original better: “In Italy, for thirty years, under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance.” But that might be just because it’s got a better punchline….

David @5, some recent brief history from Paul Krugman answers your question, I think:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/piketty-day-notes/

… and the Swiss invented LSD. Perhaps we can count the theory of relativity too.

But people who quote that line sometimes forget that in its original context it was self-justification by a despicable character.

But Orson Wells’s improvised line in the Third Man, spoken by a fictional criminal, is not strictly true. Michelangelo and other Renaissance artist were not sponsored by the Borgias, but by the the bankers and merchant guilds of the Florentine Republic . (Michelangelo himself was descended from a family of bankers.) Michelangelo’s patron in Rome was Raffaelo della Rovere from the Republic of Genoa, known as Pope Julius II, the Borgia family’s bitterest enemy, who ordered their memory expunged and who caused their apartments to remain sealed until the 19th century (if wikipedia is to be believed). He was succeeded by Leo X (a Medici).

I agree with Corey Robin about Saunders’ rather simplistic take on abstract art. I liked her earlier book more.

There are so few cultures and societies with no art and many with no great inheritances with truly fantastic art. This is simply a narrow vision of art.

I see the comment above says everything I meant to say –but better. We have decadent art mocking this very principle–Damien Hirsch, Jeff Koons.

Remember that some egalitarians too have argued that one reason for tolerating inequalities we would otherwise recoil from is that they sustain ways of living / the production of things of value which would otherwise be unavailable (because they’re simply so expensive). That’s the case, for Thomas Nagel, even if very few people can enjoy these luxuries. He finishes chapter 12 of Equality and Partiality by saying that ‘I believe no egalitarianism can be right which would permit haute cuisine, haute couture, and exquisite houses to disappear just because not everyone can have them.’

Of course, there are so many ways of attacking this argument that I lack the will to choose between them…

Carnegie endowed the library down the road from us – as well as several others in different suburbs of Manchester, and indeed many other places. He also personally funded Helen Keller, in the knowledge that she was a Wobblie. I’m not saying the man could do no wrong – you can’t forget the whole Pinkertons-using strike-breaking thing – but as cynical plutocrats go I’ll take him over, well, Jay Gould any time. (Still rather impressed by Belle’s family links, though.)

Yes, Hayek did argue that freedom from what we might call free market discipline was essential for creativity. He squared the circle through straightforward elitism, AIUI – some people needed to be free to create; most of us (or rather, most of them) were never going to create anything worth a damn, so most people just needed to be incentivised to work as hard as possible.

The interesting question is, how could a contemporary conservative make that argument work?

My great-great grandfather then proceeded to use it to make a giant checkerboard lawn on which he played chess with friends, using real live humans for pieces, with the fully armored knights mounted on horses

Awesome. WRT Corey’s point about the CIA, this is just yet another way the US has to hide perfectly sensible industrial policy, scientific funding, and artistic patronage in the military-industrial complex.

54 and the quote in the OP seem a bit disingenuous taken together. Phil, the second or third hit for me on google is pretty much always going to be this. CT has edged it out from the top though. There’s a poet named Belle Waring also from GA (?) who lives in the DC area; she and I get mixed up often.

I’d note that the quote in 54 isn’t about poverty per se; it’s about one of the particular forms poverty can take, which is significant areas that are diverse and have really cheap living costs. (He’s contrasting shantytowns to council/project housing, which seems to not have the same dynamics.)

“Ah, but madness and poverty have given us more great art than any political or economic institution ever has.”

All depends on how you figure it.

When it comes to funding for the arts, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

And when it comes to crippling democratic government the same is true.

The art of Athens was essentially made by amateurs. The great plays: tragedies and comedies — were put on at public festivals, performed once by amateur actors — and that was it. This repertoire went on to form the basis of humanistic education for the next two thousand years. There is a sense in which it is true that slavery made classical Athenian culture possible, yet slavery in Athens was rather different from the industrial or colonial slavery that we think of. For example, moneymaking was so disparaged in Ancient Greece that all who engaged in banking were debarred from citizenship and were categorized as slaves belonging to the city. Many of these slaves went on to become very rich and bought their own freedom. (I believe Aristotle’s father-in-law was a former slave. Don’t remember exactly, but I don’t think Aristotle was ever an Athenian citizen.) I don’t think a large percentage of the citizens participating in Athenian democracy were wealthy slaveowners. Many were skilled craftsmen and had one or two slaves at most, if any (the wealthy landowners resented this). Socrates was by trade a sculptor. In addition to bankers, the city of Athens did have a class of public slaves who worked in the silver mines (probably in horrible conditions) outside of town. Interestingly, the officers of the Athenian army who won the Persian wars were all elected by popular vote, not appointed. (I am not an expert and am just repeating what I remember in reading books about the subject).

I agree that great art happens from the bottom up, i.e., when lots of people engage in it. After the abolition of slavery in the USA 20 percent of African-Americans were employed as musicians of one kind or another. Jazz happened because New Orleans, a Catholic city, was the only city in the USA to have an opera house, and there were a lot of European type musical instruments in circulation that trickled down to the populace. Not to mention musicians who offered classical music lessons to same. Jelly Roll Morton, for example, studied classical piano.

In Protestant parts of the US, church congregations supported music instruction and sometimes provided scholarships so talented singers could have formal musical instruction.

In Flanders at the turn of the seventeenth century 20 percent of the population was employed as painters (or so I read this in my guidebook when traveling in Belgium).

In Germany, on the other hand, where every little city had its independent government, court culture, opera house, and orchestra, the musical arts also flourished.

Omega, it is questionable that Burroughs was influenced by Aelita, since Under the Moons of Mars was first published in 1912.
The biggest influences were the “lost civilization” romances of H. Rider Haggard snd the like and the view of Mars possibly having a declining civilization popularized byPercival Lowell.

My great-great grandfather then proceeded to use it to make a giant checkerboard lawn on which he played chess with friends, using real live humans for pieces, with the fully armored knights mounted on horses.

Holy shit, Belle. And there I thought Mel Brooks made that scene in History of the World, Part I up all by his onesies. Silly me.

“the last time anyone in your family played chess using other humans”.
WW1, WW2, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine. Numerous other exciting locales and periods.
Though my family was mostly being used, not using – moving one little square at a time as per instruction.

Luke’s penetrating the veil of bourgeois complacency.
People think the Medieval artists were solely concerned with religious subjects, but that’s just the ones that made it into the archive, because the Church had total control of what got kept. We have no idea what art was being made at the margins then. What stories, poems, songs came and went without official recognition and preservation, all along..
Jazz in the Middle Ages didn’t make into it in the canon. Because those blue notes were clearly demonic. Betcha it was there though, somewhere. Dissonance and atonality are attractive once you get the modal stuff tight and it gets too familiar.
Hmm, what’s it sound like when I bend this lute string…ooh, yeah.
People painting abstract brilliance in the nineteenth century and before were either hiding it or doing it in some well-endowed asylum.
Art is craziness first, commodity way second.

Off-topic but I would like to clamor for a dedicated Piketty forum. Some of the claims in the book concerning the famous r vs. g rates worry me. Piketty says that the capital rate of return has for centuries, nay millennia, been around 4-5% (http://www.nybooks.com/media/graphics/chart/image/krugman_3-050814.png). Apart from the absurdity of trying to quantify these rates back into the mist of history (I know, DeLong even “calculated” GDP growth rates for the last million years – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product#Historical_and_prehistorical_estimates – deserving nomination for the most ludicrous econometric overreach ever) – am I the first to point out that if capital had indeed grown on the order of 4% p.a. for 1,000 years, a “dollar” would have multiplied to about 200 million billion (I leave the other 1,000 years as an exercise)? What is it about the exponential that makes even mathematical sophisticates completely miss the obvious? Nothing in the universe can grow at sustained rates like that for centuries, let alone millennia! (http://www.slideshare.net/amenning/growth-in-a-finite-world-sustainability-and-the-exponential-function)

To be sure, the rate of return is not the same as the rate of reinvestment, but the whole (imho confused) premise of the r>g argument is that capital is growing *much* faster than income so r is taken as reasonable estimate of a growth rate. Which is simply numerically absurd.

roy belmont, isn’t there folk music inherited from centuries ago? I don’t think it usually gets too jazzy. I had also heard somewhere that musical traditions brought over from Africa were integral in developing “America’s indigenous classical music”.

Wonk
Yeah I’m just being snarky.
There seems to be a pretty consistent evolution of western musical form. Diatonic folk etc. But I have a soft spot for the weirdos. Tradition holds what it needs to, it’s just that that’s not all that’s happening at any given moment.
Bulk relevance is what you get from the past, So the picture is everyone was doing the same thing. This doesn’t match my experience, limited to the second half of the 20th c. as it may be.
And double yeah, those Arabic fretboards with umpteen more notes in between the European 12.
Africans moving through the kingdom of Charlemagne, singing, dropping the how-to on open-minded troubadors.
The same process that gave Buddy Bolden’s jas to the US must have been operating way back there, we just have no way to hear it, until it makes the consensus change.

If you’re really interested in how the rich fund art, read Rogue’s Gallery by Michael Gross. It’s the story of NYC’s Metropolotin Museum of Art. It was created by a find band of rascals and cut-throats. Of this, this isn’t direct subsidy of art, so it’s trickle down…Which is sorta’ the point.

The modern super-rich certainly do appreciate fine art:

Jurors saw the 30-minute video of the 40th birthday party for Kozlowski’s wife as part of a case that accuses him and former Tyco finance chief Mark Swartz of looting the company out of $600 million.

Tyco footed about half the bill for the party in Sardinia, which featured an ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David spewing vodka from his penis and a birthday cake in the shape of a woman’s breasts with sparklers mounted on top.

“While governments certainly do support the arts, there’s little guarantee that that the appropriated wealth would be spent in the same measure or as effectively.”

Effectively is a strange way of putting it (I’m thinking of Yachts, Jets, McMansions, ideological think tanks and political campaigns). I now live in Philadelphia where patronage by the rich has indeed left huge marks on cultural life (the Barnes etc.) but we also have a bankrupt public school system, a Third World building stock, an overproportional share of the nation’s 60,000 structurally unsound bridges are in Pennsylvania, and so on. Of course there is no connection between the one and the other. Obviously, if you want Swiss quality public infrastructure, you just can’t also have museums and art collections and orchestras and performance halls and universities. You have to choose between high culture and ordinary public infrastructure.

What are you saying, they have museums and universities and art collections in Switzerland? That’s not possible!!!

Also btw, every time some cultural institution is named after a rich donor, you can be sure that a substantial, often the overwhelming, part of the cost was absorbed by the taxpayer. It’s usually noted in smaller print on the dedication plaque.

Since I mentioned Barnes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_C._Barnes) above: Barnes was an art collector and he was passionate about art. There is little doubt that if tax rates had been higher, that wouldn’t have prevented him from pursuing his passion. More importantly, while Barnes commissioned a few pieces, most of his vast collection he bought on the art market during the depression, at depressed prices (with excellent artistic taste and business acumen). Matisse, Van Gogh, Cezanne etc. weren’t the product of art patronage by rich people. The whole premise is preposterous and ignorant.

Matt @2 and Matt @33 win the thread.

@trader Joe Proof that Ronald Reagan was transformational is that anyone in the 21st Century would say this about the institution that dominates the globe:

“The bunch in Washington don’t seem to possess any special vision about how to allocate the marginal dollar – even when its the party you might prefer, let alone when it isn’t.”

There is 60 years of data that the US Government is spectacularly successful at allocating its money to acheive its goals. And where we lag the rest of the industrialized world–health care, happiness–it is the countries with bigger governments that we are behind.

Even if you disagree, Donald Trump or Donald Rumsfeld: who would you rather pick the statue you have to see every day? He might be evil, but I’d take Rumsfeld every day of the week.

“governments don’t always spend on what people think they might spend”

I think most of us do have an idea of what governments spend money on, but thanks for reminding…

@88
“Even if you disagree, Donald Trump or Donald Rumsfeld: who would you rather pick the statue you have to see every day? He might be evil, but I’d take Rumsfeld every day of the week.”

That’s a heckuva a choice. Maybe I’d just fillibuster or flip a coin. My point isn’t who picks the statue – its there might be no statue to pick because Mr. Rumsfeld would pick the extra B-1 bomber instead.

Maybe instead of Gates funding AIDS and Malaria research, Mr. Ryan would choose to fund more insurance companies and big pharma instead and cut that darn deficit while he’s at it.

Maybe instead of Soros funding the his various causes, we can let Mr. Cantor make the selections on his behalf.

I happen to like Gates’ and Soros’ choices, I’m sure there are plenty that don’t.

I’m not anti taxation and I’m not anti-government, but its a shell game to imagine that changing the choser in allocating to the arts would change the outcome. If you prefer rich guys in Washington to rich guys in New York (or wherever they live), I can’t say you’re mistaken, but I am skeptical we’d notice a difference.

Not native english speaker @35 In this context “dispositive” is the same as “conclusive” or “settles the argument”

CIA as a patron saint of the arts (and perhaps the best patron saint of the arts!) Nothing sadder. Welcome to Monday…

Or to take the archetypical example: is there anyone who honestly believes that as mass literacy spread across the United States, local governments would not have built their own libraries?

Me.

Mass literacy was estimated at 90% in New England in 1800; I’m not aware of any free public libraries prior to Carnegie l;ibraries. (Subscription libraries were fairly common.)

100: That’s why there are no public libraries in Switzerland – the idea just never occurred to local governments.

…and anyway, a Congress that passes a giant soak the rich proposal would realistically be progressive in other ways, so they would probably at the time allocate the revenue to relatively progressive ends. Over time, spending would probably drift in a more conservative direction, but there’s a certain inertia to that kind of thing.

“And dentistry William Carlos Williams! (Or was it just medicine?)”

Chekhov was a doctor, wasn’t he? Oh, wait, that was McCoy.

Having quickly gone through the comments, I see that my comment @107 just follows what Rory Belmont @72 said already. My apologies.

One thing that did occur to me, that nobody has mentioned, is that today thanks to modern electronic media, we have crowd funding of arts. Doesn’t this count? Is inefficient distribution part of the definition of “fine art”?

When did life become a Pynchon novel?

“The bride studies Greek philosophy in the classics department, and the bridegroom is writing a dissertation on the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.”

Oh yeah … I remember *that* announcement.

Sorry for typos.

Oh, gawd, do we really have to teach Professor Cowen about the complex relationship between patronage and professionalism in the modern era? Well, perhaps, given that he is both a recipient of Koch family patronage at Mercatus and a GMU tenured professor, and one can never quite tell which hat he’s wearing. (I’m sure that he considers himself a grand patron of the ethnic culinary arts, too.)

And dentistry William Carlos Williams! (Or was it just medicine?)

Obstetrics, mainly with poorer families in Rutherford, NJ.

Well, arranging things in hierarchies can be dumb, as in “100 best”, beloved of merchandizers.

I think there are greater and lesser artworks, and I don’t mind being called an elitist about this. And it seems like most of the greatest art, at least since the early modern period, was met with initial antagonism and incomprehension. There were negative reactions to Beethoven’s Eroica, to the impressionist painters, etc.

I wonder how much great art was killed before creation because, although there were possible benefactors, the artists were ahead of the time, thus beyond comprehension. Jarry died penniless and I think it is mostly luck that we can read his Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. Joyce’s benefactors nearly gave up on him over Finnegans Wake, and it still has a very narrow audience. Yet here are two of the most far-sighted works ever, not only creating new aesthetic effects, but carrying them through with enough intellectual firepower to anticipate current artistic and even philosophical concerns.

It may not be possible to do much about this. People who have looked into the MacArthur “genius” awards system have said (sotto voce) that it is rife with internal politics, and indeed theexterior evidence is that MacArthur has funded some good researchers on the scientific side of the ledger, but on the other hand their judgments on artists are spotty.

On the other hand, if we publicly funded everybody who claimed to be an artist, not only would we have lots more great artists among the whole lot. Then also, half of the economists in the world, instead of needing to claim that they are doing “science”, could just apply for arts funding instead, and thus continue to chain together the silly syllogisms into baroque curlicues, but do so under the correct job classification.

BTW, this also applies, of course, to commercial enterprises (Kickstarter has discovered this boundary to be quite porous). The possibility of commoner capitalists, in the sense of not just kicking their funds to a 401K (agency problems there having been proven serious), but actually making investment decisions promises to bring to capitalism something it sorely needs: dilatantism. Professional investors are driven purely by the bottom line, but people have been funding commercial ventures on Kickstarter with no promise of a share of the profits, just to support ventures they want to see happen for other reasons. I think they should also share in the profits, so am glad to see the law being modified to accommodate this, but many will not revert purely to this motivation, so enterprises that have appeal beyond profit potential will have a funding advantage.

Shelley 04.29.14 at 3:28 pm:

“When did life become a Pynchon novel?”

In 1961, 0bviously.
–
Harold 04.29.14 at 4:28 pm:

There’s nothing in patronage that irredeemably taints the art delivered through it. Compromises, but doesn’t condemn.
Bach’s genius is neither ultimately indebted to nor fully separate from the cultural specifics of his moment. It’s that we’ve been trained to see it as inevitably linked. No patronage, no genius. No Church no Titian.
Caraveggio’s secular break-out, in that clamped-down view, is seen as a rebellion, when it looks from here, to me, to be more like a visible reclamation of what was already there, but invisible, because of that behaviorist control.
It is behaviorist control, even if the power that’s wielding it doesn’t define it that way.

“This ties in with my current obsession: if you make an equation true by definition of its elements, how can algebraic manipulation of those elements reveal anything interesting about the world?”

Well, presumably a numerical proof of the pythagorean theorem is an equation true by definition of its elements, and it tells us something pretty interesting about the world, quite useful when dealing with triangle-like things.

Or, from another tack: If I take ‘if p then q,’ and manipulate it, it turns out ‘if not q then not p.’ I might not have realized that, and that also seems to be a useful and interesting thing to know about the world.

In general, our definitions and identities are not self-transparent, and manipulation of them reveals information of which we were not previously cognizant. Often times that information is used to find interesting things about the world.

@GiT Thanks.

Bach was just another court/church composer among many in the numerous small courts and princely municipalities in what is now Germany. That was the necessary condition for his art to flourish. Essentially, Bach was a skilled craftsman. Music was an activity he practiced at work (he was a Latin teacher) and at home, with his family, most of whom were also musicians. He wrote the B minor mass in the hope of getting a job with a Catholic prince, but the job didn’t materialize.

Neither Bach’s patrons/employers nor his audiences understood the value of Bach’s music during his lifetime. His sons, who were musicians did. And so did Felix Mendelssohn’s grandmother, a Jewish woman who nurtured a love of Bach’s music in her children that was passed to Felix Mendelssohn, a composer, who along with Robert Schumann, revived Bach’s music in secular performance.

I got off on this riff in answer to someone who wondered if great art was called “great” chiefly because of the elites who were promoting it. My shorter answer would be no, although I understand that when, as a very young man, Proust witnessed a duke standing in front of his fireplace, sighing “Ah, Balzac,” it reportedly inspired him to wish that some day in the future a duke would also sigh: “Ah, Proust.”

I gave my opinion of the CIA above.

The National Endowment for the Arts, founded (1965) made it less necessary for the CIA to fund art in a clandestine manner, but the gap that the CIA was trying to fill is still with us.

The CIA sprung (Venus-like?) from the head of the wartime offices which oversaw a second wave of book burnings in Germany, after the war. Of course a couple very broad points remain interesting here: Firstly, a great deal of good art is done under protest (and with the Internet, today a lot of decent art is done on themes that are considered subversive or even obscene – so people of average means step into the shoes of the wealthy patrons and governments; Martin Bento kind of touched on this theme, but I wanted to reflect on how subversive a lot of ‘net art is). And this is likely to be a long-term pattern for the future.

Secondly, I think most people would imagine that at least some of the clandestine funding of art in unfriendly places has had good effect, and I think also most people would agree that denazification was a good policy. It’s problematic for those who talk of “art for art’s sake” – it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I suppose crediting the CIA is akin to crediting the policy shift after the war as the United States looked eastward.

Oops, correction: Russian “edition”, not “translation”

@Lee A. Arnold #120: The most astute comment I’ve seen on the MacArthur’s was made by Waldemar Neilsen in 1997, who suggested that their purpose was to generate PR for the foundation. I think that’s right. That program only uses 6% of the foundation’s budget, small enough to call it an overhead expense. I examined the MacArthurs in a series of posts last year, which I wrapped up into a single PDF: The Genius Chronicles: Going Boldly Where None Have Gone.

The obvious suggestion is simple: The majority of their grants go to people with good jobs at elite institutions, mostly tenured academics and good schools. Depending on circumstances those folks may or may not be frustrated in their gigs, but they’re not waiting tables or busking on the streets. They don’t need a MacArthur to do their work. So, simply don’t award any fellowships to tenured academics.

@Harold #133: But, as I point out in #57, Cowen has argued that the social condition of (a certain kind) of poverty breeds art. No funding required.

Bill Benzoin@138 Cowen argued that: “The slums of Kingston, Jamaica, bred reggae. New Orleans experienced its greatest cultural blossoming in the early 20th century, when it was full of shanties”. I have alluded to this argument (if you can call it that) at #66. Obviously, the idea that shanty conditions, with all their attendant violence and pathologies, are a necessary condition for art and ought therefore to be encouraged, is perverse and repugnant. The arts of New Orleans and the Caribbean were the result in fact of a great cultural interchange between immemorial African traditions, “high” and “low” and European music, “high” and “low”. It is a fact that “genius” folk artists and musicians usually spring from the more stable and prosperous sectors of their social sectors. New Orleans had long been safer and more prosperous than other Southern US cities because of its large Creole population, which had not been subject (at least before the Civil War) to the same degradation that had been visited on other African Americans in the Southern States. I don’t think we know much about Buddy Bolden, but I don’t think he was a version of Bigger Thomas.

I thought Peter Burke’s “Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe” had some good things to say about the social conditions in which folk art arose, at least in Europe. This and the notion of “protest” art are very complex questions.

@Lee A Arnold and UserGoogle
I don’t want to highjack the thread, but Tyler Cowen is an economist, so maybe this is germain.
The Pythagorean Theorem is obviously not the right analogy. What the “accounting identity” is doing is what would happen if there was no triangle and somebody simply said, “suppose a squared plus b squared equals c squared” and then used that supposition to make a claim about what changes in a and b do to c. Again, no triangle anywhere.

And I’ve read Krugman’s response (directed at freshwater clowns, not Taylor), but it seems to me that the move of calling it an “accounting identity” simply begs the question. He suggests that the identity is true, but only meaningful if you find the mechanism.

But who came up with the idea that there was a mechanism that works like this, even some of the time? In other words, the Pythagoreans came up with the theorem after considering a lot of triangles. And somebody like Piketty is looking at centuries of triangles.

Krugman (to beat the analogy like Dick Cheney in my dream of a just universe) says, “wait, be careful, there are non-Euclidian geometries where the theorem doesn’t hold.” And I say, “when do we look at the triangles?”

oops
Now my typos
…for great art OR against it?

Thornton Hall #142″ “But who came up with the idea that there was a mechanism that works like this, even some of the time?”

It was a combination mainly from two economists, Turgot and Smith. The story is given in Schumpeter’s very entertaining History of Economic Analysis, pp. 322-7:

“The reader need not strain his imagination unduly in order to realize what a difference it would have made to doctrinal history if the possibility and, in depressive situations, the likelihood of the occurrence of hitches had been pointed out from the first — of hitches that may paralyze the mechanism described by Turgot and cause saving to become a disturber of the economic process, hence possibly a destroyer instead of a creator of industrial apparatus. Not only would such an admission have broken off the spearhead from modern attacks upon the theory, but it would also have made it a more effective analysis within the situations FOR WHICH IT IS QUITE TRUE [italics, in original]. (Schumpeter p. 326)

“If saving is allotted such a part in the drama, the ‘prince’ (that is, public expenditure, hence public debts) cannot be expected to escape the role of the villain, or one of the villains, if the piece. The topic of public debts, though interesting from the standpoint of economic sociology and also from the standpoint of financial technique, is of little moment for us [i.e. in this book], because judgment and advocacy greatly prevailed over analysis. Therefore it will suffice to say that many authors tried hard to discover desired effects that might be attributed to public borrowing. Some indeed went so far as to make them a factor in national prosperity [footnoted to examples]. The opposite tendency prevailed, however–votaries of ideological interpretation are welcome to trace this to the increasing influence of the bourgeois mind… (Schumpeter p. 327)

Martin Bento 04.29.14 at 8:53 pm

The trope that Bach would have been Bach in any other social context, when what we are is our social context + our heritage + other stuff we haven’t figured out yet.
Genius pulls the consensus, but without the consensus to begin with how can it have any presence?
Genius hermit monk isolate in the wilderness. Who knows anything about his doings but the spirits that surround him?
The point I guess is the not-quite legitimate claiming of patronage for the works of genius by whatever power structure surrounded the working genius at the time.
It’s woven, inextricable, a matrix of causality and chance, one side too far and it’s false, but equally false too far the other way.
Without the English language what’s Beckett? Well he’s still Beckett, writing in French, isn’t he? So English can’t claim to be his primary enabler.
But English shaped him, his rebellion against it shaped him, and without the thing rebelled against what’s rebellion?
Back to Caravaggio, without the centuries of Church bottleneck on all public art he could well have been just another super-proficient draftsman, if we can even posit an existence for him without everything that went into his actual being.
What we aren’t seeing is what art, in the case of Pollack and De Kooning, would have been allowed prominence, if they hadn’t been artificially pimped by our busy friends in the CIA.
And for God’s sake let’s not talk seriously about the use of amphetamines by virtually everybody who was anybody (see Oliver Sacks, somewhere, one of the only honest rememberers of that, in public) back then, and the effect of that on the culture, in everything from art to political decisions.

@Lee A. Arnold I started with this:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/economics/

I’m now pretty well convinced that the emperor has no clothes. Smith and Hume deserved far better than a methodology developed by John Stuart Mill and “improved” by Milton Friedman!

Um, I think we are talking about the Nobel Prize winning 20th c. Irish writer Samuel Beckett who lived in France and wrote in French as well as English.

I believe the majority of the dispute arises due to the failure to assess the survivorship bias in “great” art. (Whatever art might be.) If in fact the wealthy — people, institutions — had not both paid for the creation of but also the preservation of the works of a relative few incredibly talented people, we wouldn’t have them now.

All the potential geniuses who didn’t get that support, or didn’t have the “leisure” time (whether they were inspired by suffering or not) simply are an unknown and invisible loss to us all. Most genius needs time to focus on whatever art is complex enough — in addition to being “good” — that it’s either worth learning to do or to do itself. Wealth is part of that, in public or private patronage of some form, for the arts we are taught are great — but leisure is also critical for arts that are either more ephemeral or “lower” — like guitarists prior to blues greats we already know about. Those guys had some “time” because there was a way to either avoid a “real job” or because there wasn’t one available worth taking, so they sat and practiced and performed….

How many great oral storytellers in the time prior to common education about writing could have kicked Shakespeare’s butt, given the proper education? I bet a few, given that they had to learn, modify, memorize, and extemporize over long evenings. But we’re stuck with that slacker Will, whom some really do like. These are simply examples. We could write a wikipedia full of them once we all thought about it.

It’ll always remain logically true that survivorship bias is at work in this quarrel; but it is unfortunately unpersuasive to those who disagree, because it’s really hard to prove a negative. Sigh.

Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood. …

Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray;
Along the cool sequester’d vale of life
They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.
–Gray, Elegy written in a Country Churchyard