Inequality and the arts

Ahem, Henry: https://crookedtimber.org/2014/04/27/has-there-ever-been-a-better-patron-of-the-arts-than-the-cia/

I like the idea of a scruffy, relaxed, undisciplined lifestyle (or rather than undisciplined, let us say irreverent, because self-discipline of some sort is required to get anything done), but such lifestyles were available in the 1890s and the 1920s, when there was a lot of inequality. What I think puts the screws to the scruffy in the contemporary world is not just inequality, but the efficiency with which the system, the global work machine, pursues its victims. That could happen under a quasi-egalitarian regime. (That is, one where everyone was equal but some were more equal than others.)

There are pockets and corners where people appreciate the kind of culture produced by members of the proletariat leisure class … but not enough to matter. The “culture” that matters is mass produced and mass distributed to the masses. Many of the workers in this cultural enterprise are scruffy, to be sure.

My fear is that, even if we return to full employment and make a dent in inequality, mass culture will sop up any increased leisure time with brutal efficiency AND those intrepid artists that manage to ignore the sirens of the screens will be producing culture for only the same beleaguered, aging pocket-dwellers that are here worrying about it. We’ll need to include clever YouTube videography in our definition of high art, or we are going to stop having any high art — inequality or no.

So the obvious elitist counterargument here is that 19th C art and culture were just _better_ than 20th C, indeed that compared to the glory of the 19th C the 20th was a cultural wasteland, and that one major reason for this is that the independently wealthy– particularly, the type of people who got wealthy in the high-capitalist late 19th C– were and are better people with better taste than the proletarians Scialabba lauds.

Now both parts of this are of course subjective judgments, and the second in particular is subject to counter-counters involving plausible alternative causes (e.g. artists getting killed in World Wars). But the first part seems to me at least plausible. There were great 20th C musicians, artists, and architects, but IMHO and I think in the opinion of many (not all elitists or even pro-capitalists) for overall greatness and contribution to human heritage they just can’t come close to the accumulated total of the extraordinary 19th, despite the larger population from which they were drawn.

Nicholas Weininger 04.30.14 at 8:46 pm:

“for overall greatness and contribution to human heritage “

Peering through the hyperbole there, my first response is that the measure of greatness you’re using is taught not discovered, inherited through the academy not experience, and the attitudes carried forward in that process are by nature a generation or two at best behind even the main evolutionary branch of artistic achievement.

There’s a great website, “art renewal” alloneword, devoted to exactly what I think you’re on about, it has all the bigtime realist/mushpot grandees like Bouguereau etc.
The sensual accomplishments are immense, it’s really the pinnacle of something for sure, and the last time (10 years ago or so) I looked over there they were at the ramparts valiantly defying the hordes of impressionist abstract experimental dross weirdos to bring it, bring it on. Because of greatness and contributions to human heritage.

It’s just that I’d caution you to beware conflating your own aesthetic evolution with the larger group one.
We tend not to admire genius that’s beyond our present skill set’s ability to recognize.
And some of us retreat from the necessities of progress in art we turn to for comfort, we want it to stay like that, so we can stay like that.
Others love the thrill of the demanding as-yet-unknown.
What heritage there is in either of those aesthetic postures is probably beyond us to determine, at present.
Whistler wasn’t rewarded by the 19th c. for his daring vault to pure applied theory, he was controversial as all heck, to the mainish stream. But clearly he had something going on.
It’s probably still that way, I’d suggest.

“…it’s the job of the cultured elite to pick them out…”

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that is true. Let’s also assume that in the 19th century there was a correlation between wealth and cultural elevation. Even if that is the case, what’s the causal theory? Why should we expect the same effects to flow from inequality in the 21st century?

Tyler Cowen says “We need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. Some of you don’t like the sound of that, but we already…”

Not only the sound, sir, but the stench of it. Plus it looks ugly.
“The principle”. The Satanic assertion more like.

Sometimes dying people will die just because they are people who are dying.
And then (*!*) there was doctors, and even before that healing practitioners of an atavistic sort.
So the dying people did not die, and were thus not really dying people after all.

Isn’t this just the same old pseudo-Darwinian horseshit?
Muthafuckas crawled in from the margins while the rest of us worked to discombobulate pure animalistic Darwinian grind through shared effort and rules of commonality.
And once they got nice and centered, started to agitate for a return to the very raw-nature business that would have precluded their presence, if it hadn’t been short-circuited. Advocating the sacrifice of the now-marginalized who have taken their former place at the edge of things.

“Austerity” is the war cry of idiots who would have never been born if “austerity” had been in place all along.

eh?

I wouldn’t let a currently-working (especially public) librarian hear you call his or her job “undemanding.” But in a sense, the way in which librarianship has changed is a facet of the same problem.

“Nicholas Weininger@9 – “but IMHO and I think in the opinion of many (not all elitists or even pro-capitalists) for overall greatness and contribution to human heritage they just can’t come close to the accumulated total of the extraordinary 19th”

The opinion of many such as who ? You might want to point to someone who’s actually made this argument. I very much doubt that any made with intent to support the pro-plutocrat case will withstand review. For one, a huge majority of 19th century artists were liberals who took inspiration from the revolutions (american and french), Napoleon, 1848 and the like. This is extremely clear in Stendhal, Balzac(a monarchist, but i’m talking about his characters), Flaubert & rather melodramatic works such as “The Lost Leader”. Since Cowen & his ilk (who are standing in for the pro-inequality side here, idk what they actually believe) claim to be so enamoured of 19th century culture can we assume that they will also be ok with alternating periods of reformation and revolution to refresh the tree of art with blood ? Probably not, if they affect to be terrified by Obama, it’s unlikely they’d be ok with a Napoleonic reordering, to say nothing of the jacobins.

I’ll be curious what Cowen says. As others have pointed out, he can take several routes.

The first is to say that there is some sort of correlation between economic wealth and artistic excellence, that the wealthy simply have, as an empirical fact, finer taste, better aesthetic judgment, etc. I think you’d be hard pressed to show that, but it’s a route he could take.

But it raises a second question, which someone mentioned up-thread: what’s the causal mechanism by which the wealthy have such good taste? Is it the wealth, and the access to a more educated and cultured upbringing, that gives them the taste? Why then not spread it around some? I suppose Cowen could argue that that diminishes the actual level of taste and excellence at the top for the sake of a wider distribution. But empirically it runs into the problem George mentions and Henry cites: it just ain’t true.

Hayek tried to offer an evolutionary answer: the cultivation of that sensibility takes decades, if not centuries, and so is a multi-generational project. Taste is something that develops over time, and each generation of wealth is better than the previous one. To mandate equality in each new generation is to essentially ask society, or society’s great, to start from scratch every twenty or thirty years. That’s a waste of cultural heritage. But again that runs into problems: must the beneficiary or inheritor of Tolstoy be a Russian count? Isn’t the story of culture the reconstruction and adaptation of previous forms by new forces and new social classes?

As the Nietzsche quotes that I just cited above suggest, there’s a different way of approaching this. And I think it’s the one that you see most often, historically, on the right. And that is that it’s not that the men at the top of the social/economic pyramid are the most culturally excellent — and once he came face to face with the realities of Bismarck’s Germany, Nietszche quickly abandoned that notion. And it’s not that the artist needs great resources to do his art, resources that can only be accumulated if the society is massively unequal (which again, when you think about it, doesn’t seem true.) It is instead that a society of massive inequality — indeed, of slavery and all manner of terrible social domination — is a society capable of cultural profundity. Indeed, that is the only kind of society that can generate or appreciate the deep tragic vision that great art truly entails.

For a few reasons. First, there seems to be a notion that the depth of a social hierarchy — literally the distance between the person at the bottom and the person at the top — will be mirrored in the depth of that society’s vision. Philosophical depth requires social depth; a flattened egalitarian society will produce a flattened or shallow social vision. (I actually think you see similar sorts of anxieties among some on the left, but that’s a different story). Nietzsche believed in that; so did the slaveholders in the Old South, incidentally. So did Burke.

Second, the struggles that are generated by that massive inequality — whether it be the struggle of those on the bottom to rise up the ranks of that society or overthrow it altogether; or the effort of the ruling class to hold onto its power, to defend it against attack; or more simply the complexity and dexterity of the political task of holding it all together — will generate philosophical and cultural profundity. If you end inequality, you end struggle. If you end struggle, you eliminate the sociological yeast that makes for great art. Again, you see some of this in Nietzsche and the slaveholders.

The problem with this last argument is that it seems to run counter to the whole “we need leisure and freedom from toil” to create art argument. In other words, it’s immersion in difficulty, conflict, struggle that creates art, not separation from it. Though I suppose it can be reconciled by saying you want the society to be rife with conflict but the artist should be free from it, able to look down on it all. Or something like that.

It’s not my argument; I’m just reproducing it here. But I suppose you could say it describes the great 19th century novelists from Austen to Musil and Mann (at least the inequality part). Nietzsche thought it described the world of Greek tragedy. Again, I don’t think the argument holds.

Corey Robin @24,

For the record, those Nietzsche quotes are from a very early piece (1871, before the Birth of Tragedy). They do not even represent his developing views, much less his mature views. He is still, at that stage, very much a Schopenhauerian and Wagnerian. That is to say, an anti-Nietzschean.

Anon: That very early piece was actually written as a chapter of The Birth of Tragedy, not before Birth of Tragedy. For various reasons, Nietzsche chose to take it out.

LFC: Poe. And Frederick Douglass. Also, where would Melville have been without the theme of slavery? Benito Cereno, Billy Budd (one could argue), likewise Moby Dick (one could argue). But again I’m not a defender of this theory; I think it’s nonsense.

Corey Robin @25 – “The first is to say that there is some sort of correlation between economic wealth and artistic excellence, that the wealthy simply have, as an empirical fact, finer taste, better aesthetic judgment, etc.”

If you read Proust – and i’m going to be a snob and insist that you need to read all volumes since, every now and then, he will praise the refinement of a Marquise De Villeparisis or who-have-you – he makes it quite clear that this is not the case. That is to say – the too easily changed tastes of the salonnieres are shaped by the artists to whom they lend their patronage & who, just as often as not, are parvenus from the provinces, & not the other way around.
Not that this proves anything, but i’m going to assume that Proust knew more about 19th century arts than Cowen and kind ever will.

The bolsheviks produced Vladimir Nabokov.

Corey Robin:

“what’s the causal mechanism by which the wealthy have such good taste?”

Not good taste full stop – none of us have the right to claim to know what that is – but good compared to the taste of the people below them, whose lives are compressed by tension, anxiety, and in the 19th c near slave-like toil, in a downward progression of increasing intensity.
So that the art that most immediately gratifies whatever needs it most is going to be the art of them, what their taste will feature.
Above that come the spheres of bourgeois aspiration and complacency, which are almost entirely concerned with status, not aesthetics.
People who’ve been intimidated most of their lives by their superiors in education and attainment, and are worried about their place in the social hierarchy, don’t have the mental freedom to wonder at Damien Hirst’s flabby shark-in-vitrine. Don’t have the time it takes to develop the perception necessary to begin to take in Gerhardt Richter’s genius. So they can’t tell if it’s good or whether they should allow themselves to like it.
Until someone above them grants permission.
The wealthy don’t have to give a fuck if someone else doesn’t like the paintings on their walls.
None of those below the rungs of actual wealth have the individual freedom to risk championing something on their own.
So the fearful will seek refuge in safe and commonly-approved aesthetic experience, even when it’s counter to their actual aesthetic needs, what their souls require from art.
Neither position, toil and poverty and cheap easy sentiment, or middle-class insecurity and social reassurance, are conducive to the recognition of real contemporary artistic superiority.

Plus.

The standards used here that inform aesthetic “good taste” were and are being set by the wealthy to begin with, by example and by economic main force.
So there’s undoubtedly an overlap between the persona necessary to get and keep wealth and the artistic standards of a society whose aesthetic taste the wealthy have a dominant part in setting in the first place.

Sorry, I forgot one of the more obvious reasons, which at least Nietzsche gives, as to why great art requires massive hierarchy and terrible social domination: suffering. The horror and exploitation, the misery of slavery and other manner of domination, provide the key ingredient for artistic creation. Again, suffering. We make meaning out of our suffering. Great suffering, great meaning.

Nine is on to something. You know which 20th C society was really keen on Serious Culture? Soviet Russia. You haven’t *heard* someone complain about the infantilising philistinism of capitalist comsumer culture until you’ve heard it from a former Soviet intellectual.

@Corey
One of the things that always astonishes me about Nietzsche is his apparent inablility to grapple with the reality of Athenian *democracy*. I don’t know his work well enough to expand on this.

Corey@24: This is slightly off-topic, but whenever I come across some particularly hateful opinion in Nietzsche, I think of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” where he comes close to saying that bad ideas are invariably expressed in bad writing. (What he actually says is: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness.” Not quite the same thing, perhaps.) Nietzsche seems to me not merely incapable of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness, but incapable also of writing a sentence that isn’t (even in translation) fleet, shapely, vivid, pungent, pregnant. I find that this complicates my reaction to the aforementioned bad ideas to the point of near-paralyzing confusion. Do you ever feel that way?

geo: I definitely agree with you about Nietzsche. Though interestingly he disagrees with both of us about himself: his assessment of Birth of Tragedy is that is terribly over-written, embarrassing Schwärmerei. The opposite of fleet and shapely. But I never bought into Orwell’s notion that bad political ideas necessarily entail bad writing. Because it’s premised on the notion that proponents of bad ideas inevitably seek to hide the badness of their ideas behind a fog of pleasing rhetoric. But there are a lot of writers, especially on the right, who don’t seek to hide the badness of their bad ideas at all. Maistre is a good example. Calhoun — at times — too (though he’s a bad writer for other reasons). If anything, there’s a strain on the right (which has some devotees on the left) that revels and luxuriates in wickedness. ‘Cause it’s, you know, profound.

#47: or see Carlyle, the later Carlyle especially. He’s writing racist, elitist filth, and boy does he know it, and boy is he having fun doing it. There certainly is a kind of bad thinking which can only be expressed in muddy writing (I’d cite Arnold, and I wouldn’t exempt St George himself, ironically) but it’s not universal by any means.

As well as believing that taste (and the ability recognise Art) took generations to develop, did Hayek also believe that true talent (and the ability to create Art) was a rare evolutionary sport? It seems to me that he would have to believe something along those lines in order to complete the picture – otherwise you’d have the awful thought that there were millions of mute inglorious Miltons out there, toiling away in wage slavery, and our noble patrons were only plucking out one or two of them. (I think of the Carvers at the beginning of Titus Groan, most of whose work went on the fire; I also think of X Factor.)

I don’t want to run very far with this, the audience is not receptive, and I have reading to do.

But for the alienated, she who has rejected conformism and the stultifying value of her “conservative” origins, couldn’t the home she left behind sort of a “slave society?”

This is also a common theme among the alienated, or the new “universal” subcultures, false consciousness, organization man, salarymen, what’s the matter with Kansas etc.

Again, the examples I could give of this attitude are legion.

This post reminds me of reading Patti Smith’s Just Kids, and being startled by the sheer generosity of the society she and Mapplethorpe were working in; lots of cracks and niches and terms of business that allowed of interpretation. (There’s an old Beachcomber joke about how rat-infested garrets in Paris have got so expensive these days because there’s a man who owns a lot of them. But now everywhere’s like that.)

@13 Sandwichman asked

“Let’s also assume that in the 19th century there was a correlation between wealth and cultural elevation. Even if that is the case, what’s the causal theory? Why should we expect the same effects to flow from inequality in the 21st century?”

I think the answer is painfully simple – its the money. Great art is deemed great art when people start paying big dollars to own it or view it – art is one of the ultimate vanity items and in the high dollar art world its more salesmanship and convincing the patron that “this piece has value” than any actual merit that tends to separate artists (either in their lifetime or after it).

Paintings and graphic art (a la Warhol) become valuable and ‘great’ when someone deems them so and then people with money pay to posess it. No doubt there are hundered of other artists who produce art superior in some technical sense to art that’s deemed great – but its the patronage, direct or indirect, which elevates some relative to others.

Said differnently, as long as there’s some rich dude to pay ridiculous sums for a piece of art, there will be new art deemed “great”. The inequality is part of what makes this possible. This doesn’t preclude the creation of great art through other means, but I’d question the mechanism through which this art would eventually rise through the ranks to get enough notoriety to become “great” in some consensus sort of way.

The other thing not touched on in many of these discussions is that while its certainly the case that the wealthy buy and consume art, its long been corporations that have been what is commonly thought of as “patrons” by way of supporting theater, symphony, galleries etc….this is a class of patronage that essentially replaced the church which played this role in times past (or the CIA). Not sure if it adds or deducts from the equality argument but corporate patronage does improve the availability of art – although not always at prices the masses can consume it at.

@Nine
The bolsheviks produced Vladimir Nabokov.

Some good art did come out of the USSR, eg, to mention one example, Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, though it was published in the West.

People who aren’t suffering unusually also produce a lot of art. They probably produce more art, since less of their energies are used up by unusual suffering. If you don’t like the kind of art they produce, maybe it’s the unusual suffering you like, rather than the art. I’m not deprecating anyone’s taste; people do like different flavors of things. But there are a lot of flavors of suffering to go around in this vale of tears, so maybe the lovers of unusual suffering should get out more.

As noted by others, much of the supposed greatness of supposedly great art appears to come from its association with great power and wealth. To the large extent that power and wealth are positional, social orders which are highly unequal will produce more supposedly great art because the way in which their inmates view art will be formed by the way they experience their society as a whole.

About the Blues in particular, there is a lot of music in Africa which sounds rather Blues-like, yet without the weight of cotton-picking slavery in the Delta. Maybe you would not have to enslave anybody to get the Blues.

Some good art did come out of the USSR, eg, to mention one example, Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle, though it was published in the West.

Actually some really really good art came out of the Eastern Block. And much of it, despite the censorship, would never have come out of the west.

But this whole argument is so snobbish it makes me scream. Take music. Arguably the majority of music innovation and great art has come out of ‘low’ and ‘outsider’ art. I’m thinking everything from jazz, to industrial via hip hop and techno.

As for paintings/scultpure. What TM at #60 said. The state in Europe has a pretty good record as a patron. Arguably better.

“great art is deemed great art when people start paying big dollars to own it or view it ”

– Complete and utter rubbish (think of art that is now in the public domain). Greatness is not a function of excludability. Everybody in the western world can own a copy of a great performance of Beethoven’s Fifth.

“Everybody in the western world can own a copy of a great performance of Beethoven’s Fifth.”

Indeed that’s true…but if I wish to hear it performed live at the NY Philharmonic next month, I should plan on paying about $100 bucks a chair for it (or plan to bring your own oxygen mask for the upper level seats). Sponsored by Credit Suisse, incidentally, or the prices would inevitably be higher.

I’m quite certain however that we can find a guy busking a subway stop who could bang it out on a trashcan lid for some pocket change while we wait for him to compose his own “great” symphony. All he needs is a chance and a real keyboard and we’ll have more great art than we can shake a stick at.

^^ wonderful!

And I would like to add my Ceterum Censeo: Why waste so much time paying attention to ridiculous right-wing talking points? Pretty much everything Tyler Cowen says is ignorant, poorly reasoned and unworthy of serious debate. Why o why do we waste so much time and space on debating this silly BS?

I guess I should now stop posting on this thread.

[Your argument is trollish and strawmannish, continually moving goal posts (see 60, 63, 65) and just silly. I have heard great music many times for free or almost due to the public funding of art and music made possible by democratically accountable governments. Also I’m not posting here any more.]

“I have heard great music many times for free or almost due to the public funding of art and music made possible by democratically accountable governments. ”

I’m sure you have, I have too. There’s tons of them, everywhere. There’s nothing better than a free concert.

But its not Yefim Bronfman and its not at the NY Philharmonic (it might be Beethoven).

High end theatre, art, orchestra etc. is its own little eco-system. They charge $100 because they can still fill the house at $100 and that way Bronfmann can get more and they guy selling Raisinettes can get $5 a box instead of $3 and the guy in the business office can afford to rent somewhere and not commute from Jersey and then, with the profits from charging rich people $100 so they can say they saw Bronfman at the Phil, rather than listening to it on their iPod for $0.99 …. they can afford to do some concerts in the park for free and everyone feels good about it. The rich guy gets to boast that he saw Bronfman, more art gets produced and anyone who wants to can watch a nice concert in the park.

I’m not trying to be a jerk here, and it may well be different in other countries, hopefully it is, but in the U.S. this is how money spins the merry go round. Take the money out and some new source of funding needs to replace it. As Sandwichman commented above, the marginalist snake swallows its own marginal revenue product tail!

If by ‘great’ you simply mean ‘very good’, then it is true that some great art (great for some people) can be obtained free or very cheaply. However, if you look at the language and other social phenomena around certain well-established kinds of art, ‘great’ seems to imply that the art in question somehow defeats and overmasters other, lesser art. Beethoven beats Mendelssohn and Schubert, but maybe is tied with J.S. Bach, etc. This mode of evaluation runs parallel to ideas of political power, wealth, and status: the ‘great’ art is the art which the great people say is great, either by buying it themselves for a lot of money, or causing public institutions to buy it for a lot of other people’s money. It has the highest score.

One might want to ask how Beethoven would fare if the population had equal wealth and incomes, considerable social equality and liberty, and thoroughly democratic government; in other words, if classical Western music no longer imparted any sort of cachet of upper-classedness. No doubt the existing recordings would be lovingly preserved and transmitted by his fans, but maintaining a top-level symphony orchestra and a place for them to work in might be mostly out of range for most communities. So would Beethoven still be ‘great’ in the second sense? I don’t know, but I do know that even in these class-ridden times the Beethoven species of music has been disappearing from the mass media, and that symphony orchestras have been finding it difficult to stay in business.

At some point in the future it may be possible for individuals to synthesize good new Beethoven performances on their smartphones, but we aren’t there yet.

But it’s the symphonies that are supposed to blow the ‘competition’ away, except, of course, for the highly sophisticated. That’s what was mentioned here — and, in fact, the loudest and most militaristic of the symphonies, with the most blowing of horns and beating of drums. When Edna St. Vincent Millay writes, ‘Sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease! Reject me not into the world again’ she’s talking about a symphony. Would B. still be ‘great’ if he had not written the symphonies and the concertos and Fidelio? Maybe in the way that Palestrina is great.

I’m not disparaging Beethoven and his kind at all, but I do think one should recognize the ideology connected to the realizations of their larger works and the way people talk about them.

No, not the ideology of Beethoven the person; I’m talking about the more recent ideology of Western classical music (and a lot of other art) which is laced with notions of mastery and domination. That is why the symphonies are the big deal — because they are physically big and costly to perform, and their size requires a conductor, a leader, usually one of considerable charisma, social standing, and income, there is banging of drums and blowing of horns, and of course the gods worshiped are male, warlike, powerful, heroic. So, of course, this sort of art is said by rightists to be producible only by a wealthy elite, because that’s how it was produced in the first place. This has little to do with the formal properties of the music. I’m talking about its aura in social life, not its intrinsic aesthetic qualities.

Corey’s CIA post and this one are connected for me. Eumaios the swineherd is joined in Book 20 of the Odyssey (which I think of as “the workers’ book”) by the mill woman as the interpreter of art as justice. (She doesn’t even imagine Odysseus’ homecoming — she just hopes for an end to toiling for the suitors.) Is that what we’re finally talking about here? (Though the text sees even the mill woman through Odysseus’ eyes. At first, that focalization seems elitist. But maybe not. Maybe more an aspiration — what if the mill woman and Odysseus could really occupy more or less the same position from which to view things? Happy May Day.)

“But it doesn’t cost so much because it’s Beethoven. It costs so much because it is really expensive to maintain a performance hall in Manhattan, to maintain a world class orchestra, and so on. Your whole line of reasoning I’m sorry is just silly.”

It was always expensive. That’s the point.

It took a king to maintain a world-class orchestra. If you were just a duke and you had your own orchestra, how good was your fifth-seat flute? Probably not that great.

And of course it helped that in those days orchestra members didn’t get paid all that much. Nowadays median salary for a concert violinist is around $55,000. We could probably cut salaries considerably by getting green cards for talented third-world musicians.

But this is entertainment that was always intended for elites. Kind of like, say, foxhunting. In the old days the noblemen chased the fox through the peasants’ crops, and peasants could watch but certainly couldn’t participate. If a lot of people wanted to try it today we simply wouldn’t have the resources. They wear velvet-lined hardhats because, well, why not?

“Have you checked the ticket prices for top pop/rock acts lately? – your “peasants” seem to be perfectly able to pay anything from $100-1000 to attend. This is more a cultural and sociological boundary, and that’s a shame really.”

Yes, and the costs are different. They pay many fewer musicians but much more security. The audience doesn’t mind sweating some, but lighting costs more.

[JT 83 already refuted in 72. Sigh.]

The French think pleasure is worth supporting.

Harold 05.02.14 at 3:29 pm @ 89:
‘The French think pleasure is worth supporting.’

So why don’t they support it directly, then, instead of going through the rigmarole of passing laws to tax themselves, collecting the taxes, and having elites, politicians and bureaucrats distribute it, to support it? This is not a rhetorical question. Is the rigmarole itself a pleasure? I’m curious.

The classic reference for the connection in modernity between the “millionaire society” and the arts is Wynham Lewis’s The Art of being ruled, one of the series of brilliant pamphlets he issued in the 20s. Much better than the Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, in my opinion, Lewis makes a very good case for a distinct change between the aristocratic and the millionaire relation to the arts, and its motives.

J Thomas 05.02.14 at 4:30 pm @ 94 — I see some difference between broad national projects which affect everyone, like war, police, highways, public health, and so on, and about which there is considerable agreement as to purpose and technique, and more specialized concerns, like various arts, or, as in the example that set me off, caving. In the former category, one has no choice but to bring in elites, politicians, and bureaucrats, because that is the only way we know how to do things of that scope. In the latter the need for these types is not at all clear, and in some areas, like the arts, the participation of elites is (from my point of view) undesirably conservative or even retrograde, besides generally encouraging relations of domination and passivity. I am surprised I have to explain this.

So, if the French take pleasure in caving, and robots would be helpful, why can’t the Association National de Spéléologie collect the money from interested parties and buy the robots? Again, this is not a rhetorical question. Perhaps they simply feel better if it’s handled through a bunch of officials in Paris?

96: ‘I’ – 18x.

I need J Thomas’s contacts in France!

The question of the issues/locales on which the artist (or artists) chooses to situate his art is another one that comes to mind. On the one hand, there are issues which get relatively little coverage. On other issues, there is tremendous over-coverage.

There is virtually little art that abounds where I live that pleads the case of, say, the dispossessed of the Narmada Valley or the victims of the Rwandan genocide. Where I live, there is much pleading the case of a man born in Palestine 2000 years ago who, no doubt, didn’t deserve to be crucified. But we already knew that. We don’t need another beautiful new church building to make the same point.

The laws of demand and supply, if left alone, seem to result in skew.