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NOTE Conclusion: Culture as Pop Culture

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The 10th and final lecture. We're finally home here. I've covered a lot, I feel. I don't know what to cover in the remaining time, but let's try to talk a bit about the future and maybe talk a bit about antiquity as well.

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I do want to begin by making a clarification that's very important.

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I find that when I try to talk about connections between so-called high culture and pop culture,

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that people think I'm trying to erase the distinction between them,

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and by that they think I'm trying to erase the distinction between good and bad art.

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And no, I'm just trying to reformulate it, and in a sense reposition it.

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There's, I think we've got such a prejudice against commercial art ingrained in our culture

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that for me to say Shakespeare's art was commercial, Dickens' art was commercial, a lot of people

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think I'm therefore trying to denigrate it and sort of lower the level of Shakespeare

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or Dickens to that of commercial art.

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On the contrary, I'm trying to raise the level of commercial art, maybe not to the level

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of Shakespeare, certainly to the level of Dickens, by which I mean I'm trying to say, and I tried

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to show all week that in many respects some of the great art of the past grew out of commercial

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circumstances and I'm thereby raising also the possibility that some of the art of the

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present, which we tend to condemn as merely commercial, may achieve greatness.

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I'm trying to look for good and bad art or great and ordinary art wherever I look and

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and not prejudging the case by just looking at its origins and assume that if something's

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commercial it can't have quality.

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In fact, I'm very much a believer in taste and discrimination in culture, even though

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my taste may seem indiscriminate to you, I'm really a very, very pretentious person when

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it comes to artistic taste.

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I'm actually impressed with the fact that the standards we could apply to the past in art often prevail in the present.

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A good plot has many of the same characteristics today that it had in Aristotle's day.

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I was very struck in reading in this volume created by Inside the Minds of TV's top show creators

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to see that the standards that many of the writers and television evoke sound quite traditional.

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I just want to read one passage from Brenda Hampton.

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She's the creator of Seventh Heaven.

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That doesn't sound all that high art, maybe to you, but this is when she's asked how do

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you write the pilot episode of your series.

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She says, when you think of a story, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Does that

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sound familiar? It's Aristotle's poetics. It also has some twists and turns to it. Also

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Aristotle's poetics. He called it parapetia, but Brenda Hampton can call it twists and turns.

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It has some twists and turns to it, but essentially it's comprised of those three parts. Also

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in writing the pilot, I wanted it to be true to the family genre, because that was what

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The Network was looking to produce at that time. So her concerns are genre, beginning, middle and end, straight out of Aristotle's poetics.

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I'm not saying that 7th Heaven is as good as Oedipus Tyrannus, but it does suggest there is some continuity.

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And that's what I have in mind. I'm fully in favor of evoking aesthetic standards and subjecting the art of the present to the same high standards

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I just want to give the art of the present a chance, not prejudge it by saying look at the chaotic conditions under which it's produced, look at the commercial considerations that are invoked, therefore it can't be bad.

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I just want to look at the result, not look at how the sausage was made, but just taste the sausage.

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And I think that's what we always should do in art, and when we look back we actually discover that in most cases what we now think of as the most exalted, sometimes rarefied, high culture of the past turns out to have been the pop culture to this day and that's not so unusual when you think that when you say something is popular you mean it's drawing upon a kind of energy of vibrancy, of vitality,

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of People, and I think that's what fueled the art of Shakespeare, fueled the art of Dickens and fuels the better art being produced today.

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So, now, if any theory is of value, it should somehow be predictive.

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And indeed, I've complained about the inability of most cultural theories to make valid predictions.

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I would be so much more confident in some of these cultural critics if they'd said what they're saying now 50 years ago.

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So let me go out on a limb and make a prediction, and that is that the video game will be the great art form of the 21st century.

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Now the nice thing about my saying that is I say it out of utter ignorance of video games.

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It's really, I've never played them. As I explained, I've started to learn something about them, because I keep making this statement. Really, I need something to back it up.

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But I really like making it out of utter ignorance, because it basically is, it's based on a structural argument.

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That is, I look at the place of video games in our culture right now, and what I say is this is where motion pictures were at the beginning of the 20th century.

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And so I make this prediction. That is, and I make it in full knowledge that in 1906 I would have been looked on as an idiot if I'd said the motion picture was going to be the great art form of the 20th century.

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What I observe in the most fundamental sense is billions upon billions of dollars are going into video games now.

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I believe the video game market is now roughly equivalent to the total motion picture market.

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I'm not sure of that, but if it's not, it's close. It may have even surpassed it.

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That more money is being spent on video games than on motion pictures.

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That's a staggering figure, and it tells me something.

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First and foremost, it tells me is that a lot of talent must be flowing towards video games.

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The other thing I notice about it is we're talking about a shift in medium here and that this is simply the hottest, coolest medium around today and how do I know that?

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Because kids are flocking to it and they're always ahead of us in this regard.

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Now again, if you think back to where motion pictures stood in 1906, I don't think we could name a motion picture from 1906.

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In 1906, we could barely name one that still exists, and I don't think we could name one that anyone cares about anymore.

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All the motion picture then was basically a gimmick.

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And in fact, it's the nature of new media that they begin as gimmicks, because when they're new, that's all they need is the gimmick factor.

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People were so excited to see a moving picture that you could put anything on the screen.

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and they got excited if you know you put a train moving on the screen or just a

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person waving that was enough that was worth a nickel just to see that in other

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words it's in the nature of media that people are attracted first to just the

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medium and they're excited by the novelty of the medium and it's hard just

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to produce the new medium I mean Edison had to invent the motion picture camera

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and Projector and all that stuff. And people are just excited by the novelty of that. It

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takes a while for the initial novelty to wear off and for someone now to have to put some

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content in it. And you know, within 10 years of 1906, you've got D.W. Griffith and you've

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got the Great Train Robbery and Birth of a Nation. And suddenly, someone takes what is

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is basically just a novelty item and turns it into an artistic medium, and in film, again, we can associate it with Griffith, but there were other directors around the world who were doing the same thing.

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Now, the same thing is happening in video games. I just don't know who's doing it because I just don't know video games.

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It does seem to me that video games are way further advanced in 2006 than motion pictures were in 1906.

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It has something to do with the increased pace of technological change and certainly the increased amount of money that's being thrown at this medium.

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And so, you know, I see two fundamental aspects, enormous commercial success and the potentialities of a new medium and so I'm just utterly convinced on the basis of what I know of cultural history that there will be a Shakespeare of the video game in the 21st century, at least a Dickens of the video game or a D.W. Griffith of the video game.

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Because maybe Shakespeare is unique and there's never been anyone to equal him in any medium.

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But by the year 22,106, wow, somebody will be lecturing, maybe not here, about the great

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history of the cultural development of the video game in the 21st century.

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And again, for all I know, the Shakespeare, the video game is already there.

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He probably has a Japanese name, by the way.

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But you know, I just don't know enough to say this.

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I like the fact that I don't know enough to prove this because it shows I'm making a purely

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structural argument here.

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I'm standing far enough back from cultural history to say if this is what happened with

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with the Motion Picture and what happened with the serialized novel in Victorian England.

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If this is what happened with Shakespeare's theater and so on, then I can just point to

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where it's going to happen in 21st century culture.

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It's just I don't know how it's going to happen because again, if I did, I'd make a billion

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dollars and I'd really like to dwell upon my ignorance here because I think it teaches

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and why culture critics are usually a generation, if not a century behind in what they're doing.

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I can't really talk to you about video games because they're not in my blood.

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And frankly, my reaction when I look at them is they're all the same.

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Don't laugh at me if you play them.

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But I haven't played them, so I just see this mess of all these video games

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I know enough about cultural stupidity to say that video games are probably very differentiated.

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I just don't know it. I don't know how to play them. I'm terrible at them. I'm frustrated

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when I play them. I'm embarrassed. I'm humiliated because eight-year-old kids can play them

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and I can't. And so I say it's a lousy art form. It's only my awareness of the stupidity

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of Horkheimer and Adorno and other cultural critics that teaches me a lesson. Don't criticize

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I said, if you can't play it.

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Now, in fact, one of my students in Virginia wanted to write an MA thesis on video games.

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And I said to myself, this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

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But man, this is a great opportunity for me.

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And he wrote a very interesting thesis, as it turned out.

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And I learned a lot from it.

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And above all, he forced me to play some video games.

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And it's really interesting in a way because I had been reading about Grand Theft Auto

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and how horrible this was, and yet how great it was.

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So I said, we gotta do Grand Theft Auto.

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We gotta do Grand, and he said, well, the new version is Grand Theft Auto,

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San Andreas.

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And, you know, he goes into it like he's killing a hundred people

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and negotiating his way through.

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I fell in the water.

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And I could not, there's that water along the road.

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I could not get out of the water.

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My first inclination is video games suck.

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and I translated my own frustration into that judgment and you know what I really had to admit is I'm a generation behind and it was funny because we came to the conclusion the whole problem was I tried to go straight into Grand Theft Auto San Andreas, never played, had never played a video game in my life so it was back to Pong and he took me, fortunately he's a real scholar of video games, he not only saved all the games and all the platforms so he could actually take me

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Back to 1980 and slowly work me through, find a game that was simple enough for me to work, and then it was so, we got to the one, it was some kind of California surfing game, and then another student of mine comes in, and you know, I'm struggling with this, oh that game, let me add, oh I haven't played that for 10 years, and they say, let me see if I remember the code you punch in to get 50% more speed and strength,

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I'm sure enough he punches in ten numbers and he's going, zipping right past me on the waves and I say, you know, I've lost it, I mean, I just, but, you know, this is what critics can't do, they cannot cede life to the next generation, they can't admit that the new medium is for the new generation, and I'm just, you know, and I, you know, I looked at, it was interesting to look at a grand theft auto in San Andres,

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I mean, it seemed to confirm all the terrible stereotypes I've been hearing about, incredibly violent,

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the main aim of the game seems to be to steal cars from people who are in them,

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and you go to a brothel to recharge your energy.

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And yet, I realized this was a perfectly decent kid playing the game, and that there was nothing wrong with him.

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and he had just gotten something called God of War

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that I really got impressed with all the mythology of it

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see it could appeal to the old-fashioned literary critic

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but anyway, the offshoot of this is

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I honestly myself can't get into video games

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but I know enough of cultural history to see this is where things are going

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And now another interesting aspect of it, the question of the history of media.

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I look at video games and I'm a trained literary critic.

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My initial reaction was, where's the story? Where's the narrative?

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And in fact, again, the student of mine showed me the different...

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I understand there are different genres of video games, and some are shoot-em-up games, some are puzzle games, some are role-playing games, some have more stories than others, but, you know, my initial reaction was to apply to it standards that I derived from, you know, Shakespeare and my study of literary narrative, and some of the games actually are interesting in that respect.

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On the other hand, I quickly figured out it's not fair to judge this new medium by my old standards of another medium.

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And in fact, you have to look for what's new in this medium.

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And obviously, what's so promising and novel in video games is the interactivity and the possibility of branching narratives.

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and in some ways you have to overcome your old standards derived from literature or film

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to realize what the new potential in video games are and it's obviously clear that it's

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responding to a need from an audience not to have the story perfectly shaped for them

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beforehand.

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You know, there's a lot to be said for the literary talent of people like Shakespeare

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The Theory of Money and Credit

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But what I can recognize is that you shouldn't ask a new medium simply to do what the old medium did because, in fact, it's likely to do things, the things that the old medium did, it's likely to do poorly, or at least not as well, but what you should look for is what it can do that the old medium can't do.

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I mention this, for example, that when motion pictures came along, well, particularly when

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sound motion pictures came along, and they started filming stage plays, essentially,

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you know, it looked bad at first.

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The earliest film stage plays were inferior to the most highly developed live broadway

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performances.

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It's always true that an old medium, people have been working with it for years, they've

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extracted the last ounce of potential out of it, they've learned to perfect it, they've

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learned to use it to its best.

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And new media often stumble when they try to simply repeat what the old media did.

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So it took a while with the advent of sound for motion pictures to move away from simply

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and also film stage productions and exploit things that film could do that live stage performances couldn't.

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And in fact, in balance, the motion picture has blown away the live stage performance until starting, I guess, in the 70s and 80s,

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technology reached the point where stage performances started to replicate cinematic effects,

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These things like Les Mis and so on, where you start to, you know, there's so many stage plays now, you know, Lion King or something, that imitate something that's cinematic.

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So I'm convinced that there must be potentials in the video game that I'm not aware of, that somebody's in the process of exploiting.

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If you're interested, the one scholar I found on the subject of video games, I'm sure there are many, but he's a man named Henry Jenkins, who's a professor at MIT.

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I think he's the Sega professor of interactive, no, but he's really a wonderful man.

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He came to Virginia to lecture a few years ago, and he really opened my eyes up.

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I mean he really knows video games, he works with video game manufacturers and I

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could see that there was a whole new area of scholarship here. I mean for

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example some of his interesting observations, here's one of them, that

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video games mark an enormous cultural shift because they involved a shift in

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and the Cultural Axis from the Atlantic Rim to the Pacific Rim.

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That is, for centuries, we've had an Atlantic Rim culture,

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originated in Europe, migrated to the United States and the rest of the New World,

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and cultural products have increasingly been hybrids of their European origins

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and their North and South American developments.

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With video games, the frontier is the fusion of the United States and Japan, and Japan in many ways has taken the lead, and he argues that we're seeing a Pacific Rim culture emerge, and it's going to have whole new forms of cultural hybridization.

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That's a really interesting observation and shows the kind of rethinking we're probably going to need to do about 21st century culture if the video game really does, as I think, emerge as the central art form of the 21st century.

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and it really is, it really takes breaking out of some long habits of thinking to do that

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and above all it does take overcoming a hostility to commercial art.

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I was very interested to see, you know, I was the oldest person in the audience at this lecture

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except for two people who'd wandered in thinking it was about something else I think.

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I'm older than Jenkins and the audience was all students and in the question period they started attacking Jenkins and attacking the corporate sellout of video games and that he was a tool of it because he was working with certain video game corporations and they were telling the story, oh, when video games started they were cutting edge and rebellious and outsider art

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and now the corporations are buying up the video game and they're going to ruin the creativity.

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Suddenly I thought, you know, the whole argument being reprised here, that video games were once

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this outsider art, but now that corporate America or corporate Japan and the multinational corporations

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have embraced them, they're ruining them. And Jenkins was great in that he said,

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It takes millions of dollars to develop a video game. Corporations are necessary to raise this kind of capital.

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You're dealing with software issues here, hardware issues. This is not something that can be done on a shoestring budget.

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And if corporations are not involved, there's going to be no development of the video game industry as an art form whatsoever.

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And believe me, he's not a member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.

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As far as I could tell, in his political opinions, he was a fairly typical academic, and you know what that means.

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But the fact that he worked in this area that necessarily involved him in commercial art, I think it taught him some lessons, and I really admire him for that.

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He's also, I think I mentioned him already, is one of the pioneers in looking at the active consumer in television.

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in Television. He's one of the people who wrote these books on fans and poaching and wrote a book about the Star Trek fans and so on.

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And I've actually been very encouraged by what I see in contemporary cultural studies that it is moving away from its Marxist paradigms and beginning inadvertently to embrace market paradigms and appreciate what markets do.

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So, again, what I can see is that the very reason why I can't tell you why, in fact,

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video games will truly become artistic is symptomatic of the fact that professors just,

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they barely can keep current with the last generation's achievement.

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I have to just leap over everything I feel in my gut because I really don't like video

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games.

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to just overcome that and say, I may not like it, but a lot of kids do. And younger does.

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And so I have to step back and kind of cancel out my own feelings and try to be objective

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about the situation and ask myself, if I was betting money on the next generation of artistic

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achievement, it's going to be in this field of video games and some meshing of video games

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with the Internet, with movies, I mean, about a third of the movies produced now are just

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video games. They're either video games made into movies, movies that are about to be made

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into video games. I mean, there's some kind of interesting conversion taking place between

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video games and the movie industry. You know, if you're going to be a cultural critic, you

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got to, you really have to be prepared for the world to change. And it's changing faster

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and I just, I sense my colleagues are just unwilling to really extrapolate from the past

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to see how things are going to change.

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I mean, the history of art is, of culture, is a history of media change and that's very

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complex.

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You see it to go back into antiquity here.

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I believe that Aristotle was the first media theorist, that his poetics really is a theory

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of media.

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And you see that at the very beginning when he's classifying forms of art, he really speaks

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in media terms because he's talking about means of representation.

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So that for example, among other ways he does distinguish things in terms of subject matter,

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He also distinguishes things in terms of the means of representation, and I mean in a way it's so simplistic, but I mean he's the first person making these distinctions, but he does say at the beginning of poetics, you know, there's two ways of telling a story.

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Somebody can get up and just tell you the whole story, and whoever the characters are, he'll speak in their voice, and that's Homer and that's the epic.

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But there's this other thing, that's drama, where they act the thing out for you.

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And they don't speak in other people's words, they have different people and they each speak

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in the voice of the character, and that's acting, that's drama.

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And that was exciting to him.

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And drama was still the hot new medium in his day.

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And insofar as I reconstruct the story he's telling in the poetics and the little history

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The History of Tragedy tells, it's really quite interesting what he's saying.

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He begins with Homer and epic poetry, and he sees that as the oldest form of what we

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call literature, you know, the source of the great myths, and Homer tells these stories

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of the great heroes, and then he talks about how these, you know, what we call theatrical

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and he actually seems to see that as a kind of falling off, because Homer's telling these great stories about the heroes, Aristotle points out that the original dramatic representations were things like lampoons, making fun of people, and there's really no suggestion there that drama in its origins is an elevated form.

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And as I see Aristotle telling the story, he gives the credit to Aeschylus, that Aeschylus

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was the man who came along and saw this new mode of representation and said, hey, I can

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tell the old Homeric stories in this new cool medium, the drama.

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And that's very interesting if that is the story Aristotle's telling.

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This is very controversial.

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I've written on this and many people reject my view of it.

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But the way I see it, Aristotle thinks Homer had developed the epic as far as it could

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be and found this way to represent these great noble stories of the Greek heroes and gods.

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Then this new medium comes along not for that purpose, just to entertain people in kind of

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low ways.

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It's kind of funny when I always get in trouble when I say, well, you know, in Aristotle's

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If you tragedy had really low origins, and people get really, you know, tragedy?

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The sublime art had low origins in popular culture?

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Well, the word tragedy means goat song in Greek.

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And if I told you goat songs had a kind of low popular origin,

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maybe you could understand it more.

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We don't quite know why they were called goat songs.

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One theoryivid is that in the initial competitions,

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In dramatic competitions the first prize was a goat, another theory is that the chorus took

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the form of satyrs, half man, half goat, and so on.

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But my theory is that goat song was a pretty popular form when it started, and pretty vulgar,

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and people were probably complaining, you know, they've given up hearing these wonderful

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old Homeric recitations to go to these cheap dramatic representations of low subjects,

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But then this guy, Aeschylus, comes along, and he sees how popular this new medium of representation is, and he has the idea, I can elevate it, I can tell the old Homeric stories, but in this new, really popular form of dramatic representation.

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And you know, people are running around, you know, we don't have to go and listen to one guy just tell the story to us anymore.

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They do something like called acting now. They act the thing out and it's really cool. You've got to see it.

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It's so much more dramatic when they do it that way.

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And I think, I mean, if I'm reading Aristotle correctly here, that's a kind of, that's an example of how media change occurs.

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Again, that the new medium comes along and it's popular not for its content at first, but just for its very quality as a new medium.

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People are just interested in seeing a new way, we would say, of staging things.

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And so they flock to it and then it takes somebody like Escalus to see you can really do something with this medium.

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just as the serial mode of publication developed before Dickens

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and it was basically a way of commercializing literature

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and it took Dickens to come along and see what the artistic possibilities of the new medium are

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so that's why again when I say video games may look like they have low origins in a certain sense

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They do, but I'm convinced that if not already, soon, people with artistic sensibilities will be drawn to this medium.

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And again, if you start looking at Japanese video games and the anime culture that goes along with it, and the manga culture,

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there's something extraordinarily artistic going on there.

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And what's really fascinating is it is very Japanese in sensibility and it's being meshed with all this technology.

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I'm sure a new art form is evolving. I just don't know what it is.

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And what I keep trying to do is ask myself what happened in the past, how people reacted in the past,

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and use that to judge how they're reacting in the present.

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The reaction to new media is uncannily uniform throughout cultural history.

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I mentioned this before, but I'll stress it again and sketch it out.

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Every new media that comes along, it's the same reaction.

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It contains too much sex and violence, people confuse illusion with reality, and they get addicted to it.

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You can go back to Plato's Republic, that is what he says about Greek tragedy, you know, and by the way he's right, but you know, this medium that represents the absolute peak now of high culture to us, Greek tragedy, Plato complains about how much sex and violence is, he says it teaches you to weep, it makes you weaker by going and weeping at all this stuff, he talks about

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Aristotle comes along with the Catharsis Theory to answer Plato. Plato's complaint about Greek tragedy is that it arouses the emotions, makes people angrier, makes people more lustful, and so on.

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The main complaint about Greek tragedy is that it arouses the emotions, makes people angrier, makes people more lustful, and so on.

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And Aristotle says, no, it doesn't arouse the passions, or rather, it arouses the passions only to purge them.

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And that purgation or catharsis theory in Aristotle's poetics is a direct response to Plato.

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And, you know, I could go through every medium, you know, Shakespeare's theater, too much sex and violence, people confuse illusion with reality.

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Instead of working hard, the apprentices go and see the play and get addicted to that.

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We talked about exactly the critique of the Victorian novel.

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Too much sex and violence, people confuse it with reality.

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Instead of working at the factories, they go to reading these books.

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And, you know, write down motion picture, television, comic books.

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I grew up reading comic books, there was a whole phase of this, the federal government had to hold hearings on comic books because they were destroying our youth.

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I grew up reading comic books, look at me today!

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The Senate should have acted.

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But now, video games, the exact same arguments.

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And it's interesting, Jenkins, who has had to testify in Congress, on behalf of video games, that they're not sexist, that they're not encouraging violence, and so on, and he offers Aristotle's catharsis theory, that you know what, when those kids shoot people with their video games, they don't then go out in the street and shoot real bullets at real people

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They're kind of getting it out of their system, and it's just astounding to watch this pattern, as if nobody ever learns.

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But what's interesting to me, you see, it's the question, sort of the hotness of the new medium.

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Again, I could not believe when I went back and studied contemporary reactions to the novel in the 19th century,

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How violently people were reacting to the novel and condemning it.

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We've got to stop our children from reading novels.

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It's ruining our children to read novels.

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You know, just like they say now it's rude.

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You know, now we would kill to have our kids read novels instead of playing video games.

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But, you know, time marches on and novels are boring.

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They teach them in school and your parents want you to read them.

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I want you to read them, and so there is, I mean, I see a kind of law of media here, a kind of march from medium to medium, and a medium begins by being hot.

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It's the latest thing. It has a sheer novelty as a medium. That's why it's often commercially successful.

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And so all the culture wardens condemn it, and they condemn it precisely because it's got vitality.

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And, you know, now we place Greek tragedy on a pedestal, and we try to encourage people to read it, and they should read it.

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It's great literature, but it's not water-cooler literature.

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This great phrase now from TV that you're always looking for the water-cooler breakout hit.

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The show that people will be talking about around the water-cooler the next day.

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And that was the thing, you know, ABC was so thrilled when it finally got two water-cooler hits

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with Lost and Desperate Housewives. The great quest is for the water-cooler hit.

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You know, what I'm saying is that Greek tragedy was the water-cooler hit of its day.

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That's what people were talking about, did you see Sophocles's latest play, wasn't that cool what happened with Oedipus?

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Do you really think you should kill your father and marry your mother? I don't know, it didn't seem to work out so great for Oedipus.

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People were really talking about it and so Plato condemned it.

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And, you know, Dickens was the water cooler literature of his day, movies with the water cooler are, and, you know, television is the water cooler art now, the one that really gets people talking.

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I was very amused when I was at a great books conference a couple years ago. I do have a reputation in that field and was asked to talk about Shakespeare, and there were all these people talking about Homer and Dante.

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and, you know, over dinner we were talking about the X-Files, all us great professors of high literature

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and we really are great professors of high literature, love it, and try to teach it well

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but, you know, when it came down to it, when we were on our own, what did we want to talk about?

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Oh, I hear you're writing about The Simpsons, did you see the latest episode?

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You know this, you know this is what goes on in our culture

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And it's always happened. There's a sort of migration from medium to medium and I sense that the migration is moving towards video games now.

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And I would, you know, we really have to bear this in mind in thinking about culture because ignoring the migration of the media can lead to a lot of problems

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And it's one of the sources of cultural pessimism, because the people who lament the decline of culture usually have their eye on the older media and not on the newer media.

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And they don't appreciate the fact that it's just a law of human life and culture that all media can't be at the same level of achievement at all times.

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I know, for example, in Cowan's book, Praise of Commercial Culture, which you know I've assigned a great respect for,

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in the chapter on music, which is a very fine chapter, he is very much concerned to try to convince us that music is as good now, you know,

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And now, you know, then in the 20th century, as it was in the 18th century, and, you know, we mustn't panic that, yes, they had Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven in the late 18th century, you know, we have Schockhaus and Boulez and Henzer or whatever, you know, right now, maybe they don't look as good, but really, we should learn to appreciate them, and if not them, we have hip-hop and we've got rap

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And maybe he's right, and he makes a good case. My reaction is to say, at least in classical music, is not as good in the year 2000 as it was in the year 1800.

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Unfortunately, we still have the classical music of 1800, so we're not impoverished, but in terms of the composers that were writing in 1800, I mean they just tower above the composers writing in 2000.

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On the other hand, the movie makers of 1800 really couldn't hold a candle to the movie makers of 2000.

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That was the problem. They only had candles, and they were trying to make little shades in front of the candles, and, you know, it just didn't work as motion pictures.

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It's actually very interesting. You can go back to the 18th century and see the first motion pictures.

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The French were making them. They were trying to get pictures that moved.

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The motion picture answered a cultural need, the technology that Edison developed.

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There are several points in the 18th and 19th century when people were trying to create pictures that moved.

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The Metropolitan has a good copy, and there were ones in England, they were trying to make things, you can see they were desperate to find pictures that moved, they just didn't have the technology for it.

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So yeah, we got them all beat there. They were producing better classical music, we're producing better moving pictures.

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Our television is considerably better than French television in the year 1800.

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in the year 1800. You know, we have to take pride in what we achieve that's different and not ask each age to produce just as well in every genre.

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You know, people are not writing such great epic poetry anymore, but genres do have a history.

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They're often tied to certain stages of cultural development, even to stages of economic and historical development, stages of technological development.

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They rise, they peak, they fall. Part of the problem is just the accumulation of examples of the genre.

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And contrary to common sense, often the earliest examples of the genre are the best.

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The greatest epics ever written were The Iliad and The Odyssey and, you know, topped that act, Mr. Virgil, and he tried, did pretty well, but after Virgil, what do you do?

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And so there's a reason to think that genres may exhaust themselves, they may not be infinite in their possibilities, and so it's really good in the history of culture that new media come along.

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Because it gives people new opportunities and so if I'm pretty comfortable saying that you know this is now talk like an economist the gross international product of culture in the 20th century I will set against the equivalent from any other century with the always the exception that Shakespeare's century that tops everything but the 20th century was one of the great

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years and cultural production even in things like music and painting though

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it's not as great in music as the 18th century was if I line up the pieces

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against each other I mean how are you gonna you know compare even someone like

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Shostakovich with Bach so but things balance out and again 18th century motion

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pictures were not very impressive compared to the Godfather 1 & 2 so we

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We of the 20th century should take pride in the new media we've developed, and here is one of my fundamental defenses of commercial culture, that commercial culture develops the new media, and it particularly develops new media for commercial reasons and not for artistic reasons.

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You know, I think the ancient Greek theater was a gimmick when it began.

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I don't think, if it's Thespis who invented it, that he had the Oresteia in mind.

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I think somebody came along later, Aeschylus evidently, and lifted up this new gimmick medium to a higher content.

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And again, when we can see in history this happening, that's what we observe.

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The guy who thought up serializing novels, which probably occurred sometime in the late 18th century, did not have great expectations and bleak house in mind.

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Edison did not have Citizen Kane in mind. You invent new media for, you know, basically for their novelty or their gimmick of value.

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And so it's fortunate for artists that the market keeps developing new media, because they'd be up the creek if they had to stick with the few media that developed in the ancient world.

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It's really to me the saving grace for artists that new media come along.

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And you know, when drama was getting tougher and tougher to write in the 20th century, although there have been many great 20th century dramatists,

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But when, particularly in English, people were feeling the weight of Shakespeare and how in the world am I going to write a drama better than Shakespeare's?

366
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It was very fortunate that the motion picture came along because Shakespeare had not ever made a motion picture.

367
00:47:16.540 --> 00:47:26.540
And, you know, you can see it like the two great popular genres of the 19th century really are Italian opera and the Victorian serialized novel.

368
00:47:26.540 --> 00:47:32.540
In each case, the market produces something which opens up a whole new realm to artists.

369
00:47:32.540 --> 00:47:36.540
And the great thing about artists is they really do open up the realm.

370
00:47:36.540 --> 00:47:43.540
They find potentials in the medium that no one had seen before.

371
00:47:43.540 --> 00:47:54.540
The other interesting development I find is you then can read back into earlier media some of the virtues of the new medium.

372
00:47:54.540 --> 00:48:13.540
Here's just what I mean. You know, I'm saying that when we look at a new medium, our tendency is to judge it by the standards of the old, and we often find it wanting in that respect, initially the motion picture isn't as good as the stage play, the video game isn't as good as the television show or something.

373
00:48:13.540 --> 00:48:23.540
On the other hand, we often learn from the new medium to appreciate certain virtues of old mediums that we really hadn't noticed or identified.

374
00:48:23.540 --> 00:48:30.020
Here's an example. I've mentioned Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It's a giant video game.

375
00:48:31.780 --> 00:48:40.660
Many of its virtues are the virtues of a video game, that it has all these rules, all these

376
00:48:40.660 --> 00:48:47.780
characters, it has maps, it has places. If you love that book as I do, one of the reasons you love it

377
00:48:47.780 --> 00:48:54.080
is that it has characteristics that a good video game has and I gather it

378
00:48:54.080 --> 00:48:58.380
makes a halfway decent video game but in any and and of course when you think

379
00:48:58.380 --> 00:49:03.540
about it there is a direct line from Lord of the Rings through Dungeons and

380
00:49:03.540 --> 00:49:08.500
Dragons to video games I mean there's actually a cultural connection there now

381
00:49:08.500 --> 00:49:14.500
for example Jenkins said he was working with the Royal Shakespeare Company to

382
00:49:14.500 --> 00:49:16.840
to produce a Shakespeare video game.

383
00:49:16.840 --> 00:49:21.660
Now that sounds unpromising at first.

384
00:49:21.660 --> 00:49:29.300
And you know, how many times is Hamlet going to kill Claudius?

385
00:49:29.300 --> 00:49:32.960
Undoubtedly 3,000 if it's a good video game.

386
00:49:32.960 --> 00:49:41.280
But he quickly pointed out that this wasn't designed to create narrative games, but to

387
00:49:41.280 --> 00:49:47.000
To allow you to enter into the imaginative world of one of the plays, let's say the

388
00:49:47.000 --> 00:49:48.000
Tempest.

389
00:49:48.000 --> 00:49:54.480
And now think about this, how the Tempest has the character of a video game.

390
00:49:54.480 --> 00:49:59.640
It has a topography, it has these groups of characters, you know, it has really interesting

391
00:49:59.640 --> 00:50:01.680
role-playing possibilities.

392
00:50:01.680 --> 00:50:04.600
I want to be Ariel, I want to be Caliban, and so on.

393
00:50:04.600 --> 00:50:09.000
Now, I don't know what's become of this and maybe these games are out and so on, but what

394
00:50:09.000 --> 00:50:15.280
What I'm getting at is I begin to appreciate the new virtues of a video game and can then

395
00:50:15.280 --> 00:50:20.360
read them back into older media and begin to understand that again what a video game

396
00:50:20.360 --> 00:50:27.200
has is not the narrative structure of an Oedipus Tyrannus where you're talking about.

397
00:50:27.200 --> 00:50:30.740
The great thing about this plot is the absolute necessity.

398
00:50:30.740 --> 00:50:32.920
Everything follows from everything else.

399
00:50:32.920 --> 00:50:35.800
You can't change one step.

400
00:50:35.800 --> 00:50:39.840
Video Games have this incredible inevitability which things work out.

401
00:50:39.840 --> 00:50:44.560
You know, the thing about video games is their lack of inevitability.

402
00:50:44.560 --> 00:50:46.280
That's what attracts people to it.

403
00:50:46.280 --> 00:50:51.560
The outcome is not predetermined and you have these branching possibilities and things can

404
00:50:51.560 --> 00:50:53.120
go in any direction.

405
00:50:53.120 --> 00:51:03.040
And it turns out not all literature was structured like Oedipus Tyrannus and that in fact one

406
00:51:03.040 --> 00:51:33.040
One of the virtues of the 19th century novel is that there's an element of contingency in the story and you keep thinking it's not inevitable and it could branch any way and it is funny that in the 20th century novelists start to chafe under the inevitability of plot and the unitary quality of form in the novel and you get things say like Julio Cortaza's novel Hopscotch

407
00:51:33.040 --> 00:51:38.520
which is written, there's all these chapters. They are printed in one order in the book,

408
00:51:38.520 --> 00:51:45.040
but he asks you to rearrange them as you like. And there are several experimental fictions

409
00:51:45.040 --> 00:51:54.120
like that in 20th century fiction that you can see novelists wishing they could be writing

410
00:51:54.120 --> 00:51:58.960
video games. And just as you can anticipate the motion picture in certain forms of visual

411
00:51:58.960 --> 00:52:12.960
I think you can begin to see, in some 20th century novels, novelists becoming dissatisfied with the complete closure of a volume,

412
00:52:12.960 --> 00:52:22.960
closure that the book can just tell one narrative, the Borges's idea, the Garden of Forking Paths,

413
00:52:22.960 --> 00:52:30.840
and we do start to get these books that say you know at this chapter you can

414
00:52:30.840 --> 00:52:34.440
turn into a frog or you can turn into a prince you know if you turn into a

415
00:52:34.440 --> 00:52:43.120
prince follow this line and so Shakespeare's an example well I'm

416
00:52:43.120 --> 00:52:48.960
getting at this yeah there's a kind of richness of the world that certain

417
00:52:48.960 --> 00:52:54.960
I think Tolkien is an example, Dickens would be an example, Shakespeare is an example.

418
00:52:54.960 --> 00:53:02.960
You feel that the world of their work of art is greater than the one story that's been told about it.

419
00:53:02.960 --> 00:53:09.960
One reason Tolkien seems to be so much like a video game is we have that book, Lord of the Rings,

420
00:53:09.960 --> 00:53:15.960
but there are 13 different versions of it, and he kept telling the stories, taking things in different directions.

421
00:53:15.960 --> 00:53:22.200
Direction, he couldn't stop writing appendices, writing the Silmarillion, the Lay of Beleriand,

422
00:53:22.200 --> 00:53:29.240
he created this vast world around it, it's a kind of video game like surplus, like no

423
00:53:29.240 --> 00:53:35.960
one book I write could contain all the potentiality of the literary universe I've created.

424
00:53:35.960 --> 00:53:40.280
I think that's true of Shakespeare, it's why people have, you know, what was King Lear

425
00:53:40.280 --> 00:53:42.000
like as a young man?

426
00:53:42.000 --> 00:53:47.000
What was Hamlet like at the university and people have written stories along those lines?

427
00:53:47.000 --> 00:53:51.000
What would it be like if Spock and Kirk were really lovers?

428
00:53:51.000 --> 00:53:55.000
You know, someone asked me last night what I thought was great about The Simpsons

429
00:53:55.000 --> 00:53:58.000
and one of the things I said was the richness of its world.

430
00:53:58.000 --> 00:54:07.000
There are certain works that kind of have strength and reserve, you sense about it.

431
00:54:07.000 --> 00:54:11.000
It's one reason we feel The Simpsons can go on forever.

432
00:54:11.000 --> 00:54:15.280
I would like to know about Comic Guy's childhood.

433
00:54:15.280 --> 00:54:18.720
I'm sure if the Simpsons are listening, let them write it.

434
00:54:18.720 --> 00:54:22.360
And I think that, you know, we learn more and more about Appu.

435
00:54:22.360 --> 00:54:24.680
Barney, it turns out, went to Harvard.

436
00:54:24.680 --> 00:54:30.200
You know, it's like there's endless resources as if the Simpsons was a video game.

437
00:54:30.200 --> 00:54:33.240
Now, again, I really don't...

438
00:54:33.240 --> 00:54:36.000
This is like he doth protest too much.

439
00:54:36.000 --> 00:54:39.960
I really don't know much about video games, but it did strike me

440
00:54:39.960 --> 00:54:45.160
When the student of mine was taking me on a tour of Grand Theft Auto, my reaction was,

441
00:54:45.160 --> 00:54:50.960
does this thing never end? Does it go on forever? Will I ever get out of the water?

442
00:54:50.960 --> 00:54:59.960
And, you know, I sense that's where the richness is, and it's a richness of possibility

443
00:54:59.960 --> 00:55:06.960
that what we're creating is a world that has parameters that are yet to be discovered.

444
00:55:06.960 --> 00:55:13.560
And I gather that's what people who play video games enjoy, a kind of sense of exploration

445
00:55:13.560 --> 00:55:17.080
and pushing things to the limits in this world that's created.

446
00:55:17.080 --> 00:55:23.320
And I gather that particularly these role-playing and simulation games, that the people who

447
00:55:23.320 --> 00:55:28.960
play them discover potentialities that the creators of the game didn't even realize were

448
00:55:28.960 --> 00:55:29.960
there.

449
00:55:29.960 --> 00:55:34.160
That seems very 21st century to me, and that's why I think this is somehow going to be the

450
00:55:34.160 --> 00:55:36.560
art form of the 21st century.

451
00:55:36.560 --> 00:55:42.760
And again, I feel that art was being pushed in that direction.

452
00:55:42.760 --> 00:55:48.240
It's as if 20th century art was demanding the video game.

453
00:55:48.240 --> 00:55:50.920
Our forms are too closed.

454
00:55:50.920 --> 00:55:56.400
They're not allowing us to develop the full contingency and potential of the worlds we're

455
00:55:56.400 --> 00:55:57.400
creating.

456
00:55:57.400 --> 00:56:01.120
And it seems to me that's what the video game is answering here.

457
00:56:01.120 --> 00:56:14.120
And so, it's a weird thing to say, but it, you know, from the little I know about video games, I'm noticing things about Shakespeare, Dickens, The Simpsons, Lord of the Rings.

458
00:56:14.120 --> 00:56:22.120
I'm actually sort of putting together a group of what I'm calling works that actually have the richness of a video game world to them.

459
00:56:22.120 --> 00:56:29.120
Again, Tolkien seems to be the great example of that, and I think that's why people become Tolkien nuts.

460
00:56:29.120 --> 00:56:49.120
You know, they start reading and you never see them again because they enter this world and unfortunately in many cases never come out again and it's so weird to me because can you picture J.R.R. Tolkien going down with C.S. Lewis to the corner in Oxford to play a couple of video games?

461
00:56:49.120 --> 00:56:56.120
I mean, it's just unimaginable. The connection in a way is so bizarre and yet I think it's so profound.

462
00:56:56.120 --> 00:57:25.120
So I draw quite a lesson from my video games and I hope to live to see my prophecy about it fulfilled and I just take it as an example, there's nothing that looks stupider to most high cultural critics than to say video games are the Kunstwerk der Zukunft, as well.

463
00:57:26.120 --> 00:57:56.120
And yet history tells me that it is. And so, assuming that I'm right, you know, I'll take this as my ultimate caution that we should not despise an art form because it's popular, making a lot of money, because a lot of kids seem interested in it, that's probably where the next art form is coming from because culture depends on energy.

464
00:57:56.120 --> 00:58:05.120
You know, there's a reason why each new art form embodies sex and violence.

465
00:58:05.120 --> 00:58:09.120
Those are the two fundamental impulses of the human race.

466
00:58:09.120 --> 00:58:15.120
And there where our energy comes from, you know, our anger and our sexual desire.

467
00:58:15.120 --> 00:58:22.120
If we were all head, if we were all just thinking beings, there'd be no energy.

468
00:58:22.120 --> 00:58:36.120
And so it does not surprise me that the sources of cultural vitality tend to be linked up with impulses of sex and violence.

469
00:58:36.120 --> 00:58:48.120
So we, in a way, as I've been saying, we need to respect the messiness of popular culture because culture is ultimately rooted in emotions,

470
00:58:48.120 --> 00:59:17.120
And in particular, I have been arguing against this notion of the solitary genius, and let me more or less conclude with discussing that issue, because again, I feel I was captive so long myself of that notion, it seems so intuitive to us that great unified works of art can only be produced by a single intellect, or a single culture, or a single culture.

471
00:59:17.120 --> 00:59:22.120
working on them, and I don't want to deny that they can be produced that way.

472
00:59:22.120 --> 00:59:28.120
What I'm arguing against is a single view of artistic production.

473
00:59:28.120 --> 00:59:33.120
So I'm not coming forward with a single view of artistic production that it has to be market-based,

474
00:59:33.120 --> 00:59:38.120
it has to come out of a commercial basis, it has to be collaborative and cooperative.

475
00:59:38.120 --> 00:59:41.120
All I'm saying is it can be.

476
00:59:41.120 --> 00:59:52.120
I fully acknowledge that at many points in human history a great genius has sat down at a table and written a great symphony or written a great poem.

477
00:59:52.120 --> 00:59:58.120
I actually am, however, saying that's probably happened less often than people think.

478
00:59:58.120 --> 01:00:16.120
I've been trying to call your attention. This is one of the sources of our prejudice against popular culture, that when we hear television programs are written by committee, we balk. How good can they be?

479
01:00:16.120 --> 01:00:20.120
It is interesting, though, that that is what we hear again and again.

480
01:00:20.120 --> 01:00:26.120
One of the books I put on your bibliography is by Stephen Pregay, I guess it's pronounced,

481
01:00:26.120 --> 01:00:30.120
created by Inside the Minds of TV's top show creators.

482
01:00:30.120 --> 01:00:35.120
And this is a kind of commercial item here.

483
01:00:35.120 --> 01:00:42.120
It came up with the idea of producing a book that people interested in going into television as a business

484
01:00:42.120 --> 01:00:49.280
of Business could refer to and what the editor did was just interview all sorts of top people

485
01:00:49.280 --> 01:00:54.160
in television writing and get their take on how to succeed in television.

486
01:00:54.160 --> 01:01:01.600
For example, Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, is here and Joss Whedon and some really very

487
01:01:01.600 --> 01:01:02.920
talented people.

488
01:01:02.920 --> 01:01:10.080
But one of the most common threads in the book is you've got to learn to work with other

489
01:01:10.080 --> 01:01:11.080
people.

490
01:01:11.080 --> 01:01:14.160
I myself find that a hard lesson to learn.

491
01:01:14.160 --> 01:01:16.440
I went to a very progressive elementary school.

492
01:01:16.440 --> 01:01:17.880
We didn't get grades.

493
01:01:17.880 --> 01:01:20.440
We had written report cards.

494
01:01:20.440 --> 01:01:22.720
And I was a pretty good student.

495
01:01:22.720 --> 01:01:29.480
But under works well with others, the comment was always doesn't.

496
01:01:29.480 --> 01:01:35.760
So the one negative comment my teachers had.

497
01:01:35.760 --> 01:01:38.920
But here's a couple of sample quotes.

498
01:01:38.920 --> 01:01:42.120
And it's interesting to see what these writers say.

499
01:01:42.120 --> 01:01:49.720
Here's one who says about who was his great mentor and it was a guy named Gil Grant.

500
01:01:49.720 --> 01:01:56.120
He always told me that 75% of being a staff writer is getting along with the other writers.

501
01:01:56.120 --> 01:02:00.820
That's not always easy because there are a lot of personalities and egos in a writer's room.

502
01:02:00.820 --> 01:02:04.020
Everybody thinks that their idea is the best idea.

503
01:02:04.020 --> 01:02:10.020
It taught me a lot about writing and rewriting, and about how to make a story better.

504
01:02:10.020 --> 01:02:17.020
You know, again, the great romantic myth was that first conception is purest and best.

505
01:02:17.020 --> 01:02:23.020
Percy Shelley, when composition begins, inspiration is already on decline.

506
01:02:23.020 --> 01:02:27.020
Shelley is claiming, you know, don't trust your second thoughts.

507
01:02:27.020 --> 01:02:31.020
Just put it on paper. That will be the best thing you can write.

508
01:02:31.020 --> 01:02:36.500
And maybe that was true for Shelley, although his manuscripts don't bear that out, because

509
01:02:36.500 --> 01:02:38.460
there's a lot of rewriting in them.

510
01:02:38.460 --> 01:02:44.060
But here's a professional writer telling us, you've got to learn how to rewrite and to

511
01:02:44.060 --> 01:02:48.300
work with your fellow writers.

512
01:02:48.300 --> 01:02:58.260
Here's another example, someone who worked on L Word, and she says, I'm working with

513
01:02:58.260 --> 01:03:07.260
I actually love rewriting and I love getting notes basically because I'm working with very smart people on the L-word.

514
01:03:07.260 --> 01:03:11.260
The scripts on the show have evolved a lot during the rewriting process.

515
01:03:11.260 --> 01:03:19.260
This is primarily because of the feedback that I've gotten from my writing colleagues here and from the executives working at Showtime.

516
01:03:19.260 --> 01:03:27.260
The feedback that I've gotten from my writing colleagues here and from the executives working at Showtime has always been valuable.

517
01:03:27.260 --> 01:03:30.720
Now, again, there's the auteur theory shot down.

518
01:03:30.720 --> 01:03:34.700
The feedback I got from executives has been valuable.

519
01:03:34.700 --> 01:03:39.700
Rewriting is very, very important and something I strongly believe in.

520
01:03:39.700 --> 01:03:45.800
And then just a few more when they ask, what do show creators look for in a writer?

521
01:03:45.800 --> 01:03:50.020
And this is really interesting what they say.

522
01:03:50.020 --> 01:03:54.140
Tracy and I both agree that what we look for first is a good spec script.

523
01:03:54.140 --> 01:03:59.300
When we look for someone who's nice and is going to be easy to be around, you work long

524
01:03:59.300 --> 01:04:03.860
hours in this business, you're going to be around these people anywhere from 8 to 12

525
01:04:03.860 --> 01:04:06.820
hours a day, 5 days a week.

526
01:04:06.820 --> 01:04:17.100
So I mean, again, it's a very, very cooperative medium here.

527
01:04:17.100 --> 01:04:21.780
The first, here's another person, the first ingredient is that the writer must be a good

528
01:04:21.780 --> 01:04:27.940
and easy to get along with that's pretty basic but extremely important television

529
01:04:27.940 --> 01:04:32.020
writing is such a collaborative effort that ultimately you are hiring someone

530
01:04:32.020 --> 01:04:37.340
you will be spending six days a week with now 12 hours a day in a working room

531
01:04:37.340 --> 01:04:42.780
writing together and then finally Larry David the greatest writing genius and

532
01:04:42.780 --> 01:04:48.180
comedy of our generation Seinfeld now curb your enthusiasm and here's his

533
01:04:48.180 --> 01:04:57.180
When Seinfeld was on, new writers got hired by submitting ideas or premises for shows. That was it. No specs.

534
01:04:57.180 --> 01:05:05.180
And of course, good hygiene was of paramount importance. Leave it to Larry to go straight to the heart of things.

535
01:05:05.180 --> 01:05:11.180
But it's still the basic point. You're going to have to be in a room with these other writers. Good hygiene is very important.

536
01:05:11.180 --> 01:05:20.140
and you know this is when you think about it it's not on the face of it such a

537
01:05:20.140 --> 01:05:28.460
weird idea that writing can be improved by cooperation by feedback this is where

538
01:05:28.460 --> 01:05:33.140
I think Austrian economics can really help us in rethinking cultural matters

539
01:05:33.140 --> 01:05:39.020
and I'll come back to this point that it's Austrian economics that thinks of

540
01:05:39.020 --> 01:05:45.220
of the market as a cooperative, collaborative institution.

541
01:05:45.220 --> 01:05:54.120
It's Marxist economics that, as I've said before, thinks of the market as just a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog situation

542
01:05:54.120 --> 01:05:58.520
where people are exploiting each other, where things do not occur to mutual profit.

543
01:05:58.520 --> 01:06:08.320
If we are true to Austrian economics, we will see that collaboration is at least a potential model for culture.

544
01:06:08.320 --> 01:06:27.320
That's why, what I've been saying all week is that I'm offering the Austrian idea as spontaneous order as a cultural model and that it's a very powerful one for rethinking how cultural production takes place.

545
01:06:27.320 --> 01:06:40.420
and I can put it on two levels, the level of the creation of the individual work and more broadly, the general creation of culture in a society.

546
01:06:40.420 --> 01:06:53.960
That is, that when you look at individual writers and their individual creators and ultimately creation does come down to an individual.

547
01:06:53.960 --> 01:06:59.160
And here's where Austrian economics differs from Marxism.

548
01:06:59.160 --> 01:07:02.960
In Marxism, the individual gets almost erased.

549
01:07:02.960 --> 01:07:06.120
He becomes a representative of a class,

550
01:07:06.120 --> 01:07:08.600
a representative of a historical moment.

551
01:07:08.600 --> 01:07:11.480
That to me is one of the faults of Marxist criticism,

552
01:07:11.480 --> 01:07:14.520
that the individuality of authors is lost.

553
01:07:14.520 --> 01:07:16.000
They're seen as part of a system,

554
01:07:16.000 --> 01:07:18.360
and it's precisely because Marxism

555
01:07:18.360 --> 01:07:22.840
conceives of an economic system as some kind of prison,

556
01:07:22.840 --> 01:07:28.120
that it portrays the individual as overpowered by the system and lost in it.

557
01:07:28.120 --> 01:07:34.080
I mean, Austrian economics teaches us that we're all individuals and we are creative,

558
01:07:34.080 --> 01:07:41.560
but it also sees how we can enter into creative relations with other individuals, learn from

559
01:07:41.560 --> 01:07:49.400
them, cooperate with them, and that's where it offers this alternative model of culture.

560
01:07:49.400 --> 01:08:03.400
And what we see is this idea that, yes, the writer is creating as an individual, the ideas are coming out of his or her head, but they interact with the ideas of other people, they're modified, they're refined.

561
01:08:03.400 --> 01:08:14.400
The key thing to me that Austrianism shows us is that things get organized over time. They don't get organized instantaneously.

562
01:08:14.400 --> 01:08:26.400
That's the Marxist vision of central planning, that a single intellect can see the whole and see the whole of the whole and organize it perfectly.

563
01:08:26.400 --> 01:08:31.400
That's the dream of central planning. We know that that doesn't work in economics.

564
01:08:31.400 --> 01:08:41.400
It actually works better in culture. There can be moments of more or less perfect instantaneous central planning in culture.

565
01:08:41.400 --> 01:08:47.400
We have examples, you know, Mozart suddenly thinking up the whole symphonic movement.

566
01:08:47.400 --> 01:08:51.160
And it's remarkable, it does seem maybe to happen in a moment.

567
01:08:51.160 --> 01:08:56.360
Or a poet who will just get an inspiration and sit down and it's like the whole poem's

568
01:08:56.360 --> 01:09:01.340
in his head and he just has to get it on the paper and there it is, a perfect poem.

569
01:09:01.340 --> 01:09:05.840
And that's sort of the myth that poets create.

570
01:09:05.840 --> 01:09:12.280
It does happen much more seldom than poets would like us to think.

571
01:09:12.280 --> 01:09:16.680
Coleridge's Kubla Khan is a great example of that where he talks about having this vision

572
01:09:16.680 --> 01:09:20.880
of this perfect poem and he was sitting down to write it down when unfortunately someone

573
01:09:20.880 --> 01:09:25.680
knocked at the door and distracted him and we never got the rest of the poem.

574
01:09:25.680 --> 01:09:27.760
I suspect that's a bit of a myth.

575
01:09:27.760 --> 01:09:32.500
But in any case I admit that in cultural production in certain forms, especially if you're talking

576
01:09:32.500 --> 01:09:38.500
I'm not talking about something like a 20-line poem or a short musical movement, that's possible.

577
01:09:38.500 --> 01:09:50.500
But generally speaking, cultures like other market products, things don't happen all at once and completely generated out of a single mind.

578
01:09:50.500 --> 01:09:58.500
The market really is a good model for what happens in culture, that people have first ideas,

579
01:09:58.500 --> 01:10:11.500
They put them on paper, put them in musical form, they have other people react to them, they themselves have second thoughts, they revise, they see what works, they see what doesn't work.

580
01:10:11.500 --> 01:10:20.500
This is very much the pattern in movies and television, and what I'm saying is actually the pattern in a good deal of literature, serialized novel, Shakespeare's theater, and so on.

581
01:10:20.500 --> 01:10:35.500
and it shouldn't look bad to us. It shouldn't be a problem with a work of art that someone had second thoughts or that someone took advice about it or someone corrected or revised it.

582
01:10:35.500 --> 01:10:46.500
I mean, all of us should have this experience in our lives at some point of getting advice that was right and being told to change something and it got better and so on.

583
01:10:46.500 --> 01:10:51.180
and it's certainly the way markets function you know a businessman who

584
01:10:51.180 --> 01:10:56.300
wanted to be an artiste who wanted to follow the romantic model and I'm going

585
01:10:56.300 --> 01:11:00.860
to create the perfect car and I'm not going to pay any attention to what people

586
01:11:00.860 --> 01:11:08.200
want out of a car this is like I guess Tucker as Coppola's portrayed it you know

587
01:11:08.200 --> 01:11:12.300
I'm going to create the... actually this happens with Homer in one episode of The

588
01:11:12.300 --> 01:11:19.300
You know, I'm not going to pay attention to gas mileage or comfort or whether it has headlights or not.

589
01:11:19.300 --> 01:11:25.300
You know, I'm going to just create my perfect vision of the car and you can't tell me that maybe it should have wheels

590
01:11:25.300 --> 01:11:31.300
or you can't tell me that getting one mile per gallon is a bit of a drawback in the market today.

591
01:11:31.300 --> 01:11:37.300
You know, we would laugh at that, but there are artists who behave that way.

592
01:11:37.300 --> 01:12:07.300
not very long I might add but what I'm saying is the same thing that you would say to that that ill-advised automotive entrepreneur you need to say say to artists and it's not a problem if an artist suddenly says I'm going to take my audience in view I'm going to take into consideration what might please someone it's so interesting to me that for

593
01:12:07.300 --> 01:12:15.300
You know, for centuries, the motto of literature was Horace's, to instruct and please.

594
01:12:15.300 --> 01:12:20.300
That was the function of poetry, to instruct and please.

595
01:12:20.300 --> 01:12:24.300
You know, that is anathema now to modern writers.

596
01:12:24.300 --> 01:12:33.300
You know, what Horace's motto meant for poets was that poetry is a kind of social contract.

597
01:12:33.300 --> 01:12:50.300
Going back to my caveman example here, that the artist is going to get his living from society and return to that for that, he agrees to give something from society to society in return.

598
01:12:50.300 --> 01:12:59.300
And Harris really put his finger on it when he said to instruct and please. Not to protect and serve as in Los Angeles, but to instruct and please.

599
01:12:59.300 --> 01:13:03.300
to teach people something and also let them have a good time with it.

600
01:13:03.300 --> 01:13:06.300
That's a pretty good formula for what art should do.

601
01:13:06.300 --> 01:13:13.300
And if it sounds a little philistine to you, a little crass and maybe even commercial,

602
01:13:13.300 --> 01:13:21.300
I just remind you that the vast majority of great poetry up through 1800 was written with those goals in mind

603
01:13:21.300 --> 01:13:25.300
and with the understanding that art is a social contract.

604
01:13:25.300 --> 01:13:38.300
in Ben Johnson's play Bartholomew Fair, he actually produces the contract, it's really hilarious, the character comes out at the beginning of the play and addresses the audience and gives him a legal contract

605
01:13:38.300 --> 01:13:54.300
where he says, you know, you guys pay this much money, and in fact he says, you know, as many seats as you buy, that's as many rights to applause you have, you know, you pay the money, you keep quiet, you sit still, I promise you

606
01:13:54.300 --> 01:13:57.300
I won't have these things in the play.

607
01:13:57.300 --> 01:14:00.300
It's funny because he takes a dig at Shakespeare.

608
01:14:00.300 --> 01:14:05.300
He says, I won't have some dumb tempest in the play, and it won't be bad like Titus Andronicus.

609
01:14:05.300 --> 01:14:07.300
But it'll be enjoyable.

610
01:14:07.300 --> 01:14:09.300
You'll have a puppet show at the end.

611
01:14:09.300 --> 01:14:13.300
And by God, there is a puppet show at the end of the play, and so on.

612
01:14:13.300 --> 01:14:19.300
And it's this marvelous moment where Ben Johnson, who himself had such contempt for the commercial theater,

613
01:14:19.300 --> 01:14:23.300
he really, he longed to be able to write for the court and have the prestige of it.

614
01:14:23.300 --> 01:14:53.300
But for one moment he just says, okay, this is contractual, quid pro quo, you give me your money, you give me your applause, you sit still, you be decent, and I will give you a play that you'll enjoy, and the result is his greatest play, Bartholomew Fair, which is absolutely hilarious and brilliant, it's also actually the first defense of a free market that I've ever been able to find in literature, it's a great celebration of the whole commercial world of the theater.

615
01:14:53.300 --> 01:15:03.300
You know, a lot of great art was based on that. When Shakespeare called a play as you like it, or subtitled Twelfth Night What You Will, he recognized this.

616
01:15:03.300 --> 01:15:10.300
Just think of the epilogues in Shakespeare's plays. They're much like Johnson's. Someone comes out on the stage and says,

617
01:15:10.300 --> 01:15:17.300
Thanks for your goodwill. Could you please applaud and send this off nicely? You know, we hope we pleased you.

618
01:15:17.300 --> 01:15:20.300
That's a conventional gesture, and Shakespeare knows what he's doing.

619
01:15:20.300 --> 01:15:25.660
but still it reflects the fact that he accepted a kind of social contract with his audience

620
01:15:25.660 --> 01:15:29.460
and what I'm saying is that that wasn't so bad.

621
01:15:29.460 --> 01:15:37.420
A lot of great art was produced that way and I can see why artists began rejecting that

622
01:15:37.420 --> 01:15:42.900
in the Romantic period in reaction to the development of the mass market which in some

623
01:15:42.900 --> 01:15:49.220
ways did require lowering of taste or at least a modification of taste which some of them

624
01:15:49.220 --> 01:16:04.220
and you can admire people like Blake for their integrity, they produce great, really it's starting with the romantics that you start to get elitist poetry and elitist art in general and I'm not totally rejecting that.

625
01:16:04.220 --> 01:16:16.220
The nice thing of course is that markets allow for niche markets and so that work is actually found as a reception as well and artists have been able to pursue these elitist paths.

626
01:16:16.220 --> 01:16:22.900
is past, but to reject completely the ancient and longstanding social contract of art, that's

627
01:16:22.900 --> 01:16:29.200
what I'm questioning, and ask us to rethink what really made artists like Shakespeare or

628
01:16:29.200 --> 01:16:35.860
Mozart or Dickens Gray. It wasn't turning their back on an audience, and if that world

629
01:16:35.860 --> 01:16:40.720
of cultural production looks chaotic and rough and tumble, we're in a position as Austrian

630
01:16:40.720 --> 01:17:00.720
All human activity is chaotic and rough and tumble. It's the effort to introduce order into it, to plan it ahead and to control it all the way, and to think that any one person is in a position to control it.

631
01:17:00.720 --> 01:17:07.720
That, we know, is the fallacy of socialism, and it's the problem with most government support of the art.

632
01:17:07.720 --> 01:17:26.720
of the Art. So I'll read a passage from that FM Shara book on 18th century music that's very good and I've drawn upon, but it was really sad for me to get to the end of that book where he was talking about the fact that classical music is not doing well in 20th century America.

633
01:17:26.720 --> 01:17:39.720
Now he doesn't even begin to mention the fact that the real reason is labor union, that orchestras and music production in general is the most heavily unionized section of the economy.

634
01:17:39.720 --> 01:17:55.720
It's positively medieval in its guild-like quality and the closed shops and the demands and the regulations for overtime and just the so-called safety regulations have stifled the production of classical music.

635
01:17:55.720 --> 01:18:01.220
That's why no U.S. orchestra has had a recording contract for generations.

636
01:18:01.220 --> 01:18:09.220
It's why classical orchestras must be recorded now in Eastern Europe where they're free from the tyranny of labor unions.

637
01:18:09.220 --> 01:18:15.720
I keep thinking of, you know, Michelangelo, if he had been part of the labor union, the guild of his day, and,

638
01:18:15.720 --> 01:18:20.720
okay, that's enough. You've exceeded the number of hours. You can be on the ceiling.

639
01:18:20.720 --> 01:18:27.720
You've got to come down and we'll put someone else in your place to finish doing the painting, and so on.

640
01:18:27.720 --> 01:18:35.720
But this is what Scherrer, he doesn't say break the labor unions to save classical music.

641
01:18:35.720 --> 01:18:41.720
What he says is the solution to this contemporary course disease problem is subsidy.

642
01:18:41.720 --> 01:18:48.720
And hence a reversion to the principal means used to support classical music during the 17th and 18th centuries.

643
01:18:48.720 --> 01:19:03.720
One source of subsidy, more generous on the European continent than in America, is government, which is the analogue of the noble courts that were the principal basis of political governance before the demise of feudalism.

644
01:19:03.720 --> 01:19:14.720
I began with this and in a way I ended it. That is a fundamental error to think that the National Endowment of the Arts is the equivalent of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

645
01:19:14.720 --> 01:19:21.720
And I'm a personal friend of Dana Joya, who's the current head of the NDA, and he actually is a poet himself and has great taste.

646
01:19:21.720 --> 01:19:32.720
We keep showing up at the same concerts, I've noticed, but still, he cannot exercise his taste in the way that Lorenzo the Magnificent did.

647
01:19:32.720 --> 01:19:40.720
And we are not, when we are talking about government bureaucrats, we are not talking about Frederick the Great.

648
01:19:40.720 --> 01:19:48.720
They don't have the taste, they don't have the power. They are in fact specifically not supposed to exercise taste.

649
01:19:48.720 --> 01:19:51.720
That's the whole point in turning to government funding.

650
01:19:51.720 --> 01:20:02.720
So the notion of government funding of the arts as an alternative to the market is whatever you say about it basically as a socialist alternative to capitalism.

651
01:20:02.720 --> 01:20:08.720
And more deeply it reflects an alternative view of cultural creation.

652
01:20:08.720 --> 01:20:24.720
I'm saying that culture grows out of chaos, that it grows out of competition, that it's unpredictable, that it really is a case where you cannot tell ahead of time what will succeed.

653
01:20:24.720 --> 01:20:32.720
You cannot pick the winners in the cultural contest. That's why the Greeks held the contest.

654
01:20:32.720 --> 01:20:41.720
That's why, you know, Sophocles, Oedipus, they had to actually compete and produce the plays.

655
01:20:41.720 --> 01:20:48.720
You have to, you can't tell ahead of time who will succeed, what will succeed.

656
01:20:48.720 --> 01:20:54.720
The notion behind government funding of the arts is that you can pick the winners ahead of time.

657
01:20:54.720 --> 01:21:00.720
Sometimes, I mean, like anything else, like horse races, occasionally you'll pick a few winners.

658
01:21:00.720 --> 01:21:12.720
To me, it doesn't justify the expense, but the other thing I will say is, you know, I would trust virtually anybody to pick the winners other than a government bureaucracy.

659
01:21:12.720 --> 01:21:25.720
It's like Buckley's famous line that he'd rather be governed by the first random numbers in the New York phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University.

660
01:21:25.720 --> 01:21:38.720
Well, if I had to be empirical about this and look at the record as we have it, Renaissance patrons of art have been pretty good at picking the winners.

661
01:21:38.720 --> 01:21:41.720
The market has been pretty good at picking the winners.

662
01:21:41.720 --> 01:21:53.720
Again, if you look at the list of the most popular Victorian novelists, it roughly corresponds to the list of those who are taught today and are regarded on aesthetic grounds as the most popular artists.

663
01:21:53.720 --> 01:22:01.720
And again, the most popular composers of the 18th century are by and large the ones we turn to now.

664
01:22:01.720 --> 01:22:08.720
But if you look at the winners in the government bureaucracy sweepstake, I'm much more skeptical.

665
01:22:08.720 --> 01:22:14.720
Again, precisely because these are people who enjoin not to exercise taste.

666
01:22:14.720 --> 01:22:18.720
They're presented as the very alternative to taste.

667
01:22:18.720 --> 01:22:26.720
They're supposed to operate by committees and published criteria and all these schemes of distribution

668
01:22:26.720 --> 01:22:34.720
got to be equally divided by state and of course equally divided by gender and equally divided by ethnicity.

669
01:22:34.720 --> 01:22:42.720
I'm not so sure that talent is equally divided by those categories.

670
01:22:42.720 --> 01:22:59.720
And so inevitably, by their very nature, sources of government funding operate by standard operating procedures and by categories and are more likely, I think, to miss the boat than get it or to pick losers instead of winners.

671
01:22:59.720 --> 01:23:07.720
So again, I will end as I began by saying I'm not saying that the only way to produce great culture is through markets.

672
01:23:07.720 --> 01:23:13.600
I am saying that great culture does emerge from markets, that some of the greatest examples,

673
01:23:13.600 --> 01:23:21.080
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mozart, have emerged from markets, that this is incontroversible

674
01:23:21.080 --> 01:23:26.440
proof against the arguments that commercial markets always debase culture.

675
01:23:26.440 --> 01:23:32.200
Really as I said in the beginning, I've been talking here about necessary, not sufficient

676
01:23:32.200 --> 01:23:33.200
conditions.

677
01:23:33.200 --> 01:23:42.200
I don't think there's a direct correlation between any system and necessary cultural outcome

678
01:23:42.200 --> 01:23:50.200
as I deliberately offered communist Soviet Union as an example of the worst economic system possible

679
01:23:50.200 --> 01:23:57.200
and nevertheless one which had in certain areas a real cultural flowering

680
01:23:57.200 --> 01:24:14.200
and produced the greatest 20th century composer Shostakovich and not simply as a reaction to it, but I think in some ways spurred on by the challenge presented to him by that awful Stalin's regime.

681
01:24:14.200 --> 01:24:20.200
So, you know, to me, ultimately human creativity is the greatest mystery.

682
01:24:20.200 --> 01:24:25.120
we will never be able to explain it in economic terms but we just have to do

683
01:24:25.120 --> 01:24:29.880
enough economic analysis so that we don't stand in its way and start to

684
01:24:29.880 --> 01:24:33.880
substitute for example a regime of government support for the market

685
01:24:33.880 --> 01:24:40.440
because that isn't just a waste of funds I think it actually is misleading to

686
01:24:40.440 --> 01:24:45.360
artists and encourages them to produce the worst kind of art because it

687
01:24:45.360 --> 01:24:55.360
encourages them to turn their back on the audience and to scorn any sorts of pressures to instruct and delight their audience.

688
01:24:55.360 --> 01:25:03.360
So I do, although again, for example, I'll come back to what I started with, that patronage is a pretty good way of supporting art.

689
01:25:03.360 --> 01:25:09.360
And, you know, the record of Renaissance tyrants is pretty good in the art they helped turn out.

690
01:25:09.360 --> 01:25:14.360
The record of government bureaucrats, I don't see as anything comparable.

691
01:25:14.360 --> 01:25:21.360
So if I had to say anything, individual patronage and markets seem to be the best way to support culture.

692
01:25:21.360 --> 01:25:26.360
And probably from what I can tell, bureaucratic government support is the worst.

693
01:25:26.360 --> 01:25:32.360
So on that happy note, I will end and take some questions.

694
01:25:32.360 --> 01:25:34.360
Yes?

695
01:25:34.360 --> 01:25:48.360
I think one of the things we find out about video games, rather than video games, is I believe the need of individuals to have sort of break away from the linear view of the movie, or the linear view of the novel, that at the end, it is always seen.

696
01:25:48.360 --> 01:25:56.360
And I think that video games like Phone Call, during the 90s, was a video game that basically had a 50 plus ending to it.

697
01:25:56.360 --> 01:26:25.360
You know, I actually know what that means now because of this student of mine. He explained that to me. Go ahead.

698
01:26:25.360 --> 01:26:41.360
Yeah, I'll make a very, I somehow think that video games are an inherently libertarian form and we ought to be embracing them and that they are the art form that finally fulfills the promise of freedom in art.

699
01:26:41.360 --> 01:26:53.360
That for centuries our art has reflected a regulated society where outcomes were in place and where authorities told you how things should come out.

700
01:26:53.360 --> 01:26:58.520
and you know a lot of great art was produced that way but this is why I say

701
01:26:58.520 --> 01:27:04.040
I sense a need for the video game in some 20th century fiction for example

702
01:27:04.040 --> 01:27:10.120
that that artists in the older genres are struggling with the fundamental closure

703
01:27:10.120 --> 01:27:16.460
principle of all art up to that point and that it seems to me no accident that

704
01:27:16.460 --> 01:27:21.560
in an increase well a world in which freedom has now become an ideal though

705
01:27:21.560 --> 01:27:26.560
and in which technology is pointing in the direction of freedom.

706
01:27:26.560 --> 01:27:31.560
Yeah, video games are a profoundly democratic form.

707
01:27:31.560 --> 01:27:35.560
I mean, they allow for this broad participation.

708
01:27:35.560 --> 01:27:37.560
They are great equalizers.

709
01:27:37.560 --> 01:27:42.560
They take brilliant professors and make them look like fools and their students are geniuses.

710
01:27:42.560 --> 01:27:44.560
Yeah, it's democratic.

711
01:27:44.560 --> 01:27:46.560
That's why I can't stand it.

712
01:27:46.560 --> 01:28:03.560
This is why I talked about how it's made me reread earlier art forms. I really sense that the cultural world was looking for an open-ended form, and video games are what are supplying that.

713
01:28:03.560 --> 01:28:05.560
Yes.

714
01:28:33.560 --> 01:28:45.080
I mean my reaction to video games is exactly yours and I think I'm completely wrong.

715
01:28:45.080 --> 01:28:53.520
That is I can't appreciate video games. I just I can't get into them. I don't see what the art is

716
01:28:53.520 --> 01:29:02.160
but when I look at the younger generation I refuse to say that they're bamboozled by this.

717
01:29:02.160 --> 01:29:07.160
What I see is a lot of intelligence goes into their playing.

718
01:29:07.160 --> 01:29:12.160
I'm always baffled when you get to this point and I don't see any way out of the room.

719
01:29:12.160 --> 01:29:16.160
And the student hits a few buttons and suddenly we're in another room.

720
01:29:16.160 --> 01:29:21.160
And I say, how do you do that? He said, well, if you had played the game 40 times, you'd know how to do that.

721
01:29:21.160 --> 01:29:30.160
And so, what I see is the interactivity of it that is promising.

722
01:29:30.160 --> 01:29:45.160
This is a generation that is no longer content to just sit in a movie theater and see the Godfather unfold before them, completely shaped and edited by Francis Ford Coppola.

723
01:29:45.160 --> 01:29:57.160
They want to play the game. I think it's going to influence movies, and pretty soon it's not going to be the theatrical cut and the director's cut, but Paul Cantor's cut.

724
01:29:57.160 --> 01:30:03.160
I'm going to be able to have my own cut of the movie, because a video game generation is going to demand that.

725
01:30:03.160 --> 01:30:16.160
And I don't have the sensibility for that, but I am trying to learn from the past that it is not my point or place to say no one else has that sensibility.

726
01:30:16.160 --> 01:30:20.160
Everything you say about video games, it's what I say about video games,

727
01:30:20.160 --> 01:30:22.160
The Theory of Money and Credit

728
01:30:50.160 --> 01:31:11.980
So, get out of that.

729
01:31:11.980 --> 01:31:12.980
Yes.

730
01:31:12.980 --> 01:31:14.880
Yeah, it's already, somehow, a locus of creativity.

731
01:31:14.880 --> 01:31:18.040
I can see that there's just too much energy going through it.

732
01:31:18.040 --> 01:31:24.840
And for example, I was stunned when the LA Philharmonic had a concert of all video game music.

733
01:31:24.840 --> 01:31:32.880
Now it is the LA Philharmonic, but still, that told me something, and you know what?

734
01:31:32.880 --> 01:31:38.320
The music is tonal, it has melody, it has harmony, and it actually sounds pretty good,

735
01:31:38.320 --> 01:31:40.760
and people can enjoy it.

736
01:31:40.760 --> 01:31:47.660
And I was beginning to think, maybe this is a way for composers to reconnect with an audience,

737
01:31:47.660 --> 01:31:52.540
And these composers, I gather, are earning a lot of money writing video game music.

738
01:31:52.540 --> 01:31:58.020
And so, again, in Wagnerian terms, it's gesamtkunst, it's a total art form.

739
01:31:58.020 --> 01:32:02.940
And again, I don't, I have to admit, I don't like any of the video game music I've heard.

740
01:32:02.940 --> 01:32:04.500
But I'm seeing something happening.

741
01:32:04.500 --> 01:32:11.540
I just have a gut reaction that if what has happened in the past and the culture has happened,

742
01:32:11.540 --> 01:32:13.780
this thing is developing in artistic ways.

743
01:32:13.780 --> 01:32:42.780
Well, tell our talent in the most recent book that there's sort of two motives that the government yard can take from the art, one is to pick the winners and create a push, the second is sort of cultural preservation, and you think that the government yard seems to be doing anything well, which tends to be more...

744
01:32:42.780 --> 01:32:48.780
successful at preserving what has already come to be recognized as great art.

745
01:32:48.780 --> 01:32:52.780
It seems like that's how the NEA has sort of recovered some of its reputation.

746
01:32:52.780 --> 01:32:59.780
It just sort of created a Shakespeare for the masses type approach as opposed to trying to take it to the next level.

747
01:32:59.780 --> 01:33:10.780
Yeah, I mean, if it's a comparison, yes, I think governments will always be better at preservation than picking the winners

748
01:33:10.780 --> 01:33:28.780
because there's more evidence and kind of, the kind of evidence that bureaucracies can absorb in order to preserve, you know, I'm against any formal government support for the arts and I think the market does a great job with preservation.

749
01:33:28.780 --> 01:33:45.780
DVDs are fascinating to me in this respect in that this is a total commercial development, again, depending upon new technologies, completely pushed by commercial motors, yet I am stunned at how scholarly DVDs are.

750
01:33:45.780 --> 01:33:53.780
They are a treasure trove for scholars. I was asked to write a piece on Casablanca. I had absolutely nothing to say. I really didn't know what to do.

751
01:33:53.780 --> 01:33:59.220
Interview, I bought the DVD, my whole paper was there. It was the archive, I actually

752
01:33:59.220 --> 01:34:06.060
used it again today, that the archival material they offered, interviews with Julius Epstein,

753
01:34:06.060 --> 01:34:14.420
the memos sent by Hal Wallis and Jack Warner. And I said to myself, why did they do that?

754
01:34:14.420 --> 01:34:19.000
Did they really think they'd increase sales by having a scholarly archive? And literally

755
01:34:19.000 --> 01:34:49.000
So you have to bring up frame by frame each letter and read it. That was ideal for a scholar, but why did they do it? I actually don't know, but it's turning out that DVDs are the finest archive ever, and I say to myself, you know, I was on the NEH and reviewed many archival projects, projects for preserving documents and all that, and you know, I have to say, the DVD industry has accomplished what the Federal Government never accomplished.

756
01:35:19.000 --> 01:35:29.000
Finally the merchants have decided that every scrap of paper Jack Warner and Hal Wallace wrote is somehow of archival value and they're going to put it on a DVD.

757
01:35:29.000 --> 01:35:37.000
I mean this is the greatest boon to scholarship in this field that ever could happen and it was not some federally funded archival project.

758
01:35:37.000 --> 01:35:45.000
It was a pure commercially driven project. I sort of, I'm amazed by it but it shows what capitalism can do.

759
01:35:45.000 --> 01:35:47.000
Yes, all the way in the back.

760
01:35:47.000 --> 01:35:55.000
Do you have any favorite authors or directors?

761
01:35:55.000 --> 01:36:03.000
Well, you know, that's a long question. I will say this play by Ben Johnson, Bartholomew Fair.

762
01:36:03.000 --> 01:36:12.000
If you want to see a play that celebrates the market economy and that presents a Hayekian view of the faults of central planning

763
01:36:12.000 --> 01:36:25.000
and presents Hayek's view of the problem of knowledge that the government can't create, assemble the information it needs to regulate a market, Ben Johnson's Bartholomew Fair.

764
01:36:25.000 --> 01:36:37.000
I will say there are very few authors that are familiar with Austrian economics, but the one is Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian novelist.

765
01:36:37.000 --> 01:36:57.000
He has read Hayek, he quotes Hayek, he ran on a Hayekian campaign for president, and I guess one of the great Hayekian novels would be Vargas Llosa's The War of the End of the World,

766
01:36:57.000 --> 01:37:09.000
which takes this liberal perspective on Latin America and in general several of his novels, his anti-Marxist novel, Real Life of Alejandro Maita.

767
01:37:09.000 --> 01:37:19.000
But Vargas Llosa is just about the only author I know of who has read Austrian economics and uses it in his fiction.

768
01:37:19.000 --> 01:37:22.000
Otherwise I have to kind of pull it out of a hat.

769
01:37:22.000 --> 01:37:31.000
I wrote that essay on Thomas Mann, for example, showing how he actually illustrated the Austrian Theory of Inflation, but that I don't think was deliberate.

770
01:37:31.000 --> 01:37:46.000
But I have to say, you're not going to find too much literature. Plug time, I mean, I do have a book coming out called Literature and Economics, OpenCourt will publish it next spring, co-edited with Stephen Cox.

771
01:37:46.000 --> 01:37:56.000
We have essays on Austrian economics and literature, one essay by Dario Fernandes Moreira, showing how Don Quixote illustrates free market principles.

772
01:37:56.000 --> 01:38:04.000
We're trying, but it's fine, there's really not that much.

773
01:38:04.000 --> 01:38:12.000
I mentioned Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, Victorian novel, that's anti-labor union, pro-industrialism.

774
01:38:12.000 --> 01:38:32.000
Harriet Marknow I mentioned, wrote illustrations of political economy, one after another Ricardian tales of economics, pro-free market, but unfortunately based in Ricardian economics, so labor theory of value and stuff like that, but those aren't very great as literature.

775
01:38:32.000 --> 01:38:38.000
But Gas Goes North and South is a very fine novel and pro-market.

776
01:38:38.000 --> 01:38:52.000
Well, I was wondering if you thought in a certain sense that the criterion collection DVDs would seem to be aimed at a niche market to provide an inspiration to that same package into a product.

777
01:39:08.000 --> 01:39:21.000
And ultimately, as it happens in markets, other people do just as good a job and sell it for a lower price within the limits of copyright law, or sometimes without.

778
01:39:21.000 --> 01:39:31.000
But again, I think, you know, I just think that DVDs are better than humanity deserves.

779
01:39:31.000 --> 01:39:41.000
Really, we never did anything to deserve such a wonderful thing, and it's only the market that gave it to us.

780
01:39:41.000 --> 01:39:44.000
So, God bless markets.

781
01:39:44.000 --> 01:40:04.000
Thank you to you and Dr. Kent for your wonderful seminar this week. It was remarkable. And speaking of archives, we've got a wonderful archive of all these lectures. They'll all be available for download. They are now.

782
01:40:04.000 --> 01:40:10.000
You can help, everybody can help out by sending me the link to your friends and your colleagues who can spread this.

783
01:40:10.000 --> 01:40:17.000
The goal is to get the information out. It's also coming out with an MP3. It'll be available shortly.

784
01:40:17.000 --> 01:40:21.000
As soon as they explain to me what that is, I'll be pleased.

785
01:40:21.000 --> 01:40:29.000
Well, let me just thank Jeff and Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute and Pat Barnett, who is so wonderful and helping set things up.

786
01:40:29.000 --> 01:40:36.000
and Chad Parrish deserves an award for unobtrusively running the video has

787
01:40:36.000 --> 01:40:41.180
anybody ever bothered you less when he was actually I mean we didn't know he

788
01:40:41.180 --> 01:40:45.920
was in the room so that that is the way to do it and I was just I was nervous

789
01:40:45.920 --> 01:40:49.460
whether this would be intrusive you did a great job and they really thank you

790
01:40:49.460 --> 01:40:54.240
and the Mises Institute and I thank you guys you're a wonderful audience it was a

791
01:40:54.240 --> 01:40:56.240
It was a delight working with you this week.