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.
I do want to begin by making a clarification that's very important.
I find that when I try to talk about connections between so-called high culture and pop culture,
that people think I'm trying to erase the distinction between them,
and by that they think I'm trying to erase the distinction between good and bad art.
And no, I'm just trying to reformulate it, and in a sense reposition it.
There's, I think we've got such a prejudice against commercial art ingrained in our culture
that for me to say Shakespeare's art was commercial, Dickens' art was commercial, a lot of people
think I'm therefore trying to denigrate it and sort of lower the level of Shakespeare
or Dickens to that of commercial art.
On the contrary, I'm trying to raise the level of commercial art, maybe not to the level
of Shakespeare, certainly to the level of Dickens, by which I mean I'm trying to say, and I tried
to show all week that in many respects some of the great art of the past grew out of commercial
circumstances and I'm thereby raising also the possibility that some of the art of the
present, which we tend to condemn as merely commercial, may achieve greatness.
I'm trying to look for good and bad art or great and ordinary art wherever I look and
and not prejudging the case by just looking at its origins and assume that if something's
commercial it can't have quality.
In fact, I'm very much a believer in taste and discrimination in culture, even though
my taste may seem indiscriminate to you, I'm really a very, very pretentious person when
it comes to artistic taste.
I'm actually impressed with the fact that the standards we could apply to the past in art often prevail in the present.
A good plot has many of the same characteristics today that it had in Aristotle's day.
I was very struck in reading in this volume created by Inside the Minds of TV's top show creators
to see that the standards that many of the writers and television evoke sound quite traditional.
I just want to read one passage from Brenda Hampton.
She's the creator of Seventh Heaven.
That doesn't sound all that high art, maybe to you, but this is when she's asked how do
you write the pilot episode of your series.
She says, when you think of a story, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Does that
sound familiar? It's Aristotle's poetics. It also has some twists and turns to it. Also
Aristotle's poetics. He called it parapetia, but Brenda Hampton can call it twists and turns.
It has some twists and turns to it, but essentially it's comprised of those three parts. Also
in writing the pilot, I wanted it to be true to the family genre, because that was what
The Network was looking to produce at that time. So her concerns are genre, beginning, middle and end, straight out of Aristotle's poetics.
I'm not saying that 7th Heaven is as good as Oedipus Tyrannus, but it does suggest there is some continuity.
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
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.
I just want to look at the result, not look at how the sausage was made, but just taste the sausage.
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,
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.
So, now, if any theory is of value, it should somehow be predictive.
And indeed, I've complained about the inability of most cultural theories to make valid predictions.
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.
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.
Now the nice thing about my saying that is I say it out of utter ignorance of video games.
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.
But I really like making it out of utter ignorance, because it basically is, it's based on a structural argument.
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.
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.
What I observe in the most fundamental sense is billions upon billions of dollars are going into video games now.
I believe the video game market is now roughly equivalent to the total motion picture market.
I'm not sure of that, but if it's not, it's close. It may have even surpassed it.
That more money is being spent on video games than on motion pictures.
That's a staggering figure, and it tells me something.
First and foremost, it tells me is that a lot of talent must be flowing towards video games.
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?
Because kids are flocking to it and they're always ahead of us in this regard.
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.
In 1906, we could barely name one that still exists, and I don't think we could name one that anyone cares about anymore.
All the motion picture then was basically a gimmick.
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.
People were so excited to see a moving picture that you could put anything on the screen.
and they got excited if you know you put a train moving on the screen or just a
person waving that was enough that was worth a nickel just to see that in other
words it's in the nature of media that people are attracted first to just the
medium and they're excited by the novelty of the medium and it's hard just
to produce the new medium I mean Edison had to invent the motion picture camera
and Projector and all that stuff. And people are just excited by the novelty of that. It
takes a while for the initial novelty to wear off and for someone now to have to put some
content in it. And you know, within 10 years of 1906, you've got D.W. Griffith and you've
got the Great Train Robbery and Birth of a Nation. And suddenly, someone takes what is
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.
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.
It does seem to me that video games are way further advanced in 2006 than motion pictures were in 1906.
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.
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.
Because maybe Shakespeare is unique and there's never been anyone to equal him in any medium.
But by the year 22,106, wow, somebody will be lecturing, maybe not here, about the great
history of the cultural development of the video game in the 21st century.
And again, for all I know, the Shakespeare, the video game is already there.
He probably has a Japanese name, by the way.
But you know, I just don't know enough to say this.
I like the fact that I don't know enough to prove this because it shows I'm making a purely
structural argument here.
I'm standing far enough back from cultural history to say if this is what happened with
with the Motion Picture and what happened with the serialized novel in Victorian England.
If this is what happened with Shakespeare's theater and so on, then I can just point to
where it's going to happen in 21st century culture.
It's just I don't know how it's going to happen because again, if I did, I'd make a billion
dollars and I'd really like to dwell upon my ignorance here because I think it teaches
and why culture critics are usually a generation, if not a century behind in what they're doing.
I can't really talk to you about video games because they're not in my blood.
And frankly, my reaction when I look at them is they're all the same.
Don't laugh at me if you play them.
But I haven't played them, so I just see this mess of all these video games
I know enough about cultural stupidity to say that video games are probably very differentiated.
I just don't know it. I don't know how to play them. I'm terrible at them. I'm frustrated
when I play them. I'm embarrassed. I'm humiliated because eight-year-old kids can play them
and I can't. And so I say it's a lousy art form. It's only my awareness of the stupidity
of Horkheimer and Adorno and other cultural critics that teaches me a lesson. Don't criticize
I said, if you can't play it.
Now, in fact, one of my students in Virginia wanted to write an MA thesis on video games.
And I said to myself, this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard.
But man, this is a great opportunity for me.
And he wrote a very interesting thesis, as it turned out.
And I learned a lot from it.
And above all, he forced me to play some video games.
And it's really interesting in a way because I had been reading about Grand Theft Auto
and how horrible this was, and yet how great it was.
So I said, we gotta do Grand Theft Auto.
We gotta do Grand, and he said, well, the new version is Grand Theft Auto,
San Andreas.
And, you know, he goes into it like he's killing a hundred people
and negotiating his way through.
I fell in the water.
And I could not, there's that water along the road.
I could not get out of the water.
My first inclination is video games suck.
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
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,
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,
I mean, it seemed to confirm all the terrible stereotypes I've been hearing about, incredibly violent,
the main aim of the game seems to be to steal cars from people who are in them,
and you go to a brothel to recharge your energy.
And yet, I realized this was a perfectly decent kid playing the game, and that there was nothing wrong with him.
and he had just gotten something called God of War
that I really got impressed with all the mythology of it
see it could appeal to the old-fashioned literary critic
but anyway, the offshoot of this is
I honestly myself can't get into video games
but I know enough of cultural history to see this is where things are going
And now another interesting aspect of it, the question of the history of media.
I look at video games and I'm a trained literary critic.
My initial reaction was, where's the story? Where's the narrative?
And in fact, again, the student of mine showed me the different...
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.
On the other hand, I quickly figured out it's not fair to judge this new medium by my old standards of another medium.
And in fact, you have to look for what's new in this medium.
And obviously, what's so promising and novel in video games is the interactivity and the possibility of branching narratives.
and in some ways you have to overcome your old standards derived from literature or film
to realize what the new potential in video games are and it's obviously clear that it's
responding to a need from an audience not to have the story perfectly shaped for them
beforehand.
You know, there's a lot to be said for the literary talent of people like Shakespeare
The Theory of Money and Credit
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.
I mention this, for example, that when motion pictures came along, well, particularly when
sound motion pictures came along, and they started filming stage plays, essentially,
you know, it looked bad at first.
The earliest film stage plays were inferior to the most highly developed live broadway
performances.
It's always true that an old medium, people have been working with it for years, they've
extracted the last ounce of potential out of it, they've learned to perfect it, they've
learned to use it to its best.
And new media often stumble when they try to simply repeat what the old media did.
So it took a while with the advent of sound for motion pictures to move away from simply
and also film stage productions and exploit things that film could do that live stage performances couldn't.
And in fact, in balance, the motion picture has blown away the live stage performance until starting, I guess, in the 70s and 80s,
technology reached the point where stage performances started to replicate cinematic effects,
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.
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.
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.
I think he's the Sega professor of interactive, no, but he's really a wonderful man.
He came to Virginia to lecture a few years ago, and he really opened my eyes up.
I mean he really knows video games, he works with video game manufacturers and I
could see that there was a whole new area of scholarship here. I mean for
example some of his interesting observations, here's one of them, that
video games mark an enormous cultural shift because they involved a shift in
and the Cultural Axis from the Atlantic Rim to the Pacific Rim.
That is, for centuries, we've had an Atlantic Rim culture,
originated in Europe, migrated to the United States and the rest of the New World,
and cultural products have increasingly been hybrids of their European origins
and their North and South American developments.
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.
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.
and it really is, it really takes breaking out of some long habits of thinking to do that
and above all it does take overcoming a hostility to commercial art.
I was very interested to see, you know, I was the oldest person in the audience at this lecture
except for two people who'd wandered in thinking it was about something else I think.
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
and now the corporations are buying up the video game and they're going to ruin the creativity.
Suddenly I thought, you know, the whole argument being reprised here, that video games were once
this outsider art, but now that corporate America or corporate Japan and the multinational corporations
have embraced them, they're ruining them. And Jenkins was great in that he said,
It takes millions of dollars to develop a video game. Corporations are necessary to raise this kind of capital.
You're dealing with software issues here, hardware issues. This is not something that can be done on a shoestring budget.
And if corporations are not involved, there's going to be no development of the video game industry as an art form whatsoever.
And believe me, he's not a member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute.
As far as I could tell, in his political opinions, he was a fairly typical academic, and you know what that means.
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.
He's also, I think I mentioned him already, is one of the pioneers in looking at the active consumer in television.
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.
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.
So, again, what I can see is that the very reason why I can't tell you why, in fact,
video games will truly become artistic is symptomatic of the fact that professors just,
they barely can keep current with the last generation's achievement.
I have to just leap over everything I feel in my gut because I really don't like video
games.
to just overcome that and say, I may not like it, but a lot of kids do. And younger does.
And so I have to step back and kind of cancel out my own feelings and try to be objective
about the situation and ask myself, if I was betting money on the next generation of artistic
achievement, it's going to be in this field of video games and some meshing of video games
with the Internet, with movies, I mean, about a third of the movies produced now are just
video games. They're either video games made into movies, movies that are about to be made
into video games. I mean, there's some kind of interesting conversion taking place between
video games and the movie industry. You know, if you're going to be a cultural critic, you
got to, you really have to be prepared for the world to change. And it's changing faster
and I just, I sense my colleagues are just unwilling to really extrapolate from the past
to see how things are going to change.
I mean, the history of art is, of culture, is a history of media change and that's very
complex.
You see it to go back into antiquity here.
I believe that Aristotle was the first media theorist, that his poetics really is a theory
of media.
And you see that at the very beginning when he's classifying forms of art, he really speaks
in media terms because he's talking about means of representation.
So that for example, among other ways he does distinguish things in terms of subject matter,
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.
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.
But there's this other thing, that's drama, where they act the thing out for you.
And they don't speak in other people's words, they have different people and they each speak
in the voice of the character, and that's acting, that's drama.
And that was exciting to him.
And drama was still the hot new medium in his day.
And insofar as I reconstruct the story he's telling in the poetics and the little history
The History of Tragedy tells, it's really quite interesting what he's saying.
He begins with Homer and epic poetry, and he sees that as the oldest form of what we
call literature, you know, the source of the great myths, and Homer tells these stories
of the great heroes, and then he talks about how these, you know, what we call theatrical
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.
And as I see Aristotle telling the story, he gives the credit to Aeschylus, that Aeschylus
was the man who came along and saw this new mode of representation and said, hey, I can
tell the old Homeric stories in this new cool medium, the drama.
And that's very interesting if that is the story Aristotle's telling.
This is very controversial.
I've written on this and many people reject my view of it.
But the way I see it, Aristotle thinks Homer had developed the epic as far as it could
be and found this way to represent these great noble stories of the Greek heroes and gods.
Then this new medium comes along not for that purpose, just to entertain people in kind of
low ways.
It's kind of funny when I always get in trouble when I say, well, you know, in Aristotle's
If you tragedy had really low origins, and people get really, you know, tragedy?
The sublime art had low origins in popular culture?
Well, the word tragedy means goat song in Greek.
And if I told you goat songs had a kind of low popular origin,
maybe you could understand it more.
We don't quite know why they were called goat songs.
One theoryivid is that in the initial competitions,
In dramatic competitions the first prize was a goat, another theory is that the chorus took
the form of satyrs, half man, half goat, and so on.
But my theory is that goat song was a pretty popular form when it started, and pretty vulgar,
and people were probably complaining, you know, they've given up hearing these wonderful
old Homeric recitations to go to these cheap dramatic representations of low subjects,
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.
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.
They do something like called acting now. They act the thing out and it's really cool. You've got to see it.
It's so much more dramatic when they do it that way.
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.
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.
People are just interested in seeing a new way, we would say, of staging things.
And so they flock to it and then it takes somebody like Escalus to see you can really do something with this medium.
just as the serial mode of publication developed before Dickens
and it was basically a way of commercializing literature
and it took Dickens to come along and see what the artistic possibilities of the new medium are
so that's why again when I say video games may look like they have low origins in a certain sense
They do, but I'm convinced that if not already, soon, people with artistic sensibilities will be drawn to this medium.
And again, if you start looking at Japanese video games and the anime culture that goes along with it, and the manga culture,
there's something extraordinarily artistic going on there.
And what's really fascinating is it is very Japanese in sensibility and it's being meshed with all this technology.
I'm sure a new art form is evolving. I just don't know what it is.
And what I keep trying to do is ask myself what happened in the past, how people reacted in the past,
and use that to judge how they're reacting in the present.
The reaction to new media is uncannily uniform throughout cultural history.
I mentioned this before, but I'll stress it again and sketch it out.
Every new media that comes along, it's the same reaction.
It contains too much sex and violence, people confuse illusion with reality, and they get addicted to it.
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
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.
The main complaint about Greek tragedy is that it arouses the emotions, makes people angrier, makes people more lustful, and so on.
And Aristotle says, no, it doesn't arouse the passions, or rather, it arouses the passions only to purge them.
And that purgation or catharsis theory in Aristotle's poetics is a direct response to Plato.
And, you know, I could go through every medium, you know, Shakespeare's theater, too much sex and violence, people confuse illusion with reality.
Instead of working hard, the apprentices go and see the play and get addicted to that.
We talked about exactly the critique of the Victorian novel.
Too much sex and violence, people confuse it with reality.
Instead of working at the factories, they go to reading these books.
And, you know, write down motion picture, television, comic books.
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.
I grew up reading comic books, look at me today!
The Senate should have acted.
But now, video games, the exact same arguments.
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
They're kind of getting it out of their system, and it's just astounding to watch this pattern, as if nobody ever learns.
But what's interesting to me, you see, it's the question, sort of the hotness of the new medium.
Again, I could not believe when I went back and studied contemporary reactions to the novel in the 19th century,
How violently people were reacting to the novel and condemning it.
We've got to stop our children from reading novels.
It's ruining our children to read novels.
You know, just like they say now it's rude.
You know, now we would kill to have our kids read novels instead of playing video games.
But, you know, time marches on and novels are boring.
They teach them in school and your parents want you to read them.
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.
It's the latest thing. It has a sheer novelty as a medium. That's why it's often commercially successful.
And so all the culture wardens condemn it, and they condemn it precisely because it's got vitality.
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.
It's great literature, but it's not water-cooler literature.
This great phrase now from TV that you're always looking for the water-cooler breakout hit.
The show that people will be talking about around the water-cooler the next day.
And that was the thing, you know, ABC was so thrilled when it finally got two water-cooler hits
with Lost and Desperate Housewives. The great quest is for the water-cooler hit.
You know, what I'm saying is that Greek tragedy was the water-cooler hit of its day.
That's what people were talking about, did you see Sophocles's latest play, wasn't that cool what happened with Oedipus?
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.
People were really talking about it and so Plato condemned it.
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.
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.
and, you know, over dinner we were talking about the X-Files, all us great professors of high literature
and we really are great professors of high literature, love it, and try to teach it well
but, you know, when it came down to it, when we were on our own, what did we want to talk about?
Oh, I hear you're writing about The Simpsons, did you see the latest episode?
You know this, you know this is what goes on in our culture
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.
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
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.
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.
I know, for example, in Cowan's book, Praise of Commercial Culture, which you know I've assigned a great respect for,
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,
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
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.
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.
On the other hand, the movie makers of 1800 really couldn't hold a candle to the movie makers of 2000.
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.
It's actually very interesting. You can go back to the 18th century and see the first motion pictures.
The French were making them. They were trying to get pictures that moved.
The motion picture answered a cultural need, the technology that Edison developed.
There are several points in the 18th and 19th century when people were trying to create pictures that moved.
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.
So yeah, we got them all beat there. They were producing better classical music, we're producing better moving pictures.
Our television is considerably better than French television in the year 1800.
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.
You know, people are not writing such great epic poetry anymore, but genres do have a history.
They're often tied to certain stages of cultural development, even to stages of economic and historical development, stages of technological development.
They rise, they peak, they fall. Part of the problem is just the accumulation of examples of the genre.
And contrary to common sense, often the earliest examples of the genre are the best.
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?
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.
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
years and cultural production even in things like music and painting though
it's not as great in music as the 18th century was if I line up the pieces
against each other I mean how are you gonna you know compare even someone like
Shostakovich with Bach so but things balance out and again 18th century motion
pictures were not very impressive compared to the Godfather 1 & 2 so we
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.
You know, I think the ancient Greek theater was a gimmick when it began.
I don't think, if it's Thespis who invented it, that he had the Oresteia in mind.
I think somebody came along later, Aeschylus evidently, and lifted up this new gimmick medium to a higher content.
And again, when we can see in history this happening, that's what we observe.
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.
Edison did not have Citizen Kane in mind. You invent new media for, you know, basically for their novelty or their gimmick of value.
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.
It's really to me the saving grace for artists that new media come along.
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,
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?
It was very fortunate that the motion picture came along because Shakespeare had not ever made a motion picture.
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.
In each case, the market produces something which opens up a whole new realm to artists.
And the great thing about artists is they really do open up the realm.
They find potentials in the medium that no one had seen before.
The other interesting development I find is you then can read back into earlier media some of the virtues of the new medium.
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.
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.
Here's an example. I've mentioned Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It's a giant video game.
Many of its virtues are the virtues of a video game, that it has all these rules, all these
characters, it has maps, it has places. If you love that book as I do, one of the reasons you love it
is that it has characteristics that a good video game has and I gather it
makes a halfway decent video game but in any and and of course when you think
about it there is a direct line from Lord of the Rings through Dungeons and
Dragons to video games I mean there's actually a cultural connection there now
for example Jenkins said he was working with the Royal Shakespeare Company to
to produce a Shakespeare video game.
Now that sounds unpromising at first.
And you know, how many times is Hamlet going to kill Claudius?
Undoubtedly 3,000 if it's a good video game.
But he quickly pointed out that this wasn't designed to create narrative games, but to
To allow you to enter into the imaginative world of one of the plays, let's say the
Tempest.
And now think about this, how the Tempest has the character of a video game.
It has a topography, it has these groups of characters, you know, it has really interesting
role-playing possibilities.
I want to be Ariel, I want to be Caliban, and so on.
Now, I don't know what's become of this and maybe these games are out and so on, but what
What I'm getting at is I begin to appreciate the new virtues of a video game and can then
read them back into older media and begin to understand that again what a video game
has is not the narrative structure of an Oedipus Tyrannus where you're talking about.
The great thing about this plot is the absolute necessity.
Everything follows from everything else.
You can't change one step.
Video Games have this incredible inevitability which things work out.
You know, the thing about video games is their lack of inevitability.
That's what attracts people to it.
The outcome is not predetermined and you have these branching possibilities and things can
go in any direction.
And it turns out not all literature was structured like Oedipus Tyrannus and that in fact one
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
which is written, there's all these chapters. They are printed in one order in the book,
but he asks you to rearrange them as you like. And there are several experimental fictions
like that in 20th century fiction that you can see novelists wishing they could be writing
video games. And just as you can anticipate the motion picture in certain forms of visual
I think you can begin to see, in some 20th century novels, novelists becoming dissatisfied with the complete closure of a volume,
closure that the book can just tell one narrative, the Borges's idea, the Garden of Forking Paths,
and we do start to get these books that say you know at this chapter you can
turn into a frog or you can turn into a prince you know if you turn into a
prince follow this line and so Shakespeare's an example well I'm
getting at this yeah there's a kind of richness of the world that certain
I think Tolkien is an example, Dickens would be an example, Shakespeare is an example.
You feel that the world of their work of art is greater than the one story that's been told about it.
One reason Tolkien seems to be so much like a video game is we have that book, Lord of the Rings,
but there are 13 different versions of it, and he kept telling the stories, taking things in different directions.
Direction, he couldn't stop writing appendices, writing the Silmarillion, the Lay of Beleriand,
he created this vast world around it, it's a kind of video game like surplus, like no
one book I write could contain all the potentiality of the literary universe I've created.
I think that's true of Shakespeare, it's why people have, you know, what was King Lear
like as a young man?
What was Hamlet like at the university and people have written stories along those lines?
What would it be like if Spock and Kirk were really lovers?
You know, someone asked me last night what I thought was great about The Simpsons
and one of the things I said was the richness of its world.
There are certain works that kind of have strength and reserve, you sense about it.
It's one reason we feel The Simpsons can go on forever.
I would like to know about Comic Guy's childhood.
I'm sure if the Simpsons are listening, let them write it.
And I think that, you know, we learn more and more about Appu.
Barney, it turns out, went to Harvard.
You know, it's like there's endless resources as if the Simpsons was a video game.
Now, again, I really don't...
This is like he doth protest too much.
I really don't know much about video games, but it did strike me
When the student of mine was taking me on a tour of Grand Theft Auto, my reaction was,
does this thing never end? Does it go on forever? Will I ever get out of the water?
And, you know, I sense that's where the richness is, and it's a richness of possibility
that what we're creating is a world that has parameters that are yet to be discovered.
And I gather that's what people who play video games enjoy, a kind of sense of exploration
and pushing things to the limits in this world that's created.
And I gather that particularly these role-playing and simulation games, that the people who
play them discover potentialities that the creators of the game didn't even realize were
there.
That seems very 21st century to me, and that's why I think this is somehow going to be the
art form of the 21st century.
And again, I feel that art was being pushed in that direction.
It's as if 20th century art was demanding the video game.
Our forms are too closed.
They're not allowing us to develop the full contingency and potential of the worlds we're
creating.
And it seems to me that's what the video game is answering here.
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.
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.
Again, Tolkien seems to be the great example of that, and I think that's why people become Tolkien nuts.
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?
I mean, it's just unimaginable. The connection in a way is so bizarre and yet I think it's so profound.
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.
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.
You know, there's a reason why each new art form embodies sex and violence.
Those are the two fundamental impulses of the human race.
And there where our energy comes from, you know, our anger and our sexual desire.
If we were all head, if we were all just thinking beings, there'd be no energy.
And so it does not surprise me that the sources of cultural vitality tend to be linked up with impulses of sex and violence.
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,
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.
working on them, and I don't want to deny that they can be produced that way.
What I'm arguing against is a single view of artistic production.
So I'm not coming forward with a single view of artistic production that it has to be market-based,
it has to come out of a commercial basis, it has to be collaborative and cooperative.
All I'm saying is it can be.
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.
I actually am, however, saying that's probably happened less often than people think.
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?
It is interesting, though, that that is what we hear again and again.
One of the books I put on your bibliography is by Stephen Pregay, I guess it's pronounced,
created by Inside the Minds of TV's top show creators.
And this is a kind of commercial item here.
It came up with the idea of producing a book that people interested in going into television as a business
of Business could refer to and what the editor did was just interview all sorts of top people
in television writing and get their take on how to succeed in television.
For example, Larry David, the creator of Seinfeld, is here and Joss Whedon and some really very
talented people.
But one of the most common threads in the book is you've got to learn to work with other
people.
I myself find that a hard lesson to learn.
I went to a very progressive elementary school.
We didn't get grades.
We had written report cards.
And I was a pretty good student.
But under works well with others, the comment was always doesn't.
So the one negative comment my teachers had.
But here's a couple of sample quotes.
And it's interesting to see what these writers say.
Here's one who says about who was his great mentor and it was a guy named Gil Grant.
He always told me that 75% of being a staff writer is getting along with the other writers.
That's not always easy because there are a lot of personalities and egos in a writer's room.
Everybody thinks that their idea is the best idea.
It taught me a lot about writing and rewriting, and about how to make a story better.
You know, again, the great romantic myth was that first conception is purest and best.
Percy Shelley, when composition begins, inspiration is already on decline.
Shelley is claiming, you know, don't trust your second thoughts.
Just put it on paper. That will be the best thing you can write.
And maybe that was true for Shelley, although his manuscripts don't bear that out, because
there's a lot of rewriting in them.
But here's a professional writer telling us, you've got to learn how to rewrite and to
work with your fellow writers.
Here's another example, someone who worked on L Word, and she says, I'm working with
I actually love rewriting and I love getting notes basically because I'm working with very smart people on the L-word.
The scripts on the show have evolved a lot during the rewriting process.
This is primarily because of the feedback that I've gotten from my writing colleagues here and from the executives working at Showtime.
The feedback that I've gotten from my writing colleagues here and from the executives working at Showtime has always been valuable.
Now, again, there's the auteur theory shot down.
The feedback I got from executives has been valuable.
Rewriting is very, very important and something I strongly believe in.
And then just a few more when they ask, what do show creators look for in a writer?
And this is really interesting what they say.
Tracy and I both agree that what we look for first is a good spec script.
When we look for someone who's nice and is going to be easy to be around, you work long
hours in this business, you're going to be around these people anywhere from 8 to 12
hours a day, 5 days a week.
So I mean, again, it's a very, very cooperative medium here.
The first, here's another person, the first ingredient is that the writer must be a good
and easy to get along with that's pretty basic but extremely important television
writing is such a collaborative effort that ultimately you are hiring someone
you will be spending six days a week with now 12 hours a day in a working room
writing together and then finally Larry David the greatest writing genius and
comedy of our generation Seinfeld now curb your enthusiasm and here's his
When Seinfeld was on, new writers got hired by submitting ideas or premises for shows. That was it. No specs.
And of course, good hygiene was of paramount importance. Leave it to Larry to go straight to the heart of things.
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.
and you know this is when you think about it it's not on the face of it such a
weird idea that writing can be improved by cooperation by feedback this is where
I think Austrian economics can really help us in rethinking cultural matters
and I'll come back to this point that it's Austrian economics that thinks of
of the market as a cooperative, collaborative institution.
It's Marxist economics that, as I've said before, thinks of the market as just a cutthroat, dog-eat-dog situation
where people are exploiting each other, where things do not occur to mutual profit.
If we are true to Austrian economics, we will see that collaboration is at least a potential model for culture.
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.
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.
That is, that when you look at individual writers and their individual creators and ultimately creation does come down to an individual.
And here's where Austrian economics differs from Marxism.
In Marxism, the individual gets almost erased.
He becomes a representative of a class,
a representative of a historical moment.
That to me is one of the faults of Marxist criticism,
that the individuality of authors is lost.
They're seen as part of a system,
and it's precisely because Marxism
conceives of an economic system as some kind of prison,
that it portrays the individual as overpowered by the system and lost in it.
I mean, Austrian economics teaches us that we're all individuals and we are creative,
but it also sees how we can enter into creative relations with other individuals, learn from
them, cooperate with them, and that's where it offers this alternative model of culture.
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.
The key thing to me that Austrianism shows us is that things get organized over time. They don't get organized instantaneously.
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.
That's the dream of central planning. We know that that doesn't work in economics.
It actually works better in culture. There can be moments of more or less perfect instantaneous central planning in culture.
We have examples, you know, Mozart suddenly thinking up the whole symphonic movement.
And it's remarkable, it does seem maybe to happen in a moment.
Or a poet who will just get an inspiration and sit down and it's like the whole poem's
in his head and he just has to get it on the paper and there it is, a perfect poem.
And that's sort of the myth that poets create.
It does happen much more seldom than poets would like us to think.
Coleridge's Kubla Khan is a great example of that where he talks about having this vision
of this perfect poem and he was sitting down to write it down when unfortunately someone
knocked at the door and distracted him and we never got the rest of the poem.
I suspect that's a bit of a myth.
But in any case I admit that in cultural production in certain forms, especially if you're talking
I'm not talking about something like a 20-line poem or a short musical movement, that's possible.
But generally speaking, cultures like other market products, things don't happen all at once and completely generated out of a single mind.
The market really is a good model for what happens in culture, that people have first ideas,
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.
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.
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.
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.
and it's certainly the way markets function you know a businessman who
wanted to be an artiste who wanted to follow the romantic model and I'm going
to create the perfect car and I'm not going to pay any attention to what people
want out of a car this is like I guess Tucker as Coppola's portrayed it you know
I'm going to create the... actually this happens with Homer in one episode of The
You know, I'm not going to pay attention to gas mileage or comfort or whether it has headlights or not.
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
or you can't tell me that getting one mile per gallon is a bit of a drawback in the market today.
You know, we would laugh at that, but there are artists who behave that way.
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
You know, for centuries, the motto of literature was Horace's, to instruct and please.
That was the function of poetry, to instruct and please.
You know, that is anathema now to modern writers.
You know, what Horace's motto meant for poets was that poetry is a kind of social contract.
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.
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.
to teach people something and also let them have a good time with it.
That's a pretty good formula for what art should do.
And if it sounds a little philistine to you, a little crass and maybe even commercial,
I just remind you that the vast majority of great poetry up through 1800 was written with those goals in mind
and with the understanding that art is a social contract.
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
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
I won't have these things in the play.
It's funny because he takes a dig at Shakespeare.
He says, I won't have some dumb tempest in the play, and it won't be bad like Titus Andronicus.
But it'll be enjoyable.
You'll have a puppet show at the end.
And by God, there is a puppet show at the end of the play, and so on.
And it's this marvelous moment where Ben Johnson, who himself had such contempt for the commercial theater,
he really, he longed to be able to write for the court and have the prestige of it.
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.
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.
Just think of the epilogues in Shakespeare's plays. They're much like Johnson's. Someone comes out on the stage and says,
Thanks for your goodwill. Could you please applaud and send this off nicely? You know, we hope we pleased you.
That's a conventional gesture, and Shakespeare knows what he's doing.
but still it reflects the fact that he accepted a kind of social contract with his audience
and what I'm saying is that that wasn't so bad.
A lot of great art was produced that way and I can see why artists began rejecting that
in the Romantic period in reaction to the development of the mass market which in some
ways did require lowering of taste or at least a modification of taste which some of them
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.
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.
is past, but to reject completely the ancient and longstanding social contract of art, that's
what I'm questioning, and ask us to rethink what really made artists like Shakespeare or
Mozart or Dickens Gray. It wasn't turning their back on an audience, and if that world
of cultural production looks chaotic and rough and tumble, we're in a position as Austrian
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.
That, we know, is the fallacy of socialism, and it's the problem with most government support of the art.
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.
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.
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.
That's why no U.S. orchestra has had a recording contract for generations.
It's why classical orchestras must be recorded now in Eastern Europe where they're free from the tyranny of labor unions.
I keep thinking of, you know, Michelangelo, if he had been part of the labor union, the guild of his day, and,
okay, that's enough. You've exceeded the number of hours. You can be on the ceiling.
You've got to come down and we'll put someone else in your place to finish doing the painting, and so on.
But this is what Scherrer, he doesn't say break the labor unions to save classical music.
What he says is the solution to this contemporary course disease problem is subsidy.
And hence a reversion to the principal means used to support classical music during the 17th and 18th centuries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And we are not, when we are talking about government bureaucrats, we are not talking about Frederick the Great.
They don't have the taste, they don't have the power. They are in fact specifically not supposed to exercise taste.
That's the whole point in turning to government funding.
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.
And more deeply it reflects an alternative view of cultural creation.
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.
You cannot pick the winners in the cultural contest. That's why the Greeks held the contest.
That's why, you know, Sophocles, Oedipus, they had to actually compete and produce the plays.
You have to, you can't tell ahead of time who will succeed, what will succeed.
The notion behind government funding of the arts is that you can pick the winners ahead of time.
Sometimes, I mean, like anything else, like horse races, occasionally you'll pick a few winners.
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.
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.
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.
The market has been pretty good at picking the winners.
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.
And again, the most popular composers of the 18th century are by and large the ones we turn to now.
But if you look at the winners in the government bureaucracy sweepstake, I'm much more skeptical.
Again, precisely because these are people who enjoin not to exercise taste.
They're presented as the very alternative to taste.
They're supposed to operate by committees and published criteria and all these schemes of distribution
got to be equally divided by state and of course equally divided by gender and equally divided by ethnicity.
I'm not so sure that talent is equally divided by those categories.
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.
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.
I am saying that great culture does emerge from markets, that some of the greatest examples,
Shakespeare, Dickens, Mozart, have emerged from markets, that this is incontroversible
proof against the arguments that commercial markets always debase culture.
Really as I said in the beginning, I've been talking here about necessary, not sufficient
conditions.
I don't think there's a direct correlation between any system and necessary cultural outcome
as I deliberately offered communist Soviet Union as an example of the worst economic system possible
and nevertheless one which had in certain areas a real cultural flowering
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.
So, you know, to me, ultimately human creativity is the greatest mystery.
we will never be able to explain it in economic terms but we just have to do
enough economic analysis so that we don't stand in its way and start to
substitute for example a regime of government support for the market
because that isn't just a waste of funds I think it actually is misleading to
artists and encourages them to produce the worst kind of art because it
encourages them to turn their back on the audience and to scorn any sorts of pressures to instruct and delight their audience.
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.
And, you know, the record of Renaissance tyrants is pretty good in the art they helped turn out.
The record of government bureaucrats, I don't see as anything comparable.
So if I had to say anything, individual patronage and markets seem to be the best way to support culture.
And probably from what I can tell, bureaucratic government support is the worst.
So on that happy note, I will end and take some questions.
Yes?
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.
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.
You know, I actually know what that means now because of this student of mine. He explained that to me. Go ahead.
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.
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.
and you know a lot of great art was produced that way but this is why I say
I sense a need for the video game in some 20th century fiction for example
that that artists in the older genres are struggling with the fundamental closure
principle of all art up to that point and that it seems to me no accident that
in an increase well a world in which freedom has now become an ideal though
and in which technology is pointing in the direction of freedom.
Yeah, video games are a profoundly democratic form.
I mean, they allow for this broad participation.
They are great equalizers.
They take brilliant professors and make them look like fools and their students are geniuses.
Yeah, it's democratic.
That's why I can't stand it.
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.
Yes.
I mean my reaction to video games is exactly yours and I think I'm completely wrong.
That is I can't appreciate video games. I just I can't get into them. I don't see what the art is
but when I look at the younger generation I refuse to say that they're bamboozled by this.
What I see is a lot of intelligence goes into their playing.
I'm always baffled when you get to this point and I don't see any way out of the room.
And the student hits a few buttons and suddenly we're in another room.
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.
And so, what I see is the interactivity of it that is promising.
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.
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.
I'm going to be able to have my own cut of the movie, because a video game generation is going to demand that.
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.
Everything you say about video games, it's what I say about video games,
The Theory of Money and Credit
So, get out of that.
Yes.
Yeah, it's already, somehow, a locus of creativity.
I can see that there's just too much energy going through it.
And for example, I was stunned when the LA Philharmonic had a concert of all video game music.
Now it is the LA Philharmonic, but still, that told me something, and you know what?
The music is tonal, it has melody, it has harmony, and it actually sounds pretty good,
and people can enjoy it.
And I was beginning to think, maybe this is a way for composers to reconnect with an audience,
And these composers, I gather, are earning a lot of money writing video game music.
And so, again, in Wagnerian terms, it's gesamtkunst, it's a total art form.
And again, I don't, I have to admit, I don't like any of the video game music I've heard.
But I'm seeing something happening.
I just have a gut reaction that if what has happened in the past and the culture has happened,
this thing is developing in artistic ways.
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...
successful at preserving what has already come to be recognized as great art.
It seems like that's how the NEA has sort of recovered some of its reputation.
It just sort of created a Shakespeare for the masses type approach as opposed to trying to take it to the next level.
Yeah, I mean, if it's a comparison, yes, I think governments will always be better at preservation than picking the winners
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.
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.
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.
Interview, I bought the DVD, my whole paper was there. It was the archive, I actually
used it again today, that the archival material they offered, interviews with Julius Epstein,
the memos sent by Hal Wallis and Jack Warner. And I said to myself, why did they do that?
Did they really think they'd increase sales by having a scholarly archive? And literally
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.
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.
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.
It was a pure commercially driven project. I sort of, I'm amazed by it but it shows what capitalism can do.
Yes, all the way in the back.
Do you have any favorite authors or directors?
Well, you know, that's a long question. I will say this play by Ben Johnson, Bartholomew Fair.
If you want to see a play that celebrates the market economy and that presents a Hayekian view of the faults of central planning
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.
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.
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,
which takes this liberal perspective on Latin America and in general several of his novels, his anti-Marxist novel, Real Life of Alejandro Maita.
But Vargas Llosa is just about the only author I know of who has read Austrian economics and uses it in his fiction.
Otherwise I have to kind of pull it out of a hat.
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.
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.
We have essays on Austrian economics and literature, one essay by Dario Fernandes Moreira, showing how Don Quixote illustrates free market principles.
We're trying, but it's fine, there's really not that much.
I mentioned Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, Victorian novel, that's anti-labor union, pro-industrialism.
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.
But Gas Goes North and South is a very fine novel and pro-market.
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.
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.
But again, I think, you know, I just think that DVDs are better than humanity deserves.
Really, we never did anything to deserve such a wonderful thing, and it's only the market that gave it to us.
So, God bless markets.
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.
You can help, everybody can help out by sending me the link to your friends and your colleagues who can spread this.
The goal is to get the information out. It's also coming out with an MP3. It'll be available shortly.
As soon as they explain to me what that is, I'll be pleased.
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.
and Chad Parrish deserves an award for unobtrusively running the video has
anybody ever bothered you less when he was actually I mean we didn't know he
was in the room so that that is the way to do it and I was just I was nervous
whether this would be intrusive you did a great job and they really thank you
and the Mises Institute and I thank you guys you're a wonderful audience it was a
It was a delight working with you this week.