The Theory of Money and Credit
I'd like to welcome you all to the Mises Institute. We were founded in 1982 to advance scholarship
in the Austro-libertarian tradition and the seminar is certainly part of that mission.
We inaugurated this series of seminars because, well, we were affected to find that there's supposed to be course-long recordings of people like Mises,
and what would you do for a week of lectures by Mises, you know, or even Rothbard? There's not enough of those.
So we decided to inaugurate this series in the summer as a way of putting together an act of coursework by all the top scholars in the field.
and that way we're going to the archives and be available for people. We make it available online, both live and for download later in the archives and also for sale on MPC.
So this is part of this whole series that we're running every summer now and there are lots of people listening online.
Let me just talk about some of the ground rules here. The first one is that while you're here,
this week you have to buy a lot of t-shirts. Is that sort of essential?
Yeah.
Is there a place in the world where you can get a t-shirt of Purgo with Purgo on it?
Yeah, it's very nice. I think that's really a surprise big seller.
Do you have to get it together?
We have to get it together, right?
The reason I'm here is because we are making recordings as part of the forecast. Remember that your questions will be immortalized by how you frame your questions. So don't use the opportunity to make a speech. Keep your questions short and concise.
and take them clearly, and that's so that we can hear them on the audio.
If you have profound disagreements with the professor this week, he welcomes those,
have to be submitted a written form, but really, arguments and that sort of thing are best kept during coffee hour afterwards,
questions only, but, okay, so, I'd like to welcome everybody, and this week we're going to be hearing
and Paul Cantor is a fascinating case.
He studied with Mises very early on in his educational life and was completely captivated
by the Misesian approach to looking at economics and considered to be an economist,
but instead decided to pursue his vocation in literature, which turns out to be a question
in which there aren't a lot of the Misesians currently working.
So he's dedicated to the leopards or something, to the poor cantor in the literature department, and they think he's done such a bit on studying not only literature but of culture, and let me just say that this is going to be a fantastic week because we have here in the series of lectures a unity of economic understanding, cultural history, and art history, and literature,
These are all the most fascinating subjects there are, and they're all super-pensive,
and the third lecture is a treat. So you're in the right place.
This is going to be wonderful. Very glad to have Professor Cantor with us.
And from now on, I'll be bringing him into these all of his own lectures.
If you have any questions about anything going on here, feel free to ask the class.
and make stuff at home. I value stuff to all the uses of the library and all the resources we have.
So I'm very glad to have you and I'm especially pleased to have you on the campus.
Well, thanks very much for that introduction, Jeff. I want to thank the Eugen Institute for inviting me here.
It's a wonderful opportunity to put together some thoughts I've been having about the nature of culture
and Economics.
I will begin a few words about my qualifications here, or my lack of qualifications.
I should point out that I don't have a graduate degree in economics.
I don't have an undergraduate degree in economics.
I never took a course in economics during my undergraduate days.
So my money was completely untucked by mainstream economics.
And therefore, I couldn't qualify to talk on the subject.
I took three courses on economics during my high school years, two of them were literature and music, so that's it, I can also add on almost any subject I'm going to talk about, I have no full-fledged, except maybe English words, but I do have a PhD in math, but music, painting, I'm all self-taught in those regards, so take a lot of what I'm going to be saying with a grain of salt, I will be largely restricting
and Human Rights.
These are seminars.
I used to come in and lecture.
I will take that as my model today, but I'll probably time for questions again, and I'm
going to be very much available during the week to talk about things in detail and in
person.
One last thing.
I got here last night and eaten at a fast food Chinese restaurant, and I found the following
and Cookies, and we'll return you unexpected support over next week's Accepted Gracious
Lake. So you guys can't falsify our sports and cookies. So be nice to me.
Okay, posture. The final frontier. This really is the last battleground between Marxism and
and Free Market Economics.
In every other area Marxism seconds categorically defeated.
The 20th century saw one reputation after another of Marxism in theoretical terms
and in practical terms Marxism proved to be a disaster when communism was spread out
in various countries around the world.
And in many ways the 20th century marked a vast repeat on the part of Marxism
and it's ended up pulled up in English departments and other Japanese departments around the world.
Essentially, the only defense now of Marxism is in cultural terms.
Marxists more or less understand the law of economic argument.
In fact, their argument now has to go something like this, oh yeah,
capitalism produces a lot more goods for people but it's corrupt their souls.
and the religious underpinnings of Marxism have emerged in the course of these arguments.
In many ways, the most successful and influential tool of Marxism in the 20th century was the
Franksburg School, an act for which I might say there was one out, and their argument
is essentially an argument against capitalism as mass culture.
The argument that capitalism is the one with mass production, the famous essay by Walter Benjamin, a kind of sidekick to the Frankfurt School,
the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, that the mass production of any work of art destroys it all, ruins it.
of Mass Productions of Reproductions of Great Worth and Arth to destroy them.
And it's a curiously aristocratic and elitist argument that objects to one of the best aspects
of capitalism, the ability to deliver the goods and to take items that were originally luxury items
and make them available to the mass of people.
in general you get this bias against commercial culture, and interestingly enough that has been embraced by both the right and the left, and there are many ways in which the cultural critique by the left is repeated by figures on the right, you get a lot of people who in general support free markets, but when they get to cultural
and I'm going to be doing a subject book as supporting the free market to raise questions
about, for example, television and how it's the basis of humanity
and American culture specifically.
So, it does revolve upon the vendors of the free market to come to the defense
of the free market even in the area of culture and that's what I'm going to be doing this week.
and it is an interesting case of off-the-economics, I think we're going to be seeing
that the principles we know from off-the-economics turn out to help us very much
in understanding culture and also I think we'll be able to illustrate some
of our familiar principles of economics by looking at cultural phenomena.
So today I'm going to give a general overview of what we're doing and trying
and I'll be trying to pose this whole question, I'll be trying to answer, and so I want to just begin
with a sense of what the issue of economics and culture is.
The two peoples are related, but what I'm basically going to be insisting is that when you're talking about economics,
We're going to be talking about unnecessary convictions for culture, but never a specific
conviction of culture.
We're going to be talking about what essentially is a very loose relation between economics
and culture.
That is, I don't believe one can establish a strong connection between any form of economic
system and any culture.
I think one of the things we're going to be seeing is that humans are very resilient and culture can flourish under any conditions, even the worst of economic conditions.
One reason I've included a unit on totalitarianism rather than looking at Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union is to show that even under the antithesis of free market conditions,
Culture, nevertheless, will be able to survive, and in certain respects, even to flour. That's something about human beings. They are believers. And nothing can stop them. Even Marxist professors of literature cannot stop them.
I think one of the problems with Marxist analyses is they treat economic conditions
as sufficient conditions, that somehow you can look at the economics of a period
and you will know then what the art is going to be like and that there's some kind
of one-to-one correspondence between economic conditions and the social development.
I intend to deny that.
But what we're talking about when we look at the economic basis of culture is simply the notion
of the necessary conditions without a certain economic level, you're not going to have culture at all.
And let me begin with that point, and in a way, the overarching point
of everything we're going to be discussing this week.
And what it comes down to, this culture is a perfect example of a very familiar principle
of Economic Division of Labor, there would be no culture without the possibility of division
of labor. Artists are very specialized. They are people who do not produce their own means
for living. They don't grow their food, sew their own clothing, steal their own clothes.
Now, in fact, most of us don't do that, because we live in a very sophisticated economy with a great deal of business labor.
But it's important to identify that without a certain stage of economic development,
a rather sophisticated stage of the business labor, all art as we know it is impossible.
One way of seeing this is that art is very much an urban phenomenon.
and I'm going to talk a little bit about it, it's a wonderful book, and he has a whole chapter on thinking in cities, showing the correlations between the development of painting in certain key cities in Europe, like Barnes and Vance and Paris and then on to the New World and New York.
Aristotle discusses this into a very well-in-book one of his politics, and we, the first people
you know of, historically, who discusses the digital labor are Plato and Aristotle, Plato
and the Republic, Aristotle and the Politics, and at the very beginning of the politics,
and politics in Greek means the things of the city, that's what that word originally
And he regards the city as the unit of human self-sufficiency. Talks there about how families are inadequate, and clients are inadequate. They both abuse everything we need to be fully human beings.
and they talked about how human beings keep moving beyond these more limited forms of
organizations until they reach what usually are the limits of Sydney.
And this is a community that's large enough to allow the division of labor so that all
the wonderful things we have like shoes and houses and clothing and cars and so on, can
be produced by centralized craftmen.
And what Aristotle puts it is the city comes into existence for the sake of meal life, but it exists for the sake of the good life.
That is, the city has to take care of providing all these basic necessities, and then you can go beyond them to produce what is called luxury goods.
And a perfect example of it would be, although I don't know if you've heard of it, is the Greek theater.
I said it was called the theater of Athens. When Athens was created as a city, it wasn't because people said,
gee, we really need a theater. It's boring here in the cave. If only we had a theater.
That's not the way they were thinking. They banded together for the sake of defense and economic production.
Production, the ones in Peking Theater, one of the most talented cities in the, in the,
throughout antiquity. But the point is once you have a city and you have a flourishing
agricultural community, you have people in the arts and you have commerce, then you have
the surplus. You have enough food so that there are some people who don't have to spend
The whole first book on politics is an attempt to define what truly makes us human beings
and if the state of the city can be beyond the realm of mere necessity.
It is just as important always to remember this, that in a sense, artists live a farmed life.
In the case of the dead of human beings who don't worry about seeing themselves closing themselves,
I'm going to stay here in the cave and draw a painting of it.
This is the greatest artist ever.
Forget about Michael Hansel, forget about Shakespeare, forget about Mozart.
This guy founded art.
And he's thinking a lot for the rest of the clan, you know, that's great.
Now, let's get this straight.
We're going to go out in the fusion lane and hunt down that mammoth, and pull it, and drag it back,
If you're going to stay in a cave next to a fire and draw a painting of it, that better be one hell of a painting.
If you will remember that person, this whole week will be clear to you, that art is withstanding.
Like every other thing in human life, every other art is withstanding.
As a rule of forms, it involves someone saying, well, you guys do all the work, I'm going to sit here and clean.
And when you reduce it to that essential, you see that the artist has to offer something in return for his movements to live.
He has to provide something in return that the rest of the tribe will like.
You know, maybe he conned them and said, you know, if I draw the paper before you, Hannah, you will succeed in killing the manna.
That's for the leaders to speak to the paper, that you will invoke the great god of manna to go and say,
maybe he, in his talk to the leaders, kind of said, I will ensure you are the one to kill the manna.
You will become famous for killing the manna.
and that's the political aspect, that's how you'll pay for it.
Notice he did not submit an application for community acknowledgement at the National Endowment for K-Grand Arts to get a grant to do the painting, very significant there, but all of the economic aspects of our rebukes to that K-Grand example.
And it shows that artists are making an amazing demand upon the rest of us.
They read through all of the work and they'll get the accretion.
And for most of human history, they'll have to deliver something in return for that.
And so that's why we're going to be discussing the issue of how does the artist get economic support.
and we're going to examine, come down to the three basic forms of support and we'll be outlining them now as we look at this all week.
Basically the three forms we've known are patronage of the market and what I'll call institutional support of the arts.
I originally called it government support of the arts on the outline, but let's call it institutional support.
And let me run through the advantages and disadvantages of all three of these.
Again, these are the questions we'll be posing this week,
but let me give you an outline to start with.
In no respect, patronage has the only history in art, and much of the greatest art we've ever seen
has been produced by a patron system.
In a patronage system, there's some body or some organization with a great deal of wealth which gives it to artists to produce works of art with the general student commissioning.
The two key sources of patronage in the history of European art are the aristocracy and the church, and those two things often blend together.
We only have to look at Rome to see what patients can do. The Catholic Church has been perhaps the most significant patient of ours, even in history. In Rome, it's a great monument to that.
These are all ways in which the crystals of the church, in many cases the pulps themselves, supported great artists like Maxwell or Michelangelo in producing again some of the greatest art the human race has ever seen.
You just have to go to the royal palaces throughout Europe, maybe you need to be converted into
art museums like the ones in Paris, just go to, most of the art museums have collections
that were collected by royal families, as I've suggested before, they promised me to
System, but in many ways it works. And, although I'll be arguing for the market as a way of
learning through the arts, I don't ever want to deny that hatred works. And indeed, what
you have in hatred is people with a lot of money to spend, and it often takes a lot of
are all powered, beyond just the money, between ideal working conditions for artists, even
from any concerns whatsoever, in any case, it makes them extremely wealthy, sometimes
even powerful themselves, and the results speak for themselves.
Most of the great European architecture, as well as the kind of painting, painting, sculpture,
and the Sea of Literature, which we've shaped here.
I've spread out papers there this afternoon, music as well.
And many artists themselves think of paper as the ideal system.
It is in a way the artist reads.
Someone will say, here's a pile of money, you know, here's all the marble you want,
here's a square in the center of the house, do what you want with it.
and a lot more than all that's asked for.
And indeed, as patients received it as a possibility in the 18th
and 19th century, all this grew more and more nostalgic for patient age and a lot of the hostility
for the market as an economic support for the arts took the form of a kind
of romanticizing, idealizing of the patient system.
So we have to keep reminding ourselves what was wrong with the paper system, and the answer is simple, papers are paperizing.
They look difficult to find the very audits that they list up.
That it's papering can be very demanding.
In fact, the history of papering in art is very complicated.
At the height of papering, you constantly have audits complaining about it.
Michelangelo was always fighting with Pope Julius, with his other patrons, Leonardo thought
of his patrons. In fact, it's not the perfect system because there's often a clash between
what the patrons want and what the artists want to do. There's an awful lot of religious
in the History of European Art, and on work because artists have people who don't know that.
It also is somehow related to the fact that the Catholic Church and churches in general were enormous sources of patronage,
and some of these artists may have been doing what they were doing not out of equal distinction, but because that's where the money was.
How about the OECD Council, which will be tonight in that regard?
So, patients, in a way, make the point, even in art, there's no freelance, there's no ideal
system of economic support for art, there's much to be said for patients, but we had its
Lawbanks as well. So turning to the, broadly speaking, the second system of support towards
the market, it too has its advantages and disadvantages. And here it's important to
see that market-based art is much more prevalent than you would think to listen to the critics
and the Critics of the Market and Commercialization of the Arts.
We have the notion now, and I'll discuss the analysis of this a little later,
that somehow commercialized art is a new phenomenon and largely a result of the 20th century
and the globalization of capitalism, so it's important to remember that many
One of the greatest moments in European art, and I'm concentrating on European art,
is when, have been commercial moments.
The famous athlete, St. Peter's Theatre, was commercial.
They did the first example of kind of mass, mass culture.
In the 19th century, the, in any case, the two greatest phenomena of 19th century culture,
were opera and the novel, particularly Italian opera and the English novel were mean commercial enterprises.
Dickens and Beardy were in modern terms mean-heirs. They did more things than what they were doing.
And it's true, if you look at the 20th century, you've got films, you've got television.
and then there's this fundamentalist commercial art from the very beginning.
So an amazing amount of what is regarded as high art today wasn't that commercial in its own day.
Again, I think if people were trying to think of an elite art form in the 20th century,
they would say opera, and there were all these demands for government subsidy of opera, for example,
and so it really sits on the surface of it, if you do a quick survey of the various forms
of art in European history, the market already looks pretty good, and again a lot of great
Art for the result of the cases, but a lot of great art, a lot of the art that we find
the most actually grew out of it, too many commercialized systems like Shakespeare's
Theatre or Berta Berry's opera. And the obvious advantage for the market is that it does generate
a lot of money for art, and many of the wealthiest artists have derived their income from the
from essentially market-based operations, Shakespeare, Dickens-Berry, these would be examples,
Rubens and Painting, Picasso and Painting of the 20th Century.
And so, one thing the market does is keeping the division of labor.
That's the thrust of the market, and it's therefore allowed for increasing specialization,
and one of those areas of specialization is all the different arts and you can just watch
or listen and we'll talk about some fine examples of it in the course of the week of cases
where artists have seen a market opportunity and explored it
and where independently developed movements
in the market have facilitated the development of the art.
I mean, motion pictures is the idea of that.
I mean, when Edison invented the motion picture, he did not foresee E. R. Bergman
and Frederic Alperini, who wasn't thinking, oh, what a great large form that's coming out of this.
But what a great commercial gimmick here, to charge people a nipple to see these things.
And we tend to think, oh, that's unique to the 20th century.
that was a classic school of finance, but even things like hunting.
Hunting was a deeply capitalist development, and hunting was a major industry throughout its history,
and it was a way of mass producing things, and it eventually made it possible for authors
to earn a living by selling books to a large market.
in the field of the visual arts, related development, engraving, doing prints of artwork, made it possible for artists to become less dependent upon individual, very wealthy patients and sell to a broader base of public.
So, in general, what we're talking about here, we call about the market as a phenomenon,
is marketing, being able to market to a larger number of people, and that has been tremendously
liberating to many artists.
It meant they didn't have to deal with these patrons anymore, and we find this again and
And again, Dickens celebrated the mass market for books as a way of liberating him from
patronage.
The German Revolutionary Parliament speaks about how healthy he was to be able to deal
with the commercial public in Homburg and not have to suck up to the petty German princes
in order to make money.
When the market began to display paperage, there was a leak before and audits themselves embraced it and found it a tremendous leak.
One way of looking at it is, again, and very much in economic terms we understand, the market is an impersonal phenomenon.
The point about patronage was that it was deeply personal.
You were in a one-on-one relation with this patron, and if it worked well, that was great,
but if it went sour, it was terrible.
The nice thing about the market is it distributes and dilutes the power.
You're no longer dependent upon one person to support you.
and we've got this large, even mass audience and, you know,
they pay their ticket at the box office.
They don't hand you the money directly.
You don't have to feel so beholden to them.
Now, every good thing comes with a bad thing in the story I'm telling you
and the very impersonality that in some way makes the market superior
in other ways. And again, you lose some of that warmth of contact. You're now dependent
on a mass audience. What increasingly struck all this is how fickle that audience could
be one day they like you, one day they don't. It turns out they can be very demanding and
you have to produce with them in mind. A patient, and I think a lot of patients, this is what
The Market in its own way will produce frustrations, that's why as the market increasingly dominates
in the course of the 19th century, artists who originally braced the market started to
become the sound of the paperwork system.
And that's why, as the market increasingly dominates in the core of the 19th century,
artists who originally braced the market started to become the founders of the painting system.
So we'll be looking at these two systems, with Dr. Dew, in the case of Shakespeare's theater,
Kamala, in the case of painting, and music.
And we will look, again, at the advantages and disadvantages of both systems,
And again, I'm not being able to say that the market is deeply supportive of the arts.
It's the answer to the problem.
No patronage has worked very well in history.
But one thing I'd like to stress is that the lines you see in patrons
in the market is not broad and not always easy to draw.
and that however they differ, they share the fact that a customer for art is involved.
When you were painting for the church or the aristocracy, you had to please them as an artist.
And similarly when you're working for a market, you have to please an audience.
And again, I put more distinction on the grounds of personal versus impersonal, that by and large, the market is a more impersonal system, and there is less direct contact between the audience and customers, and there's a great deal of mediation through viewers and art and concert and portfolios and music and publishers in literature.
The nature of the patronage was very direct, as Carter Cowan points out. In many cases, the Renaissance art had the little contracts that artists signed with their patrons, which in some cases grew up quite specifically, what the statue should look like, how much bronze you got to use, what did you pay for it down to the last one, and so on.
and so on, that's not the way the market operates.
So again, there's stuff like multiple personalized patient systems.
But nevertheless, these two broad systems both involve things in somebody
and somebody's space is involved.
And again, it's sometimes hard to say whether one is dealing with patients or the market.
You know, in Renaissance Italy there were so many small principalities that stood in Germany in the 19th century.
You don't know whether to regard these people as aristocrats or just rabble-offly people who were buying art.
And for that matter, in the course of the 19th century, as private middle class politics built up,
We began to see the re-emergence of patronage, people, you know, the great names of American art collectors, the Mellons, the Frecks, the Shakespeare, the Crescent, I mean, most of the great American art museums are founded on collections assembled essentially by mercies of one kind or another and so the market-based system can generate enough private money
and wealth, and it kind of re-instituted the patronage system, and in some ways, even in its height, the patronage system was a bit of a market, a market at least competing for artists among the patients.
So again, I'm setting up these two categories that grow the legitimacy of the definite market
and convenience places where I can contract and say this is truly a market, this is truly a patronage.
But I just want to stress that for most of human history, artists had to pay somebody,
Whether it was an individual patron or some kind of market audience, very important to remember
that patronage still involved a customer relationship because there is a tendency among some writers
in this field to keep patronage as if it was an earlier form of government supporting arts.
That's because, you could say, Casimo de' Medici is the head of Florence, that his support for artists was government support of the arts, and when people call for government financing the arts, they often describe it as if it's patronage and talk about it in glowing terms, as if it was going to reproduce the splendor of Renaissance Florence by having the ODA in the United States,
in the States, but I'd like to thank you then for my final five words, government support
of the art, institutional support of the art, I hope we're all art fans here, and you know
that means we're very stressed about, of government support of the art, and the good
and so on and so forth as I'll try to say.
But I want to, you can identify the problem with, again, I'll call it institutional formula,
because it isn't always just government, I'm going to argue it's academic now,
and university support for the arts, big museums supporting our kids, public museums and so on.
There are lots of ways in which we have institutional support of the arts now,
which is only crazy governmental support of the arts.
We're often using it for the funds, but in some ways, it's independent of that.
So, we'll call it an institutional support of the arts, and I'll focus on institutional
because the notion now is specifically to replace the customer relationship.
That's really the motive behind institutional governance for the arts, explicitly.
It's regarded as a response to market failure, the idea being that the market cannot adequately
support the arts, but it also, implicitly, is a rejection of outer socket that is not
The people that support this kind of economic energy will make an aristocratic argument for, although I think it's actually beneath the surface and implicit in their attitude.
But you could say that it's very much a 20th century phenomenon, and it's a rejection, like so many things in the 20th century, of human history, of the idea that aristocracies can support us, or that the middle class can support us.
and it's really exclusively a rejection of the notion of faith, if you can say that the
aim of this people's portfolio is to be faith-racked, you can have a very useful term, that is it's
an alternative to the notion of faith.
For centuries all this has been true, we're going all the way back to my caveman example,
You have to deliver something in return for being given your means to live.
And it may be pleasing the church, it may be pleasing an aristocratic ruler,
pleasing a large mass market, and artists themselves,
The whole analogy is that this scam was not food enough. It was not food enough to give them means to live because it always came with these conditions at that.
People wanted something in return and you had to feed them and somehow you had to give them what they wanted and artists got fed up with that.
and we've never quite been willing to say this openly, but it's able to do some of these little things.
By the 20th century, all this is saying, we don't know anything, but you owe us a little.
The humanity owes us a little bit. We could just be given the means to support, and moreover, the means to produce our art,
and you shouldn't be beholden to anyone for that and who can possibly just own the government?
I was really just part and parcel of the whole development of some of those ideas in the 19th century
and when we look at it carefully enough we see that artists were very prominent in the development of this
particularly in the room of people like William Morris and John Ruskin
and basically this notion that the world owes artists a living
and not now in return because they make life better, although the artists have said they do,
but it's always in the living and they don't know anything in return.
And the only way to bring that about is to get something that completely substitutes
for the customer relations and the notion of taste.
That the taste of the patient governs the art or the taste of the mass audience governs the art.
and so we get the notion of institutional support of the arts.
Now, most of all, we somehow ultimately involve tax payers' money and so that any man who had to go out on the bandit hunt and was wondering what the guy left in the cave, that now becomes the steel worker in Ohio who wonders why his tax money is being spent on an investment fund.
is being spent on an exhibition of scene art in Washington, D.C., which he will never see himself and wouldn't want to see, and in fact he's offended at the idea, but that artist won't talk about, the money comes from nowhere, it comes from that money, and you know, you can see it's introduced another level of impersonality into the relation of the artist, and again, you can see why artists would love this.
I want to find it hard to understand how anyone would object to be given all the money he needed
to live on plus whatever he needed to earn his art, and, indeed, this, of course, is the problem
with institutional support of the arts.
If the artist doesn't have to give anything in return, why wouldn't everyone become an artist?
This doesn't really happen in the Netherlands. I haven't really studied this, but I keep hearing about the fact that in the Netherlands, among other benign government programs, they have one where if you call yourself an artist, the government will support you, and supposedly they've got warehouses of the art produced by this that they don't know what to do with.
It does show the problem that even the most magical government systems can't overcome the scarcity of human resources.
And it's incredibly difficult work on the part of the human race.
And so if you simply announce the program, the government will now support all genuine artists.
and so even governments have to find some way to talk about the money and deal with our face.
It has to be faceless and so we have committees and that's where our social people base their of this kind of government support.
The idea now is that you will create a new group of specialists who will judge applications
and it will not be in the traditional market form or the traditional patient form.
They will not be judging which work pleases them.
They will have to have some set of criteria which are separate from their personal taste.
And so we get all these bureaucratic mechanisms.
And again, once again, no one will call government support of the arts what it really is bureaucratic support of the arts.
But again, we as authors should understand this, that wealth is so benevolent that it really turns out to be a good product and a good process.
Now, I have to say, I've not sat on the ADA, I've sat on the Astrodialysis of Humanities, the Astral Council, I've seen these processes at work.
The truth is that personal taste is not abuted out of these properties.
You have these peer review committees and frankly most of the time they're operating at personal taste anyway.
But they cannot state that and I think it's time for them to realize that the whole purpose of this vast structure,
the institution's courtyard, is to deny that personal taste is involved.
That's really this great claim to face, to find a principle that substitutes
for either the aesthetic notion of faith or the market notion of faith.
And it's even, it's a totally academic, we're talking about grand processes here,
people have to apply to their government agencies like the NAEA or the NAEA,
or they apply to universities or they apply to museums or to foundations.
There are all these grant programs for the arts now and they all are heavily bureaucratized,
often with layers and layers of peer review, screening committees, central committees,
so and it's actually very socialist in its motion, basically saying, among other things,
that a committee will arrive at a better decision than any individual can be.
You know, Hope Moody's the second, what did he know about building the church, you know,
look at the Senators, we'll put it together by committee.
Well, we can have some fun in Nigeria, what the Senators would like to put together by committee.
The motion is that we will come up with standard operating procedures,
and Public and State Criteria, and you know we have this illusion that this will produce some kind of objective judgment of art.
Patience, that will keep it protected. The market, that keeps it protected.
No, we're going to have professional evaluators, people you know to be professors of art, professors of music, professors of literature,
and Social Security, and so on, evaluating these things, and this, then, is supposed to produce a higher quality of art than the market or the patient assistance would be.
Now, the record isn't even that, because this kind of bureaucratized support of the art is relatively easy.
This was a drama in the 20th century.
Like any other system, it's not completely bad, and it's abusing to look into organizations like the MEA or the MEA to send themselves based on psychic, just anything that produces that worth of music or just worth of music.
And, you know, my action is to spend $180 billion with difficult math to come up with something of artistic value, something.
The question is, you know, what's the bang for the buck?
And, you know, I've said to myself, who sped money more widely, a Renaissance tyrant or the AAs?
and we'll look at the results and let us know how it will turn in, in terms of what they'll produce.
We have nothing on the paper, let us know clearly, but, you know, again, there's no financial waste moriarty that's going to produce totally negative results.
But the question is what are you standing on?
I think it's reasonable for the group to conclude on the basis of the 20th century experience
that government funding the arts is a tumor-worn system characterized by humanity.
Again, it's not totally negative, it does produce a good result.
What I'm going to argue when we get to the issue of modernism
is that it actually has some built-in negative consequences,
that the dream of this system is actually a downfall.
The idea of fielding the artist from the public
has proved to be a disaster in 20th century art, particularly in music and in painting.
That one of the things that we argue is that all this needs to change, that having customers
in one form or another really takes all this art, it makes them to be better artists.
The claim that new needs for the call for government funding are is that customers ruin art, and specifically that said art has to rely on the market against debates, the very notion of commercial maintenance frightens people, that if an artist is shown to the public, that's the worst possible thing to happen.
and so much of the economic development since our founding in the 20th century has specifically been designed to shield artists from any kind of commercial preference which means to shield them from having to please anybody.
That's what foundations will say when they're offering music to composers and composers.
It's what museums will say. It's essentially the very notion between universities and their having departments of painting, music composition, and so on.
This was called a dream, and look, it's a music painting that resulted in most cases.
It doesn't please anybody, and indeed that becomes this kind of a thing now.
Artists resist it, oh yes, they don't like my music, it must be good.
And we'll talk about that in a little bit more.
But that's my point about this kind of institutional or government funding, you know, it's specific aid, it's to break that original bargain between the caveman paper and the prize, that you have to come up with something inside the box in the terms of not having to go out on a hunt and stay in the wrong cave.
and now the notion is that the government will feel the demand of the given amount,
now it still has to be distributed on some basis and so you start to see new elements
of the rationality entering, you know, the argument against the mass audience is this
lack there, look at the movies they watch, look at the television they watch and they're
and the Civil and State, we always look at this pavement, since we've read it sometimes,
it's been irrational, and so there are so many other things in the 20th century.
We will substitute government rationality for these market failures.
We will create committees of experts.
We are the one more example of the administrative world in the 20th century of this notion
and the experts can do things better than mass audiences can.
And when you start to look over how these experts operate, you know,
there's just a bunch of academics, there's just a bunch of committees,
and believe me, I've sat on many and many committees, and you start to see
that new irrationalities enter into the system.
And I shouldn't say that I got a full picture of my experience with the National Values of the United States, but let me tell you a few stories here.
The National Values of the United States is a national organization, and at some point it realized there were 15 states in the United States, and each one of these states had two senators.
and therefore began to go on anyway that, you know, grants ought to be a little more evenly distributed
and maybe all of them shouldn't go to New York State or all of those other, you know, intellectual or federal.
So we began to see that geographic distribution became important in any grant.
and there probably are a larger number of worthwhile things in New York City than there are in Chicago and North Dakota, I'd say, and so it might in fact be rational that more of our friends should go to New York City than should go to North Dakota, and in fact that's what happens, but still, I mean, in the 1980s, they have to work against that.
In other words, politics introduces its own form of irrationality into this so-called rational, objective,
explicit system of distributing money. I won't go into great detail about the issue of political correctness,
but it's still being used very large in government funding laws now, that the grants have to be,
and even distributed according to gender, according to race, ethnicity, and again there's no reason to think that those criteria have any aesthetic validity. They do have vertical validity. So again, quite simply, the system which claims now to be rational, objective, and not to have biases, not to involve the illicitness, illicit secrecy,
and the risk of how it pays for the fickle market, it turns out to be just as whimsical
and idiosyncratic and maybe even more so than any other, any other system. And as I said,
I don't think it solved the problem, it couldn't solve. Now artists suck up to government committees,
and so on. Contrarily, you know, something I would not argue that the commercial system is uniquely superior to patronage. I've got a warm spot in my heart for Renaissance scientists and archdioceses in general. I would dupe people. You know, the one form of support that looked bad historically is bluntly supporting others. And when we get to that, I'll ask your argument in great detail. I think it's kind of a more predominant
and I want us to be able to pay one way or another for getting that support.
You may have to pay for a little paper.
You may have to please a large audience.
He's not going to be free by working for the government directly or indirectly.
He's going to have to give the government what it wants.
and the Directive of Contemporary Art discussion here shows the effects, in fact,
of the rock band of art from the committee's support or institutional committee in general.
So one last point as an overview, you know, again,
we're going to bring the same brand of systems throughout the history
of European art in the course of the week.
I want to talk a bit in greater detail about what I'm going to call the myth
of the Romantic Artists, because that's the thing that we're going to be trying to counter
this week. And this is, in some ways, it's one of the most deeply ingrained myths in our
culture. It is the myth of the heroic, isolated, created genius. Largely a product of Romanticism
and Socialism in the 19th Century. It is now that it implies in our culture, for movies like Luck for Life and the Avenue in the Existing, and when you pick an artist, you pick Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, you pick the Salter Petson as Michelangelo, the Black artist, and we have this notion that the artist is this solitary genius,
Working Alone and No One Should Interfere With Him, and it's essentially this idea that any interference with the pure individual activity of knowledge is corruptive, is debasement, and above all, this is where we get the idea that the commercialization of art is truly negative.
Management, Charles Dickens, leading faculty, Neil Austin, DePonte, are not a very romantic,
positive vision of these people, liberal-oriented fanatic, only to be really too gay to accept
their demise.
Charles Dickens, the most famous author of his day, again a multi-millionaire of many
current dollars.
Even one of those authors was commercially successful, some more than others, but he forgot to expect people simply to wait until the addicts, they were very much involved in commercial marketing, even Jim Austin, but certainly De Branco, certainly Hackeray will talk about when we get to the 19th century novel, the ways in which the
It was a true example of commercially produced art, and the artists were in great conjunction with their editors, their publishers, to make as much money as possible, and I think their art is actually better as a result.
Subjective to the Westinic, Leverage, Millenium, English major, Princeton, I'm actually sure they taught them a little better than that.
But there is this notion that a great artist is never recognized in his own day,
that some of their most tragic figures, they have to suffer, they're scorned in their own day.
on Day. This is a notion that originated roughly around 1800, very much a product of the American
era, and in fact it is a reaction to the beginning of mass culture as a phenomenon. Now I'm going
I'm going to talk about 50 years, the first example, 50 years, the first example of half-culture,
and there's some truth to it, I don't know if I was going to be saying it, but basically,
when we're talking about numbers in the medium, we'll, you know, thousands of people saw a
at its peak. It's only in the 19th century that you start to see the number of millions appear in Tulsa. I believe it's towards the end of the 19th century. I think maybe in the 1880s that you get the first newspaper with a million circulation in England. I think it's the Daly Mirror, not the New York one, but I think it's roughly in the 1880s that a newspaper cracked a million circulation
and Human. That's what it's all about. It's all about the paper, of steam-driven printing presses, of line-of-type studies. It's only the sort of technological development that made that kind of mascot so popular.
But it's really starting in the early 19th century, as you start to get more thoughts on the water part, it's really the first best-selling novelist, and that's around the 1820s, the 1830s,
and you get the first book that is trying hundreds of thousands of, and again, all of this is
happening in technological development, but this is the point where you start to see these
romantic artists reacting against mass culture and deciding there must be something wrong
It's really the romantics who start to develop a notion of an elite culture and of the very
split between high culture and pop culture, or artistic culture and commercial culture.
Basically, the entire town is very good at stepping into this, up until about 1800, most
Most of the great artists you think of were popular, and thought of themselves as popular, and still are popular.
Mozart, Beethoven, all the great painters certainly faced fear.
The notion that the artist is somehow graphic and isolated, that's very much a product of the 19th century.
in the 19th century, all of themselves up to that point are very much part of society.
They may always like it, but sometimes the dog is in so low it's going through with all
this, like Leonardo and Michelangelo, and they told them they don't know enough about
Shakespeare, they say one way or the other, but by and large, artists up to 1800 were
willing to make at least a superficial piece of society, because they were always in a
in some form of public, and they basically, to get their support, had to somehow compromise
a lot of people's taste, but on the other hand, they were lacking to be part of society
and to be lionized by it, to enjoy the fame, to enjoy the financial reward, provide leave,
of the 19th Century Artists, to the feel that they would somehow be left by the wayside.
You see it, for example, in the 19th century, even, with the poets reacting
to the new supremacy and success of the novelists.
And again, up through roughly 1800, the artists we tend to think of as the great period were also
and the Best Gallery for the Most Popular Artists.
The reason for that is we're talking about a vastly reduced public up to that point.
When we're talking about up to 1800, when we're talking about books, we're talking about things, books that sold in the thousands.
We're talking about concerts that were prevented to maybe a couple of thousand people at most.
The Artists we think of as great enjoyed a bad popularity in a very much reduced public because the public was so limited that its taste was so much higher in fact because the fact is up until 1800s the world was so poor that most human beings didn't have the luxury of paying attention to the art
and the theory about art, all of the steps that we're working to stay together living in stride
and you know, the average person in the union up there, you know, couldn't take it going to a concert,
couldn't take it going to taking a time off to go to a meeting, couldn't take it going to a play,
I mean, it took you an hour of your life, just basically to keep life and living together.
It was a great science of capitalism by the 19th century of raising the standard of living
in any place that was tried out that created a mass audience for us by simply taking the
pressure and necessity of such a large number of people.
And it's actually incredible to look at the figures of the 19th century even about wealth
in the 18th century and the sake of all the great novels written in early default
and the system of common thought.
That was inconceivable in 1800.
If you had told someone in 1800 that in the year 2000 Daniel DeFoe's novels were being taught
in the university, at Oxford University, they were sort of crazy.
This is now, someone said, if you said a good design was being taught at a university,
and People That Think I Was Preachin'.
Well, again, a lot of things when we think of the Thai culture now are thought of as low peak commercial culture then and the novel above all.
And a lot of this reaction, this, this notion of the artists, as I say, came to the fact that these artists felt that they were being squeezed out of these new mass markets for literature, for example.
and, I think, and, and, the science-racist notion that art should be good had to be unpopular.
They were trying to become not actually unpopular, but most popular relatively.
And the reaction was to, to turn that into a virtue.
As you know, it's only starting around 1800 that you start to get arguments made that art,
and so on. And it leads to this notion of an adverse relationship between the artist and any kind of store of commerce. And it's interesting because, again, we, as Austrian thinkers, can recognize that the
What's going on here, it is a conception of market activity of exploitation, that is,
it's fine with the Romantic poets in England and some of the Romantics in Germany as well,
that they regard themselves as being exploited by a commercial market and speckled by publishers.
Eugen Boehm formulated this in a lot of his little public manifestos that he grew up in,
Commerce are a total enemy. And the idea is basically this, that any kind of artistic transaction is an act of exploitation, that there is no common interest, let's say, between writers and their publishers, that in fact there is a fundamental antagonism, that the artist has this true vision, this perfect vision, and somehow it could ruin
And by all the commercial pressures on it, the public is saying we've got to make the book fuller.
We've got to add a copy ending because the audience won't like this tragic ending.
This should come to light.
And so on.
And this is pretty much the radius of this idea that the only thing that publishers, editors, booksellers,
and the most glorious poetry ever written is only a feeble shadow of the course of original contention.
He's a feeble shadow of what Shakespeare originally thought of. Unfortunately, he had to write it down.
He had to write it down. He had to write it down. He had to write it down.
The theory of money is a key shadow of what Facebook originally thought of. Unfortunately,
it had to write it down. Unfortunately, it had to work it off with a steward company and
write it far to rob their arm in the pool and, you know, have to play around with it anyway.
You know, the idea, the study fact is perfectly romantic in the sense that the work of art
The work of art exists in this ethereal, ideal state, and any attempt to transplant it into material reality inevitably compromises and corrupts it.
Now, there's some truth to this. Otherwise, it wouldn't be such a friendly myth, and all this wouldn't be so firmly believed in it.
and we will look at examples, particularly when we get to the Victorian novel, of the way the pressures of the audience did make life hard for the novel and in some cases ruined their work and certainly the history of movies and television is so bad of directly forced to change their endings and television shows dumbed down and so on.
There are inevitable issues in which art has been compromised, but, again, that happens in any system,
happens on the industry side of things, and it happens on the industry side as well.
The effort to please people sometimes makes the work of art worse, but not always, and maybe even not on balance.
and what we're looking at is a more Austrian conception of the relationship of art to commerce,
which suggests that art is part of a social process and that a social process is one of cooperation
in which people have in fact a common interest and it is tough to say this to many artists.
A publisher is not interested in ruining your book.
Sometimes the publisher may in fact ruin it.
But let's not run so long for you that in fact, like every other economic transaction,
there's a common interest there.
And every time these publishers, let's say, suggest a thing, they're trying to improve it.
They may be wrong, that's in the nature of human life, but in fact, far from being an
exploitative relationship, the relationship of publisher or author, like any other economic
relationship, is one of common interest. Now, any business transaction, some of them will
go to the state and produce the wrong outcome for the quantity of participants, but that
And so, what I'll be talking about is the reason which art actually includes from being part of a market, and largely through a process of feedback, that this artistic dream of so many writers, poets, musicians, pageants, all, overturns your nightmare.
This idea of having it all your way, of being able to produce the work solely the way you want it often proves to be a financial disaster but also an aesthetic disaster.
You've seen it in the careers of so many filmmakers. Their best work was their commercial work.
The more independent they became, the more self-independent they became.
Just a few words to answer your question about Francis Ford Cotillot, so even Cotillot would be an example of that, and so many of the rest of us are, when they have the pressure of pleasing an audience, to do their best work, and when they became famous and wealthy and could start to do just what they want to do,
and so on.
What I'm getting at is that the pressures of markets are not so negative.
I'm not going to claim they're so impoverished either.
Again, I will not deceive the fact that commercial pressures can at times corrupt all.
What I do deceive is that commercial pressures always deceive or corrupt all.
and that in fact one can study many examples in every field where the interaction between the artist
and his public has improved the quality of his art and especially the interaction has mediated
by a whole series of cultural new-mans like art-elers or editors or concert and concertos and so on.
This idea that art can be produced only in perfect isolation is a myth and in most cases
contradicted by the facts. In fact, art is a human activity, it's a form of exchange,
it involves forms of feedback as well. What I'm getting at here is that art is an example
of the Phenomenon that Friedrich Hayek calls spontaneous order and that, you know, we can
see as a reflection of the market. That is, when you see the attitude of so many of these
artists in the Romantic tradition, and I include modernism, I was a descendant of that, the
The notion is that you need this solitary creator who can produce everything perfectly
uniform solely out of his own brain with no interaction or exchange with another human
being.
It's the same attitude that economically is reflected in socialism.
The idea that the market is messy, it's chaotic, it's uncoordinated, that everything should
and more than success. What art is like the market, for every success there are a thousand failures, but the only reason you get the successes is if you have a thousand failures.
That art is very much like the market phenomenon, even without the market phenomenon, that what you need is a vast array of experimentation and then various ways of weeding out the failures.
The thing that strikes me about the academic studies of art and why it is so often marketed is academics would like art to be a predictable phenomenon.
They would like to be able to explain to you how great art is. They've never come close to doing it, and it can't be explained.
The mystery of creativity is maybe the greatest mystery of human life.
and so all of this phenomenon is very much
like the economic phenomenon often have come to understand.
It's a realm of playoff theory where things are not predictable
and that's why any kind of central control of art,
whether by the civil artist or by a government committee,
so on that that seems to be the most antithetical notion
to the Actual of Spread and Development of Art.
So, that's the overview of the kind of issues we're going to look at.
We'll quickly give you a sense of what we're doing and why we're covering it.
It's a few minutes to have a meeting here.
And this afternoon, we'll talk about Stacey and Peter as a great example of commercial art,
although complicated installation of patronage.
Tomorrow, we're going to look at, very quickly, two broad areas, art, painting and music,
and in both cases looked at the intensity between patrons and the market.
Painting and music are two great tributes to the power of painting and the power of the market.
Then on Wednesday we looked at Dickens and the phenomenon of the sterilized novel
in the 19th century which offers my key example of popular culture as a feedback mechanism
and how the very commercial sectors, though they in some ways made life difficult for the audience, also helped increase the power there are.
Then, we're through Wednesday afternoon, and by the way, the schedule says 2 to 3, it's actually 2 to 3.30 on the handout.
We'll look at modernism. I think I'll be nervous to take it in, use it very quickly.
and they are both showing how modernism is reacting to the emergence of a two-mass culture
in the 19th century and how it concerns the government support as a reaction to that.
One of those forms of government support turned out to be totalitarianism.
And on Thursday we'll look at that, people's examples of Nazi and Soviet culture,
and, as I said, these are, in a way, horrible tributes to the resilience of the human spirit that even under two of the most prolific regimes ever developed on earth, the arts didn't exactly score it, but survived and, in some cases, produced some remarkable results, but I also want to show the surprise of continuity between the so-called totalitarian approach to the arts and things that were occurring simultaneously in the United States
States and the Dow in regards to explainable, the parallels between so-called WPAR on the
art produced in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, which is really quite remarkable in
general terms.
Then we'll look at two, on Thursday we'll look at the motion picture on Friday morning
on television, at television, two examples of the purely commercial art, almost purely
and Human Rights, which for so long were authored by people like Paul Heimer as examples of what was wrong with time and time again.
They're now recognized, at least movies are recognized as a great art form. I believe television is in the process of being recognized.
And then finally we'll try to draw things together. I need to talk a bit about video games.
is now arguing for this and it's painful to be planting.
Okay, if I say that no one is perfect,
why shouldn't there be room for some government support yards,
particularly Al-Bantara?
And what I'll say is this,
I'm going to argue that, in fact,
government support has extremely negative results.
It is not just that it wastes a lot of money
and doesn't produce a good result but in fact I think a great deal of the sterility of 20th century art is a result of institutions support and I mean largely in painting and above all in music.
and so these offices are picking their pants to get out there and lose the public.
But having said that, being the free market type I am, it's foundations
and private universities want to support art and provide alternatives to market support.
That's fine.
I think there's much less of it and the money is the lies in many cases from the government.
But certainly, I have no objection to private foundations, private institutions in various ways supporting art.
I do think they need to take a look at what they're doing, the kinds of art they're supporting and how they're supporting it.
And that, you know, in fact, what has been happening is a real metaphor of corruption barred.
They're encouraging the idea that art to be great, not to detain people, has been the greatest asset of the 20th century art, and we're only now beginning to become a part of it in painting and music, so, other questions?
In your discovery of the kind of finance issues that impact that, do you have any other analysis you could qualify yourself?
I think that you, I think you may have seen the scholarship program, and it's done through the community?
Yes, I mean, it is, well, it's the glory of the Division of Labor that it has reduced remarkably
And the number of people it takes to produce the basic necessities of life.
You know, there was a point where, you know, 99.99% of the people were farmers.
Now in the United States we have to blow 3% and it's incredible how few people it takes to produce not only enough food to feed the United States for much of the world.
And that leads people up to do a lot of weird things. They'll become professionals.
I feel my whole life is in a scam. I've never worked a day in my life, except for writing papers.
But otherwise, people are paying me to do what I love doing, read books and talk about that.
That's an incredible scam! You idiots!
You know, you make me do something productive in my life for a change.
But there's a lot of us today, and you know, the line between artists and non-artists is increasingly blurred
and so on. So, yeah, it was the triumph of the division of labor that it allowed increasing
numbers of people not to have to be concerned with the basic assessment of life and to be
able to do something higher in some sense. This is what Aristotle saw that we could,
You know, insofar as we view the assessment of life, you know, animals do that, other animals do that, as I would say, but we are the animal that does something beyond that, and we do it because we form these cities that allow us to do these things.
Well, how do you summarize that sense of victimology as a focus spin among the artists?
Well, actually, you know, it's easy, but I'd say that these developments are part and parcel of the enormous emergence of victimology in the 19th century.
People sense that they're being exploited. You know, I mean, that's the, you know,
and, you know, the great appeal of Marxism to this day in which we come to know if we are being exploited by class and being exploited by race or gender or ethnicity, there are, well, Mises is very good about this in the anti-capitalist mentality, it's the book I put on, yeah, I put on the reading list, that is, the work he dropped on the populism is that it does generate
and so it's very easy for people to react, not for the general lives of the standard of living but for the relative rates and that's what you start to see, I mean it's incredible when you look at the 19th century, you know it's hard to quantify this but according to some standards, you know, the standard of living quadruples, quadruples, quadruples, quadruples, quadruples, quadruples,
in England in the course of the 19th century, but not equally for all people, and when everybody
is burnt poor and completely reduced to excesses, they don't even notice what's going on elsewhere.
But you can look back at what you did, it made everybody wither, but not at the same
rate, and so all of these starts to develop as a new phenomenon in the 19th century.
And artists were one of the groups, and as Mises points out, it's very easy for artists
to say, you know, I'm so much more talented than these businessmen, why are they getting
all the rewards? And so I think, I think artists began to think of themselves as victims at
the same time as large numbers of people started to think of themselves as victims. They happened
to be more articulate, especially writers, but things, you know, they can see that, so
So in some ways their voice was heard sooner and louder and more widespread, but, you know,
it's in a way the strategy of capitalism that it's very engine of development is inequality.
It's some people being rewarded more than others.
So the only bodies standing are limited in the case, but again not at the same rate.
So it's very easy for people to get more obsessed with not the fact that they've gotten richer,
And this is what someone else has got to do with any more of it.
If I did it, it would be that wonderful play.
But then it's just that the ball whoops.
Yeah.