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NOTE The Economic Basis of Culture

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It's a wonderful opportunity to put together some thoughts I've been having about the nature of culture and economics.

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I will begin a few words about my qualifications here, or my lack of qualifications.

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I should point out that I don't have a graduate degree in economics.

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I don't have an undergraduate degree in economics.

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In fact, I never took a course in economics during my undergraduate days.

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So my mind is completely untouched by mainstream economics.

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I'm qualified to talk on the subject.

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In history, I took three courses on economics during my high school years.

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Two of them were with Ludwig von Mises, so that does qualify me a bit.

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I should also add on almost every subject I'm going to talk about,

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I have no formal training, except maybe English literature.

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I do have a PhD in that.

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But music, painting, I'm all self-taught in those regards.

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So take a lot of what I'm going to be saying with a grain of salt.

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I will be largely lecturing Mises' seminar. I used to come in and lecture for an hour and a half, and I will take that as my model today, but I'll try to leave time for questions at the end.

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And I'm going to be very much available to you during the week to talk about things in detail and in person.

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One last thing, I got here last night and ate in a fast-food Chinese restaurant and I found the following fortune cookie,

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you will receive unexpected support over the next week, accept it graciously.

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So you guys can't falsify a fortune cookie, so be nice to me.

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Okay, culture, the final frontier.

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This really is the last battleground between Marxism and free market economics.

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In every other area, Marxism stands categorically defeated.

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The 20th century saw one reputation after another of Marxism in theoretical terms,

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and in practical terms, Marxism proved to be a disaster when communism was tried out in various countries around the world.

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And in many ways the 20th century marks a vast retreat on the part of Marxism

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and it's ended up holed up in English departments and other humanities departments around the world.

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Essentially the only defense now of Marxism is in cultural terms.

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The Marxists more or less understand they've lost the economic argument.

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In fact their argument now has to go something like this,

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Oh yeah, capitalism produces a lot more goods for people, but it corrupts their souls, and indeed the religious underpinnings of Marxism have emerged in the course of these arguments.

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In many ways, the most successful and influential school of Marxism in the 20th century was the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer, Teodor Dornow,

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and their argument is essentially an argument against capitalism as mass culture.

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The argument that capitalism is the realm of mass production.

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The famous essay by Walter Benjamin, a kind of sidekick of the Frankfurt School,

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The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,

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that the mass production of any work of art destroys its aura, ruins it.

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Mass productions of, reproductions of great works of art destroy them.

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And it's a curiously aristocratic and elitist argument.

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It in fact objects to one of the best aspects of capitalism.

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Its ability to deliver the goods and to take items that were originally luxury items

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and make them available to the mass of people.

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But in general, you get this bias against commercial culture, and interestingly enough, that has been embraced by both the right and the left.

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And there are many ways in which the cultural critique by the left is repeated by figures on the right.

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You get a lot of people who in general support free markets, but when they get to cultural subjects, balk at supporting free markets and raise questions about, for example, television and how it's debasing humanity and American culture specifically.

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so it does devolve upon defenders of the free market to come to the defense of

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the free market even in the area of culture and that's what I'm going to be

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doing this week and it is an interesting test case of Austrian economics I think

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we're going to be seeing that the principles we know from Austrian economics

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turn out to help us very much in understanding culture and also I think

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I think we'll be able to illustrate some of our familiar principles of economics by looking at cultural phenomenon.

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So today I'm going to give a general overview of what we'll be doing and trying to pose the sort of questions I'll be trying to answer.

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And so let me just begin with a sense of what the issue of economics and culture is.

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The two fields are related, but what I'm basically going to be insisting is that when you're talking about economics, you're talking about a necessary condition for culture but never a sufficient condition of culture.

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We're going to be talking about what essentially is a very loose relation between economics and culture.

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That is, I don't believe one can establish a strong connection between any form of economic system and any culture.

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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.

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One reason I've included a unit on totalitarianism, we're going to be looking at Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union,

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is to show that even under the antithesis of free market conditions, culture nevertheless was able to survive, and in certain respects, even to flourish.

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That's something about human beings. They are creative, and nothing can stop them. Even Marxist professors of literature cannot stop them.

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I think one of the problems with Marxist analyses is they treat economic conditions as sufficient conditions.

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That somehow you can look at the economics of a period and you will know then what the art is going to be like

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and that there's some kind of one-to-one correspondence between the economic condition and the cultural production.

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I intend to deny that.

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What we're talking about when we look at the economic basis of culture is simply the notion of the necessary condition.

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Without a certain economic level, you're not going to have culture at all.

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And let me begin with that point, and in a way it's the overarching point of everything we're going to be discussing this week.

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And when it comes down to this, culture is a perfect example of a very familiar principle of economics, the division of labor.

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There would be no culture without the possibility of division of labor.

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Artists are very specialized. They are people who do not produce their own means for living.

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They don't grow their own food, sew their own clothing, build their own homes.

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Now, in fact, most of us don't do that because we live in a very sophisticated economy with a great deal of division of labor.

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But it's important to identify that without a certain stage of economic development,

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a rather sophisticated stage of the division of labor, all art as we know it is impossible.

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One way of seeing this is that art is very much an urban phenomenon.

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It is, generally speaking, a product of cities throughout its history.

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The one book that I asked you to read ahead of time was Tyler Cowen's book in Praise of

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Commercial Culture.

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It's a wonderful book.

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We're cribbing a lot from it this week.

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And he has a whole chapter on painting in cities, showing the correlation between the

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development of painting in certain key cities in Europe, like Florence, Amsterdam, and Paris,

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and then on to the New World and New York.

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Aristotle discusses this issue very well in book one of his politics, and indeed the first people we know of historically to discuss the division of 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 means, Aristotle begins with the definition of the city

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He regards the city as the unit of human self-sufficiency, talks there about how families are inadequate, the tribe and the clan are inadequate, they don't produce everything we need to be fully human beings.

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And so he talks about how human beings keep moving beyond these more limited forms of organization until they reach, what he regards as a limit, the city.

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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 carts and so on, can be produced by specialized craftsmen.

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And the way Aristotle puts it is the city comes to existence for the sake of mere life, but it exists for the sake of the good life.

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That is, the city has to take care of providing all these basic necessities, and then you can go beyond them to produce what we would call luxury goods.

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And a perfect example of it would be, although Aristotle doesn't use this, is the Greek theater, say the great theater of Athens.

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When Athens was created as a city, it wasn't because people said, gee, we really need a theater.

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Life's boring here in the cave. If only we had a theater. That's not the way they were thinking.

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They banded together for the sake of defense and economic production.

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They weren't even thinking theater when they founded the city in the dim shrouds of antiquity.

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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 this surplus.

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You have enough food so that there are some people who don't have to spend all their time producing the food they eat. And you start to have some wealthy merchants who can pay for the chorus in the theater and so on.

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Once you have a city, you can then think about having a theater.

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And Aristotle's point would be that actually then makes you a full human being,

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having things like these theaters.

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Animals produce food, they go around hunting and gathering and so on.

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They don't have theaters.

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And so the whole first book of the politics is an attempt to define what truly makes us human beings.

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And it's these things that the city can do beyond the realm of mere necessity.

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This is very important always to remember this, that in a sense artists live a charmed life.

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They are this set of human beings who don't worry about feeding themselves, clothing themselves, housing themselves,

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Basically asking all the rest of us to do that for them, so that they can produce this higher thing, this good that enhances our lives, art.

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I like to think back to the foundation of art in prehistoric times.

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It was a moment when the clan was gathering to go out and hunt the mammoth, and one guy said to the others,

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You guys go out and kill the mammoth.

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I'm going to stay here in the cave and draw a painting of it.

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I mean, there's the greatest artist ever.

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Forget about Michelangelo, forget about Shakespeare, forget about Mozart.

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This guy founded art.

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And just think of the reaction of the rest of the clan.

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You know, they're safe.

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Now, let's get this straight.

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We're going to go out in the freezing rain and hunt down that mammoth

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If you're going to kill a mammoth, and kill it, and drag it back, and you're going to stay in the cave next to the fire, and draw a painting of it, that better be one hell of a painting.

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If you remember that principle, this whole week will be clear to you, that art is an exchange, like every other thing in human life.

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If there is an exchange and its original form, it involves someone saying you guys do all the work, I'm going to sit here and create.

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And when you reduce it to that essentials, you see that the artist has to offer something in return for his means to live.

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He has to provide something in return that the rest of the tribe will like.

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Maybe he conned them and said, you know, if I draw the painting of you killing the mammoth, you will succeed in killing the mammoth.

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That's a religious dimension to the painting, that he will invoke the great god of mammoth killing by drawing his painting.

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Maybe he snuck to the leader of the tribe and said, I'll make sure you're the one killing the mammoth.

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You'll become famous for killing the mammoth.

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And then the leaders said, okay, okay, great, and that's the political aspect, that's having a patron.

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Notice he did not submit an application to a committee of cavemen at the National Endowment for Caveman Arts to get a grant to do the painting.

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It's very, very significant there, but all of the economic aspect of art reduces to that caveman example.

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and it shows that artists are making an amazing demand upon the rest of us that we do all the work and they'll get to create and for most of human history they had to deliver something in return for that and so that's what we're going to be discussing the issue of how does the artist get economic support and we're going to examine what kind

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So let's come down to the three basic forms of support, and let me outline them now, we'll be looking at this all week, and basically the three forms we've known are patronage, 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

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Again, these are the questions we'll be posing this week, but let me give you an outline to start with.

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In many respects, patronage has the oldest history in art, and much of the greatest art we've ever seen has been produced by a patronage system.

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In a patronage system, there's somebody or some organization with a great deal of wealth, which gives it to artists to produce works of art, which are generally speaking commissioned.

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The two chief sources of patronage in the history of European art are the aristocracy and the church, and those two things often blend together.

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One only has to look at Rome to see what patronage can do.

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The Catholic Church has been perhaps the single greatest patron of art in human history,

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and Rome is the great monument to that.

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The Sistine Chapel is the result of patronage.

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The great churches of Rome, these are all ways in which the princes of the church,

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In many cases the popes themselves supported great artists like Raphael or Michelangelo

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in producing again what some of the greatest art the human race has ever seen.

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You just have to go to the royal palaces throughout Europe, many of which have been converted

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into art museums like the Louvre in Paris, just go to most of the great European art

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Museums have collections that were collected by royal families. As I'll

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suggest in a minute, there are many problems with the patriot system, but in many ways it

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worked. And although I'll be arguing for the market as a way of nourishing the

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Arts, I don't ever want to deny that patronage works. And indeed, what you

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have in patronage is people with a lot of money to spend, and in an often case a

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lot of power beyond just the money, who can create ideal working conditions for

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artists, free them from any concerns whatsoever, many cases make them

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extremely wealthy, sometimes even powerful themselves, and the results speak

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think for themselves. Most of the great European architecture is a result of this kind of patronage, painting, sculpture.

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You see it in literature. We'll see Shakespeare sort out patronage this afternoon. Music as well.

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And many artists themselves think of patronage as the ideal system. It is in a way the artist's dream.

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Someone just says, here's a pile of money, here's all the marble you want, here's a square in the center of town, do what you want with it.

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I mean, what more could an artist ask for? And indeed, as patronage receded, as a possibility of the 18th and 19th century, artists grew more and more nostalgic for patronage.

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and a lot of the hostility to the market as an economic support for the arts took the form of a kind of romanticizing, idealizing of the patronage system.

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So we have to keep reminding ourselves what was wrong with the patronage system and the answer is simple, patrons are patronizing.

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They look down upon the very artist that they lift up.

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That is, patrons can be very demanding. In fact, the history of patronage in art is very complicated.

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At the height of patronage, you constantly have artists complaining about it.

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Michelangelo was always fighting with Pope Julius, with his other patrons. Leonardo fought with his patrons.

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and in fact is not the perfect system because there's often a clash between what the patrons want and what the artists want to do.

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There is an awful lot of religious painting in the history of European art and I'm sure it's because artists have deep religious feelings and all that.

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It also is somehow related to the fact that the Catholic Church and churches in general were enormous sources of patronage.

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And some of these artists may have been doing what they were doing not out of deep religious conviction, but because that's where the money was.

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Caravaggio is an example who leaps to mind in that regard.

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So, patronage in a way makes the point, even in art there's no free lunch, there's no ideal system of economic support for art,

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there's much to be said for patronage, but it had its drawbacks as well.

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So turning to broadly speaking the second system of support for the arts, the market, it too has its advantages and disadvantages.

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And here it's important to see that market-based art is much more prevalent than you would think to listen to the critics of the market and commercialization of the arts.

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We have the notion now, and I'll discuss the analysis of this a little later, that somehow commercialized art is a new phenomenon,

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and largely a result of the 20th century and the globalization of capitalism.

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So it's important to remember that many of the greatest moments in European art,

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and I am concentrating on European art this week, have been commercial moments.

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As we've seen this afternoon, Shakespeare's theatre was commercial.

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was commercial, maybe the first example of kind of mass culture.

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In the 19th century, in many ways, the two greatest phenomena of 19th century culture were opera and the novel.

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And particularly Italian opera and the English novel were extremely commercial enterprises.

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Mises. Dickens and Verdi were in modern terms millionaires. They made fortunes at what they

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were doing. And it's true, when you look at the 20th century, you've got film, you've

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got television. They are just fundamentally commercial arts from the very beginning. So

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an amazing amount of what is regarded as high art today was in fact commercial in its

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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.

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And there are all these demands for government subsidy of opera, for example.

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And you realize that throughout much of its history, this is a little complicated, but opera was able to survive as a commercial enterprise.

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And so it really, just on the surface of it, if you do a quick survey of the various forms

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of art in European history, the market already looks pretty good.

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Again, a lot of great art is the result of the patronage, but a lot of great art, a lot

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of the art we prize the most, actually grew out of an extremely commercialized system

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like Shakespeare's theater or Verdi's opera.

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And the obvious advantage to the market is that it does generate a lot of money for art.

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And many of the wealthiest artists have derived their income from essentially market-based

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operations.

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Shakespeare, Dickens, Verdi, these would be examples, Rubens in painting, Picasso in painting

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in the 20th century. And so one thing the market does is deepen the division of labor.

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That's the thrust of the market. And it therefore allows for increasing specialization.

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One of those areas of specialization is all the different arts. And you can just watch over history,

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and we'll talk about some prime examples of it in the course of the week of cases where artists have seen a market opportunity and exploit it and where independently developed movements in the market have facilitated the development of the arts.

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Motion pictures is the ideal example. When Edison invented the motion picture, he did not foresee Ingmar Bergman and Frederico Fellini.

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He wasn't thinking, oh, what a great art form is coming out of this, but what a great commercial gimmick here will charge people a nickel to see these things.

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And we tend to think, oh, that's unique to the 20th century, that was the Frankfurt School's claim.

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But even things like printing, printing was a deeply capitalist development,

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and printing was a major industry throughout its history, and it was a way of mass producing things.

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and it eventually made it possible for authors to earn livings by selling books to a large market.

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In the field of the visual arts, a related development, engraving, doing prints of artworks,

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made it possible for artists to become less dependent upon individual, very wealthy patrons

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and sell to a broader-based public.

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So in general, what we're talking about here, when we talk about the market as a phenomenon, is marketing, being able to market to a larger number of people.

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And that has seemed tremendously liberating to many artists. It meant they didn't have to deal with these patrons anymore.

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And you find this again and again. Dickens celebrated the mass market for books as a way of liberating him from patrons.

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The German composer, Philipp Telemann, speaks about how happy he was to be able to deal with the commercial public in Hamburg

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and not have to suck up to these petty German princes anymore to make money.

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When the market began to displace patronage, there was a reason for it, and artists themselves embraced it and found it a tremendous relief.

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One way of looking at it is, again, and very much in economic terms we understand, the market is an impersonal phenomenon.

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The point about patronage was that it was deeply personal.

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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.

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The nice thing about the market is it distributes and dilutes the power.

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You're no longer dependent upon one person to support you.

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You've got this large, even mass audience, and, you know, they pay their ticket at the box office.

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They don't hand you the money directly. You don't have to feel so beholden to them.

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Now, every good thing comes with a bad thing in the story I'm telling,

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and the very impersonality that in some ways makes the market superior to patronage, in other ways makes it inferior.

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And again, you lose some of that warmth of contact, you're now dependent on a mass audience.

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What increasingly struck artists is how fickle that audience could be. One day they like you, one day they don't.

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It turns out they can be very demanding and you have to produce with them in mind.

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A patron, the nice thing about a patron is he's told you, this is what I want, do it.

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With a market, because it's impersonal, you have to guess, well, what do they want?

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And you have to do a lot of thinking after the fact, well, why did they like King Lear so much?

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And can I reproduce that success? And so on.

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So the market in its own way has produced frustrations.

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That's why, as the market increasingly dominates in the course of the 19th century,

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Artists who originally embraced the market started to become nostalgic for the patronage system.

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So we'll be looking at these two systems this afternoon, in the case of Shakespeare's theater,

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tomorrow in the case of painting and music.

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And we will look, again, at the advantages and disadvantages of both systems,

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because again, I'm not here to say that the market is uniquely supportive of the arts,

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in the Arts, that it's the answer to the problem, no patronage has worked very well in history.

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But one thing I'd like to stress is that the line between patronage and the market is not sharp

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and not always easy to draw, and that however they differ, they share the fact that a customer

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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.

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Again, I could draw a 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 artist and his customers and there's a great deal of mediation through dealers and art and concert impresarios and music and publishers in literature.

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Again, the nature of the patronage was very direct, as Tyler Cowen points out, we, in many cases, for Renaissance art, have the literal contracts that artists signed with their patrons, which in some cases drew up quite specifically, you know, what the statue should look like, you know, how much bronze you got to use, what you'd be paid for it, down to the last bar, and so on.

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That's not the way the market operates. So again, there's something much more personal about the patronage system, but nevertheless, these two broad systems both involve pleasing somebody and somebody's taste is involved.

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And again, it's sometimes hard to say whether one is dealing with patronage or the market.

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In Renaissance Italy, there were so many small principalities. It's true of Germany through the 19th century.

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You don't know whether to regard these people as aristocrats or just rather wealthy people who are buying art.

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And for that matter, in the course of the 19th century, as private middle class fortunes built up,

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You began to see the reemergence of patronage, people, you know, the great names of American art collecting, the melons, the frecks, the chases, the creces, I mean, most of the great American art museums are founded on collections assembled essentially by merchants of one kind or another.

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And so the market-based system can generate enough private wealth to kind of re-institute the patriot system

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and in some ways, even at its height, the patriot system was a bit of a market.

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It was a market at least competing for artists among the patrons.

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So again, I'm setting up these two categories.

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There are definitely lots of intermediate cases where I'd be hard pressed to say if this is truly market or this is truly patronage, but I do want to stress that for most of human history, artists had to please somebody, whether it was an individual patron or some kind of market audience.

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It's very important to remember that patronage still involved the customer relation because there is a tendency among some writers in this field to treat patronage as if it was an earlier form of government support of the arts.

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That because you could say, Cosimo de' Medici is the head of Florence, that his support for artists was government support of the arts.

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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,

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as if we're going to reproduce the splendor of Renaissance Florence by having the NEA in the United States.

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Still waiting to see the results.

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But, and that takes me then to my final category, government support of the arts or institutional support of the arts.

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We're, I hope we're all Austrians here, and you know that means we're very suspect of government support of the arts.

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and with good causes, I'll try to show, but I want to, you can identify the problem with, again, I'll call it institutional support of the arts, because it isn't always just government, I'm going to argue it's academic now, university support for the arts, big museums supporting the arts, big public museums and so on, there are lots of ways in which we have

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Institutional support of the arts now, which is only quasi-governmental support of the arts, it often uses government funds, but in some ways it's independent and so on.

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So let's call it institutional support of the arts, and I'll focus on institutional because the notion now is specifically to replace the customer relation.

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That's really the motive behind institutional or government support of the arts.

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Explicitly, it's regarded as a response to market failure, the idea being that the market cannot adequately support the arts,

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and it also implicitly is a rejection of aristocracy.

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That is, none of the people that support this kind of economic underpinning argument will make an aristocratic argument for,

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although I think it's actually beneath the surface and implicit in their attitudes,

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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,

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of human history, of the idea that aristocracies can support art or that the middle class can support art.

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and it's it's really explicitly a rejection of the notion of taste you can

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say that that the aim of institutional support the art is to be tasteless using

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that a very neutral term that is it's an alternative to the notion of taste for

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centuries artists had to please be we're going all the way back to my caveman

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example. You had to deliver something in return for being given your means to live, and it meant maybe pleasing the church, maybe pleasing an aristocratic ruler, pleasing a large mass market, and artists themselves, starting the 19th century, decided this scam was not good enough, it was not good enough

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Getting these other human beings to give them the means to live, because it always came with these conditions attached.

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People wanted something in return, and you had to please them, and somehow you had to give them what they wanted, and artists got fed up with that.

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And they've never quite been willing to state it openly, but occasionally the truth glimmers through.

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By the 20th century, artists are saying, we don't owe you anything, but you owe us a living.

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The humanity owes us a living.

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We should just be given the means to support, and moreover, the means to produce our art.

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And we shouldn't be beholden to anyone for that.

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And who can possibly do this? Only the government.

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And it's really, it's part and parcel of the whole development of socialist ideas in the 19th century

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And when you look at it carefully enough, you see that artists were very prominent in the development of this

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Particularly in England with people like William Morris and John Ruskin

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And it's basically this notion that the world owes artists a living

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And not now in return because they make life better although the artists insist they do

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But just it owes them a living and they don't owe anything in return

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And the only way to bring that about is to get something that completely substitutes for the customer relation and the notion of taste.

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That the taste of the patron governs the art or the taste of the massed audience governs the art.

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And so we get the notion of institutional support of the arts.

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Now notice it always somehow ultimately involves taxpayers' money.

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And so that caveman who had to go out on the mammoth hunt and was wondering that 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 exhibition of obscene art in Washington DC, which he will never see himself and wouldn't want to see, and in fact is offended at the idea of it.

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But that artists don't talk about the money comes from nowhere because it comes from tax money and you know you can see it's introducing another level of impersonality into the relation of the artist and again you can see why artists would like this.

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One finds it hard to understand how anyone would object to being given all the money he needed to live on plus whatever he needed to produce his art.

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And indeed, this, of course, is the problem with institutional support of the arts.

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If the artist doesn't have to give anything in return, why wouldn't everyone become an artist?

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This evidently has happened in the Netherlands, I haven't really studied this but I keep hearing about the fact that in the Netherlands among their 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.

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It does show you the problem that even the most magical government system can't overcome the scarcity of human resources

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and the disinclination to work on the part of the human race.

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And so if you simply announced a program, the government will now support all genuine artists.

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Everyone will become a genuine artist.

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And so even governments have to find some way to parcel out the money, but it's got to be without taste, got to be tasteless, and so we have committees.

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And that's why I stress the institutional nature of this kind of government support.

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The idea now is that you will create a new group of specialists who will judge applications

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and it will not be in the traditional market form or the traditional patronage form.

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They will not be judging if the work pleases them.

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They will have to have some set of criteria which are separate from their personal taste.

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And so we get all these bureaucratic mechanisms.

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And again, one thing to understand, I mean, no one will call government support of the arts what it really is, bureaucratic support of the arts.

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But again, we as Austrians should understand this, that what is so benevolent in theory turns out to be bureaucratic in process.

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Now I have to tell you, I've not sat on the NEA, I've sat on the National Down for Humanities, National Council, I've seen these processes at work.

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The truth is that personal taste is not eliminated out of these processes.

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because you have these peer review committees and frankly most of the time they're operating

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with their personal taste anyway.

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But they cannot state that and I think it's very important to realize that the whole purpose

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of this vast structure, the Institute for the Support of the Arts, is to deny that personal

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taste is involved.

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That's really its great claim to fame, to find a principle that substitutes for either

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the aristocratic notion of taste or the market notion of taste.

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And it is heavily academic, we're talking about grand processes here, people have to

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apply to various government agencies like the NEA or the NEH or they apply to universities

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or they apply to museums or to foundations, there are all these grand programs for the

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and the arts now. And they all are heavily bureaucratized, often with layers and layers of peer review, screening committees, central committees, and so on.

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And it's actually very socialist in its notion, basically saying, among other things, that a committee will arrive at a better decision than an individual human being.

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Pope Julius II. What did he know about building a church? Look at St. Peter's. We'll put it together by a committee.

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Well, we could have some fun imagining what St. Peter's would look like if it was put together by a committee.

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The notion is that you will come up with standard operating procedures, publicly stated criteria,

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And, you know, we have this illusion that this will produce some kind of objective judgment of art.

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Patronage, that was too subjective. The market, that's too subjective.

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No, we're going to have professional evaluators, usually, you know, to be professors of art, professors of music,

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professors of literature, so on, evaluating these things.

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And this, then, is supposed to produce a higher quality of art than the market or the patronage system could do.

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Now, the record isn't in yet, because this kind of bureaucratized support of the art is relatively recent.

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It's largely a phenomenon of the 20th century.

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Like any other system, it's not completely bad.

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And it's amusing to listen to organizations like the NEA or the EDH defend themselves,

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because they'll point to this painting that was produced, or that work of music, or this work of literature.

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and you know my reaction is you spend a hundred and eighty million dollars it's

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difficult not to come up with something of artistic value somewhere the question

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is you know what's the bang for the buck and you know I asked myself who spent

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money more wisely a Renaissance tyrant or the NEA and you know look at the

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The Renaissance tyrants look pretty good in terms of what they produce.

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Not that I'm in favor of Renaissance tyranny, but again, there's no financial way of supporting the arts that's going to produce totally negative results.

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But the question is what do you see on balance?

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I think it's reasonable to begin to conclude on the basis of the 20th century experience

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that government funding of the arts is the single worst system yet devised by humanity.

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Again, it's not totally negative. It does produce some good results.

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But I'm going to argue when we get to the issue of modernism that it actually has some built-in negative consequences.

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That the dream of this system is actually its downfall.

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The idea of shielding the artist from the public has proved to be disastrous in 20th century art,

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Art, particularly in music and in painting, that one of the things I'm going to be arguing

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is that artists need constraints, that having customers in one form or another really shapes

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artists up.

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It makes them produce better art.

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You know, the claim, let me examine this in detail, the claim that leads to the call for

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for Government Funding of the Arts is that customers ruin art, and specifically that to the extent art has to rely on the market, it gets debased.

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The very notion of commercialization frightens people, that if an artist is serving a public, that's the worst possible thing that can happen.

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And so much of the economic developments in art funding in the 20th century have specifically been designed to shield artists from any kind of commercial pressures, which means to shield them from having to please anybody.

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That's what foundations will say when they're offering music to composers and painters. It's what museums will say.

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It's essentially the very notion behind universities and their having departments of painting and

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music composition and so on.

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And you know, this was supposedly the dream.

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Look at the music and painting that's resulted in most cases.

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It doesn't please anybody.

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And indeed that becomes its claim to fame now.

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,"Oh, you don't like my music, it must be great." We'll talk about that in a little while.

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But that's my point about this kind of institution or government funding.

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Its specific aim is to break that original bargain between the caveman painter and the tribe.

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That he'd have to come up with something the tribe would like.

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in return for not having to go out on the hunt and staying in the warm cave.

374
00:49:59.440 --> 00:50:06.440
Now the notion is that the government will shield them from that or just give them the money.

375
00:50:06.440 --> 00:50:14.440
Now it still has to discriminate on some basis, and so you start to see new elements of irrationality enter.

376
00:50:14.440 --> 00:50:19.440
You know, the argument against the mass audience is it's irrational.

377
00:50:19.440 --> 00:50:26.440
is irrational. Look at the movies they like. Look at the television they watch. And their opinions change.

378
00:50:26.440 --> 00:50:32.440
The argument against patrons, against these Renaissance tyrants, is they're irrational.

379
00:50:32.440 --> 00:50:42.440
And so, like so many other things in the 20th century, we will substitute government rationality for these market failures.

380
00:50:42.440 --> 00:50:51.400
Failures. We will create committees of experts. The arts are one more example of the administered

381
00:50:51.400 --> 00:50:59.920
world in the 20th century, of this notion that experts can do things better than mass

382
00:50:59.920 --> 00:51:06.000
audiences can. And when you start to look, though, at how these experts operate, you

383
00:51:06.000 --> 00:51:10.760
know, they're just a bunch of academics. They're just a bunch of committees. And believe me,

384
00:51:10.760 --> 00:51:16.360
I've sat on many and many of these committees and you start to see that new

385
00:51:16.360 --> 00:51:23.280
irrationalities enter into the system. Now again I shouldn't tell tales out of

386
00:51:23.280 --> 00:51:28.120
school, I shouldn't tell tales of my experience with the National Down for the Humanities

387
00:51:28.120 --> 00:51:33.200
but let me tell you a few stories here. National Down for Humanities is a

388
00:51:33.200 --> 00:51:38.960
national organization and at some point it realized there are 50 states in the

389
00:51:38.960 --> 00:52:08.960
in the United States, and each one of these states has two senators, and therefore it began to dawn on the NEH that, you know, its grants ought to be a little more evenly distributed, and maybe all of them shouldn't go to New York State, where all those artists and those intellectuals are settled, and so you began to see that geographic distribution became important in NEH grants, not quite by quotas or mathematically even,

390
00:52:08.960 --> 00:52:21.960
They began to be aware that they'd better please all 100 of those senators, and one way to do that was to distribute money around, especially to the so-called state councils of the humanities.

391
00:52:21.960 --> 00:52:29.960
Now, any study of human history would suggest that artistic talent is not evenly distributed throughout the 50 states of the United States.

392
00:52:29.960 --> 00:52:35.960
And, in fact, you know, the studies of people like Calvin have shown that, in fact, art's concentrated in big cities.

393
00:52:35.960 --> 00:52:49.960
in New York City. And there probably are a larger number of worthwhile painters, if there were any, in New York City than there are in Fargo, North Dakota, let's say.

394
00:52:49.960 --> 00:52:57.960
And so it might, in fact, be rational that more arts grants should go to New York State than should go to North Dakota.

395
00:52:57.960 --> 00:53:03.960
And in fact, that's what happens, but still the NEH, they have to work against that.

396
00:53:03.960 --> 00:53:13.960
In other words, politics introduces its own form of irrationality into this so-called rational objective expert system of distributing the money.

397
00:53:13.960 --> 00:53:22.960
I won't go into great detail about the issue of political correctness, but it certainly looms very large in government funding of the arts now.

398
00:53:22.960 --> 00:53:52.960
and it starts now, that the grants have to be evenly 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 political validity, so again, quite simply, the system which claims now to be rational, objective and not to have biases

399
00:53:52.960 --> 00:54:00.160
and not to involve the idiosyncrasy of aristocratic taste or the fickle market.

400
00:54:00.160 --> 00:54:10.840
It turns out to be just as whimsical and idiosyncratic and maybe even more so than any other system.

401
00:54:10.840 --> 00:54:15.680
And as I say, I don't think it's solved the problem it claimed to solve.

402
00:54:15.680 --> 00:54:21.240
Now artists suck up to government committees just the way they sucked up to patrons or

403
00:54:21.240 --> 00:54:38.240
or to the vast art market, actually they've ended up imprisoned in a system they're increasingly growing to despise and they've sold their soul to a bureaucratic committee instead of to the market or some Renaissance tyrant.

404
00:54:38.240 --> 00:54:58.240
So, you know, again, I really feel that art can be produced under any kind of financial system, contrary to, you know, something I would not argue that the commercial system is uniquely superior to patronage.

405
00:54:58.240 --> 00:55:04.040
I've got a warm spot in my heart for Renaissance tyrants and aristocracies in general.

406
00:55:04.040 --> 00:55:11.640
I do feel that the one form of support that looks bad historically is government support

407
00:55:11.640 --> 00:55:12.640
of the arts.

408
00:55:12.640 --> 00:55:17.560
And when we get to that, I'll actually argue in greater detail why I think it's had a more

409
00:55:17.560 --> 00:55:21.960
predominantly negative effect than positive.

410
00:55:21.960 --> 00:55:27.960
An artist is going to pay one way or another for getting that support.

411
00:55:27.960 --> 00:55:34.960
He may have to kowtow to a patron. He may have to please a large audience.

412
00:55:34.960 --> 00:55:39.960
He's not going to be free by working for the government directly or indirectly.

413
00:55:39.960 --> 00:55:46.960
He's going to have to give the government what it wants and the direction of contemporary art.

414
00:55:46.960 --> 00:55:55.960
in this country, you know, shows effects of the fact of what kind of art government committees support or institutional committees in general.

415
00:55:55.960 --> 00:56:07.960
So one last point as an overview here, and again, we're going to trace these various systems throughout the history of European art in the course of the week.

416
00:56:07.960 --> 00:56:14.960
I want to talk a bit in greater detail about what I'm going to call the myth of the romantic artist

417
00:56:14.960 --> 00:56:19.960
because that's the thing that we're going to be trying to counter this week.

418
00:56:19.960 --> 00:56:29.960
And this, in some ways, it's one of the most deeply ingrained myths in our culture.

419
00:56:29.960 --> 00:56:41.960
It is the myth of the heroic, isolated, creative genius, largely a product of romanticism and the 19th century.

420
00:56:41.960 --> 00:56:50.960
It has now been inscribed in our culture through movies like Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy.

421
00:56:50.960 --> 00:56:58.960
When you picture an artist, you picture Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh, you picture Charlton Heston as Michelangelo.

422
00:56:58.960 --> 00:57:15.960
Michelangelo, god-like artist, and we have this notion that the artist is this solitary genius working alone and no one should interfere with him.

423
00:57:15.960 --> 00:57:24.960
And it's essentially this idea that any interference with the pure individual activity of the artist is corruption.

424
00:57:24.960 --> 00:57:31.960
It's the basement. Above all, this is where we get the idea that the commercialization of art is purely negative.

425
00:57:31.960 --> 00:57:35.960
Now, I'm going to, at various points, illustrate this conception of a culture.

426
00:57:35.960 --> 00:57:44.960
But to start off with, this is from an interview and TV guide, which is the main source of my information on culture in general.

427
00:57:44.960 --> 00:57:49.960
And it's an interview with Wentworth Miller, you know, the star of Prison Break.

428
00:57:49.960 --> 00:57:56.960
And I'm going to claim I'm smart here. I am not handsomer than Wentworth Miller.

429
00:57:56.960 --> 00:58:01.960
I mean, that's kind of obvious, but I don't want to give him his due. The guy is incredibly handsome.

430
00:58:01.960 --> 00:58:04.960
And he's a good actor, too. I like Prison Break.

431
00:58:04.960 --> 00:58:10.960
But TV guys have this feature where people could write in to Wentworth Miller and ask him questions.

432
00:58:10.960 --> 00:58:13.960
And I don't think they realized at the time he's a Princeton graduate.

433
00:58:13.960 --> 00:58:17.960
So some of the answers were a little strange.

434
00:58:17.960 --> 00:58:23.960
What five people in history do you admire? writes Angela from Detroit.

435
00:58:23.960 --> 00:58:26.960
And his answer is, and he was an English major,

436
00:58:26.960 --> 00:58:30.960
I've always had an interest in the English novelists from the 1800s,

437
00:58:30.960 --> 00:58:32.960
which is why I became an English major.

438
00:58:32.960 --> 00:58:36.960
Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, Jane Austen, the Brontes,

439
00:58:36.960 --> 00:58:40.960
I have a very romantic, tragic vision of these people

440
00:58:40.960 --> 00:58:46.960
scribbling away in some attic, only to be really appreciated after their demise.

441
00:58:46.960 --> 00:58:56.460
Well, you know, Charles Dickens, the most famous author of his day, again a multi-millionaire in current dollars,

442
00:58:56.460 --> 00:59:11.960
every one of those authors was commercially successful, some more than others, but these were not tragic people scribbling it away in some attic,

443
00:59:11.960 --> 00:59:31.960
They were very much involved in commercial markets, even Jane Austen, but certainly the Brontes, certainly Thackeray, will talk about when we get to the 19th century novel, the ways in which it was a true example of commercially produced art.

444
00:59:31.960 --> 00:59:43.460
and the artist's work in great conjunction with their editors, their publishers, to make as much money as possible

445
00:59:43.460 --> 00:59:47.460
and I think their art was actually better as a result.

446
00:59:47.460 --> 00:59:56.960
So as you can see, Webworth Millers, the English major at Princeton, I'm actually sure they taught him a little better than that there.

447
00:59:56.960 --> 01:00:13.960
But there it is, this notion that a great artist is never recognized in his own day, that somehow they're all tragic figures, they have to suffer, they're scorned in their own day.

448
01:00:13.960 --> 01:00:23.160
This is a notion that originates roughly around 1800, very much a product of the Romantic Era.

449
01:00:23.160 --> 01:00:35.160
And in fact, it is a reaction to the beginning of mass culture as a phenomenon.

450
01:00:35.160 --> 01:00:41.560
Now I'm going to talk this afternoon about Shakespeare's first example, his theatre as the first example of mass culture.

451
01:00:41.560 --> 01:00:49.560
and there's some truth to that or otherwise I wouldn't be saying it, but basically when we're talking about numbers in the millions,

452
01:00:49.560 --> 01:01:07.560
thousands of people saw a Shakespeare play at its peak, it's only in the 19th century that you start to see the number a million appear in culture.

453
01:01:07.560 --> 01:01:17.560
I believe it's towards the end of the 19th century, I think maybe the 1880s, that you get the first newspaper with a million circulation in England.

454
01:01:17.560 --> 01:01:27.560
I think it's the Daily Mirror, not the New York one, but I think it's roughly in the 1880s that a newspaper cracks a million circulation in England.

455
01:01:27.560 --> 01:01:38.560
That's a result of capitalism. It's a result of cheap paper, of steam-driven printing presses, of linotypes.

456
01:01:38.560 --> 01:01:43.560
I mean, it's only a series of technological developments that made that kind of mass culture popular.

457
01:01:43.560 --> 01:01:53.560
But it's really starting in the early 19th century that you start to get mass cultural phenomena.

458
01:01:53.560 --> 01:02:01.560
Walter Scott is really the first best-selling novelist, and that's around the 1820s.

459
01:02:01.560 --> 01:02:09.560
Dickens, 1830s, you get the first books that are selling in the hundreds of thousands.

460
01:02:09.560 --> 01:02:15.560
And again, all because of capitalism and technological developments.

461
01:02:15.560 --> 01:02:33.560
But this is the point where you start to see these romantic artists reacting against mass culture and deciding there must be something wrong with it, because they're not part of it.

462
01:02:33.560 --> 01:02:47.560
It's really the romantics who start to develop the notion of an elite culture and of the very split between high culture and pop culture, or artistic culture and commercial culture.

463
01:02:47.560 --> 01:03:01.560
Basically, and Tiger Cowan is very good at sketching this book, up through to about 1800, most of the great artists we think of were popular, and thought of themselves as popular, and sought popularity.

464
01:03:01.560 --> 01:03:09.560
Mozart, Beethoven, all the great painters, certainly Shakespeare.

465
01:03:09.560 --> 01:03:22.560
The notion that the artist is somehow tragic and isolated, that's very much a product of the 19th century.

466
01:03:22.560 --> 01:03:26.560
Artists thought of themselves up to that point as very much part of society.

467
01:03:26.560 --> 01:03:30.560
They didn't always like it. They sometimes rebelled against their role.

468
01:03:30.560 --> 01:03:36.360
That's certainly true with artists like Leonardo and Michelangelo and artists like Mozart and Beethoven.

469
01:03:36.360 --> 01:03:39.440
We don't know enough about Shakespeare to say one way or the other.

470
01:03:39.440 --> 01:03:48.360
But by and large, artists up through 1800 were willing to make at least a superficial piece with society

471
01:03:48.360 --> 01:03:54.040
because they were always in a customer relation to some form of public.

472
01:03:54.040 --> 01:04:03.040
and they basically, to get their support, had to somehow compromise with other people's taste.

473
01:04:03.040 --> 01:04:11.040
But on the other hand, they were happy to be part of society and to be lionized by it.

474
01:04:11.040 --> 01:04:17.040
They enjoyed the fame, they enjoyed the financial rewards for a variety of reasons.

475
01:04:17.040 --> 01:04:21.040
They might be happy or unhappy at any given moment, but they didn't think of themselves

476
01:04:21.040 --> 01:04:27.040
is tragically isolated from the rest of the world.

477
01:04:27.040 --> 01:04:36.040
It's really this image of the artists we have today up in the attic, scribbling away, not achieving recognition,

478
01:04:36.040 --> 01:04:47.040
very much a product of 19th century ideas, and it seems to be a reaction by 19th century artists

479
01:04:47.040 --> 01:04:51.040
to the fear that they were somehow being left by the wayside.

480
01:04:51.040 --> 01:04:55.040
You see it, for example, in the 19th century in England

481
01:04:55.040 --> 01:04:59.040
with the poets reacting to the new supremacy

482
01:04:59.040 --> 01:05:03.040
and success of the novelists.

483
01:05:03.040 --> 01:05:07.040
Again, up through roughly 1800

484
01:05:07.040 --> 01:05:11.040
the artists we tend to think of as the great period

485
01:05:11.040 --> 01:05:15.040
were also the best sellers or the most popular artists.

486
01:05:15.040 --> 01:05:21.600
Artists. The reason for that is we're talking about a vastly reduced public up to that point.

487
01:05:23.040 --> 01:05:28.960
When we're talking about up through 1800, when we're talking about books, we're talking about

488
01:05:28.960 --> 01:05:35.600
things, books that sold in the thousands. We're talking about concerts that were presented to

489
01:05:35.600 --> 01:05:42.320
maybe a couple of thousand people at most, paintings that were seen by very limited numbers

490
01:05:42.320 --> 01:05:54.320
of people. The artists we think of as great enjoyed a vast popularity in a very much reduced public.

491
01:05:54.320 --> 01:06:01.680
It's because the public was so limited that its taste was so much higher, in fact, because the fact

492
01:06:01.680 --> 01:06:08.800
is up till 1800 the world was so poor that most human beings didn't have the luxury of caring

493
01:06:08.800 --> 01:06:17.360
about Art. They were just desperately working to scrape together living and survive. And you know,

494
01:06:17.360 --> 01:06:23.440
the average person in England up to 1800 couldn't think of going to a concert, couldn't think of

495
01:06:23.440 --> 01:06:29.520
going to taking the time off to go to a museum, couldn't think of going to a play. I mean it took

496
01:06:29.520 --> 01:06:36.640
you every hour of your waking life just basically to keep life and limb together. It was the great

497
01:06:36.640 --> 01:06:45.640
It was the triumph of capitalism by the 19th century of raising the standard of living in any place that was tried out

498
01:06:45.640 --> 01:06:53.640
that created a mass audience for art by simply taking the pressure of necessity off such a large number of people.

499
01:06:53.640 --> 01:06:59.640
And it's actually incredible to look at the figures in 19th century England of how wealth increased

500
01:06:59.640 --> 01:07:08.640
and basically people now had time to read and capitalism was starting to produce books cheap enough for them to read.

501
01:07:08.640 --> 01:07:16.640
And it's in this circumstance that the old cultural elite began to panic.

502
01:07:16.640 --> 01:07:26.640
Going into the 19th century to be a writer, to be a literary artist, meant to be a poet.

503
01:07:26.640 --> 01:07:34.640
We now go back to the 18th century and we think of all the great novels, Richardson, Fielding, Defoe, and we teach them in college and so on.

504
01:07:34.640 --> 01:07:49.640
That was inconceivable in 1800. If you had told someone in 1800 that in the year 2000, Daniel Defoe's novels were being taught at Oxford University,

505
01:07:49.640 --> 01:07:53.320
University. They would have thought you were crazy, just as now some would say, if you

506
01:07:53.320 --> 01:07:57.720
said that Gilligan's Island was being taught at a university, people would think that was

507
01:07:57.720 --> 01:08:06.040
crazy. So again, it's typical. A lot of things that we think of as high culture now were

508
01:08:06.040 --> 01:08:11.120
thought of as low, cheap commercial culture then, and the novel above all. And a lot of

509
01:08:11.120 --> 01:08:18.920
this reaction, this notion of the artists, as I say, came from the fact that these artists

510
01:08:18.920 --> 01:08:26.920
felt that they were being squeezed out of these new mass markets for literature, for example.

511
01:08:26.920 --> 01:08:35.920
And they started to create this notion that art to be good had to be unpopular.

512
01:08:35.920 --> 01:08:40.920
They were starting to become not actually unpopular, but less popular relatively.

513
01:08:40.920 --> 01:08:45.920
And their reaction was to turn that into a virtue.

514
01:08:45.920 --> 01:08:57.920
And really it's only starting around 1800 that you start to get arguments made that art to be really good has to be really unpopular.

515
01:08:57.920 --> 01:09:05.920
This culminates in the 20th century in the theorists of music like Arnold Schoenberg, many of the painters and so on.

516
01:09:05.920 --> 01:09:15.920
And it leads to this notion of an adverse relationship between the artist and any kind of form of commerce.

517
01:09:15.920 --> 01:09:25.920
And it's interesting because again we as Austrian thinkers can recognize what's going on here.

518
01:09:25.920 --> 01:09:31.920
It is a conception of market activity as exploitation.

519
01:09:31.920 --> 01:09:36.180
that is it's starting with the romantic poets in England and some of the

520
01:09:36.180 --> 01:09:42.400
romantics in Germany as well that they regard themselves as being exploited by

521
01:09:42.400 --> 01:09:46.880
a commercial market and especially by publishers. William Blake formulates this

522
01:09:46.880 --> 01:09:53.120
and a lot of his little public manifestos that he drew up that art and

523
01:09:53.120 --> 01:09:59.440
commerce are eternal enemies and the idea is basically this that any kind of

524
01:09:59.440 --> 01:10:09.440
An active artistic transaction is an act of exploitation, that there is no common interest, let's say, between writers and their publishers.

525
01:10:09.440 --> 01:10:26.440
That in fact there's a fundamental antagonism, that the artist has this true vision, this perfect vision, and somehow it gets ruined by all the commercial pressures on him.

526
01:10:26.440 --> 01:10:40.440
Publishers saying, you've got to make the book shorter, you've got to add a happy ending, because the audience won't like this tragic ending, Mr. Tolstoy, and so on.

527
01:10:40.440 --> 01:10:51.440
And this is very much ingrained in this idea that the only thing that publishers, editors, booksellers can do is to ruin a book.

528
01:10:51.440 --> 01:10:57.440
Percy Shelley has an amazing line in his Defense of Poetry where he says,

529
01:10:57.440 --> 01:11:11.440
When composition begins, inspiration is already in decline, and the most glorious poetry ever written is only a feeble shadow of the poet's original conception.

530
01:11:11.440 --> 01:11:17.440
King Lear, just a feeble shadow of what Shakespeare originally thought of.

531
01:11:17.440 --> 01:11:30.440
Unfortunately, he had to write it down. Unfortunately, he had to work it up for this theater company and write a part for Robert Armand, the fool in it, and he had to play around with the ending.

532
01:11:30.440 --> 01:11:41.440
The idea, Shelley captures perfectly this romantic notion that the work of art exists in this ethereal ideal state

533
01:11:41.440 --> 01:11:49.440
and any attempt to translate it into material reality inevitably compromises it and corrupts it.

534
01:11:49.440 --> 01:11:57.440
Now there's some truth to this, otherwise it wouldn't be such a prevalent myth and artists wouldn't so fervently believe in it.

535
01:11:57.440 --> 01:12:24.440
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 novelists, and in some cases ruined their works, and certainly the history of movies and television show that, of directors forced to change their endings and television shows dumbed down and so on.

536
01:12:24.440 --> 01:12:35.940
There are inevitable ways in which art has been compromised, but again that happens in any system, happens under aristocratic patronage, it happens under institutional funding as well.

537
01:12:35.940 --> 01:12:46.940
The effort to please people sometimes makes the work of art worse. But not always. And maybe even not on balance.

538
01:12:46.940 --> 01:13:16.940
and what we're going to be looking at is a let's say 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 although you know it is tough to say this to many artists a publisher is not interested in what

539
01:13:16.940 --> 01:13:46.940
and Ruining Your Book, now sometimes the publisher may in fact ruin it but that's not what he's setting out to do that in fact like every other economic transaction there's a common interest there and every time these publishers let's say suggest the changes 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 exploit

540
01:13:46.940 --> 01:13:52.940
The relationship of a publisher or author, like any other economic relation, is one of common interest.

541
01:13:52.940 --> 01:14:00.940
Now, in any business transaction, someone may make a mistake and produce the wrong outcome from the point of view of participants.

542
01:14:00.940 --> 01:14:03.940
But that almost certainly was not the aim.

543
01:14:03.940 --> 01:14:14.940
And so, what I'll be talking about is ways in which art actually improves from being part of a market.

544
01:14:14.940 --> 01:14:29.940
and largely through a process of feedback, that this artistic dream of so many writers, poets, musicians, painters, often turns into a nightmare.

545
01:14:29.940 --> 01:14:43.940
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.

546
01:14:43.940 --> 01:14:52.220
Master. We see it in the careers of so many filmmakers. Their best work was their commercial

547
01:14:52.220 --> 01:14:59.620
work. The more independent they became, the more self-indulgent they became. I've got

548
01:14:59.620 --> 01:15:07.980
three words for you if you question that. Francis Ford Coppola. But even Chaplin would

549
01:15:07.980 --> 01:15:21.980
would be an example of that. And so many directors, when they had the pressure of pleasing an audience, produced their best work.

550
01:15:21.980 --> 01:15:29.980
And when they became famous and wealthy and could start to do just what they want to do, watch out.

551
01:15:29.980 --> 01:15:36.980
And there are similar phenomena in painting and music as well.

552
01:15:36.980 --> 01:15:43.380
Now, what I'm getting at is that the pressures of markets are not solely negative.

553
01:15:43.380 --> 01:15:46.620
I'm not going to claim they're solely positive either.

554
01:15:46.620 --> 01:15:52.700
Again, I will not dispute the fact that commercial pressures can at times corrupt art.

555
01:15:52.700 --> 01:15:59.020
What I do dispute is that commercial pressures always dispute corrupt art.

556
01:15:59.020 --> 01:16:05.100
And that, in fact, one can study many examples in every field where the interaction

557
01:16:05.100 --> 01:16:16.740
between the artist and his public has improved the quality of his art and especially the interaction as mediated by a whole series of cultural middlemen

558
01:16:16.740 --> 01:16:24.300
like art dealers or editors or concert impresarios and so on.

559
01:16:24.300 --> 01:16:35.060
This idea that art can be produced only in perfect isolation is a myth and in most cases contradicted by the facts.

560
01:16:35.060 --> 01:16:45.060
In fact, art is a human activity, it's a form of exchange, it involves forms of feedback as well.

561
01:16:45.060 --> 01:16:53.060
In short, what I'm getting at here is that art is an example of the phenomenon that Friedrich Hayek called spontaneous order,

562
01:16:53.060 --> 01:17:00.060
and that we can see as a reflection of the market.

563
01:17:00.060 --> 01:17:28.060
That is, when you see the attitude of so many of these artists in the romantic tradition, and I include high modernism as a descendant of that, the notion is that you need this solitary creator who can produce everything perfectly, fully formed, solely out of his own brain, with no interaction or exchange with another human being.

564
01:17:28.060 --> 01:17:33.060
It's the same attitude that economically is reflected in socialism.

565
01:17:33.060 --> 01:17:42.060
The idea that the market is messy, it's chaotic, it's uncoordinated, that everything should be centrally planned,

566
01:17:42.060 --> 01:17:45.060
that everything has to be put together according to a single vision.

567
01:17:45.060 --> 01:17:48.060
That's the only way to achieve rationality.

568
01:17:48.060 --> 01:17:52.060
It's the only way to achieve economic perfection.

569
01:17:52.060 --> 01:18:01.060
That's what free market economics has shown to be untrue, and I'm going to argue it's equally true in culture.

570
01:18:01.060 --> 01:18:12.060
That culture, in fact, is a messy process. It involves trial and error. It involves a lot more error than success.

571
01:18:12.060 --> 01:18:19.060
That's why ARK is like the market. For every success there are a thousand failures.

572
01:18:19.060 --> 01:18:24.060
But the only reason you get the successes is you've had the thousand failures.

573
01:18:24.060 --> 01:18:31.060
That art is very much like market phenomenon. It is in fact a market phenomenon.

574
01:18:31.060 --> 01:18:40.060
That what you need is a vast degree of experimentation and then various ways of weeding out the failures.

575
01:18:40.060 --> 01:18:46.060
The thing that strikes me about the academic study of art and why it is so often Marxist

576
01:18:46.060 --> 01:18:51.620
is academics would like art to be a predictable phenomenon.

577
01:18:51.620 --> 01:18:57.180
They would like to be able to explain to you how great art is created.

578
01:18:57.180 --> 01:19:01.020
They've never come close to doing it, and it can't be explained.

579
01:19:01.020 --> 01:19:07.900
The mystery of creativity is maybe the greatest mystery of human life.

580
01:19:07.900 --> 01:19:15.540
And so art as a phenomenon is very much like the economic phenomenon Austrians have come to understand.

581
01:19:15.540 --> 01:19:20.340
It's a realm of chaos theory, where things are not linear, they're not predictable.

582
01:19:20.340 --> 01:19:28.540
And that's why any kind of central control of art, whether by the single artist or by a government committee,

583
01:19:28.540 --> 01:19:37.540
go on that that proves to be the most antithetical notion to the actual spread and development of art.

584
01:19:37.540 --> 01:19:41.540
So, that's an overview of the kind of issues we'll be looking at.

585
01:19:41.540 --> 01:19:47.540
Just quickly to give a sense of what we're doing and why we're covering it in the few minutes I have remaining here.

586
01:19:47.540 --> 01:19:56.540
Now this afternoon, we'll talk about Shakespeare's theater as a great example of commercial art, although it's complicated in its relation to patriotism.

587
01:19:56.540 --> 01:20:09.540
Tomorrow, we're going to look at very quickly at two broad areas of art, painting and music, and in both cases look at the tension between patriotism and the market.

588
01:20:09.540 --> 01:20:17.540
Painting and music are two great tributes to the power of patronage and the power of the market.

589
01:20:17.540 --> 01:20:26.540
Then on Wednesday we'll look at Dickens and the phenomenon of the serialized novel in the 19th century,

590
01:20:26.540 --> 01:20:31.540
which I'll offer as my chief example of popular culture as a feedback mechanism

591
01:20:31.540 --> 01:20:37.540
and how the very commercial pressures, though they in some ways made life difficult for the artist,

592
01:20:37.540 --> 01:20:52.540
also helped increase the power of their art, then we'll turn Wednesday afternoon, and by the way the schedule says 2 to 3, it's actually 2 to 3.30, it was a misprint on the handout you got.

593
01:20:52.540 --> 01:21:05.540
We'll look at modernism, I think I'll do literature painting and music very quickly there, but showing how modernism was a reaction to the emergence of a true mass culture in the 19th century

594
01:21:05.540 --> 01:21:11.540
and how it turned to government support as a reaction to that.

595
01:21:11.540 --> 01:21:16.540
One of those forms of government support turned out to be totalitarianism.

596
01:21:16.540 --> 01:21:22.540
And on Thursday we'll look at that, chiefly the examples of Nazi and Soviet culture.

597
01:21:22.540 --> 01:21:30.540
As I said, these are, in a way, horrible tributes to the resilience of the human spirit

598
01:21:30.540 --> 01:22:00.540
and Human Spirit, that even under two of the most horrific regimes ever developed on earth, the arts didn't exactly flourish, but survived and in some cases produced some marked results, but I also want to show the surprising continuities between these so-called totalitarian problems for the arts and things that were occurring simultaneously in the United States and are generally regarded as favorable, the parallels between so-called WPs

599
01:22:00.540 --> 01:22:08.540
and the art produced in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the thirties is really quite remarkable in visual terms.

600
01:22:08.540 --> 01:22:14.540
Then we'll look at two, on Thursday we'll look at the motion picture on Friday morning on television,

601
01:22:14.540 --> 01:22:27.540
two examples of the purely commercial art, almost purely commercial art, which for so long were offered by people like Horkheimer and Adorno

602
01:22:27.540 --> 01:22:56.540
And then finally, we'll try to draw things together. I may talk a bit about video games on Friday, a subject about which I know absolutely nothing, but I think it's only true if you can't talk about something you know nothing about, then you're really not a good lecturer.

603
01:22:56.540 --> 01:23:10.540
So, I think I have time for a couple questions. Yeah, so again, I will restate your question, but try to state it clearly. Yes.

604
01:23:26.540 --> 01:23:46.540
Well, I'll deal with that. The question is, what would I say to a mixed economy? It's basically Tyler Cowen is now arguing for this in his latest book, Good and Plenty.

605
01:23:46.540 --> 01:23:56.540
Okay, if I say that no one system is perfect, why shouldn't there be room for some government support of the arts, particularly avant-garde arts?

606
01:23:56.540 --> 01:24:05.540
And what I will say is this, I am going to argue that in fact government support has extremely negative results.

607
01:24:05.540 --> 01:24:14.540
That is not just that it wastes a lot of money and doesn't produce the good results,

608
01:24:14.540 --> 01:24:26.540
But in fact, I think a great deal of the sterility of 20th century art is a result of institutional support, and I mean largely in painting and above all in music.

609
01:24:26.540 --> 01:24:33.540
These artists need to kick in their pants to get out there and please the public.

610
01:24:33.540 --> 01:24:48.540
But having said that, being the free market type I am, if foundations and private universities want to support art and provide alternatives to market support, that's fine.

611
01:24:48.540 --> 01:24:56.540
I think there'd be much less of it, because the money is derived in many cases from the government.

612
01:24:56.540 --> 01:25:07.540
But certainly I have no objection to private foundations, private institutions in various ways supporting ARC.

613
01:25:07.540 --> 01:25:13.540
I do think they need to take a look at what they're doing, the kinds of ARC they're supporting and how they're supporting it.

614
01:25:13.540 --> 01:25:22.220
and that, you know, in fact, what has been happening is a real, another form of corruption of art.

615
01:25:22.220 --> 01:25:31.980
The encouraging the idea that art to be great has to displease people has been the great disaster for 20th century art

616
01:25:31.980 --> 01:25:35.800
and we're only now beginning to recover from it in painting and music.

617
01:25:35.800 --> 01:25:41.040
So, other question? Yes.

618
01:25:41.040 --> 01:25:48.580
You described the artist as kind of finding something of a unique product in your paper and examples.

619
01:25:48.580 --> 01:25:53.580
Do you have any other analogies you could draw, like of other professions, maybe,

620
01:25:53.580 --> 01:25:57.580
I'm thinking something like maybe scholarship would be in a similar category,

621
01:25:57.580 --> 01:26:00.880
and like food industry or something like that?

622
01:26:00.880 --> 01:26:06.320
Yes, I mean it is, you know, it's the glory of the division of labor

623
01:26:06.320 --> 01:26:14.360
that it has reduced remarkably the number of people it takes to produce the basic necessities

624
01:26:14.360 --> 01:26:15.360
of life.

625
01:26:15.360 --> 01:26:22.080
You know, there was a point where, you know, 99.99% of human beings were farmers.

626
01:26:22.080 --> 01:26:25.440
Now in the United States, was it below 3%?

627
01:26:25.440 --> 01:26:30.940
It's incredible how few people it takes to produce not only enough food to feed the United

628
01:26:30.940 --> 01:26:33.160
States but much of the world.

629
01:26:33.160 --> 01:26:37.520
And that frees people up to do a lot of weird things, like become professors.

630
01:26:37.520 --> 01:26:39.920
I mean, I feel my whole life has been a scam.

631
01:26:39.920 --> 01:26:43.880
I've never worked a day in my life, except for grading papers.

632
01:26:43.880 --> 01:26:48.960
But otherwise, people are paying me to do what I love doing, read books and talk about

633
01:26:48.960 --> 01:26:49.960
them.

634
01:26:49.960 --> 01:26:51.280
That's an incredible scam.

635
01:26:51.280 --> 01:26:53.840
You idiots!

636
01:26:53.840 --> 01:26:57.180
Make me do something productive with my life for a change.

637
01:26:57.180 --> 01:27:06.180
But there's a lot of us today, and the line between artists and non-artists is increasingly blurred in this country.

638
01:27:06.180 --> 01:27:11.180
What do you say about people who make beautiful furniture and so on and so on?

639
01:27:11.180 --> 01:27:24.180
Yeah, it is the triumph of the division of labor that it allows increasing numbers of people not to have to be concerned with the basic necessities of life

640
01:27:24.180 --> 01:27:28.180
and to be able to do something higher in some sense.

641
01:27:28.180 --> 01:27:34.180
This is what Aristotle saw that we could, you know, insofar as we deal with the necessities of life,

642
01:27:34.180 --> 01:27:38.180
you know, animals do that, other animals do that, Aristotle would say.

643
01:27:38.180 --> 01:27:45.180
But we are the animal that does something beyond that and we do it because we form these cities

644
01:27:45.180 --> 01:27:48.180
that allow us to do these things.

645
01:27:48.180 --> 01:28:00.780
Well, actually, you know, it isn't, and I'd say that these developments are part and parcel

646
01:28:00.780 --> 01:28:05.240
of the enormous emergence of victimology in the 19th century.

647
01:28:05.240 --> 01:28:11.020
People sense that they're being exploited, you know, I mean, that's the great appeal

648
01:28:11.020 --> 01:28:16.040
of Marxism to this day and the way it's reconstituted now.

649
01:28:16.040 --> 01:28:22.640
If you aren't being exploited by class, you're being exploited by race or gender or ethnicity.

650
01:28:22.640 --> 01:28:29.800
You know, Mises is very good about this in the anti-capitalist mentality.

651
01:28:29.800 --> 01:28:34.200
It's a book I think I put on the reading list.

652
01:28:34.200 --> 01:28:41.140
That is, the one problem with capitalism is that it does generate envy, because it generates

653
01:28:41.140 --> 01:28:46.500
It's enormous amounts of wealth, and everybody gets a piece of it, but not everyone gets

654
01:28:46.500 --> 01:28:48.060
the same share.

655
01:28:48.060 --> 01:28:54.180
And so it's very easy for people to react, not to the general rise in the standard of

656
01:28:54.180 --> 01:28:58.140
living, but to the relative rates, and that's what you start to see.

657
01:28:58.140 --> 01:29:04.780
I mean, it's incredible when you look at the 19th century, you know, it's hard to quantify

658
01:29:04.780 --> 01:29:09.420
this, but according to some standards, you know, the standard of living quadrupled in

659
01:29:09.420 --> 01:29:13.420
in England in the course of the 19th century, but not equally for all people.

660
01:29:13.420 --> 01:29:18.420
And when everybody is dirt poor and completely reduced in assesses,

661
01:29:18.420 --> 01:29:20.420
they don't even notice what's going on elsewhere.

662
01:29:20.420 --> 01:29:25.420
But the thing that capitalism did was it made everybody richer, but not at the same rate.

663
01:29:25.420 --> 01:29:30.420
And so envy starts to develop as a huge phenomenon in the 19th century.

664
01:29:30.420 --> 01:29:32.420
And artists were one of the groups.

665
01:29:32.420 --> 01:29:37.420
And as Mises points out, you know, it's very easy for artists to say,

666
01:29:37.420 --> 01:29:41.980
You know, I'm so much more talented than these businessmen.

667
01:29:41.980 --> 01:29:45.060
Why are they getting all the rewards?

668
01:29:45.060 --> 01:29:51.980
And so I think artists began to think of themselves as victims at the same time as large numbers

669
01:29:51.980 --> 01:29:56.180
of people started to think of themselves as victims.

670
01:29:56.180 --> 01:30:02.540
They happen to be more articulate, especially writers, but painters, you know, they can

671
01:30:02.540 --> 01:30:03.540
speak.

672
01:30:03.540 --> 01:30:16.540
In some ways their voice was heard sooner and louder and more widespread, but it's in a way the tragedy of capitalism that its very engine of development is inequality.

673
01:30:16.540 --> 01:30:23.540
It's some people being rewarded more than others, so that everybody's standard of living is increased, but again not at the same rate.

674
01:30:23.540 --> 01:30:35.540
So it's very easy for people to get more obsessed with, not the fact that they've gotten richer, but that someone else has gotten even more richer.

675
01:30:35.540 --> 01:30:39.540
If I may use that wonderful phrase for an English professor, more richer.

676
01:30:39.540 --> 01:30:41.540
Thank you very much.