We're halfway through, believe it or not, five down, five to go, and we've made it to the 20th century, and my topic today will be, this afternoon will be Modernism.
My epigraph is taken from an epigraph in Paul Delaney's book, Literature, Money and the Market.
This is Ezra Pound writing to James Joyce in 1918, why in Christ's names we aren't all millionaires, I don't know.
To go back to my initial parable of the cave, where I try to define the fundamental artistic transaction, let's go back to those caveman days, and imagine some progress has been made, and one day, our caveman artist says to the group, well, things are a little different now, you guys still go out and kill the mammoth, and you still bring me the meat while I stay in the cave.
The drawing I'm going to do today, don't expect it's going to look like the mammoth.
In fact, it may not look like anything, but don't let that upset you.
And that drawing I did of the god of hunting to help you guys kill a mammoth,
I'm going to cover it with mammoth dung today.
I'm feeling expressive today, but I still want the mammoth meat.
and the mammoth meat. Don't worry, but that's modernism for you.
So I'm going to ask you to rethink modernism today in light of what we've been discussing.
And this may be my most controversial lecture, but maybe modernism needs some rethinking.
And I want to do it in light of the fundamental issue that's emerging,
that we could really focus on this morning and that's this question are artists better off being shielded from the market or actually being exposed to its pressures and there's no simple answer to that and I looked at the example of the serialized novel in Victorian Britain to show that there are pluses and minuses to market pressure that indeed we can see the novelists themselves complaining about commercial pressures we can identify ways in which their novels
became aesthetically worse because some of the commercial pressures, sometimes they're too long, sometimes they're too short for commercial reasons.
On the other hand, I've pointed out ways in which the commercial system could, in many ways, improve their work through this feedback system of seeing what the audience liked and didn't like.
Just to point, you know, one obvious factor, the commercial nature of 19th century publishing forced people to produce novels at the rate of sometimes two every three years, let's say.
Sometimes they were rushed because of that and maybe had less aesthetic value. On the other hand, we have more novels out of these people.
James Joyce took seven years to write Ulysses, and I think 13 years to write Finnegans Wake.
In effect, we have three novels from his whole career.
Now, maybe we should be thankful for that, especially looking at Finnegans Wake.
But, you know, the output of 19th century novelists is much greater than that of most 20th century novelists,
and yes, individual novels may be more aesthetically perfect because the author took more time on it, but would we really like fewer novels out of Dickens in return for the few we had being more aesthetically perfect?
There is a trade-off there between writing a lot of novels with some aesthetic failings
and writing fewer that are aesthetically more perfect.
That's a genuine trade-off, and you can argue either side of the point.
But I do want to suggest, in just some sort of a basic way,
simply this aesthetic commercial pressure to churn out novels.
It was very difficult on the novelists,
But in many ways it may have left us with a richer world of literature.
Now, as I talk about modernism, I want to think about it in these terms that it specifically developed as an anti-commercial movement.
And a lot of people have been rethinking it that way.
Lawrence Rainey in this book, Institutions of Modernism, that I recommended to you,
and Paul Delaney in this book, Literature of Money in the Market.
So I didn't develop this theory, I'm just capitalizing on the work of others here.
Again, the way modernism presented itself is that it's set off on this deliberate aesthetic
course and it happened to be incompatible with commercial considerations.
People like Rainey and Delaney have suggested that, in fact, modernism set out to define itself in opposition to commerce.
Delaney quotes Ezra Pound at one point, in some ways formulating the essence of modernism,
Nothing written for pay is worth printing, only what has been written against the market.
And you can find analogous statements from Arnold Schoenberg about music.
Right down the line, you can see the modernists explicitly defining themselves against the market
by claiming that precisely if something is commercial, it lacks artistic merit.
And if something is not commercial, it must have artistic merit.
In fact, what I'm going to argue is modernism is the chief source of our anti-commercial bias.
That when you have an anti-commercial bias in culture, you're buying in to what is essentially a modernist myth.
So how did that develop?
It really develops in reaction to the emergence of a mass market for culture for the first time ever in the world in the 19th century, beginning in England and in Europe and eventually in the United States.
This is a tremendous change in human life, an ethical change, and it understandably did produce some interesting reactions.
That is, before 1800, what we think of culture was of necessity an elite phenomenon restricted to a really small portion of society.
Both Shakespeare and Love and Amadeus helped crystallize that.
in both works, culture really revolved around a court, occasionally spilled over into some popular areas and artistic endeavors like the theater or operetta.
But basically, when we now as cultural historians look back at things before 1800, we are inevitably looking at largely elite phenomenon centered around aristocratic,
and in some cases church centers and somewhat spreading out for example in
literature you have the issue of sheer literacy literary literacy rates were
basically so low that when you talk about literature up to 1800 you're
talking about things that are being read by a couple of thousands of people both
both because of low literacy rates, the expansiveness of books, and so on.
What capitalism made possible in the 19th century was the mass production of literature, the spread of literacy.
Richard Altick's book shows that. What's interesting in that book is he desperately considers every altruistic, philanthropic attempt to spread literacy in England.
Church Organizations, wonderful philanthropists who would open up libraries for the poor and provide them with literature for free.
And one after another, these projects failed. Why? Because they were not market-oriented.
You went to the wonderful free library and there was all this moral, religious literature for you to read, to uplift you, and the working class stayed away in droves.
who made the English working class literate and gave them the habit of reading the capitalist book-selling industry
because it gave them what they wanted.
Now, in the course of the 19th century, cultural elites were appalled at that result
because what they saw was that the price of widespread cultural literacy and making reading a habit
was what they regarded as a displacement of taste.
When you think about it, the logic was inevitable.
You know, the 18th century literacy, as we see it, revolves around the poems of Alexander Pope.
Magnificently sophisticated, brilliantly written poems.
But they were read by hundreds and maybe thousands of people.
The idea that you could take millions of people
and get them to read Pope's Essay on Man or Pope's Essay on Criticism, that proved to be a chimerical dream.
What is truly impressive is you could get them to read Dickens' novels.
I want to stress that we're talking about change in taste here, but it's not necessarily a pure debasement, far from it.
And when you look at what was the basis of widespread literacy in 19th century England, it was pretty impressive.
So much so now that we assign those books in universities.
So much so now that cultural pessimists lament the fact that the average college student doesn't read Dickens for pleasure, but instead goes to a movie or watches television.
It's interesting to realize that in the 19th century, reading a Dickens novel was looked down upon with the same contempt that people now look down upon as watching television and going to movies.
I was actually astounded to go back and look at books attacking reading in the 19th century.
Hard to believe, but there were substantial anti-reading campaigns in early 19th century literature.
People were convinced, in early 19th century England, people were convinced that this was destroying the working class,
that they were picking up this habit of reading.
A lot of, I'm not joking about this, this is for real, there are whole books written on this subject
And it's partially the old moralistic campaigns, the same kind of objections that were raised at the Elizabethan Theatre that people said, books are morally corrupting, you know, there's sex and violence and books that should be read.
But I was shocked to see that it was a more abstract, media-oriented argument.
You know, a lot of people now object to television, not on the specific grounds of the content of the programs,
but they say it's just a bad habit watching television.
You get locked into it, it's like a drug, you get addicted to it.
What really surprised me was to see that that argument was made against reading novels in the 19th century.
Matthew Arnold's father, Thomas Arnold, the headmaster of Rugby School,
When he was in school, one of the most prominent Victorians gave a sermon in which he condemned the horrible habit of serialized novels.
And he said, it's just awful now. These kids can't wait for the next installment of the novel to come out.
And they read it instantly. And they don't do their schoolwork. Instead they want to read the novel.
And they're hooked into it. They're addicted to it.
to it. I mean, he's not even saying anything about the content, but just about the habit
of these serialized novels. That really stunned me, but it shows you something. Every time
a new medium comes along and gets popular, the intellectual, cultural, moral elite objects
to it, you know, the way Plato objected to Greek tragedy. All these things now that we
hold up on a pedestal and contrast with the basement of our culture, they were regarded
is the base culture in their day.
And indeed, there was a real almost class panic
in the 19th century, precisely as literacy spread
to the middle and lower classes.
And they were finally getting their entertainment
and had novels being written with them in mind
as audiences that they could appreciate and enjoy.
Again, many of them were no doubt trash.
Many of them have been forgotten.
But all the novels that we now teach in universities
in the 19th century, the sense that the old forms of the cultural elite were being displaced.
One perfect way to see it is in the status of poetry.
Going into the 19th century, poetry was regarded as the highest form of literature and over the course of the 19th century.
Going into the 19th century, poetry was regarded as the highest form of literature and almost as the essence of literature.
So that you would teach poetry in universities then, not English poetry, but Latin and Greek poetry, but still poetry.
And anyone with literary aspirations to immortality, to be a great writer, would want to go into poetry.
The joke is, if you had the brains in 1800, you would have seen that the novel was where to go.
That a lot of great poetry had been written, and you weren't going to challenge Homer and Dante and Shakespeare,
but not too many great novels had been written by then.
And indeed, in literary terms, the great history of the 19th century is, in a way, a shift in power from poetry to fiction.
And much of the reaction at the time was a result of an older poetry-oriented elite feeling it was losing its grip on the world of literature.
So then, for example, the first Marxist criticism of popular culture comes from William Wordsworth.
Long before Marx, Wordsworth was a member of the Frankfurt School, 150 years ahead of time.
In the preface to the second edition of the lyrical ballads that Wordsworth wrote with Coleridge, came out in 1800, Wordsworth offers these poems as an alternative to the debased taste of contemporary readers.
and he gives a pure Frankfurt School argument he says people are more and more forced into cities
and their lives are becoming more and more monotonous and as a result they need sensation
their craving a kind of morbid excitement and they turn to these cheap German dramas and Gothic
like fiction, you know, because the industrial world has dulled their senses, and so their
taste has been debased, and we're going back to the nature and the countryside and the
roots of true virtue, and our poems are a cure for this.
Again, it's a pure Frankfurt School argument, and he actually uses, doesn't quite use this
He talks about urbanization, talks about all the things that the Marxists complained about in modern life
and offers his romantic poetry as a cure for that and an alternative to these debased forms of mass popular literature
chiefly German melodrama and these Gothic novels with their sensational plots and their blood and gore
are absolutely fascinating. It's only about four sentences in the preface. It's a lot
better reading than dialectic of enlightenment, I'll tell you. Wordsworth says about four
sentences what Horkheimer and Adorno take a whole book of turgid German prose to say.
But it's important to see that that argument was made that early because I think it really
gives a sense of the context for modernism and for much of the Marxist critique of commercial
Literature. The old elite didn't like what was happening. There was a great
power shift going on and in the, you can see it, the fact that going into the 19th
century, poetry was still a best-selling form. People like Walter Scott in his
Scottish tales like Marmion and Leia the Last Minstrel, Lord Byron in his
Oriental tales like the Jower and the Bride of Abydos, these sold really staggering amounts
of volumes for poetry. Some of Byron's poems would sell 10,000 copies in a week. I think
poets would kill for that and now sell 10,000 copies in a lifetime. Now it is interesting
if you look at the Byron's poems that sold, they were tales, get this, of liberating a woman from
from a Turkish harem, killing a sultan on the way, they turned out to be pretty blood and guts themselves.
And one of the great cultural signs in the 19th century, in 1816, Walter Scott switched from poetry to the novel.
He published a novel called Waverly, the first of his so-called Waverly novels, published it anonymously because he had a great reputation as a poet.
He didn't want to ruin his reputation by being caught writing something so vulgar as a novel.
So he published his novels anonymously for many years.
It wasn't the greatest kept secret in British literary history, but it's a sign that he
himself looked down upon novel writing.
This was a way to make money, but his novels were so successful that it really opened up
the whole possibility.
It suddenly became clear there was a lot of money to be made in novel writing, and people
like Dickens came along showed something more was even possible so what you have
is this tremendous expansion of the reading public from a time in the 18th
century when books were lucky if they sold hundreds of copies maybe 5,000
copies the figures are really astounding and now Frankenstein for
example which Mary Shelley brought out in 1816 I've always thought of that as a
is a very successful novel.
It turns out that in the whole of the 19th century, it sold only 7,500 copies.
I found that astounding when I discovered that.
That was still considered very good sales.
It sold a lot of copies, more sensitive.
If she'd had the movie rights, she'd be a rich woman today.
But still, it gives you some sense of what we're talking about, how shocked people were
When Dickens started selling 40,000 copies, 50,000 copies, 100,000 copies,
that's a major demographic shift in the industry, and it of course had consequences.
100,000 readers are not going to have the same taste as 500 readers,
though that doesn't necessarily mean that they have bad taste.
That's, of course, what the old cultural elites said, that these novels aren't bad taste.
And in retrospect, we say no, that, I mean, in fact, the Victorian public had pretty remarkably good taste,
and that the fiction they liked, we still admire today as models of fiction.
But this is the cultural pressure that generated modernism,
that a certain kind of author and artist in other fields felt this new pressure of the mass market
and we've talked about the real effective commercial pressures.
If you wanted that market, there were certain things you had to do.
You had to write a certain way.
Now, it's interesting.
Tennyson stuck with poetry and was an enormous bestseller in poetry.
I think he was handed, I think, a £25,000 check as an advance from a publisher for one of his poems.
I think that's right. That's millions of dollars for a poem.
So none of these things happen overnight.
It's not like up to 1816, people write poetry, then they stop and start writing novels.
for Writing Novels. But broadly speaking, you can watch the change in public taste over the 19th century, a shift from poetry-based popular literature to a novel-based popular literature.
And you can see how the poets began to feel left in the dust and why they start to comment negatively against commerce. You see it in Blake. You see it in Percy Shelley.
and why the novelists like Dickens are raising their toasts to cities like Birmingham that are buying their books.
But notice we're talking about an additive phenomenon now.
And I'm sure more volumes of poetry were being sold at the end of the 19th century than in 1800.
But relative to novels being sold, it looked bad.
I've listed Robert Darten, the French historian, on your new bibliography
because he's spent his whole life looking at the French book trade
and has written some remarkable books, this book on the French encyclopedia called
The Business of Enlightenment, whole studies of the development of the infrastructure
of the French publishing industry confirms much of what I've been saying.
at the English Publishing Industry, but he talks about the paradox of the situation of writers in the 19th century.
As the publishing industry developed, never had writers had greater opportunities to get published and to make money.
But that, at the same time, created immense frustration because some made so much more money than others.
and you had a kind of revolution of rising expectations.
As the markets opened up and there were more and more opportunities to publish
and more ways to make money for publishing, people in fact got more frustrated
because more people wanted to go into the publishing industry, into the writing industry
and they might in fact do much better than 18th century writers did financially
but they didn't let's say do as well as Dickens and and and and d'Artin talks about the generation of envy
in the French intelligentsia he goes back into the 18th century in this sees it actually is one of the causes of the French Revolution that
precisely the expansion that capitalism made possible led to great frustration because it was never enough and
You suddenly began to have the phenomenon of the unemployed
and employed intelligentsia, who people felt they'd been lured into writing with promises of, you know, they were all dreams on air, with promises of great success and the market hadn't met it.
And so the generation of anti-commercial sentiment in the 19th century has a lot to do with that logic.
You can understand that, that it's not that capitalism doesn't deliver the goods,
but it often doesn't deliver enough goods to sacrifice certain people.
And if it's intellectuals, that means they're the most vocal people in this regard.
One of the books I suggested was John Bailey's The Intellectuals and the Masses,
which develops this argument as well.
And so when you get to the 20th century, you have a lot of sour grapes mentality having developed in the intellectual world and the world of writers.
Again, it's astounding how many people were able to earn their livings writing in the 19th century in a new way that had never been possible in the world.
The literary world expanded exponentially.
I didn't even talk about the phenomenon of magazines in the 19th century,
because in many ways, magazines were a better source of steady income.
And many of these novelists actually made their steady income writing book reviews,
which were disproportionately rewarding.
You could get one-tenth of the money for writing a novel, for writing one-hundredth the length of pages.
I'm just making up those figures, but that's roughly what we're talking about.
And so a lot of people were able to support themselves. George Eliot would be an example.
Writing book reviews and other little essays, there was a vastly expanded market, totally made possible by cheaper paper,
better distribution systems for magazines, the elimination of taxes on magazines, which occurred around the middle of the 19th century, and so on.
You know, people complain, say, about the 20th century, oh, poetry isn't supported the way it was in the 18th century.
I mean, the number of practicing poets in the United States today undoubtedly exceeds all the poets in the history of humanity.
in every corner of the earth. You know, my university alone has three tenured poets in its department.
You know, we remember maybe 50 poets total from the 19th century in England.
And now, you add up just to the academic world, there are thousands of poets in America.
What they're complaining about, again, is not something absolute, but something relative.
They're earning livings, but they're not earning as big a living as Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise and all these people out in Hollywood.
Again, I will repeat, pound to joys, why in Christ's name we aren't all millionaires, I don't know.
Again, that's always the problem in capitalism. It generates lots of wealth, but doesn't spread it around equally.
I don't think that's wrong, but it does show why people begin to resent it.
Mises is very good in discussing this in the anti-capitalist mentality, especially when he talks about the resentment of the literati.
He analyzes the process there.
What this is saying is that the situation out of which modernism grows, the idea that the market is failing, not absolutely, but relatively.
It's failing because it's not supporting us to the extent it's supporting other people.
And so you get art novelists, artsy novelists in the late 19th century, early 20th century, basically their resentment is they're not making as much money as Dickens did.
Dickens did. Now it turns out they're not willing to do what Dickens did. Meet his audience
halfway and write novels that would be popular and they, but they resent that and so they
start to try to turn their disadvantage into an advantage or their necessity into a virtue.
And you start to generate this new modernist ideology that if something succeeds in the
in the market, that's evidence that it's not artistically good, and a totally illogical conclusion from that, that if something fails in the market, that proves that it is good, that it's not illogical.
The first premise is dubious, but the conclusion from it is even more dubious, but modernism does come to define itself precisely on its anti-commercial character.
Artists who, for one reason or another, could not compete in the markets, who did not want to compete in the markets, tried to make a virtue out of that, and that's when we developed this myth of the outsider artist, the alternative artist, the myth of the misunderstood genius, and let me take what in some ways is the defining artistic myth of the 20th century modernism, and that's the premiere of Stravinsky's Right of Spring in Paris, maybe the single most
and the famous artistic premiere of the 20th century with the possible recent debut of Pirates of the Caribbean, which set all those wonderful records.
But I suppose you know the story that Diaghilev's Ballet Company is staging the Ryder Spring with Stravinsky's music, and there's a riot.
The audience boos, stamps, drowns out the orchestra and the premiere of this great masterwork
of the 20th century, Rider Spring, is ruined.
We have paid ever since for that night.
I'd like to pistol whip that audience, if only they'd behave themselves better, because
since then we have not been able to boo at the premiere of Eddie Mada's work.
We have to sit there and suffer.
No matter what trash the artist serves up, we got to be behaved and not riot because
we mustn't ever recreate the tragedy of that night.
Now, it's a very interesting story, but it's a myth.
And let me defend that opening night audience a bit.
We now know Rite of Spring is a great, great piece of music and I love it and in fact become
part of popular culture because of Walt Disney's Fantasia in which you had a wonderful performance
by Leopold Sikowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra performing it.
The fact is if we'd been at that premiere we might not have liked the music because
it was being badly played.
Now Pierre Montour was conducting it and one of the great, one of the ten greatest conductors
of the 20th Century and a Man I Deeply Admire, and he later went on to record it with the
Boston Symphony, it's a great performance, but it was very hard for that premiere night
for the orchestra.
The rhythms were very complex, they didn't have enough rehearsal time, they weren't playing
it very well.
As you might imagine, the first time, as try hard as Montour could, he couldn't whip that
orchestra in shape to give a performance of it that was good.
But that really wasn't the problem. In fact, the problem was the choreography. Nijinsky,
greatest male dancer of the 20th century. But he wasn't that great a choreographer,
and this was one of the first ballets he'd choreographed. Again, typical, he was a great
dancer, but now he's got to be a choreographer. Diaghilev led him. It's virtually the first
And so the dancing was pretty bad and awkward. Someone recreated it. There was no film of it, but there's a form of choreography notation, and there was a PBS special about 15 years ago where they recreated it, and it doesn't look very good.
And I'll tell you another thing, Writer's Spring is usually successful as an orchestral score.
It's very seldom performed as a ballet to this day, because it's great music, but it's not easy to dance to.
Remember in Dick Clark's American Bandstand, where there were rating records, you know, 98, why, Dick would ask?
It's easy to dance to. Well, Socret de Printal would not have gotten a 98 on American Bandstand.
to this day, you know, orchestras can now play it, but it's still not easy to dance to, and I don't know if it's out on DVD, I luckily taped it, but if you ever see this recreation of what the ballet looked like, it's pretty laughable.
And then there's the costumes. I went to this exhibit at the Museum of Natural History in New York because it was this history of Diaghilev and the great master of the ballet ruse, the great empresario, and they had all this stuff of the costuming.
And I got to the right of spring and I said, well this can't have been what the dancers were dressed like.
It looks like a Daniel Boone movie. It looks like, you know, silly American Indian costumes.
And I said, well, this is just ridiculous, you know, someone's silly idea what it looked like.
And then I found photographs. And they'd reproduced them perfectly.
I mean, it looked like bad costuming out of an American Western.
So, I would have laughed. I laughed at the costumes the first time I saw them. I hate to say it.
Actually, I think in the, there's a 1980s movie about Nijinsky's life with Alan Bates as Nijinsky and George de la Pena as Alan Bates as Diaghilev and George de la Pena as Nijinsky.
I think they have a brief recreation in that. And, you know, it really was bad, even though we can now say Rider Spring is a great piece of music.
Probably, that was a failed production, and people were right to laugh at it and hooted it.
Now again, you shouldn't embarrass Russian composers like that, or choreographers.
But still, the idea that this was some great performance of right of spring,
and only the Philistine stupidity of the audience made them reject it is a complete myth.
Moreover, it now turns out that there were enemies of Diaghilev, I think, who paid people in the crowd to boo, or for all I know, Diaghilev paid people in the crowd to boo, to create a scandal and promote the work.
But, you know, there are many such stories, this I think is the most famous one, which is supposed to teach us never reject a work of art.
Would we would reject more of them? Because, you know, this was part of this movement to free the artist from any audience pressure.
That's why this myth is told and retold, and why we're told nobody appreciated Vincent van Gogh during his life.
And nobody, you know, we've actually bought the line that nobody appreciated Picasso, and that Picasso had to struggle and struggle, get a breakthrough.
He was a very wealthy man, early in his career, worked very carefully with his dealers.
That Fitzgerald book I told you about proves that.
And again, we've got this myth ingrained in us so that we're afraid to dislike any modernist work
because we've been convinced that modernist artists have to struggle, you know, TSA in the wasteland.
It took six months for the genius of that poem to be recognized and what an agonizing six months it must have been for T.S. Eliot.
It's almost laughable when you realize how quickly modernism came to dominate in every field.
Most artistic styles had taken centuries to establish themselves.
Modernism was very well organized, lots of great self-promotion, self-publicity,
and part of it was convincing us that we're too dumb and we don't appreciate great art
and so we better shut up and sit there and like it and unfortunately that's actually worked.
Now, the first generation of artists were great artists, really.
I mean, I'm a great admirer of modernist painters like Picasso, modernist composers like Stravinsky.
My problem is that this first generation, maybe the second generation triumphed in their desire to get artists shielded from public pressure.
And that's what's opened the floodgates to a virtual half-century of trash in modernist music and modernist painting.
Now, drawing upon Rainey and Delaney, I want to look into some more detail on this modernist reaction.
One of the forms it took, and this is again important for us as we think about things in economic terms,
Both Delaney and Rainey show that for all the scorn for marketing and commerce in modernism,
in fact it developed a very recognizable marketing strategy which we call niche marketing.
That is, in reaction to the mass market, these modernists, together with various cultural middlemen,
Art dealers, publishers, actually evolved very canny marketing strategies that made them money,
not at the rate of bestsellers in books, but made them quite a bit of money.
Rainey famously has discussed Joyce's Ulysses in this regard, and again I recommend very highly
the chapter in Institutions of Modernism on Joyce's Ulysses.
Ulysses was published initially in a private edition, a limited run of 1,000 copies.
They knew that Ulysses was not going to be a bestseller.
They could figure that out.
And so they pursued the opposite strategy, which was to price it higher,
produced it in a very luxuriously designed private edition, and they
actually targeted the book collecting market, not the book buying market. And
Reidy has done a careful study and shown this. Again, the myth of Ulysses as this
very high-ranking group of brilliant intellectual and artists subscribed to
the initial publication, and they can show that people like Andre Gide, and I
I believe even Winston Churchill were among the original subscribers but Reidy went down the list beyond the first few names and then you see one rare book dealer after another buying this thing because they know even at a very expensive price Reidy calculates it cost as much as a month's rent in a Paris apartment that time that's his attempt to give us an equivalent for it you go down and more than half the buyers are book dealers and they knew
This thing was going to go up in price as a collectible. In other words, Joyce's Ulysses was marketed as a limited edition collectible, and part of Joyce's remuneration was that he got a certain number of copies, which were worth more than royalties he could get at the time or any kind of advance.
And indeed, well, I don't know what a first edition of Ulysses sells for now, but let's go on eBay, it's probably a lot.
And the funny thing, this goes all the way back to William Blake, around 1800.
He despised the commercial market, yet he was a small businessman, and he chose to, he published his books himself on his own little printing press, and he chose to price them higher.
And, you know, that sounds crazy, but, you know, go through the ads you get in the mail for limited edition books and for collectible silvers, things, and these commemorative plays.
I mean, two words, Franklin Mint. I mean, this is a familiar capitalist strategy, that you take a book that anybody can buy for five bucks and put it in a leather binding and have an introduction by somebody
and tell you there's only 500 copies being printed and you can charge a hundred bucks for it.
That's the strategy that Blake had figured out. Didn't work too well in his case, I have to say.
But he made a living and it's exactly the strategy pursued in Joyce's Ulysses.
And as Rainey points out, I mean, they thought this through.
They were essentially trying to transfer to the book market what was already there in the art market.
Modernist artists, painters, were doing quite well already by the 1920s because they were selling unique collectible items and you could see already at auctions the prices were going up and this was not lost on other modernist artists, in this case the writers.
and the writers. So, there it is. Modernism, in terms of its economic underpinnings, to a large extent, took the form of niche marketing.
And that's what I was saying earlier today. Capitalism supports a whole range of cultural achievement, including everything that has been done before and all these new things.
Again, what frustrates people is it doesn't support everything at the same level of support.
And you can't say, you know, Joyce was frustrated that he wasn't making as much money, let's say, as Hemingway did,
who knew how to approach a popular market more. But still, he was in some ways making good money.
And many modernists learned to pursue that.
But also, as both Delaney and Rainey show, modernist artists marked a return to patronage.
There was a kind of nostalgia for patrons, patronage.
Again, when people had patrons, they realized what a problem they were.
And you get these statements like Dickens saying, thank God we don't have to rely on patrons anymore.
The market has liberated us from patrons.
But the people who felt frustrated by the market, they didn't see what was wrong with patrons.
They just saw what was wrong with the market, and so they longed to get back to patronage.
And typically there was so much wealth floating around in the 20th century that a new class of patrons developed.
sons and daughters of wealthy families, some people who are businessmen who have made a lot of money themselves and wanted to spend it on art and get the prestige of being literary patrons and so what you find out is that a lot of these modernist artists either some of them were relatively wealthy T.S. Eliot for example was for a rather substantial
The financial St. Louis family had enough money to send him to Harvard, for example, but other people sought out patronage, and Joyce had several patrons,
above all this man named John Quinn, who kept Joyce and money while he was writing Ulysses and helped other artists, including Eliot.
Delaney has a wonderful chapter on the finances of T.S. Eliot, where he shows how much money
Eliot had from his family, how much he inherited from them, how much he borrowed from whom.
It's actually rather amusing that Delaney points out that Eliot managed to borrow money
from people who were poorer than he was, that he had a bigger income from his investments
than some of the people he was borrowing money from.
And then you get the phenomenon that many modernist artists manage to support themselves in relatively
easy desk jobs.
Elliot worked for Lloyd's Bank for many years.
He has a great comment where he says it's tough but it's not as bad as school teaching.
Paula Stevens was an insurance executive at Hartford, Ives, the American composer, was
also in the insurance business, and so they got, Kafka, Kafka was in a job in the insurance
business.
Can you imagine going in and getting your insurance policy underwritten by Franz Kafka?
I'm looking for some life insurance, Franz.
You're not going to have some death insurance, but you can, if you go to Prague, you can still see the insurance business building, it's right on Wenceslas Square, where Kafka worked, I just, the number of famous modernists who were in the insurance business, really very strange.
But, so, you have to think that Lloyd's Bank helped support T.S. Eliot at a key point in his career.
And so, you know, again, we have this image of these starving, struggling artists.
And, you know, they're all living in nice apartments, traveling to Italy for vacations, throwing parties.
I mean, it really, it's very much one of the catiest things of modernism, the way it promotes business, to make us all feel bad about we own more money and why aren't they millionaires.
Now, and again, it's quite amazing the number of patrons who came forward in the 20th century.
Peggy Guggenheim is obviously one of the most famous of the figures.
A number of the Rockefellers supported art in various forms.
So in a certain way you can say the market stepped up and restored patronage in a kind of upper middle class form.
Now there is a dark side to this turn to patronage that is worth discussing to sort of bring out what I'm talking about in modernism.
The return to patronage was real return to patronage, namely a return to renaissance tyrants, and if you couldn't get a renaissance tyrant, a fascist tyrant would do almost as well, and his name was Mussolini.
As you may know, Pound ended up in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in the Washington, D.C. area after World War II,
because during World War II, he was the Tokyo Rose of the Western Front.
He had made a broadcast on behalf of Mussolini and fascism, and the U.S. didn't know what to do with him after the war.
Maybe at the time, the most famous living American poet, and he'd been broadcasting for fascist Italy during the war
and more, and appealing to American troops to lay down their arms in support of Mussolini and that sort of thing.
By all standards, quite honestly, he should have been executed for being a traitor.
And if he hadn't been Ezra Pound, he undoubtedly would have been.
And the solution they came up with was to say he was crazy.
To do this for Tokyo Rose, for example, who turns out to have been only one person among
a whole series of people that were named Tokyo Rose and so on. But for Pound, they came up
with a fiction that he was insane. To do this, he must have been insane. And so he was put
in this hospital. Oddly enough, one of my students' fathers was stationed at St. Elizabeth's
This time we got the new pound and he was no more insane than the average American poet
is, and he continued to write poetry from St. Elizabeth, many of the last cantos were
written there and published from there.
In a way it's a very sad story, but people are reluctant to face the consequences of
that he was this man that thought the world owed him a living and thought that there should be patronage for art, that a man like him should not have to depend upon the market to support him, that there should be patronage for him, he should be relieved of the pressure of the market and supported so that he could write these incomprehensible cantons
which could never sell adequately in any market. Now that's sort of, people know that story and they try to come up with the argument, you know, oh late in life, Pound got confused and what Rayleigh does is show that in the 1920s, Pound is already sucking up to Mussolini and dreaming of him as his new patron and it's a very
This is a very controversial argument. Again, I recommend reading the chapter in this book From the Patron to Il Duce.
And it's really quite remarkable what he discovers. He finds first that what's so interesting about Pound is he thinks this through with true logic and historical perspective,
so that in his cantos, he celebrates Sigismundo Malatesta, one of the most famous of Renaissance tyrants,
a guy that Burkhard discusses at length in his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy.
And you can see Pound celebrating this very typically nasty Renaissance despot in his cantos
and starting to make the connection with Mussolini and starting to wonder whether Mussolini is the answer,
whether he can do for the 20th century what Malatesta did for the 16th century
and could Mussolini be the new patron of arts that among other things could relieve Pound of any market pressures
and given the kind of resources he needed to be the great artist he wanted to be.
This is from a letter, a pound star to write to a woman he knew who was an American woman
but who was connected with the Mussolini circuit.
If you go down to Rome, Georgia, up to Rome, Georgia from here, yeah, in the town of Rome
There is a, it's the famous wolf statue, the Romulus and Remus and the She-Wolf, the founding of Rome, it was a gift of Mussolini to the sister city, his sister city in Georgia.
It was tactfully removed for many years during World War II, but it's back now, I think. Last time I was there it was back.
I mean, there's a lot of interesting relations between Mussolini and Americans before the war.
And this is a letter that Pound wrote to this woman asking her to help him approach Mussolini and broach a great arts project with Il Duce.
This is the source for government support of the arts.
To clear up what I said the other day, it would be quite easy to make Italy the intellectual center of Europe.
And that by gathering 10 or 15 of the best writers and artists.
The experiment would not be expensive. The whole thing depends on the selection and the manner of the invitation.
Next sentence. I shouldn't trust anyone's selection save my own. That's the key.
Give me the choice and I can put together the 15 greatest minds in Europe and Italy and we'll have the Renaissance again.
There's no use going into details until one knows if there is or could be any serious intent in the idea.
If he is interested in the procedure of Sigismundo Malatesta in getting the best artists of his time into Rimini, a small city with no great resources, I know in a general way the fascio includes literature and the arts in its program that is very different from being ready to take specific action.
Mussolini willing to back up his words and produce a cultural revival in Europe because if so, I'll lead it.
You have to avoid official personages, the dead wood of academies, purely pedagogical figures.
The life of the arts is always concentrated in a very few individuals, they invent and the rest follow or adapt or exploit.
So he doesn't want any bureaucratic procedure. Me and the Duce, we get together, we'll solve the problem.
He makes the trains run on time. He can make the arts run on time, too.
That's just what he was admired for.
The duché doesn't mess around with little things like rule of law and that, gets things done.
Let's see him do it in the arts now.
I'm not making this up.
This is great now, the last paragraph of this letter.
Italy has an opportunity now.
This is 1924, he's writing.
An opportunity she would not have had 30 years ago or even 10 years ago.
Germany is busted. England is too stupid. France is too tired to offer serious opposition.
America is too far from civilization and won't for a hundred years distinguish between the first rate and the second rate.
She will always stay content with copies.
And then, a year later, he asked her to arrange a personal meeting between him and Mussolini. It was 1924.
Now, half of this is in Italian, but I'll translate it, because my Italian's so bad.
If the topic can be opened by your asking Mussolini one simple question, or even getting Rismondo to ask it,
So long as you get a direct, definitive answer, and the question is, does he want Italy to be truly the center, not a center of European life, the intellectual and cultural center of Europe, as it was in the 15th and 16th centuries?
If he's, if so, he can have my support.
I'm sure Mussolini was just waiting to get the support of Ezra Pound.
Though he did, I mean, the sheer pretentiousness of that.
It's of Wagnerian proportions.
But it is, you know, I want, this is, and this is not an isolated or off-base example.
Don't tell me Pound was crazy in 1924.
I mean, this was the central figure in Anglo-American modernism.
The patron of Joyce, the patron of Eliot, very much closely connected with Yeats.
Wyndham Lewis, this was the man who was absolutely at the center of what we think of as Anglo-American modernism.
And that's what's going on in his mind in the 1920s.
If I can just get an Italian dictator as my patron, we can really bring Europe to life.
And again, Pound is an extreme example, but not all that extreme, and it's a story that is increasingly being told,
but the connections between modernism and the European right are quite deep and extraordinary.
The myth is that by and large modernism was left-wing, but you look at Yeats,
He was writing some very ugly pro-fascist things in the 1930s, so much so this book on the boiler has never been reprinted to this day.
Obviously in Germany there are lots of figures, the most famous of whom would be Martin Heidegger, who in some ways was too extreme even for the Nazi party.
We'll talk a bit about that tomorrow, but certainly there were sympathies with the Italian futurist painters with fascism in France, all sorts of figures that were sympathetic to fascism in the 1930s.
There was that famous scandal a couple years ago when the Belgian-American deconstructionist critic at Yale, Paul de Man, was discovered to have written pro-fascist journalism during the early years of World War II, back in Belgium.
So it seems in a way so strange to us, but modernism bought into the left and the right because both the left and the right were socialist, anti-market, anti-commercial and anti-capitalist.
And it was very tempting for artists to make a deal with either the European left or the European right because they saw it as the alternative to the commercial world.
And above all, you see this idea, we'll see it again in talking about Shostakovich,
talking about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany tomorrow,
that the attraction of the political extremes is they seem to care about artists.
They seem to give the artist a central role in the culture.
and Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, it was part of their political program to look very carefully at the arts and to encourage the arts
and if you could get on the good side of one of these dictators, it actually was very profitable to your career and all the architecture they sponsored
and the various forms of music, painting and literature they sponsored
And you can see here, Pound wants to get back before capitalism, and of course his cantos are filled with crazy American populist attacks on capitalism.
Although he's right about some of the economic issues like the gold standard.
But here you can see in an extreme form, but therefore a clear form of this terrible temptation of the modernists
that the market had betrayed them, that the market didn't sufficiently value them,
that it made other writers millionaires and not them.
And so therefore there must be something wrong with the market and the enemies of the market must then be our friends.
And in some cases it turned out to be fascist dictators and in other cases Soviet communist dictators.
But the political and economic extremism of modernism has its roots in this profound envy generated by the market system.
And again, it's not that these guys weren't doing actually pretty well financially.
These guys were not starving.
But they weren't making anywhere near as much as other people.
and that proved to them the fundamental injustice of the capitalist system and the market as a basis for culture.
And so again, the idea is that it's right across the board the notion that the proof of your power as an artist is precisely the unmarketability of your art.
that if you're really successful, your stuff can't be good
and you can offer the fact that you're unsuccessful as proof of your achievement
and increasingly you therefore get the cult of difficulty and impossibility of communication in art
and right across the board in painting, in music and in literature
literature, you get artists deliberately insulating themselves from the market, let's say, you
know, writing basically incomprehensible books, so they can't be blamed, you know, if their
books fail in the market, they say, oh, the audience just doesn't understand me, I'm too
profound to be understood, and you know, writing music that no one wants to listen to and then
Oh, this proves how great I am because the audience doesn't understand me.
Now again, I admire Joyce.
I've never been a real fan of Pound's poetry.
I obviously think highly of Eliot and Yates and teach them.
And so in many ways, I genuinely admire this generation of artists.
The problem is, once you establish the principle that art is only good if it's difficult, art is only good if it's rejected by the market, you essentially have no standards left whatsoever.
Anybody can write incomprehensible music, anybody can write incomprehensible paintings, anyone can write incomprehensible prose.
It's very difficult to tell good incomprehensible prose from bad incomprehensible prose.
I see them all the time in my grading of papers, but that's how the first generation of modernism opened the floodgates and that's where it starts to go bad and especially as modernist art tends to define itself in negative terms
and insists on priding itself on what it does not do in opposition to traditional art or commercial art.
I have a really hard time with abstract expressionism as a form of painting,
and I will ask people why I should like this thing by Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning or Mark Rothko
And they'll say, I say, what's so great about it? It doesn't represent anything.
And I say, yes. And they say, it's paint. The painterliness of it is patently evident.
You can see that it's just paint and it's not a painting of something. I say, yes.
And then, you know, they'll show you like a blank canvas, and they'll say, well, again, it doesn't represent anything, and that's the same thing when, you know, I'll ask the modernist music, and I, for example, I actually, when I was growing up, bought into a lot of this modernist ideology, and I grew to like Schoenberg's music, for example, and I know it's very easy for people to always just say in that, you know, I could say I like Schoenberg's music and go home and listen
I will say I prefer his first and his fourth string quartets and don't so much like the second and third. I don't like Gerlita, but I like Fairclay at the Dock. I like his violin concerto better than his piano concerto. I own five recordings of his opera, Moses and Aaron. I really do know the guy's music. About half of it I honestly don't like and can't stand listening to. But I actually sit there and hum along with Moses and Aaron. It opens Einziger,
Eviga algegin vertiga, it's Moses thinking about God, alone, eternal, all present.
I mean, I could actually hum the tunes from Moses and Aaron, so I'm not speaking of ignorance when I talk about modernism.
But beyond Schoenberg, I have real problems when you get to even someone like a student, Anton von Webern.
And beyond that, I cease to follow what's going on.
And again, I ask people about Boulez, and I ask them about Stockhausen, and I ask them about Henza, and Uzyachevsky, and whatever, and you know, I say, well, what's so good about this, and they say, it doesn't have any melody, and I say, yeah, yeah, and they say, well, what else is good about this, it doesn't have any harmony, yeah, you know, and they always tell me what it doesn't have or what it doesn't do, and I'm supposed to like it because it doesn't have harmony, and all this traditional art has,
and all this commercial art, music has harmony and so on.
And after a point I really just, now again I'm, maybe I'm wrong on this and I, people I respect genuinely like some of this music.
I pick up on classical music after all this, I start to like things with minimalism, some of Philip Glass and I really like some of the contemporary composers like,
All from the Baltics, Arvo Pärt from Estonia and Pieter Vass from Latvia.
As you'll see, I really love Shostakovich, by and large. We'll be talking about him tomorrow.
And he's in many respects a modernist, though in some ways an anti-modernist.
But what I'm getting at is what strikes me about so much of this art is its only claim to fame is its rebellion.
and not, you know, I can understand what Schoenberg is doing and can see the justification for the ways he departs from traditional tonality.
I still, however, would love to have said to the guy, you know, Fair Claire Tannach is so beautiful. Why couldn't you have written more of that?
And why did you have to take me on to your second string quartet in the Variations for Orchestra?
But still, you know, I can sort of see what's going on there and why he feels compelled to do what he does.
But beyond that, it does seem to me that a great deal of modernist art is just different for the sake of being different.
And it's really, I find it a failure of artistic courage and unwillingness to confront the greatness of past art and genuinely try to compete with it.
Now, what has made this possible? Because what I'm saying is that modernism develops this ideology, this anti-commercial ideology, and tries to shield the artist from the market, and the answer is government support for the arts, and above all, academic support for the arts, which is a form of government support for the arts, and here's the question.
Here's where I'll say that I think government support of the arts can be, in fact, negative.
We can now see it in the context of this larger issue I created, whether artists are better off being shielded from commercial pressures or subjected to commercial pressures.
The ideology behind government support for the arts is specifically that artists need to be shielded from commercial pressure.
That's the logic behind it. It's specific, you know, it's like no commercial artists need to apply for these grants.
And, you know, the argument in favor of this is it can't hurt.
You can get in arguments about the economics of it, but you basically feel like saying it's neutral to good.
And for any government support of the arts, you can point to successes.
You can say this work was funded by the NEA and look how good it is.
And it would seem the worst you can say is okay, a lot of bad art was produced from this agency,
in this agency, but at least something good was happening, and isn't that just the way
you describe the market, that a lot of bad culture is generated, but there's some good
examples, and so let's just leave it at that, and why would government support be any worse?
Well, my argument is that government support for the arts sends a signal to artists. It
It says a signal that commercial art is bad, and it above all sends the signal that pleasing
an audience is bad.
In a way it sounds crazy, but think about it, how ingrained that is in our ideology
about aesthetics now, that pleasing an audience is a bad thing.
And I think it's a bad thing to come to the conclusion that pleasing an audience is a
bad thing.
I think what's wrong with so much particularly contemporary painting and contemporary music
is that it actively seeks to displease its audience and to avoid having a pleading audience.
And the way you do that is get a post in a university, be appointed to a composing position
in a music department or a painting position in a painting department.
Now, I know some people who are good composers working in universities.
I particularly know some people who are good painters working in university environments and so on.
I'm certainly not suggesting it's a uniform bad situation.
But I do think the cumulative effect of foundation support for the arts,
direct government grants for artists and the whole apparatus,
The academic support for the arts has created a sterility in much modern and contemporary art and that shielding these artists has really cut them off from any feedback, just go to any juried show of art at a university.
You know, there are all these polite comments, much like the Salieri in the movie about Mozart's words,
these polite non-committal arguments. There's something to be said for the market as a genuinely disciplining and energizing force
and being forced to please real people who have to put up their own money to support what you're doing,
rather than having someone spend other people's money on you.
and I see the pattern again and again and it's not just that this encourages what I regard as bad art, it actively discourages what I regard as good art and again the record of grant supporter art is mixed, certainly there are good examples of art but for example in music it's quite amazing that Arnold Schoenberg couldn't get a grant
to Finish Moses and Aaron. He wrote two acts of it. He was under tremendous financial pressure.
When he moved to the United States, he had to teach in order to make a living.
He applied to the Guggenheim Foundation and several other foundations.
They turned down Arnold Schoenberg.
And, you know, I would love to know who got the grant those years instead of Schoenberg.
It just shows, I mean, the notion somehow is that these grant mechanisms, government funding, foundation funding, that will, that somehow will, that will be perfect.
The market has failures, the markets are rational, but for some reason the idea is these other forms of funding, they will be rational.
Their record is no better than the market. As far as I can tell, it's far worse.
And again, it's not just that they support bad art, but time and again they appear to fail to support good art by, and I know I'm not supposed to know the difference, know how to tell good from bad art, but I know it when I see it, and I know it when I hear it.
and even the long-term record seems to suggest the errors there.
There's a story that going into World War II, the British were determined not to commit the error they made in World War I
of sending their best and brightest to death, you know, Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke and all these great...
The British really lost a whole generation of artists in World War I and they supposedly, I mean I read about this, I wish I'd saved the article, they created a committee to draw up a list of all the great young artists in Britain who would not be sent into World War II and he published the list and he didn't recognize a single one of the names. In other words, when the government had been charged with figuring out who the great artists of the next generation would be. As you might well imagine, they had no idea because probably it's a government
and the government committee and they were having the artists of the last generation choose the great artists of the next generation and I bet my life that those were their students that were on the list and not the people who would eventually become the great artists so I'm not at all convinced that the alternatives to the market can make better choices than the market does and in many ways this whole apparatus of non-market funding for the arts has actually fed
and into this whole ideology that art is good only if it's difficult.
That's interesting.
I see signs of the market forcing changes in art.
If you go to commercial art galleries around the country, places like Santa Fe, which has
a lot of good art galleries, you're increasingly seeing representational painting as what's
And it looks a lot better to me than the abstract expressionist paintings you used to see in every gallery around the country.
And in music, again, supposedly the market has failed in supporting classical music.
But this wonderful label, ECM, promoted the music of Arvo Peart.
And if you've not heard this, it's like post-modern medieval music.
It's got a piece called Fratres and Arbos, a wonderful St. John's Passion.
It's really remarkable music.
Guys from Lithuania, who would have heard of him except a record label discovered him and has promoted him.
And I think it's, you know, the most beautiful music, choral music written since Just Can to Pray.
and so I see market forces overcoming this sterility of the, what I regard as the second phase of modernism, all because, again, artists, they balked at the competition, they balked at the market competition with their fellow artists, they balked at any kind of competition with the great traditional artists and wanted
in some way where, in effect, nobody could judge their art anymore, where you just submit
some kind of proposal, have committees of academics, read them over, and if you've ever
been on the committees, you see that professors give the grants to their students, usually,
or to the students of one of their fellow professors, and so on.
It's an incredible hall of mirrors, and then they turn around.
We gave a grant to this person, oh, look, he then won that prize.
And it turns out, you know, half the people on the committee that gave the grant were on the committee that awarded the prize.
It's an enormous hall of mirrors now.
So, again, I really don't want to seem too negative, especially about the first 50 years of the 20th century and the art achieved there.
And I think literature, actually, modernist literature has been more successful in some ways
because there's still been a publishing industry and many of the modernist authors, particularly in fiction, have been successful.
Faulkner was a great, great writer and yet a bestseller, a very successful writer, and then went out to Hollywood and made some money writing screenplays and so on.
and so on. So, it's not as if, I'm not saying that all modern art has been divorced from the market, but I think insofar as it has been, it's suffered for it.
Now again, there are undoubtedly cases where it's, some elite art has been produced. I actually have ridiculously elite tastes.
I love the late writings of Samuel Beckett. It doesn't get any more obscure, difficult and unmarketed oriented than that.
I will confess to having a warm spot in my heart for such delightful books as Worse Wood Ho and Ill Seen, Ill Said by Beckett.
And I'm glad that Peggy Guggenheim supported him at certain points in his life and freed him from market pressure
and the market pressure and freedom from having to be a teacher, which was a brief nightmare in his life.
He had to go in front of a classroom and so on.
And you know, what's great about the capitalist world is it's produced so much wealth
that it can support people on the margin and support people in niches.
But by and large, this ideology that something is necessarily good because it's difficult
I think that's been a very dangerous tendency in 20th century art and very much encouraged by systems of support for the arts that explicitly rule out taste, as I said in my first lecture.
That is, you can see, obviously, why these artists craved it.
You know, I think we all feel, as Pound did when he wrote DeJoy,
why am I not a millionaire?
That's why we have all these game shows now, Marry a Millionaire,
all these shows that try to offer to the average American a chance to be a millionaire.
But that's just not going to happen for most of us.
and allowing the market to distribute wealth is probably our safest and best way of doing it, even in culture because it does leave room for all these special cases and, as I said, niche marketing and special patronage and so on.
At the same time though, again, by and large, I think works of art have more vitality if the artist is in a dialogue with an audience.
And so, in fact, you know, there are signs to me that the history of 20th century art, painting, music, literature, is going to look very different a hundred years from now.
And many of the writers that we now think of as central will be forgotten, and many writers who are thought of as peripheral will be thought of as important.
Here's an interesting example, you know, as the 20th century ended, they had all these polls,
who's the greatest writer of the 20th century?
And we all know who won, it was Tolkien.
When people anywhere were polled, who was the greatest writer of the 20th century?
What was the greatest book of the 20th century?
It was, you know, Lord of the Rings, one hands down.
Now that, I mean, that's a modernist nightmare to hear that.
that this pseudo-medieval epic, which sold hundreds of millions of copies, that that should be what was held up, and it was the great work of the 20th century.
And you can just see modernists say, oh, we told you so. You see this commercial work that is so hokey, that this is regarded by the general public as the greatest work.
And as you well know, Tolkien just had his pulse on the market all his life, all he wanted to do was have a bestseller, and publishers were rushing to get this in press, you know, I think he went through 30 publishers or something before he got accepted, no one in the world thought that would ever sell, and I think it's a great work, I mean, it has its failings, it is somewhat hokey, the plot is a little creaky at times, but you know, it's imaginatively brilliant, it's worked on a vast
scale, it is deeply plugged in to mythology. I personally think it's a great work and I love to reread it, which is more if I can say for some of the modernist novels I've had to read.
And again, I think as I was saying about the Da Vinci Code earlier, this is a more extreme case. I think it's a real tribute to a popular readership that that's the book that more than any other the market has embraced.
Because on the surface of it, it doesn't look like something that would be popular.
That's certainly what every publisher that turned it down said.
And it's hilarious to read the various correspondence with publishers over it.
I mean, the constant reaction was, this will never sell, and yet it has, and now it's been made into movies,
and it's emerged as kind of the great mythic story of the 20th century.
I really love it, and I think it's a great work, not in certain ways that, you know, it's very odd to say I like Beckett's late prose and I like Tolkien.
They have absolutely the opposite set of virtues, but that doesn't mean that Tolkien doesn't have his virtues.
And so, I mean, I would regard that as a great market success of the 20th century, one that in fact would have been utterly unpredictable.
and people rushed to imitate it or promote other books, nothing has had any comparable effect because there's something about it.
It really is in its own way very well written. It is written by someone who deeply knows the mythology he's basing it on and is able to work it up.
And it's quite remarkable. Now it's finally being taught in universities, but it's like academics were virtually the last to discover this work.
The whole rest of the world had to understand how great it was.
Ironically, it's written by an academic and is a deeply academic work.
And it's its own way links up with a lot of interesting aspects of modernism.
And it is a book that reflects the tragedies of the 20th century
and the First World War and the Second World War.
And there are lots of interesting ways to be discussed in that sense
in its relation to the whole question of the nation state.
And libertarians should be interested in it
because it is about freedom in the medieval sense and the rights of the shire and that sort of thing.
But setting that aside, in a way it's an emblem for everything I'm trying to say here,
that here's this work that was a great, I mean, enormous commercial success, totally improbable
and totally against any law of modernism, except the idea that I think it is difficult
in its own way.
And, you know, the success of Lord of the Rings is my example that I actually have greater trust in markets than I do in academics.
I think in some ways the market is a better judge of aesthetic quality than professors are.
And on that noble note, I'll conclude now and take questions. Yes?
I have a little bit of a problem with you criticizing Joyce's manner of release for your listeners.
Here's an example of Arnold Harris.
And it's actually related to UCM's YouTube channel.
I'm sure as you know, the UCM records are very, very expensive,
because they're not as widely available for the record.
Well, first of all, I wasn't criticizing the way Joyce released Ulysses.
Fine, great. You know, it was a pure market transaction.
I was just pointing out that this modernist with an anti-market ideology
actually pursued a well-known market strategy, and that's fine.
But ECM CDs cost the same thing as other CDs.
Oh, you've got to go on the Internet.
Well, what are they?
What are they?
A dollar more expensive?
Oh, no way.
I mean, I buy them all the time.
Oh, look, I go on the Internet through Tower.
I get part CDs for $14.
Oh, that's your Canada.
Yeah, that's your...
Okay, that's your problem.
You're in protectionist Canada.
Go on the Internet.
I mean honestly I mean I man do I buy CDs all the time at most they're a dollar
more expensive but I don't even and you wait and get them on sale they're
cheaper okay well yeah I could have gotten it for you from 15 I swear to you
yes and by the way I mean that's still only a couple of dollars the the I mean
Again, I'm not criticizing Ulysses, but we're talking it was 40 times more expensive than another book.
It's kind of a packed on question of that. Do you think that people like, say,
Falkner's resentment of the lack of populist wealth is also a
resentment in the fact that they see the market as failing to disperse their ideas
to the people, and that, you know, getting money and remuneration from those people
kind of indicates that people are actually getting high interest in their ideas.
The question is, do I think the anti-commercial character of modernism is incidental to it or necessary?
My answer, you know, I was trying to make the radical thesis that modernism is not anti-commercial because at heart it's rebellious,
but rather that it's rebellious because at its heart it's anti-commercial.
Now that's undoubtedly an overstatement and too sharp a reversal.
But it's worth considering and that's why I'm asking you to rethink modernism.
What people, especially like Rainey, have argued is that in a weird way the anti-commercial animus is first and it generates the rebelliousness that because they feel disappointed in the market and are in a certain sense afraid of the market, they deliberately cast an art that they know is not going to succeed in the market and surrounded with an ideology that says that if it's
anti-market, anti-commercial, it must be good art.
Now that is an exaggeration, and as I said, I respect in many ways the internal logic of modernism.
I mean, Schoenberg wrote the way he did because he drew some conclusions from late Wagnerian tonality
and the wanderings towards atonality, especially in Tristan, and he was trying to figure out
The logic of where music could go from there and there's a strong sense of the autonomy of art in modernism and what these artists would claim is we are following out the logic of this art, dam the market, we will not shake in our devotion to what the music demands just to please the public.
That's the self-presentation of modernism and that's the way it's been understood for many years
and I was brought up on that argument and in some ways still accept it.
Nevertheless, it's just so tempting to consider the alternative that what Schoenberg realized is he never was going to be Wagner.
Try as he might in Gurlieder, add as many trombones as he could and contrabassoons he could never outdo Wagner.
and so he came up with an explanation of his art that would make a virtue out of his necessity or make a virtue out of his lack.
Harold Bloom actually suggests that in his theory of revisionary ratios, for example.
Bloom talks about how one strategy of artists is less is more.
that if you're faced with this tremendous titanic towering predecessor genius and so you make austerity a feature of your art.
This is very well illustrated music that Schoenberg tried to out-Wagner Wagner in his early works.
Both harmonically and in terms of scale, the girl leader requires a large orchestra than even a Wagnerian opera.
And there's a certain sense in which Schoenberg failed at that.
I'll be there, and I've always enjoyed the two opposite ends of you, but here's time, I don't get it.
The man suffers for an hour and 45 minutes until he kills himself on stage, but I love it, too.
I love the Klaus Kitschke movie. I love the original Bixner play, and I love the opera, too.
No, I really do like Boyd Sack. I don't know Lulu well enough, but I love his violin concerto, for example,
and the lyric, sweet, and so I do know Bayard's music.
And you know, but Bayard is often regarded as the sell-out in the Second Vienna School,
in a school.
That Webern really was devoted to Schoenberg and carried out the logic of music.
And the great thing is Berg was the one who commercialized the 12-tone system, because
he made a compromise in Schoenberg's 12-tone system, you must always avoid harmony at all
costs, even if it is falling into place that the 12-tone row will generate some harmony,
you must rewrite it to avoid it.
There are harmonic moments in the Bärg Violin Concerto, for example, that make it beautiful.
He uses a Bach Chorale, for example, in the Violin Concerto.
Schoenberg wouldn't allow that.
So it's funny that people will complain, oh, Alvan Bärg, that's commercial 12-tone music.
On the other hand, he's by far the most successful of the three.
People really do like to listen to the Violin Concerto and some of the...
Yeah, and that's it.
are accessible, that damns it in terms of modern aesthetics, so you know Berg is a complicated case as I have to again I make these terrible admissions that I do like some modernism, but again I find it really interesting in that case that a lot of the really hardcore musicological types will say you know Berg, he sold out, Berg went Hollywood in the violin concert,
I was wondering what you thought here on graffiti as well, and how that goes?
Art. However, it does occur to me, in many cities today, you see beautiful art painted
on walls, and you see that, and it's representational. And so, some of this street art is actually
a rebellion against what I would regard as modernism. You know, if it's just someone
telling me, oh, it's outsider art and it's rebellious, and look, they've painted a curse
word on the wall, that's great art. To me, that's the reductio ad absurdum of much modernist
Ideology but if you're referring to the fact that many cities today you see this
gloriously representative art often of an ethnic nature you can sort of tell
the neighborhood from what the the is that what do you mean by graffiti oh
Q. You haven't people actually critical not by the other is healthy, right?
Q. Or can you keep people from being targeted?
A. Okay, you know, now that you put it that way, yeah, I see what you're talking about.
I've actually noticed that in many cities around the world, now, that there's a kind of grass roots rebellion against this abstract art,
and what I would regard as sterility and these people really, people love representational art, that's what they turn to, they want to see something represented again and again and even if the stuff doesn't represent anything they find something that it does represent and so yeah I'm actually rather touched by the quality of some of this art that you see and around the world, I'm just trying to think where I most recently saw a remarkable example of it and I'm kind of blanking out on it, oh Rio, when I was
I was in Rio last fall. There was just an amazing mural of the girl from Ipanema 40 years later.
It was really just a remarkably clever idea. It was in this Ipanema square.
Obviously, they were sick of the merchandising of the song.
And so they represented a pretty grotesque figure, but very well drawn.
And I felt really brilliant. And I said, wow, that's art.
I'd rather see that in a museum than the stuff I was seeing in the Rio Museum, the official museum.
Official Museum. One more question? Okay, let's call it quits. We're over time already.