In Praise of Commercial Culture - Softcover

Cowen, Tyler

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0674001885 ISBN 13: 9780674001886

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2000

Synopsis

Does a market economy encourage or discourage music, literature, and the visual arts? Do economic forces of supply and demand help or harm the pursuit of creativity? This book seeks to redress the current intellectual and popular balance and to encourage a more favorable attitude toward the commercialization of culture that we associate with modernity. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a plurality of co-existing artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, supporting both high and low culture, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it. Contemporary culture, Cowen argues, is flourishing in its various manifestations, including the visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and the cinema.

Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture. Shakespeare and Mozart were highly popular in their own time. Beethoven's later, less accessible music was made possible in part by his early popularity. Today, consumer demand ensures that archival blues recordings, a wide array of past and current symphonies, and this week's Top 40 hit sit side by side in the music megastore. High and low culture indeed complement each other.

Cowen's philosophy of cultural optimism stands in opposition to the many varieties of cultural pessimism found among conservatives, neo-conservatives, the Frankfurt School, and some versions of the political correctness and multiculturalist movements, as well as historical figures, including Rousseau and Plato. He shows that even when contemporary culture is thriving, it appears degenerate, as evidenced by the widespread acceptance of pessimism. He ends by considering the reasons why cultural pessimism has such a powerful hold on intellectuals and opinion-makers.

About this title

About the Author

Tyler Cowen is Professor of Economics at George Mason University.

Review

“Unlike critics...who laud the free market but have suspicions about the pop culture it spawns, or critics...who love pop culture's vibrancy but disdain capitalist markets, Mr. Cowen thinks that American-style commerce and culture come awfully close to representing the best of all possible worlds...Key to his argument is the notion that cultural markets are not zero-sum. Even if the markets are serving up pabulum to the masses, that doesn't prevent Mario Vargas Llosa or Salman Rushdie from reaching an audience. The relevant question isn't how many more books Tom Clancy sells than Rushdie, Mr. Cowen insists, but whether serious novelists can reach the audiences that are hungry for them. In other words, the efficient distribution of books at every level of taste is the sign of the healthiest kind of market...Mr. Cowen also takes issue with the 'winner-take-all' theory of cultural markets...[which] suggests that cultural markets favor lowest-common-denominator blockbusters...and that more artistic works get shunted aside as studios and publishers seek the next giant payday. Mr. Cowen's response is that trite best sellers may generate more cultural noise than smaller works, but that if you cut through the noise, smaller works are still thriving.”―Christopher Shea, Chronicle of Higher Education

“In Praise of Commercial Culture by Tyler Cowen...is a treasure trove of insights about artistic genres, styles and trends, dexterously illuminated through economic analysis. Cowen's main argument is that capitalism--by fostering alternate modes of financial support and multiple market niches, vast wealth and technological innovation--is the best ally the arts could have.”―Andrew Stark, Times Literary Supplement

“A masterful performance...Cowen has provided a marvelously exuberant counterblast to the wide-spread view that in our philistine, materialist world the arts are going to hell in a handbasket. They are not. They are alive and well, and thriving as never before. Cowen goes a long way towards explaining why. For anyone with any interest in the history, funding and encouragement of the arts, In Praise of Commercial Culture is not to be missed.”―Winston Fletcher, Times Higher Education Supplement

“[Tyler Cowen] argues that market forces stimulate the production of culture, high and low, and that far from homogenizing taste, they tend to produce art that is more specialized and diverse than it would be otherwise. In three especially lively chapters, Cowen traces the markets for the written word (where the printing press has been around for centuries), music (where recording technology became available only relatively recently), and painting (where reproductive technology counts for much less)...The picture of the art markets that emerges from In Praise of Commercial Culture is a reassuring one...It is less possible than ever before to create the monopoly on commercial culture that is the objective of totalitarian states. Within wide bands of fad and fashion, people are going to decide for themselves what they like.”―David Warsh, Boston Sunday Globe

“Jesse Helms and Karen Finley: Take note of Tyler Cowen. The George Mason University economist is an avid arts warrior, but one who rises above the reactionary postures that have come to define the debate over arts funding...[His] new book In Praise of Commercial Culture, argues that free markets, unbridled by government, produce the best environments for creative expression...'Ninety percent of what is released is usually junk,' he observes, 'but junk is just a symptom of the riches we enjoy.'”―Louis Jacobson, Washington City Paper

“I have been doused by cold water, and by an economist at that. In Praise of Commercial Culture proclaims that a thriving capitalist society sustains the arts better than any other form of social organisation...As with the debate in the US over the National Endowment for the Arts, the row over Britain's Arts Council never goes away. The belief is that high culture would fade away if state subsidies were withdrawn. We are unwilling to place our cultural bets on the finer impulses of the super-rich. We prefer, irrationally to leave it to officials to decide who is worthy. Creative capitalism does it better.”―Joe Rogaly, Financial Times

“In Praise of Commercial Culture is a profoundly important book: In a historical moment when even socialists grant the efficiency and efficacy of markets in delivering a dizzying array of goods and services to people (and an increasing number of conservatives lament the same), there is still a great deal of resistance to applying a similar analysis to the production and consumption of culture...Cowen's book is a seminal effort toward understanding that cultural matters, like other forms of human activity, benefit greatly from the decentralization, innovation, and feedback mechanisms endemic to market orders. In Praise of Commercial Culture is rich in nuance yet highly accessible to the general reader...By contextualizing pessimism within a larger dynamic of cultural growth and by showing the beneficial effects of markets on art, In Praise of Commercial Culture remaps the debate in a way that should greatly inform all future arguments.”―Nick Gillespie, Reason

“By writing In Praise of Commercial Culture, Tyler Cowen gives his readers a clearly reasoned argument for cultural optimism, and, in the process, gives individuals...confidence to substantively critique Americans' tendency toward grossly underestimating the quality of our artistic output in the latter half of the twentieth century.”―Craig Farmer, Fodder, The Newsletter of the Hungry Mind Bookstore

“Capitalism is better than an other 'ism' at delivering the goods--food, cars, shoes, and the other materials of everyday life. But few people associate capitalism with culture. In fact, many see the two as antithetical. Tyler Cowen, an art-loving economist, disagrees. Far from hurting culture, Cowen argues that capitalism nurtures it. Precisely because capitalism delivers the goods, Cowen writes, people have the means to buy books, paintings, and other forms of art. Improvements in production and marketing, for example, as well as increased wealth, have made books available to the masses. In 1760 a common laborer has to work two days to earn enough money to buy a cheap schoolbook; today the cost of a paperback is slightly more than the hourly minimum wage.”―David R. Henderson, Fortune

“The view that art should sup with commerce only with the help of a very long spoon is the extension of a popular view of artistic endeavor--that the best artists, musicians and writers are outsiders, pushed by poverty, ill-health or an oppressive state to create...Mr. Cowen won't have a bar of such pessimism. He argues that the best artists have mostly been in the thick of life...writing, painting or composing to the dictates of the market. Commercialisation, in fact, is just what art needs and Adam Smith was right: prose and poetry flow naturally from the growth of prosperity...Moreover, wealth and financial security give artists scope to reject societal values; a large market lowers the cost of creative pursuits and makes market niches easier to find; increasing wealth means better and longer life expectancy, which helps artists realise their potential.”―Graham Adams, New Zealand National Business Review

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0674001885
• ISBN 13: 9780674001886
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288