Commerce and Culture

[From the 2006 Commerce and Culture Seminar, presented by Paul Cantor.] Now that Marxists have lost the economic arguments, culture is now the last battleground between Marxism and free markets. Marxists say mass production of anything ruins it. But this is elitist thinking. In Marxist thinking, there is a bias against commercial culture. But, art and culture depends on a division of labor. Without attaining a certain sophisticated level of economic development, cannot have what we now think of as culture. Up until 1800, the world was too poor to care about art. The triumph of capitalism created a mass audience for art and books. Art is an example of spontaneous order. Art is like the market. Art and culture are messy and experimental. Academics would like art to be predictable, but it cannot be. Art improves from being part of a market. Lecture 1 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

We have such a bias against commercial art in our culture that Cantor tries to show that some of the great art of the past grew out of commercial activity. Cantor had never played a video game, so he had to work through those. He sees that this is where things are going.Ignoring the migration of media can lead to a lot of problems and make you pessimistic. It is commercial culture that develops the new media. The richness of video gaming is the richness of possibilities. Culture grows out of chaos.  Patronage and markets seem to be the best way to support art and culture. Bureaucratic organizations are the worst.Lecture 10 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

The motion picture is purely commercial art. Lack of taste can earn a producer a fortune. This is the perfect intersection of commerce and culture. Most movies are bad, but many are very good. The movie form is so recent, that its history is right there to see. It was just a novelty item at first.Hollywood is unpredictable, just as economics is unpredictable. The same things that produce a flop produce a blockbuster like The Godfather – Cantor’s favorite. There is an anti-commercial bias behind movie production, but many directors do their best work under hard commercial pressure. Many artists produce poorly when given great leeway. The structure of the movie industry is a mess. It’s everybody working against everybody else.Lecture 8 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

Television is not better because you don’t want it to be. The relation of government and television and movies are certainly not free markets, just relatively free markets. TV has always been in a regulated environment. TV is licensed by the federal government.Movies were incredibly freer, allowing them to develop quickly in their first thirty years. Novels surged beyond poetry because no one was noticing. New media will be inventive, experimental and competitive.The history of TV is the history of deregulation because it began so regulated. TV was less creative. It is a good case for free market supported art rather than government supported art. Reality TV comes mainly from Europe. The Prisoner and The Avenger – both great TV -came out of private TV.Networks want the largest audiences and, thus, cater to the lowest common denominator. Three stations were not enough. Fox was the network that was not a network. Fox was not considered a network because of too few hours. This freed Fox from limitations by the SEC. Murdoch was a risk-taking entrepreneur. Cable and satellite changed the system. TV is powerful proof of the commercial culture.Lecture 9 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

Modernism was a reaction to mass culture and totalitarianism government support. Are artists better off being shielded from markets and commercial pressures? There are pluses and minuses to commercial systems.Commercialization produced more novels. Capitalists gave readers what they wanted and made reading widespread. Modernism in some ways set out to define itself in opposition to the market, claiming that anything commercial lacks artistic effort. Cantor claims that modernism is the chief source of anti-commercialism.Some patronage did not work so well. Mussolini was Ezra Pound’s patron. Pound was later declared insane so he would not have to be imprisoned. He was the central figure of North American modernism.Lecture 6 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

Art can flourish under any conditions. Many falsely imagine that commercialization is always a bad thing, but the commercial system has produced great art, too. Totalitarianism and modernism is the last thing anyone wants to say anything good about.A musicologist of Moscow said Russian composer Shostakovich was really valued, despite what had been said about his modernist music. He is considered the greatest composer of the 19th Century. He is one of the few who is regularly programmed.Control is the price each artist paid for working for the state’s support of their artistic endeavors. Nazi and Soviet-like central cultural planning literally put guns to heads and mandated art and music. Hitler and Stalin assured legitimating modernism by attacking it.Nazi and Soviet art was all about young vibrant bodies devoting themselves to the state. This fascist art matched the art produced by the New Deal in American. Everybody was turning toward the state. The modernists bought into this powerful national, war-oriented state. The state would give artists recognition that the market never did.Lecture 7 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

There was a conflict between patronage and the market in music, as reflected in the book, Quarter Notes and Banknotes. The classical music tradition is traced back to Paris. The Court of Burgundy in the 14th and 15th Century begins to get interesting.Development around Venice and the first operas flourished in roughly the first time and in exactly the same places as painting. Patronage and the great commercial centers supported the luxury of music which required performers, which required money. The environment was very competitive. Rather than a national, big-state culture, culture blooms best in decentralized ways. French culture is basically just Paris imposing its way upon France.Vivaldi was one of the first successful composers. He could sell his music. Mozart would sell out before concerts. Mozart made a fortune in his lifetime, but he spent more than a fortune. Mozart was not, however, buried in a pauper’s grave.Music publishing became an industry. The publishers were the entrepreneurial middlemen.Lecture 4 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

Dickens’ work reflects popular culture as a feedback mechanism. He saluted middle class virtues. He praised capitalism. He had high regard for free enterprise. Dickens was the greatest novelist in English. Dickens died a very wealthy man.We are now in the world of commodification. Mass production of a unified product was demanded. Commercialization kept artists rooted in living audiences.Serialization meant that a typical novel was three books of twenty parts each over a year or a year and a half, because the novel in single book form was too expensive. British publishing was the greatest opportunity open to women in the world by that time. There was ease of entry. The market tried everything.Lecture 5 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

This is a great example of commercial art and a great commercial artist – Shakespeare. Nobody does like competition, but competition, like Marlowe and Johnson, is healthy for culture. Shakespeare had to approach entrepreneurial backers in London who had surplus wealth to invest in a capital project so that people might spend money on entertainment.The Globe Theater, holding an audience of 3,000, took a big investment to build. The theater was often attached to some aristocratic patronage. It had shareholders, like Shakespeare himself. The entrance fee was one penny which was one hour’s wage. Command performances at Court were prestigious and enhanced the fundamental commercial theater. Shakespeare is now high art and culture, but he was vulgar pop culture in the 1620s – as low as it got. By the end of the Eighteenth Century, people had elevated him above his commercial origins.Lecture 2 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.

A priceless Klimt painting turned out at auction to have a price - $135 million. Scholarship on painting is sympathetic to markets, unlike scholarship on music. Picasso was even called an entrepreneur.  Picasso was quite wealthy early in his career and died a billionaire. Not every artist starves.Painting requires a certain level of economic development. Paint was not cheap. Both paintings and tapestries were portable and highly valued. Painting walls or ceilings -was the original mode. Now called frescos, building paintings were, of course, immobile.The Flemish painter, Peter Paul Rubens, was the most prolific and successful painter of his time. He had a large workshop which would execute his overall sketches.  Rubens would then come in and paint the eye – some specific part. This was simply division of labor. Rubenesque became a brand. Marx would have called this a Rubens sweatshop.Lecture 3 of 10 from Paul Cantor's Commerce and Culture.