Who Says The Arts Are Dying?

"We should not delpore modern culture, as the pessimists do. Rather, we should recognize its ... creativity, entertainment, innovation, and, above all, diversity."

THE MUSIC of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven is more accessible to today's listeners than to those of the 18th or 19th centuries. Modern concertgoers can sample an unparalleled range of musical periods, instruments, and styles. Even relatively obscure composers' material is stocked in music superstores, the largest of which carry up to 22,000 titles. One company label markets excellent performances of the classics for as little as $5.99 for 70 minutes of music. Music of all kinds--old and new--is available in great profusion.

Movies, including many silents, can be rented or purchased on videocassettes, or on DVDs for those who want higher-quality picture and sound. Modern video stores, run on a private for-profit basis, are libraries full of classic films.

New and definitive editions of many literary works, or better translations, are published regularly. The Bible and Plato, two favorites of many cultural pessimists, continue to be reissued in new editions, while many of the classics are available in paperback. Television, video stores, and bookstores give modern fans better access to the works of Shakespeare than the Elizabethans had.

Literacy and reading are two areas where the modern world comes in for especially harsh criticism, but even here the trends are largely positive. American illiteracy was far worse 100 years ago or even in the middle of the 20th century. Furthermore, the average American buys more than twice as many books today as in 1947. The number of bookstores has jumped nearly tenfold, and their average size has increased dramatically. Book superstores have become commonplace.

Contrary to the many claims, television and the Internet are not killing the book. The printed word offers unique modes of story-telling and analysis that other media have not replaced. Television and the Internet often complement reading and stimulate reader interest iii books, rather than replacing them. Today, a wide variety of talented writers are actively publishing and transcending traditional genre boundaries.

Art museum attendance is booming. Blockbuster exhibitions travel the world and bring great paintings to increasing numbers of viewers. This is in contrast to but a few decades ago, when most Americans outside of New York had few means of viewing high-quality art. In art publishing, even minor painters have published catalogues full of beautifully reproduced color plates.

Live performance of the arts has flourished as well. From 1965 to 1990, the U.S. went from having 58 symphony orchestras to nearly 300, from 27 opera companies to more than 150, and from 22 nonprofit regional theaters to 500. Contemporary Western culture, especially in the U.S., is thriving.

The market economy continually spurs new artistic innovations. Arguing the worth of particular contemporary creations is more difficult, given the tendencies for disagreement about the present-day culture. (Mozart was controversial in his time, but few dispute his merits today.) Modern creators have offered many deep and lasting works that are universal in their scope and significant in their import, delighting and enriching large numbers of intelligent fans and influencing subsequent artists. We can fully expect many modern and contemporary works to stand the test of time, just as earlier works have, even if we cannot always identify now which are the best.

The most impressive creations of contemporary culture include cinema, rock `n' roll, Pop Art and Minimalism, modern dance, jazz, genre fiction, and the modern biography, to name but a few. The architectural skylines of Manhattan, Chicago, and Hong Kong were financed and designed almost entirely by the private sector. The exact contents of such a list will vary with taste, but today's culture provides a wide variety of styles, aesthetics, and moods. An individual need not have a very particular set of preferences to love contemporary creations. The 20th century was the age of atonal music and the age of rock star Buddy Holly and film director Steven Spielberg, two life-affirming and celebratory creators.

New musical genres continue to blossom. The 20th century saw the development of blues, soul, rhythm and blues, jazz, ragtime, swing, rock, country and western, rap, and bluegrass, as well as more recent forms of electronic music. Some of the most significant modern artists are still around, playing and recording for audiences' enjoyment. Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones can be heard in concert, still in good form, even if not at their youthful peak.

Film became the art of the 20th century, combining drama, music, and high technology to entertain and inspire large audiences. Art movies and independent pictures show continued vitality, but moviegoers around the world want to see mainstream American creations, and for good reasons. Some film buffs complain that "they don't make them like they used to," but the best American efforts of the last 20 years--my personal favorites include "The Thin Blue Line," "Blue Velvet," "The Empire Strikes Back," "Basic Instinct," "Schindler's List," "Dangerous Liaisons," "L.A. Confidential," "Titanic," "Saving Private Ryan," and "The Truman Show"--belie this opinion. This list will not command unanimity, but most viewers will have no trouble noting their own favorites.

New or newly deregulated technologies are likely to induce further cultural innovations. Cable television is expanding rapidly and breaking down the hegemony of the networks. Viewers with satellite dishes are able to choose from hundreds of channels. Cable already offers the world's greatest movies, the modern drama of sporting events, large doses of popular music, and high arts such as ballet, theater, and classical music. Viewers can take a class in Shakespeare without leaving their living rooms, or use foreign dialect channels to learn other languages, thereby enlarging their access to the world's cultural treasures.

Nor is cable the only new artistic medium. The Web, virtual reality technologies, and Hypertext will all revolutionize the delivery of older creations and provide new media for future works.

Finally, quasi-artistic activities are blossoming like never before. Fashion, decoration, cuisine, sports, product design, computer graphics, and commercial art--to name just a few examples--continue to flourish. As recently as 20 years ago, Thai food was not available in most American cities; now, Thai restaurants dot the suburbs as well. Although these fields are not art in the narrow sense, they bring beauty and drama into our lives. A beautifully decorated home or a luxurious shopping mall delight us and appeal to our aesthetic sense. The question "What is art?" has become less fruitful with the growing diversity of capitalist production.

How markets support culture

It is no accident that contemporary culture has flourished in today's wealthy society. Most of the great cultural eras of the past--ancient Athens and Rome, early China, medieval Islamic civilization, the Italian Renaissance, 19th-century Europe, and 20th-century modernism--came in societies that were relatively wealthy and commercial for their time. Nowadays, most of the important works in film, music, literature, painting, and sculpture are sold as commodities. Contemporary art is capitalist art, and the history of art has been a history of the struggle to establish markets.

Creators have the best chance of living from their work in a wealthy, capitalist society. Artists and audiences alike have more leisure time and are freed from tiresome physical labor. The larger size of the market supports a greater diversity of products in artistic and non-artistic realms. Accordingly, the number of individuals who work as full-time creators has risen steadily for centuries.

Capitalism increases the independence of the artist from the immediate demands of the culture-consuming public. The wealth of a market economy funds alternative sources of financial support, such as private foundations, universities, bequests from wealthy relatives, and day jobs. These funding sources allow artists to invest in skills, undertake long-term projects, and control their fate. Ironically, artists who care about art, rather than money, have the best chance in a system based on money and commercial incentives.

Wealthy societies give artists the greatest chance of financial independence and thus creative independence. Beethoven wrote: "I am not out to be a musical usurer as you think, who writes only to become rich, by no means! Yet, I love an independent life, and this I cannot have without a small income." A steady income allows artists to purchase the necessary materials for artistic creation, such as paint and canvas, or, in the case of avantgardist Damien Hirst, sharks and formaldehyde.

The painters and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance were businessmen who produced for profit and negotiated hard bargains. Mozart wrote: "Believe me, my sole purpose is to make as much money as possible; for after good health it is the best thing to have." Capitalism allows artists to commercialize their product and sell to large numbers, if they so wish, thereby mobilizing greed in the service of creativity.

Many arts depend on the technological innovations delivered by capitalism. Paper is taken for granted today, but in earlier eras, its high expense significantly limited the output of writers and artists. Photography, cinema, and electronic reproduction of music were not possible until relatively recent times. Advances in medicine allow artists to live to older ages, and birth control permits female creators to manage their careers more effectively.

Why cultural pessimism?

Western culture has been on an upswing since at least the year 1000. Innovation and preservation of the past have blossomed. Why then has cultural pessimism had so much influence? Why do a range of critics from Marxists to neo-conservatives attack contemporary culture for its commercialism?

Cognitive biases induce observers to give cultural pessimism more plausibility than it deserves. The pessimists focus on the decline of what they already appreciate and neglect the rise of what is yet to come. It is easy to perceive the loss of what is known and harder to discern forthcoming surprises. Even if long-term trends are positive, culture may appear to be deteriorating.

Observers unfairly compare the entirety of modern culture against the very best of the past. No matter how vital contemporary culture may be, one's favorite novels, movies, and recordings were not all produced just yesterday. Anyone's favorite epochs, including those of the cultural optimist, will lie at some point in the past. Each field, therefore, will appear to have declined, but this is an illusion. Creativity is not necessarily drying up, but, rather, the past contains more accumulated achievement than does any single point in time, such as the present. Given that the world continues to produce creative works, cultural pessimism will appear more and more persuasive. As every year goes by, the past contains an increasing amount of culture, relative to the present.

We consume contemporary culture less efficiently than we consume the culture of the past. Eighteenth-century music critics did not commonly understand that Haydn and Mozart were categorically superior to Christoph Gluck, Luigi Chembini, Domenico Cimarosa, and Andre Modeste Gretry. Years of debate and listening were needed for the truth to become obvious. Similarly, we are not yet sure who are the truly seminal performers in modern popular music or contemporary art. It takes decades, and sometimes even centuries, to separate the cultural wheat from the chaff.

Most great creators, even those who now strike us as conservative, faced great opposition in their day. The French Impressionists were rejected by the artistic mainstream and considered to be garish and unstructured. Mozart's music was deemed too dissonant by many of his contemporaries. One critic charged Anton Bruckner with being "the greatest living musical peril, a tonal Antichrist ... [who] composes nothing but high treason, revolution and murder ... poisoned with the sulphur of Hell."

Older audiences often cannot appreciate new and innovative cultural products. Many people devote their maximum attention to culture in their youth. Between the ages of 15 and 25, for instance, the mind is receptive to new influences; individuals are searching for their identity; and, more often than not, youth are rebelling against their elders. For many, this serves as a formative period for cultural taste. Over time, however, marriage, children, and jobs crowd out the opportunity to discover new products. In their eyes, culture appears to be drying up and declining, creating yet further support for pessimism.

Some individuals hold pessimistic attitudes to support their elitism. Elitists need to feel that they belong to a privileged minority. Contemporary culture, though, is massive in size, diverse in scope, and widely disseminated. Elitists have a hard time sustaining their self-images if they admit that today's culture is wonderful and vibrant. Celebrating the dynamism of modern creations ascribes aesthetic virtues and insights to a very large class of artistic producers and consumers, contra elitism.

The diversity of modern culture implies that much trash will be produced, providing fodder for pessimism and elitism. We should keep these low-quality outputs in proper perspective and view them as a luxury that only diverse and wealthy societies can afford.

Some kinds of cultural pessimism spring from lack of imagination. We should not look for cultural innovation to recur in the same areas; if anything, we should expect the opposite. There is no 20th-century Homer or Aeschylus, but we do have film director Alfred Hitchcock, jazz musician Duke Ellington, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Cultural pessimism has been around as long as culture. Pessimistic attacks have been leveled for centuries, although the target has changed frequently. Many moralists and philosophers, including Plato, criticized theater and poetry for their corrupting influence. Books became a target after the onset of publishing. Eighteenth-century pessimists accused novels of preventing readers from thinking, preaching disobedience to parents (note the contradictory charges), undermining women's sense of subservience, breaking down class distinctions, and making readers sick. Libraries, especially privately run circulating ones, were another target. As author Edward Mangin remarked in 1808: "There is scarcely a street of the metropolis, or a village in the country, in which a circulating library may not be found: nor is there a comer of the empire, where the English language is understood, that has not suffered from the effects of this institution."

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the targets included epistolary romances, newspapers, opera, the music hall, photography, and instrumental virtuosos, such as Franz Liszt and Niccolo Paganini. The 20th century brought the scapegoats of radio, movies, modern art, professional sports, the automobile, television, rhythm and blues, rock 'n' roll, comic books, MTV videos, and rap music. Each new medium or genre has been accused of corrupting youth and promoting excess sensuality, political subversion, and moral relativism.

I, however, am a cultural optimist--one who believes that modern commercial society stimulates artistic creativity and diversity. Capitalist art consists fundamentally of bringing the consumer and producer together. Therein lies its exhilarating, challenging, and poetic nature. Marketplace art is about the meeting of minds and hearts. We should not deplore modern culture, as the pessimists do. Rather we should recognize its fundamentally capitalist nature, which implies creativity, entertainment, innovation, and, above all, diversity.

Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, Fairfax, Va., is the author of In Praise of Commercial Culture.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group