摘要：This Transatlantica dossier tries to offer the reader a concise, provocative gathering of questions, subjects, and possible answers to a core issue of American Civilization—the dynamic tension between profit and creativity, money and the muse. A great deal of orthodox social and aesthetic analysis since the advent of the industrial revolution has understood business and art to be at odds with each other. Many an artist in Anglo-American Civilization and elsewhere have not been comfortable with industrial, commercial civilization—a complaint one can hear in the well-known lines of William Blake’s visionary quest: “And was Jerusalem builded here / Among these dark Satanic mills?” through Lawrence Ferlingheti’s condemnation of America’s buy-and-sell culture blanketed with “freeways fifty lanes wide / on a concrete continent / spaced with bland billboards / illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness,” through Orson Scott Card’s stringent criticism of the US corporate versus the artistic mentality in Card’s many short stories1.
