This is actually the kind of "economic" argument that Cowen uses throughout his book /In Praise of Commerical Culture/ as well as /Creative Destruction/. He's an economist and ultimately believes deep down in Adam Smith kinds of principles of the "wealth of nations." Thus, for example, the fact that some of the Jamaican steel drums are made out of old oil barrels is evidence that capitalism and commerce is good for the arts. If he was saying this tongue in cheek, I'd think him clever. But he says this (I'm paraphrasing as I don't have the book with me) in complete earnestness and throughout the book similar analogies are made.
[WS:] I did a rather critical review of that book for the International Journal of Cultural Policy 5(2), 1999. Since the review is not available on line, I attached the manuscript below - for whatever it is worth. It is a bit on the long side, so apologies to Doug for taking the precious bandwidth.
Wojtek
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BOOK REVIEW S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore
Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture, Cambridge, MA, London, UK: Harvard University Press, 1998, ix + 278
The argument presented in this book is deceptively simple, but beneath that simplicity lurks complex reality waiting to be discovered. Arts and culture need material resources and freedom to thrive. Capitalism supplies both. Ergo: capitalism is good for arts and culture. Cowen devotes over two hundred pages to illustrate his thesis with empirical examples. He evokes countless instances of famous writers, painters and performers who thrived in affluent commercial societies. And that is precisely the problem with the empirical part of the argument, but more about it in a moment. The polemical thrust of the book is directed against "cultural pessimists." It is Cowen's term denoting doom-sayers, mostly of the conservative persuasion, decrying the decline of "high" culture due to excessive pandering to popular and multicultural tastes. Cowen aptly demonstrates that culture thrived rather than degenerated in open, multi-cultural societies. He dismisses cultural pessimism as a cover up for political bigotry, and a cognitive illusion that makes the past look more appealing than the present. To the cultural pessimists on the left bemoaning the corruption of culture by commercial interests, Cowen replies that culture cannot survive on the ideas alone. It also needs "bread and butter," material resources, production technologies, and sustenance for the producers. A point well taken, indeed. Karl Marx himself would not have said it better. The critique of "cultural pessimism," or more generally idealistic views of culture as Platonic ideas that live independently of the flesh and can be corrupted by earthly concerns, is perhaps the strongest point of Cowen's argument. In the times or "irrational exuberance" when speculation and impression count more than material reality, it is a reminder of the ancient portent "primum vivere deinde philosophari," financial and cultural idealists notwithstanding. The problem with Cowen's argument is its second premise claiming the unique role of capitalism in the development of culture and arts. His failure to account for the influences of other than market social institutions leaves this premise unsupported. Does capitalism really create social environment and resources that allow culture to thrive better than other forms of social organization do? To answer that question in a scientifically correct way, we need to examine how capitalism compares, ceteris paribus, to the alternative forms of social organization in creating openness, freedom, and resources needed for healthy cultural growth. That means taking into account the instances of successes and failures to create such thriving conditions, and then evaluating how capitalism compares in that success-to-failure ratio to the alternative forms. Moreover, the ceteris paribus requirement means a comparison of social entities that are similar in all but two respects: presence or absence of capitalism and higher or lower success/failure ratios in helping cultural growth. If we fail to do so, and instead compare entities that differ in other respects as well, we cannot rule out the effects of those other factors, and we cannot attribute any differences in cultural production solely or even in part to the influences of capitalism. Unfortunately, Cowen refuses to be scientifically correct. His strategy rests on reciting a long litany of the well-known cases of artistic or cultural successes in Western countries, and summarily attributing them to the supposedly beneficial effect of the capitalist markets. He fails to consider instances of capitalism's failures to nourish culture and arts, and he fails to rule out the effects of other than capitalist markets factors. This is the same kind of logic as arguing that hospitals are life-threatening institutions, because many people die there.
Separating the effects of the capitalist market from those of other political-economic formations is a formidable intellectual task. Paraphrasing Margaret Thatcher, there is no such thing as the market, only the money grubbers and their apologists. In other words, the best we can hope to find in the real world is exchanges or transactions among individuals that follow more or less institutionalized patterns. Some of those patterns may resemble what economists call the market, but many other may not. In fact, most transactions in modern economy occur within the corporate environment or "hierarchies' rather than "markets" to use Williamson's terminology. To characterize a nation-state as "capitalist" or "market economy is a "pars pro toto" fallacy, or characterizing the whole by one of its parts while ignoring all other parts. Since each country is a unique mixture of different institutions, comparing nation-states that meet the ceteris paribus requirement and differ only in the presence or absence of capitalist markets borders with impossibility. A more promising strategy of ferreting out the effects of capitalism on culture is a comparison of different types of institutions within the same nation state. The potential for such comparisons is already in Cowen's book. For example, he juxtaposes television, the most market-driven American medium, and publishing which, while profit seeking, has an institutional culture that different from the profit-ueber-alles culture of the TV world (p. 54 ff.). By Cowen's own admission, the results of that comparison are not favorable for television, yet he fails to bring that finding to a logical conclusion that effects of commercial markets may not be as beneficial as he believes, and there might be other institutional forces that score better than capitalist markets in supporting cultural diversity. Or take another example. Cowen writes that in 1931 "America had only 500 legitimate bookstores and that two-thirds of America's counties had no bookstores at all" (p.52). If we compare this characterization to the author's picture of the US as the cultural paradise some fifty years ago, a question comes to mind what brought about such a radical change? Did the US become more capitalistic after 1931, or did the New Deal policies soften "raw" capitalism that ravaged the country during the Great Depression? Again the logical conclusion of that comparison might question the beneficial effects of capitalism. That is, of course, not to say that Cowen's thesis is without merits. General prosperity, freedom, and open society are indeed beneficial for culture and arts, and such conditions did prevail in the developed countries. But these societies are also a mixture of different institutions, not just the market, so the real question is what are these institutions' specific contributions to freedom and prosperity, which in turn produced to the cultural bonanza that Cowen describes. Looking at this issue from another angle, the profit-oriented rationality, the engine of capitalist growth, may under certain historical circumstances produce prosperity and openness that cultivate the arts. But under a different sets of circumstances it can also produce Auschwitz - a very efficient profit making enterprise indeed - oligarchy or autocracy, as examples of Indonesia, much of Latin America, Spain or Greece illustrate. Or under still different conditions, it can ravage and plunder a national economy, as it did in the US during the Great Depression or in Russia after the IMF-prescribed "shock therapy." So the real question is not whether capitalism produces prosperity and openness than benefit culture and arts, but under what conditions. The problem may get even more complicated with the possibility of interaction effects. That is, cultural growth may be produced not by the presence of hypothesized institutions alone, but by several such institutions together, interacting with each other. Thus, the opening of the American society in 1960s that led to the proliferation of cultural expressions may have resulted not as much from the nature of the US political-economic system, as from its interaction with other countries. That opens a thought-provoking possibility that the openness of the American society has its dialectical roots in Stalin's autocracy. Instead of undertaking a difficult intellectual task of sorting out the effects of different social forces on arts and culture, Cowen takes an easy route. He fails to examine counterfactual evidence of artistic creativity being hampered by commercialism, and focuses only on cases that support his claim. He attributes all the evidence he manages to muster to a single and most salient factor - the political-economic labels of nation states - without examining the influence of various social, political, and economic institutions, and the interaction between nation-states. To be certain, this is the fault of not just an individual writer, but of the neoclassical paradigm. It is an ahistorical paradigm that sees little difference between historical causality and hindsight rationalization. It also treats social institutions and individual preferences as given rather than social constructs that require an explanation. That paradigm is also well-suited for maintaining Panglossian optimism. Assuming away that tastes are socially constructed saves Cowen from loosing his faith in the providence of the invisible hand, after he concurred that "several hours of American television provide the best argument against market-supplied culture." By and large, television is not only the most popular medium, but in many instances the only source of information and a socializing agent that shapes people's world views. Only a religious belief that individual preferences are not profoundly affected by such a formidable commercial force can save one from worrying about detrimental long-term effect of thorough commercialization of the American culture. Another bad influence of the neoclassical genre on this book is the gut reaction against anything that smacks of government support. Cowen essentially regurgitates the neoclassical mantra that public funding is evil. While denouncing the more radical attacks on public funding of the arts staged by the Republican Right, he nonetheless argues that such support means clientelistic relationship between politicians and artists (p.37) and centralized control of culture. He further supports his position by citing examples of famous artists who preferred contracts to clientelistic relationships with wealthy patrons and semi-public or public authorities (p. 90 ff.). The problem with this argument is that it fails to recognize two analytically distinguishable components of public support: the availability of public funding per se, and the institutional organization of its distribution. Only centralized control over distribution can have the adverse effects Cowen fears. The centralization of funds per se in the public hands has essentially the same effects as centralization of private funds, say, in a bank. If we accept Cowen's position that the latter does not have any particularly detrimental effect on artistic freedom and creativity, it stands to reason that neither does the former. It thus follows that public funding can have a positive effect on the arts by stimulating the demand (as Cowen argues), on the condition that the institutional arrangement of the distribution of such funding is decentralized. The advances in communications technology make such decentralized control rather easy to implement. For example, citizens could receive electronic vouchers which they could spend in qualified cultural institutions (e.g. having a nonprofit status) of their choice. Alternatively, the decision to distribute the federally procured funds could be made by a consortium of nonprofit organizations representing the artists, the audience, as well as various public interests. While Cowen is highly appreciative of technological innovations that bring privately funded cultural products closer to the consumer, he apparently does not share the same enthusiasm for the improvements in public funding distribution. That attitude is inconsistent with his elsewhere professed support for cultural variety. There are forms of artistic expressions that cannot survive without public support, e.g. forms encumbered with the "free-rider" problem, such as murals, graffiti, or street theater that have limited capacity to generate fee income precisely because of that problem. They are unlikely to attract wealthy sponsors either, because of their low social status. Democratically distributed public funding seems to be the most viable alternative for these endangered artistic species. Public funding is also important for another function of artistic expression -educating the public - which Cowen barely mentions. For him, the main function of the arts is to appeal to individual tastes, in other words, to entertain. Yet, the arts can also educate, and that often requires challenging some commonly held beliefs or stereotypes. Since breaching established conventions is often seen as insulting by the public, it has a negative impact on fee income. Private funders, such as corporations, may also eschew their support for the fear of negative publicity. Government funding, administered by a democratic consortium of nonprofit public interest organizations appears to be the best option for supporting such art forms. Cowen's advice to artists in that category is 'get a job elsewhere to support your unpopular art.' That solution may work for artistic production with low capital costs, such as poetry, literature or music. But it does not work for more capital-intensive forms, such as dance company or theatre. A broader point is that Cowen recognizes the existence of artistic forms of expression that cannot be sustained by fee income, i.e. commercial markets alone, and need some form of institutional support. He argues, however, that other capitalist institutions, such as private foundations, wealthy sponsors, or alternative employment can provide such a support. That argument is altogether different from the original praise of the beneficial effects of commercialism for the arts. It is an argument that commercial environment is not totally poisonous to non-commercial art forms, which can after all survive under capitalism. That is indeed a far cry from the usual boast that the raison d'etre of the capitalist system is its superior rationality or the most efficient utilization of resources. Clearly, there are more efficient ways to institutionalize such support for the non-commercial art than moonlighting in a capitalist firm. We do not ask the providers of other public goods, firefighters, teachers, policemen, or soldiers to get a night job at a gas station. We institutionalized public support for them instead. Would not it be more prudent to ask for the same treatment of non-commercial art? To summarize, Cowen succeeds in deconstructing cultural pessimism and convinces us that culture needs a strong economy and an open society to thrive. However, he fails to demonstrate under what conditions capitalism can create such thriving for the arts environment. He even fails to demonstrate that in its Maecenas role, capitalism can deliver its advertised special of being the most efficient distributor of resources. This is not to say that such claims cannot be demonstrated, but that they need to be demonstrated by separating the effects of different social institutions under different social historical conditions, rather than by hindsight rationalizations of the neoclassical variety. As a final comment, I agree that capitalist development has been good for the arts, albeit for different than Cowen's reasons. Any social force that frees human creativity from rigid institutional constraints and brings people of different backgrounds together stimulates cultural development. Capitalism was one of such forces, but not the only one. State socialism in Russia had a similar effect, as wide variety of cultural expressions thrived in 1920s, before the Soviet system ossified into oppressive bureaucracy under Stalin's rule. Cowen gives us no reason to share his optimism that capitalism will not become such oppressive monopolizing behemoth in the future.