[lbo-talk] globo & culture

Sean Andrews cultstud76 at gmail.com
Thu Feb 22 20:52:52 PST 2007


Thanks for passing this along. Cowen just came out with a new book on public funding for the arts in the US and how it's better that we don't have much of it. I doubt it is a whole lot more rigorous than the other two since it likely starts with the conclusion and works from there.

Speaking of commercial culture, Wojtek, do you (or anyone else in Baltimore) know of any good place to eat there? I live near DC and I am always saying that I'm going to go up and get to know Baltimore, but it is a hard place to figure out so my trips usually involve some sort of time-pressed necessity. In this case I am going up there tomorrow night to have dinner with a family friend and his mom who are visiting from out of town. They wany to go somewhere by the water, but I don't trust myself to choose a place based on external appearances alone. Any suggestions? I guess once you decide on the harbor the experience is already limited, but any pointers for the uninitiated would be helpful. Thanks in advance.

s

On 2/22/07, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:


> 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.).



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