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.).