In Praise of Commercial Culture - by Tyler Cowen
ISBN: 9780674001886Date read: 2025-11-24
How strongly I recommend it: 4/10
(See my list of 430+ books, for more.)
Go to the Amazon page for details and reviews.
Cultural optimism! I’d never considered that term before, but I love its mindset. My life was changed when Camille Paglia said, in the 90s, that Hollywood movies are the high art of our times. It enriched my life to see them that way ever since. Now in this book Tyler uses her statement as an example of cultural optimism. I see it in his day-to-day writing and podcasting too. I recommend this book for its focus on that, and great art/cutlure insights. But the book is 25 years old now, with expired references, and he’s improved so much as a writer since then.
my notes
Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture.
Economic incentives affect the artist’s choice of audience.
Poetry costs very little to write, and therefore can appeal to minority tastes.
Most movies, in contrast, must cover their high capital costs.
Artistic values:
One point of view =
There’s nothing that an audience won’t understand.
The only problem is to interest them.
Once they are interested, they understand anything in the world.
Another point of view =
Masterpieces are inaccessible to most readers.
Only those who read, reread, and study the classic works can hope to unlock their secrets.
A work easily accessible on first reading is unlikely to be truly great.
The best writers know far more than their audiences.
...
Capitalism can support each kind of art.
Cultural optimist position:
Modern creators offer a large variety of deep and lasting creations that are universal and significant.
These creations delight and enrich large numbers of intelligent listeners, and continue to influence subsequent artists.
We can expect many modern and contemporary works to stand the test of time.
Cultural pessimists take a strongly negative view of modernity, believing that the market economy corrupts culture.
Pessimism of the neo-conservatives often extends beyond culture in the narrow sense.
Many neo-conservatives believe that Western civilization is collapsing under a plague of permissiveness, crime, and loss of community.
Camille Paglia defends the Rolling Stones and Hollywood cinema as artistically vital forces in the modern world.
She writes favorably about how capitalist wealth has stimulated artistic production.
Literacy has been increasing over time, rather than decreasing.
Material wealth helps relax external constraints on internal artistic creativity, motivates artists to reach new heights, and enables a diversity of artistic forms and styles to flourish.
Artists work to achieve self-fulfillment, fame, and riches.
The complex motivations behind artistic creation include love of the beautiful, love of money, love of fame, personal arrogance, and inner compulsions.
Creators hold strong desires to be heard and witnessed.
The highest ambition of every artist is to be thought a man of genius.
Consumers and patrons stand as the artist’s silent partners.
We support creators with our money, our time, our emotions, and our approbation.
We discover subtle nuances in their work that the artists had not noticed or consciously intended.
Inspired consumption is a creative act that further enriches the viewer and the work itself.
Wealth and financial security give artists the scope to reject societal values.
The bohemian, the avant-garde, and the nihilist are all products of capitalism.
They have pursued forms of liberty and inventiveness that are unique to the modern world.
A large market for art lowers the costs of creative pursuits and makes market niches easier to find.
In the contrary case of a single patron, the artist must meet the tastes of that patron.
Today it is easier than ever before to make a living by marketing to an artistic niche.
Stravinsky, Picasso, and the Beatles outpaced their competitors, at least for a while, by undergoing several metamorphoses of style.
Artistic fertilizations and innovations also occur backwards in time, as later works improve the quality of earlier ones by changing their meaning.
Verdi’s opera Otello and Orson Welles’s film Othello tell us more about Shakespeare’s Othello than does any piece of literary criticism.
These variations on the work, through different media and presentation, enable us to see Shakespeare’s work anew.
The more notable works that are produced, the greater the significance of the best works from the past.
The present therefore deserves at least partial credit for our understanding of the past.
The very best creators manage to anticipate the future development of their genre and to produce works that will subsequently exhibit an ever greater richness.
Growth eventually transforms popular culture into high culture.
As popular culture genres lower their costs, they achieve the potential for greater diversity and exoticism.
Art films, documentaries, and avant-garde movies have expanded since the early days of the medium.
Charles Perrault’s late seventeenth-century versions of folk tales - “Mother Goose,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Sleeping Beauty” - served as a broadside in these debates.
Perrault defended cultural optimism and printing with enthusiasm.
By writing his fairy tales, he hoped to show that modernity could match such ancient achievements as Aesop’s Fables.
Criticisms of contemporary culture strongly resemble the criticisms leveled at past masterworks.
History often judges a culture differently than do critics or participants of that time.
A culture already admired by the establishment usually is a culture whose best days lie in the past.
Pessimists focus on the decline of what they like and neglect the nascent forces that will appeal to others.
Cultural products compete with churches and religious figures for the attention of the populace.
Religious and ideological competition tend to turn monotheism into polytheism.
Islam, the most self-consciously monotheistic of the major religions, has placed especially severe restrictions on the depiction of images in the mosque.
Cultural pessimism is not easily accountable to controlled experiment.
The magician can be asked to perform, but the cultural pessimist need only point to artistic failures
The Christian right are not concerned first and foremost about family values per se.
Family is a codeword for constraint.
Families and family values place constraints on individuals more effectively than any other institution, including government.
The Christian right seeks a society in which all are constrained.
They reject big government for failing at constraint.
This hidden agenda helps account for the obsession of the Christian right with homosexuals:
Gay males often have no commitments to children, and no other culture has so proudly paraded a conscious rejection of external constraint.
Multiculturalists have shied away from the cultural optimist position.
Cultural optimism would create the impression that today’s world, no matter how imperfect, was somehow on the right track.
Embracing cultural optimism might also appear to diminish the moral force of past injustices.
Cultural pessimists seem to enjoy envisioning themselves as superior to the medium of TV.
Deep down, an improvement in the quality of television would disappoint them by removing this source of satisfaction.
Pessimists who question contemporary trends help the modern world sort out good from bad.
If no one attacked contemporary culture, our understanding of that culture would remain at a low level.
The attacks force us go back and reread, relisten, and reexamine our basic assumptions about art.
Bohemians write or paint in response to the establishment.
The criticism they encounter helps them define their roles as outsiders and innovators.
We understand Gauguin better by knowing what his work reacted against.
The Clash and the Sex Pistols were fortunate to have had Margaret Thatcher in office during a period of resurgent social conservatism.
A sense of impending decline sometimes will spur cultural creativity.
Pessimistic creators wish to capture a mood, spirit, or times before it vanishes.
Stefan Zweig and Arthur Rubinstein, who portrayed the decline of pre-War Europe in their writings, in fact produced some of the finest portraits of that world.