In Praise of Commercial Culture

Does the market economy encourage or discourage music, literature, and the visual arts? Do economic forces of supply and demand help or harm the pursuit of creativity? This book seeks to redress the late 1990s intellectual and popular balance and to encourage a more favourable attitude towards the commercialization of culture that we associate with modernity. Economist, Martin Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting both high and low culture, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it.

ISBN 0674001885   Pages 288 ISBN13 9780674001886 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Harvard University Press   Weight (grammes) 399 Imprint Harvard University Press   Published in Cambridge, Mass Format Paperback   Height (mm) 235 Publication date 03 Apr 2000   Width (mm) 155 DEWEY 306.3   Spine width (mm) 22 DEWEY edition DC21   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly

* Introduction * The Arts in a Market Economy * The Market for the Written Word * The Wealthy City as a Center for Western Art * The Developing Market for Music: From Bach to the Beatles * Why Cultural Pessimism? * Notes * Index

Unlike critics...who laud the free market but have suspicions about the pop culture it spawns, or critics...who love pop culture's vibrancy but disdain capitalist markets, Mr. Cowen thinks that American-style commerce and culture come awfully close to representing the best of all possible worlds...Key to his argument is the notion that cultural markets are not zero-sum. Even if the markets are serving up pabulum to the masses, that doesn't prevent Mario Vargas Llosa or Salman Rushdie from reaching an audience. The relevant question isn't how many more books Tom Clancy sells than Rushdie, Mr. Cowen insists, but whether serious novelists can reach the audiences that are hungry for them. In other words, the efficient distribution of books at every level of taste is the sign of the healthiest kind of market...Mr. Cowen also takes issue with the 'winner-take-all' theory of cultural markets...[which] suggests that cultural markets favor lowest-common-denominator blockbusters...and that more artistic works get shunted aside as studios and publishers seek the next giant payday. Mr. Cowen's response is that trite best sellers may generate more cultural noise than smaller works, but that if you cut through the noise, smaller works are still thriving. -- Christopher Shea Chronicle of Higher Education In Praise of Commercial Culture by Tyler Cowen...is a treasure trove of insights about artistic genres, styles and trends, dexterously illuminated through economic analysis. Cowen's main argument is that capitalism--by fostering alternate modes of financial support and multiple market niches, vast wealth and technological innovation--is the best ally the arts could have. -- Andrew Stark Times Literary Supplement A masterful performance...Cowen has provided a marvelously exuberant counterblast to the wide-spread view that in our philistine, materialist world the arts are going to hell in a handbasket. They are not. They are alive and well, and thriving as never before. Cowen goes a long way towards explaining why. For anyone with any interest in the history, funding and encouragement of the arts, In Praise of Commercial Culture is not to be missed. -- Winston Fletcher Times Higher Education Supplement [Tyler Cowen] argues that market forces stimulate the production of culture, high and low, and that far from homogenizing taste, they tend to produce art that is more specialized and diverse than it would be otherwise. In three especially lively chapters, Cowen traces the markets for the written word (where the printing press has been around for centuries), music (where recording technology became available only relatively recently), and painting (where reproductive technology counts for much less)...The picture of the art markets that emerges from In Praise of Commercial Culture is a reassuring one...It is less possible than ever before to create the monopoly on commercial culture that is the objective of totalitarian states. Within wide bands of fad and fashion, people are going to decide for themselves what they like. -- David Warsh Boston Sunday Globe Jesse Helms and Karen Finley: Take note of Tyler Cowen. The George Mason University economist is an avid arts warrior, but one who rises above the reactionary postures that have come to define the debate over arts funding...[His] new book In Praise of Commercial Culture, argues that free markets, unbridled by government, produce the best environments for creative expression...'Ninety percent of what is released is usually junk,' he observes, 'but junk is just a symptom of the riches we enjoy.' -- Louis Jacobson Washington City Paper I have been doused by cold water, and by an economist at that. In Praise of Commercial Culture proclaims that a thriving capitalist society sustains the arts better than any other form of social organisation...As with the debate in the US over the National Endowment for the Arts, the row over Britain's Arts Council never goes away. The belief is that high cultu

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