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This article in the Guardian purports to be a defense of art, but ends up sounding more like an attack on capitalism.
Why? What does this or that particular economic system have to do with art? And why do so many artistic and creative types seem to be on the left? Are capitalism and art really in opposition, as this writer and so many others seem to assume?
To answer that question logically requires comparing the state of the arts in capitalist societies to that in various other economic systems.
So: what have we got? A distinct flowering of the arts in Ancient Athens, surely. Oddly enough, this was a capitalist society—an economy “based on manufacture and trading.” By comparison, the pastoral, socialist Spartans? Military power, but nothing worth calling art.
Rome, they say, was derivative. The Middle Ages? Personally, I love the Romanesque style; and we have the great cathedrals. But consensus is that the next great flowering of the arts was in the Italian Renaissance.
Centred in Florence; why Florence?
As it happens, surely not by coincidence, Florence was then the banking capital of Europe—a capitalist society in the most literal sense. And Florentine artists specifically had the patronage of the Medici, owners of Europe's largest bank. These were among the great capitalists of history.
From Florence, the Renaissance spread first to Rome, under the patronage of the Church, then to Venice—another great bourgeois banking and trading centre. After that, it hopped over the continent to the Lowlands of Northern Europe, the Netherlands—the other great trading centre, where artists lived primarily on portrait commissions from newly-wealthy burghers. That is, bourgeois.
After that, opinions no doubt diverge as to where and when the arts were next especially lively. Some would cite Shakespearean England—another busy trading society, Napoleon's “nation of shopkeepers.” Some would cite Paris in the later 19th century—both the Second Empire and the Third Republic were pursuing free trade policies, and consumerism was producing the first great department stores.
Capitalism, in other words, is the economic system that seems most likely, historically, to produce good art.
Notably, more recent experiments with other economic systems –Soviet Russia, the East Bloc, Red China, Nazi Germany, North Korea--have not generated anything anyone would call an efflorescence of the arts. Rather, the arts in this context seem to have gotten awful. “Socialist Realism” and all that. "Roughneck Baroque," they call it in Bulgaria.
So what are these left-wing North American artists thinking, pining for such a state?
Ironically, most artists, today and in the past, themselves come from bourgeois families. Shakespeare's dad was a glover and an alderman. Bob Dylan's folks were in hardware. As the Dowager Countess comments in a recent episode of Downton Abbey, “I've only heard of one peer who was a poet—Lord Byron. And that didn't turn out well, did it?”
No doubt, artists who endorse the anti-capitalist message in the Guardian article are hoping for a regular government subsidy to permit them to work steadily. I can sympathize with that. But this would not produce good art. Art and artists chosen by bureaucrats would be certain to be highly conventional, politically correct, and unimaginative. Bad artists might eat regularly, but any true artist, if working at all, would be working in chains.
In a bourgeois system, on the other hand, even if each individual bourgeois tends to be, as reputed by modern artists to be, conventional in his thinking, there at least is a variety of funding sources, so that different ideas and approaches may compete for audience.
To answer that question logically requires comparing the state of the arts in capitalist societies to that in various other economic systems.
So: what have we got? A distinct flowering of the arts in Ancient Athens, surely. Oddly enough, this was a capitalist society—an economy “based on manufacture and trading.” By comparison, the pastoral, socialist Spartans? Military power, but nothing worth calling art.
Rome, they say, was derivative. The Middle Ages? Personally, I love the Romanesque style; and we have the great cathedrals. But consensus is that the next great flowering of the arts was in the Italian Renaissance.
Centred in Florence; why Florence?
As it happens, surely not by coincidence, Florence was then the banking capital of Europe—a capitalist society in the most literal sense. And Florentine artists specifically had the patronage of the Medici, owners of Europe's largest bank. These were among the great capitalists of history.
From Florence, the Renaissance spread first to Rome, under the patronage of the Church, then to Venice—another great bourgeois banking and trading centre. After that, it hopped over the continent to the Lowlands of Northern Europe, the Netherlands—the other great trading centre, where artists lived primarily on portrait commissions from newly-wealthy burghers. That is, bourgeois.
After that, opinions no doubt diverge as to where and when the arts were next especially lively. Some would cite Shakespearean England—another busy trading society, Napoleon's “nation of shopkeepers.” Some would cite Paris in the later 19th century—both the Second Empire and the Third Republic were pursuing free trade policies, and consumerism was producing the first great department stores.
Capitalism, in other words, is the economic system that seems most likely, historically, to produce good art.
Notably, more recent experiments with other economic systems –Soviet Russia, the East Bloc, Red China, Nazi Germany, North Korea--have not generated anything anyone would call an efflorescence of the arts. Rather, the arts in this context seem to have gotten awful. “Socialist Realism” and all that. "Roughneck Baroque," they call it in Bulgaria.
So what are these left-wing North American artists thinking, pining for such a state?
Ironically, most artists, today and in the past, themselves come from bourgeois families. Shakespeare's dad was a glover and an alderman. Bob Dylan's folks were in hardware. As the Dowager Countess comments in a recent episode of Downton Abbey, “I've only heard of one peer who was a poet—Lord Byron. And that didn't turn out well, did it?”
No doubt, artists who endorse the anti-capitalist message in the Guardian article are hoping for a regular government subsidy to permit them to work steadily. I can sympathize with that. But this would not produce good art. Art and artists chosen by bureaucrats would be certain to be highly conventional, politically correct, and unimaginative. Bad artists might eat regularly, but any true artist, if working at all, would be working in chains.
In a bourgeois system, on the other hand, even if each individual bourgeois tends to be, as reputed by modern artists to be, conventional in his thinking, there at least is a variety of funding sources, so that different ideas and approaches may compete for audience.
But are bourgeois really so conventional in their thinking? Mediocre bourgeois, perhaps. A true entrepreneur in fact must have an artistic temperament. He must be imaginative and ready to take risks: a Henry Ford, a Steve Jobs, a Walt Disney, a Rupert Murdoch, a Richard Branson. There is a natural sympathy here with the arts; in fact, the original artists werev the artisans, and the original artisans were the first urban dwellers and the original shopkeepers. And so, it is perhaps no coincidence that many of the great art museums were in fact created and endowed by wealthy capitalists: the Met, the Tate, the Guggenheim, the Fisk...
So why do artists so oddly hate capitalism, it being their mother's milk?
It could be the traditional bourgeois appetite for social climbing. Artistic bourgeois may aspire to be like the traditional aristocracy in seeing the work of generating money as beneath them. They want to be aristocrats, above the clatter of the market. Or they may aspire to the supposed simplicity of the life of the working class. They are imaginative sorts, and imaginative sorts always imagine the grass is greener on the invisible side of the hill.
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