Art, Fame, and Commerce

Abstract

In Praise of Commercial Culture. By Tyler Cowen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), ix + 278 pp. $14.95 paper.

What Price Fame? By Tyler Cowen (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 248 pp. $22.00 cloth.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Reva Wolf for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

Notes

Notes

1. Robert N. Wilson, “Business and the Creative Arts,” in The Business of America, ed. Ivar Berg (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 388–405.

2. Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1956), 16.

3. Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), 93.

4. If that were his argument, then it would seem to follow that the commercialized greeting card industry has, somehow, inspired ever more diverse and high quality poems! Note, by the way, that in his second work, What Price Fame?, Cowen concludes that an ideal state of society includes areas of creativity that have not been commercialized (137).

5. Cowen admits, at one point, that “Sports … do not qualify as art in the narrow sense” (35), but why should we regard sports as art in any sense? That an activity, such as sports, has an aesthetic element does not entail that it is art.

6. And consider Robert S. Lopez's pointed reminders: “Yet if bankers like the Medici and the Fuggers had been capable of conjuring up artists like Michelangelo and Dürer, then our own Rothschilds and Morgans ought to have produced bigger and better Michelangelos. And how could we explain the emergence of Goya in an impoverished Spain, or the artistic obscurity of the business metropolis that was Genoa?” Robert S. Lopez, “Hard Times and Investment in Culture,” in Social and Economic Foundations of the Italian Renaissance, ed. Anthony Molho (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1969), 96.

7. “I wonder whether, when we try to respond to electronic music, for example, we do so knowing that we can count on Mozart to be there to go back to.” Murray Krieger, “The Arts and the Idea of Progress,” in Progress and Its Discontents, ed. Gabriel A. Almond, Marvin Chodorow and Roy Harvey Pearce (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977), 461.

8. As did Donald Davidson, “A Mirrror for Artists,” in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1930), 28–60. Ernst Fischer offers an interesting account of commodification and Romanticism in The Necessity of Art (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963).

9. The decline of the hero and the rise of celebrity are broached more fully in chapter 2 (“From Hero to Celebrity: The Human Pseudo-Event”) of Daniel Boorstin, The Image (New York: Vintage, 1992), 45–76.

10. See the opening paragraphs of Part VI, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, with Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, vol. 11 (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 59–137.

11. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), I.iii.2.1 (p. 50).