Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (8 page)

Shortly before renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz died at the age of 80, he wrote, “…aging scholars, like aging parents and retired athletes, tend to see the present as the past devitalized, all loss and faithlessness and falling away. But there does seem to be a fair amount of malaise about, a sense that things are tight and growing tighter, an academic underclass is forming, and it is probably not altogether wise just now to take unnecessary chances, strike new directions, or offend the powers. Tenure is harder to get…and the process has become so extended as to exhaust the energies and dampen the ambitions of those caught up in it. Teaching loads are heavier; students are less well prepared; administrators, imagining themselves CEOs, are absorbed with efficiency and the bottom line. Scholarship is thinned and merchandised, and flung into hyperspace. As I say, I do not know how much of this is accurate, or, to the degree that it is accurate, how much it represents but a passing condition, soon to right itself; how much an inevitable retrenchment from an abnormal, unsustainable high, the smoothing of a blip; how much a sea-change, an alteration, rich and strange, in the structure of chances and possibilities. All I know is that, up until just a few years ago, I blithely, and perhaps a bit fatuously, used to tell students and younger colleagues who asked how to get ahead in our odd occupation that they should stay loose, take risks, resist the cleared path, avoid careerism, go their own way, and that if they did so, if they kept at it and remained alert, optimistic, loyal to the truth, my experience was that they could get away with murder, could do as they wish, have a valuable life, and nonetheless prosper. I don’t do that anymore.”
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When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgement of the gift you have been given, which is the life itself.

—STANLEY KUNITZ

Beethoven and Michelangelo, who sold their artworks for a profit, were entrepreneurs and capitalists.

—TYLER COWEN

IN THE ANCIENT WORLD, art was a skill — any human skill at all. Whether you made soup, painted, sculpted, or built chairs, what you made counted as art. You were a maker, someone who modified what was already there, unlike God, a creator who made something out of nothing. Art served a purpose; it didn’t exist for its own sake. It was part of everyday life and was used to decorate functional objects like jars, furniture, and walls — so much so that if you were an artist, you were considered a manual laborer because you worked with your hands.
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In the eighteenth century in Europe, that holistic idea of art split in two. Artists became thought of as people who practiced the fine arts, including poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture. Artisans, on the other hand, practiced crafts like shoemaking, embroidery, storytelling, or making popular music. By the end of the eighteenth century, artisans were thought of as entertainers or makers of useful things. But fine artists were considered to be God-like creators — people who embodied the power of nature itself, wrapped up in genius and inspiration. Their work didn’t have to be functional; it was deemed worthy of contemplation in and of itself. Over time, the
fine
in fine art became so taken for granted that it disappeared for the most part, and art became its own realm of truth, spirit, and creativity.
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Toward the end of the eighteenth century, the patronage system that had seen artists sponsored by aristocrats who commissioned their work started to collapse during the French Revolution. Artists began to claim the freedom to do what they wanted to since they didn’t have to follow their patrons’ dictates anymore. That freedom meant artists became more dependent on selling their art to make a living since the legacy of the French Revolution meant art was no longer needed to adorn cathedrals, palaces, monuments, or tombs. At the same time, aristocrats, trying to raise money to flee the country, were selling off their art too, so the art market was flooded. That confluence of events gave rise to our image of the starving artist.
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By the end of the eighteenth century, people began to feel that art represented a deep and unknowable reality, that it revealed the truth and healed the soul. The word
romantic
was used to describe that feeling. Art became an exploration of truth, a way to recover ideals that had been dirtied by the greed and materialism of the Industrial Revolution. Art, in other words, was set up in opposition to commerce and became one of our highest values, something spiritual, transcendent, and redemptive.

Being an artist became understood as a spiritual calling, a vocation that demanded personal sacrifice and suffering. If you were an artist, you were graceful and imaginative, set apart, original, rebellious, and nonconformist. This Romantic idea of art was still evident in 1945, when economist John Maynard Keynes, then chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain, said the work of the artist was “individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled. The artist walks where the breath of the spirit blows him. He cannot be told his direction; he does not know it himself. But he leads the rest of us into fresh pastures and teaches us to love and enjoy what we often begin by rejecting, enlarging our sensibility and purifying our instincts.”
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Despite the spiritual nature of art and its opposition to commerce, artists had to strike an uneasy truce with the market. Your ability to survive as an artist, after all, hinged on being able to sell your art to the public. The muddle was that as an artistic genius and prophet, you were supposed to be free from the constraints of the market and the pursuit of market success, both of which were considered a threat to your artistic genius.
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Artists even looked down on other artists who had popular success, because the public was assumed to be hostile to art and artists were supposed to suffer.
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Eventually, some of this art made its way into art museums. A museum, a “temple of the muses,” is a place for us to preserve and pass on our human heritage based on the idea that the visual arts are a fundamental part of our common experience.
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Stephen Weil, one of the leading commentators on museums, said art museums represent “a basic, irreducible commitment to the importance and vitality of works of art, to the excitement of their creation, and to the experience of seeing them…places where there is a stubborn insistence on the importance of the visual arts as a human activity…places, in short, where we celebrate the discoveries, delights, and deep awareness that can come uniquely through the visual.”
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Weil believed that art museums enrich our lives by teaching us how to look and how to see. He said, “To see well is to live richly, and the museum can be a school for seeing, a place where seeing is celebrated.”
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Art museums sharpen our perceptions, improve our visual intelligence, and widen our perspectives, Weil said, helping us make informed judgements about the past and more insightful choices about the future.
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The public was introduced to art museums in London, Paris, Munich, Vienna, and Rome in the 1700s. In America, early art museums were open to the public but were privately funded, often from huge personal fortunes. Private citizens started museums like the Boston Museum of Fine Arts out of civic pride, partly because the Puritan ethic stressed “the right use of riches,” which led to a considerable amount of philanthropy, and partly because wealthy citizens willed their collections to museums since estate tax had made it too expensive to pass the collection on to heirs. But in 1913, federal personal income tax was introduced, and much of the money that had funded museums was siphoned away to the government instead.
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Since the government had effectively drained money from the arts with tax legislation, some citizens thought government should support the arts. With government support, museums would be able to subsidize admissions or allow free admissions altogether, improving public access. Government cultural policy in the arts came to be based on a Romantic ideal that the arts mattered and deserved public funds because art had a civilizing influence on us and contributed to our humanity. President John F. Kennedy said, “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose, and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.”
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The world of the arts was based on the idea that some forms of cultural and creative expression are better than others. The difference between high art and low art, says philosopher and visual art scholar Larry Shiner, was thought of as the difference between fine art and mass art, complex and simple, original and formulaic, critical and conformist, challenging and escapist, and (often) a small audience versus a large audience — the difference, some would say, between literary fiction and detective novels, or opera and pop music.
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Your role as the art-viewing public was to enjoy the art. If you didn’t enjoy it, you obviously needed more encouragement and art education; the problem was
you
, not the art, because the focus of attention was on the artist, not the viewer. People generally assumed that the public’s taste in art needed to be shaped and developed, and that’s what museums were for. Giving you what you wanted to see was just not what an art museum was about. Weil said, “If a million people a month would pay three dollars to see, for example, a Matisse exhibition, we would not need financial support. And if we deliberately set out to find out what a million people a month
would
pay three dollars to see, then we would not be museums anymore — we would be Disneyland.”
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Then the story changed.

After a change in tax rules in the 1970s, American corporations started giving more money to the arts.
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Corporate patronage of the arts was geared toward certain kinds of programs, and that uneasy tension between art and commerce surfaced again. One policy analyst noted, “The only reason [corporations] have any interest in the arts, or at least the primary reason they have an interest in the arts, is one of visibility and public relations. And the minute you’re talking about that, then you seem to be denying the main tenet for the arts, which seems to be an exploration or a discussion or a forum about the society in which the arts are existing. And when the arts are doing that in any kind of critical level or base, they are going to make waves, then they’re going to make problems for the funders.”
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Those problems didn’t exist for long. In the economic story, cultural institutions like museums, which were once buffered from the market, are reclassified as creative industries within the world of markets. The creative industries, according to the Hong Kong Centre for Cultural Policy Research, are “a group of economic activities that exploit and deploy creativity, skill and intellectual property to produce and distribute products and services of social and cultural meaning — a production system through which the potentials of wealth generation and job creation are realized.”
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These industries — also known as the cultural industries or the creative economy — are one of the fastest growing economic sectors, and include arts and crafts, fashion, film, theatre, the performing arts, advertising, architecture, publishing, music, and broadcast media.
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The global worth of the creative industries ballooned from US$831 billion in 2000 to US$1.3 trillion in 2005, and the sector is now seen as central to the economies of Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, the U.S., and the UK.
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In the creative industries, culture gets reinterpreted as a means of economic development. Culture becomes a lifestyle, a consumer choice. Art matters not because it elevates the human experience, but because it contributes to “international competitiveness, economic modernization, urban regeneration, economic diversification, national prestige, [and] economic development” — the way theatre in New York creates jobs and gets tourists to spend money on restaurants, hotels, and cabs.
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Radiohead guitarist Ed O’Brien warned that the climate of the music industry has changed since the band was signed to a record label in 1991; creativity is now second to monetary concerns. O’Brien said, “[The industry has] become dominated by money…And I think the problem with that is that the creativity’s gone out of the industry, the fun…You realise there’s something hugely missing now…the money men are now running the companies, whereas traditionally it’s always been the creatives.”
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As arts organizations become part of the world of markets instead of being buffered from it, their focus shifts from preserving human heritage and culture to attracting and building a paying audience. It’s easier, after all, to measure artistic success in terms of tickets sold than in terms of something vague like aesthetic triumph. Arts organizations start to think and act like businesses, adopting management philosophies and marketing techniques and training staff in management and business practices. That training is offered mostly through business schools, which also stress the importance of the market.
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Museums start to see themselves as competing with all kinds of other organizations — like shopping malls — for your dollar of disposable income.
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You’re more likely to be part of a museum’s target audience if you’re a well-educated, upper-income professional, because you have enough disposable income to afford high ticket prices for cultural events, even though targeting the wealthy flies in the face of the old ideal of art for all, public accessibility, and art for education.
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In the economic story, museums develop closer relationships with corporations. In 2009, museums were reported to be accepting loans of ready-made art exhibitions that could be shown to the public for a nominal fee from companies like JPMorgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, and UBS.
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Banks, in some cases, have collected art for up to 50 years, growing their collections by acquiring companies that themselves have art collections. Reports put the Bank of America art collection at 60,000 pieces; Deutsche Bank’s collection is roughly 56,000 pieces. Museums like the idea of “renting” a turnkey exhibition because it’s cheaper than to mount one themselves, especially in an economic downturn. Critics say the arrangement makes the company, not the museum, the curator of the exhibition, and that exhibiting a corporate collection in a museum increases the legitimacy and value of a collection that could one day be for sale in the market.

As those partnerships develop, museums begin to accept more explicit product tie-ins in their exhibitions. The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis — the world’s largest children’s museum — teamed with Proctor & Gamble to name Swiffer its “official cleaner.” The museum’s press release read, “Swiffer products will be used throughout the 479,000 square-foot museum to try and lock dust and dirt in every exhibit it houses, including its most complex, ‘Fireworks of Glass’…created by world-renowned artist Dale Chihuly. ‘Dale Chihuly’s artwork is one of the centrepieces of our Museum, and the preferred dusting solution to help keep it clean and dust-free is Swiffer…,’ said Jeff Patchen, president and CEO of The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. ‘After seeing how well it works on such a delicate piece of art as Chihuly’s piece, we wanted to deepen our partnership with Swiffer to help keep our exhibits clean and dust-free for our young visitors to enjoy.’”
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