Leave culture to the market, suggests Eric Jones

‘All classes of society are trades unionists at heart, and differ chiefly in the boldness, ability and secrecy with which they push their respective interests,’ wrote Stanley Jevons as long ago as the 1880s.(1) We still live in a world of multiple distortions, of rent seeking and attempts to block trade and competition. The producers of art and entertainment, with all the public relations help they can command, are leaders in trying to socialise risk, privatise profit, and fend off foreign competition. They realise how much they stand to gain or lose, while dispersed consumers have little recourse beyond writing to the newspapers and hoping against hope that politicians will defend free trade and competition.

Threats to Australian identity
Australian interests have long been piqued at New Zealand competition. Pique turned to outrage when a trade agreement forbade excluding New Zealand television programs from the Australian market.(2) A spokesperson for one Australian opposition party claimed that New Zealand competition threatened not only the cultural identity of Australians but their human rights. The Australian government lamented that the trade agreement prevented it from excluding the competition but swore that local content quotas would insulate Australia’s ‘world class’ (yet somehow tragically vulnerable) television networks from fresh foreign assaults over the next decade.

Filmmakers in Australia have not been greatly comforted by this promise. One of them demanded, to rapturous applause, that American movies be kept out because they will not tell Australian stories. He insisted that the government ‘take culture off the negotiating table entirely.’ An actress speaking for a film institute added that what was wanted was for the film industry to be exempted from the proposed U.S-Australia free trade agreement, for the sake of Australian culture. She did not, of course, define Australian culture—this sort of argument usually refers to the products made in a given country and really means the incomes of those who make them.

‘Keep the Australia in Australian Television’, demanded a newspaper advertisement published by local cultural producers’ organisations and signed by a long list of their members. ‘By giving in to this pressure from New Zealand’—which had merely asked that a freely negotiated trade agreement be enforced—‘we don’t just give away a small part of our power as a nation to define and express our culture through television. We risk losing it entirely ... We need a little help ... We don’t want handouts ... This problem can be fixed without a taxpayer’s cent being spent on it.’(3) In reality the consumer’s cent would be diverted to paying for the more expensive local product and consumer choice would be restricted.

The head of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation launched an attack on competition from the ‘xenophobic and parochial’ United States.(4) The way to destroy a people, she stated, is to detribalise them by taking away their stories and dreams, replacing them with imported ones. Small cultures had survived through geographical and linguistic isolation, but because of new communications technology, ‘the old forms of cultural protection and the values inherent in individual cultures are being challenged.’ The nature and superiority of these ‘values’ went, as usual, unspecified.

Only a rare voice points out that trade is by definition a two-way street: Australian performers get a showing overseas, and the electronic revolution enables them to be marketed anywhere. Only a rare voice is raised in favour of free trade and intellectual openness. The most forceful riposte to the protectionists comes from Imre Salusinszky, who makes a connection between the upsurge of cultural protectionism and the overall climate of opinion about world trade.(5) In the 1990s cultural producers and trades unionists, sensing that the mood was shifting from automatic support for industrial special pleading, switched to arguments based on cultural and national identity.

The present importance of nationalism lies in its giving cultural producers teams to cheer and pretexts for subsidising national art. Salusinszky refers to the children’s television bureaucrat cited earlier and says that maybe what she really wants is for the part of Big Bird in Sesame Street to be taken by an emu. This should not be shrugged off as a cheap gibe. The move would be consistent with other attempts at delinking Australia from shared Western culture. Local producers have lobbied to replace the Easter Bunny with the bilby, thus securing the Easter market for newly minted stories about a native animal that few have previously heard of and almost no one has ever seen. As Salusinszky says, individuals do not need regulation to tell them what their identity is. By and large Australians have already voted with their wallets. If they do possess ‘something called a cultural identity,’ he states, ‘then one aspect of that identity is a fierce enjoyment of films, music and television originating from the United States. If this discountenances their cultural betters, then so be it.’(6)

State-sponsored arts
Subsidising the arts is one of cultural protectionism’s main purposes. Among the thousands of demands on the British taxpayer, one was made by Gerald Kaufman, chairman of the House of Commons’ Culture Committee, when he insisted that to make the ‘right kind’ of British films a great deal of taxpayers’ money should be spent.(7) A figure had been suggested by Lord Gowrie, who thought the arts should receive 1% of total public funding, to be indexed at 2% per year.(8)

A shrewd observation about the chorus of demands was made by Ivan Hewett, a BBC music presenter.(9) He remarked that the premier British funding body, the Arts Council, had been founded at a time when the eternal verities of art and the personal taste of the elite coincided, and art was then defined so broadly that it must always want more subsidy. Philip Hensher, too, commented that the system of official intervention reflects an elitist society that no longer exists and only the arbitrary means of funding prevents us from recognising the fact.(10) Formerly the radio or concert hall was the most convenient way of hearing classical music. Today 20 or 30 versions of any piece can be downloaded or bought in a music shop, and ‘it serves no end to pretend that the means by which culture is conveyed must be preserved at any cost.’ No one considers that there may be too many live orchestras for current demand.

State-sponsored art runs the gamut of political ideologues. At the totalitarian end of the spectrum, murals of tractors denote Soviet realism, and the most bland and insidious conformity denotes Nazi taste. Bland? Goebbels decreed literary criticism to be a Jewish perversion and that reviews must be friendly or bland! At the other end of the spectrum are the subsidies that bestow competitive advantage on favoured artists and favoured nationals, supporting tens of thousands of seemingly innocuous galleries, concerts, and books. The results may sometimes be excellent, but without open competition there is no good way of telling this or ensuring it will happen. The longer subsidies and quotas on foreign products persist, the more likely taste will come to rest within approved bureaucratic parameters. Artistic composition will increasingly have its eye on grant getting.

Every so often a writer does stand up to challenge these arrangements. One is Richard Pells, who argues that ‘the hunger for a hit and the fear of commercial failure are precisely what give American film, television, books and magazines their vitality, their emotional connection with audiences and their immense global popularity.’(11) While part of the success of American cultural exports is no doubt due to the scale of their distribution network (built on the back of earlier successes), their box office appeal must contain an element of what Pells calls ‘their emotional connection with audiences.’ This is resented by cultural producers and intellectuals in other countries who are insulated from the marketplace and have a tendency to create ‘works that are neither entertaining nor provocative, just self-indulgent.’

Creative conservatism
Cultural protection is conservative. The creativity it fosters is the devising of ever more arcane, emotive, and improbable elaborations of the status quo. Films made with European subsidies are known as ‘Europuddings,’ since the ingredients are influenced by the requirement that a mixture of nationalities be employed. The European Union ensures that there is a media desk for each member country and two for Belgium (one for the Flemings, one for the Walloons).(12) The cost of promoting EU film production between 1996 and 2000 was US$333 million. Many films were made, but most were unwatchable or at any rate unwatched. Several crashed at the box office.(13) Europe’s most creative directors, writers, actors, and production specialists did not wait to share the largesse; they moved to Hollywood where over one hundred worked on Titanic alone. The EU wound up with an audiovisual trade deficit of US$6 billion per annum.

In Australia the major performing arts companies lost a total of A$13 million in four years at the end of the 1990s, A$11.4 million of this being swallowed up by music and opera companies.(14) This could hardly be ignored even in that prodigal climate, and it is not surprising that a defence of the funding of orchestras was speedily elicited from Richard Mills of the West Australian Opera.(15) His arguments were as follows: Australian musicians are cheap by international standards; orchestras have curatorial and teaching functions and can ward off depression among audience members (depression being billed as the fourth most expensive medical condition); and Australians are becoming less civilised [sic] as a result of prepackaged entertainment crowding their mental space for dreaming, so they should (be obliged to) participate in classical music.

Protectionist arguments are seldom more persuasive or less ad hoc than those put forward by Mills. From the point of view of economics, they constitute no technical case to answer, but this does not make them insignificant. Their feeble reiteration succeeds in causing economists to lose interest, with the result that the ideas are not vigorously challenged. There is a large literature on the economics of subsidising the arts, but the worlds of practical politics and advocacy seldom draw on it. In country after country, lobby groups milk taxpayers and cause their choices to be restricted, thereby distorting the pattern of economic activity and—it is important to note—removing the incentive to improve the lobbyists’ own products. As Salusinszky concludes for Australia, cultural protectionists ‘debilitate the very activities that they are meant to promote.’(16) When things go badly, protectionists look to the government for cash, compulsion, and intervention, ‘not to their own performance (hardly surprising, given that they have never functioned in a fully competitive environment) ... it is never the fact that the music, the drama, the fiction, or the films may not be of sufficient quality.’

Markets and culture
The most outstanding contributions to the debate about culture, in the sense of the arts, that have appeared in recent years are Tyler Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture (1998) and Creative Destruction: How Globalisation Is Changing the World’s Cultures (2002).(17) The first of these volumes, partly because it was the first, came as a shock to conventional anti-market wisdom. Cowen demonstrates that government agencies and public monies are not essential to creating an active and original world of the arts. Some of his most intriguing observations are directed at the way individuals form their taste, devise their judgments, and erect their (mis)perceptions about cultural products. These are insights that strip away the veil of common assumptions, especially the recurrent opinion that all the greatest artists, musicians, and writers are already dead and that the latest art forms are always degenerate. This assumption persists because it is the way successive cohorts of the middle-aged come to see things.

The best days of an admired culture are almost always located in the past, but we should realise that in their own day similar abuse was directed at those who are now seen as great masters. Chopin’s contemporaries described his music as ‘ranting hyperbole and excruciating cacophony’, ‘earrending, torturous, and repugnant’, as well as ‘trivial and incoherent’. Bruckner was charged with being ‘the greatest living musical peril, a tonal Antichrist.’ The very recurrence of such language should alert us to look for the motives beneath its abusive surface.

Cowen urges that capitalism and competition are good for the arts. He has no difficulty in demonstrating, mainly for the United States, that we revel in the largest range, the cheapest and the most accessible products of any age, and these things may be expected to grow in variety and fall further in price. The cost of materials and equipment has come right down. The list of modern offerings is endless and has expanded even in the few years since Cowen wrote: videotapes, compact discs, DVDs, iPods, vast libraries, Internet search engines giving access to whatever information one wants, definitive and better translated editions of literary works, ‘better access to Shakespeare than the Elizabethans had,’ catalogues of paintings full of superb coloured plates, and collections of artworks ‘comparable to or better than those of earlier kings’ made for American businessmen.

Between 1965 and 1990 the number of symphony orchestras in the United States increased from 58 to nearly 300, opera companies from 27 to over 150, and non-profit regional theatres from 22 to 500. In 1947 there were only 357 publishers in the United States; today there are over 49,000, many of them small operators but most of them on the lookout for innovative works. There is no domination by either elitism or mass-market trash. Whereas the blockbusters of history, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, utterly dominated sales in their day, during the 1980s the top fifteen bestsellers in the US accounted for less than 1% of total sales. Even in the superstores, bestsellers represent only 3% of sales. This is a country where artists’ incomes do not depend on political connections or acceptability but on pushing concepts to the limit.

Twentieth century culture was more of a ‘festive bazaar’ than all previous centuries. It melded together more styles. The dam walls between genres burst. Scott Joplin took classical piano lessons from a German teacher but infused the music with the syncopated rhythms used by black banjo players; he combined high and low culture by echoing Chopin, Debussy, and barroom entertainers. Syntheses of art forms from around the world are still taking place, just as they are in cuisine, as benign but underrated features of globalisation. The logical extension of this is more, not less, novelty. But most people’s eyes are averted from this.

Cowen shows that cultural pessimism is unwarranted or at most unreliable. The masterpieces of the past have survived a prolonged process of winnowing that contemporary products have not yet undergone. It is too early to take pot shots at contemporary art, music, or literature. In the long run, public opinion (aka. the market, in its widest sense) can be left to judge the works.

Markets relax the constraints on internal creativity. The great thing is to evade single buyers—patrons or Arts Councils—since these are likely to cramp one’s style, like that of poor Velasquez, who had to paint eighty-one portraits of Philip IV.

Compared with the competitive American market, government-sponsored art tends to be lifeless. Money that could be better spent goes on administration: France has twelve thousand cultural bureaucrats who certainly do have reason to fear the market. Actual cultural producers need not do so. As Frances Cairncross says of the cinema in France and Italy, if those countries were once again to become centres of artistic excellence, the pressures for protection would probably fade away.(18)

Culture and globalisation
In his second book, Creative Destruction, Cowen remarks that anti-globalisation polemicists are not really concerned with creative diversity but with particular desires of their own. His volume is a sensitive exposition of the merits of cosmopolitan diversity that does admit there are some philosophical difficulties in defending the position. Economic development creates homogeneity and heterogeneity at the same time, and there are problems in reconciling what may be the final outcome.

Cowen counters the anxiety that globalisation may make all regions culturally uniform by noting that individuals will have more choice, since trade heightens the pace of change and raises the level of diversity per unit of time. ‘Critics of cross-cultural exchange face an awkward question. If diversity at any point in time is desirable, why is intertemporal diversity not desirable as well?’(19) And he shows that native cultures are usually themselves the result of earlier processes of creative destruction and remixing, since the past has been dynamic, not static: ‘most cultural innovations are (and have been) far more syncretic than most individuals realise.’(20)

Cultural protection consists disproportionately of demands to keep out competition from the United States or, more broadly, from the so-called Anglo-Saxon world and its instrument, the English language. If we can find a non-Anglo-Saxon author who dissents from this campaign, his or her words should carry special weight. Why, though, should anyone abandon calls for protection if these would bring him or her personal advantage? Only those confident of the quality of their own work are likely to scorn the crutches of state aid and the shelter of nationalism’s walls.

The individual who most fits the bill is the Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa.(21) He makes the essential points, namely, that globalisation has expanded rather than curtailed individual liberty and that cultures do not need to be shielded by commissars to remain lively and adaptable. It is not globalisation per se that is bringing about change, he says, but modernisation, which will unavoidably cause some of the world’s folkloric variety to disappear.

To this I would add that much of that variety, while colourful in the eyes of tourists from the industrialised world, derives in fact from rural poverty; its loss could not compare with losing the works of Montaigne, Descartes, Racine, and Baudelaire that French intellectuals think are so threatened by Hollywood and the English language. Vargas Llosa dissents from the very notion of cultural identity, which he sees as a collectivist and ideological abstraction of all that is original to free spirits. True identity springs from individual creativity, not geographical affiliation. There will be new syntheses; local cultures that were silenced by domineering nation-states and empires like the USSR will be reborn. Modernisation may demolish some anthropological oddities, but it will lead to a more varied future.

Endnotes
(1) Quoted in Henry Phelps Brown, The Origins of Trade Union Power (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 12
(2) Eric L Jones, The Record of Global Economic Development (Cheltenham,U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2000), 171–72.
(3) The Australian, 22 June 1998.
(4) The Australian, 3 July 1998.
(5) Imre Salusinszky, ‘The Culture Club Con,’ The Age, 24 June 1999.
(6) Imre Salusinszky, ‘A Critique of Cultural Protectionism,’ Bert Kelly Lecture, Centre for Independent Studies, 1999.
(7) BBC 4, 18 September 2003.
(8) The Spectator, 12 June 1999.
(9) Prospect Magazine, May 1999.
(10) The Spectator, 12 June 1999.
(11) International Herald Tribune, 16 December 1997.
(12) The European, 13 April 1998
(13) The Financial Times, 8 November 2002.
(14) The Australian, 3 April 2000.
(15) Australian Financial Review, 7 April 2000.
(16) Salusinszky, ‘Cultural Protectionism’, 1999.
(17) Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Tyler Cowen, Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Cultures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
(18) Frances Cairncross, The Death of Distance (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997), 251.
(19) Cowen, Creative Destruction, 137.
(20) As above, 145.
(21) ‘Vargas Llosa on Culture and the New International Order,’ La Trobe University Bulletin, Sep–Oct 2002, 7; Mario Vargas Llosa, ‘Globalization at Work: The Culture of Liberty,’ Foreign Policy, Jan–Feb 2001, www.foreignpolicy.com.

Eric Jones is Professorial Fellow, Melbourne Business School; Emeritus Professor, La Trobe University; and Visiting Professor, University of Exeter. This article is extracted from his new book, Cultures Merging : A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture, Copyright (c) 2006 Princeton University Press.