ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: Capitalism and quality of art and culture: the debate among economists
Author: Santos Redondo Manuel
In industrial age, mass production and technological advances led to the “democratization” of art and culture, thought newspapers and magazines, lithographs, radio, cinema, recorded music, television, and mass attendance to museums and live entertainment. But this is often seen as impoverishing the quality of culture. Art critic John Ruskin (1819—1900) thought that this techniques bring the “multiplication of inferior Art for private possession”, created by “second-rate or third-rate artists” and then mass-reproduced. There has been a debate about the effect of material progress, capitalism, and free market, on culture. Philosopher Ortega y Gasset (1930, Revolt of the Masses) saw “democratization” of culture as impoverishing. Benjamin (1935, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction") considers that things had been totally renewed. Horkheimer and Adorno (1944, "The culture industry. Enlightenment as mass deception"), thought it was a way of making the revolutionary masses docile. Criticism, since Carlyle and Ruskin, seems to be part of a general critic of capitalism, markets and the “dismal science”. But many free market advocators share the same negative view. Mises acknowledged in 1950, at the Mont Pelerin Society, that the capitalism system has a negative cultural effect; and Hayek thought that “capitalism is not necessarily favourable to culture”. More recently, liberal economist Tyler Cower (In Praise of Commercial Culture, 2000) argues that capitalism promotes quality cultural production. But liberal novelist and liberal thinker Mario Vargas Llosa is worried by about “banalization of commercial culture” in modern capitalism (La civilización del espectáculo, 2012). The judgment about this quality is mainly in the field of art and literary criticism and sociology; but in the past two centuries the pessimism about quality of art and culture is linked to technical and economic progress, and so the debate is in the realm of economic ideas.
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