The Culture Consumers a Study of Art Affluence in America
EVERYBODY IS IN THE QUEUE; THE Culture CONSUMERS: A Report of Art and Affluence in America. By Alvin Toffler. 263 pp. New York: St. Martin'southward Printing. $5.
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December 13, 1964
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IN Houston last October a dozen affluent Texans pooled $100,000 in a venture called Art Investments, Ltd. Their intent, as Business Week reported it, is to "combine their own cultural betterment with a chance at financial proceeds." Their initial acquisitions include 8 paintings and a metal sculpture which in due course they hope to sell profitably, using the proceeds to purchase new items rich in cultural involvement and growth potential.
In New York City the $160 million complex of arts buildings grouped in Lincoln Center moves toward completion to the accompaniment of the usual din from construction workers and the increasingly familiar shrieks of anguish from musicians and arts executives discontented with acoustics, ticket prices, lease arrangements, space, or all four. In WinstonSalem, North. C, and St. Paul, Minn., and at least 123 other communities, active Arts Councils run coordinated drives, often on Community Chest principles, for the support of local theater and music groups.
Culture equally an industry has arrived. On the principle that what interests us nationally must be measured, the researchers have gone to work. This twelvemonth at its Christmas meetings, the American Economic Association will take official note of the performing arts every bit an economical miracle with the presentation by 2 wellknown Princeton economists of a paper entitled "The Economics of the Performing Arts." The same economists are working on a full‐calibration study supported past the Twentieth Century Fund. Over the last two years the Rockefeller Brothers Fund has kept xxx panelists at piece of work—among them businessmen like Devereux Josephs and Stanley Marcus, theater people like Norris Houghton and Louis Kronenberger, and cultural entrepreneurs like Samuel Gould—discussing the identify, role, and financial support of performing arts institutions. Their volume‐length study is expected in February.
What is the market? Buying the tickets are hordes of college students who often have available to them lavish theaters and auditoriums constructed under academy auspices. Also buying are very big numbers indeed of ordinary Americans. It is likely that attendance at concerts, recitals, ballet and trip the light fantastic performances, plays, operas and art exhibitions rises each yr faster than either population or income. Upwards‐todate corporations, eager to concenter young executives to their outlying plants, frequently stress, and sometimes create, advisable esthetic amenities. In the more affluent suburbs the public schools traffic more and more briskly in music and art.
And nosotros know that not all of this huge market place is simply listeners and watchers. Little‐theater groups, apprentice orchestras and sleeping accommodation ensembles, choral singers and Lord's day painters are legion in the country. The purveyors of art books, painters' supplies, ballet costumes and musical instruments appropriately rejoice.
What does it all mean? Taken at face up value, this ever‐expanding market for "culture" is a deeply cheering sign that education and affluence accept stimulated in middle‐form and upper‐class Americans a yearning for creative experience. Instead of simply piling up even so more than material possessions, they seek instead to improve the quality of their lives. In this quest they are willing to open their minds and their senses to such novel experiences as contemporary painting and electronic music. Thus in criticism of the dejected English language aphorism "more means worse," "more than" means larger audiences willing to betrayal themselves to artistic experiment, eager to learn from the exposure and capable of developing sophisticated tastes for art, music, and drama.
OR this is the line taken past Alvin Toffler in his unpleasantly titled but extremely useful journalistic survey of the market for culture, "The Civilization Consumers." The evidence, he alleges, all goes to prove that the quality of artistic artifacts has steadily risen equally the quantity of cultural experience has grown.
Mr. Toffler cites the high quality of American long‐playing records, the very broad repertory of recorded music (the revival of Baroque music is the famous example) and the fine monaural and stereophonic equipment installed in many homes. He points to the tremendous circulation of respected books in paperback, the increasing boldness of concert programs outside of New York too every bit inside, the wide popularity of American performers in other countries (even French republic), the innovating activities of some of the apprentice theater groups and the world‐broad triumph of American abstract expressionism, which haa fabricated of New York City the painting capital letter of the earth. Sketchy, allusive and impressionistic as much of Toffler'south evidence has to be, the example has its impressive points.
The opposite of the Toffler view is the traditional aristocratic suspicion that when the center class becomes interested in the arts it is not the middle class that is uplifted but the arts that are degraded. Of what avail is the magnificently equipped university theater if it is used to put on "Mary, Mary," a current favorite of college groups? Why bother to construct a Repertory Theater at Lincoln Centre in gild to produce Arthur Miller's "Afterward the Fall," which whatsoever Broadway entrepreneur would willingly have merchandised? If the New York Philharmonic sells out, is information technology because the new esthetes bring their scores, listen critically to the performance and utilise what they take learned to their own musical groups, or considering all the world loves a celebrity and "Lenny" is unmistakably a king amidst celebrities?
Why rejoice in the figures of museum attendance when the Metropolitan vulgarly adver tises the enormous toll that it paid to acquire Rembrandt's "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer" ? Did the crowds which dutifully filed past it nourish because they were impressed by the large financial outlay for a piece of colored canvas? Or did they come because they judged Rembrandt, Aristotle or Homer, or all three, to be "personalities"? After their several seconds of contemplation, how many of the viewers sought out other Rembrandts? How many returned to the museum another twenty-four hours? Were some impelled to pick up Aristotle'southward "Poetics" or Homer's "Iliad"?
When fine art becomes one more than of the ploys of a bored social club, the temptations placed before art's creators and servants are securely subversive of art'south purposes. The stylish painter and the fashionable performer pander to their audiences. Fifty-fifty the author, poet or musician in dignified residence on the college campus is diverted from his proper work by lectures, conversations and demonstrations, and still more by the easy praise and adulation of the immature.
The pampered, prosperous artist is unlikely for long to be a good artist, for almost good mod art implies breach. Information technology follows that the artist who becomes a good, responsible citizen, a resident of the stylish suburbs, a canny manager of an investment portfolio, shortly ceases to create art.
And finally the pace of corruption has been accelerated by the operations of the mass media. The Fourth dimension‐New Yorker tone of blasé sophistication conveys the heart‐forehead's weekly reassurance that he really knows all that he needs to know about painting, sculpture, drama and music. In the meanwhile, a serious periodical like Odyssey stops publication for want of subscribers. The new patron of the arts consumes "experience" every bit he munches breakfast foods: the irritants have been removed from both. Ill‐educated palates crave pap. The mass media obligingly "process" an endless quantity of "material." And so runs the tale told by the critics of
THE rise of a mass public for the arts tin can, in its style, exist compared with the rise of mass literacy in the 18th century in England. It must accept amused the nobility to find their social inferiors struggling with their ABC's. Yet mass literacy has been 1 of the really central advances achieved by mankind in its long and gory history. The ascent of interest in the arts by a mass public in the U.s. could, despite all the humor information technology provides to the caricaturist and the critical establishment, despite all the tinsel and tomfoolery it entails, herald something quite important in the social evolution of modern man.—"The Civilization Consumers." mass culture, and the outraged prophets of "mid‐cult."
For my part, I am unhappy with both of these polar positions. Uncomplicated conclusions are probably wrong conclusions when the range of issues is so bafflingly broad, the country so huge. There is, to brainstorm with, the key distinction betwixt creation and performance. As a nation we are notoriously proficient in the engineering science techniques which insure higher‐fidelity phonograph reproduction and dramatic stage lighting—although we seem not notwithstanding to have mastered the science of acoustics. It remains to exist demonstrated, except perhaps in painting, that nosotros are every bit capable of providing the environment in which artistic and musical cosmos flower. Much of the evidence in Toffler'southward brisk trot through the arts concerns the technical quality of performance, the enlargement of concrete facilities and the spread of such new organizational devices as the arts council and the cultural center, not the cosmos of new music and drama.
At the heart of creation is mystery. Thus it is likely that we shall never have very practiced luck in defining the environs most favorable to the production of masterpieces. Great fine art has in the past been produced under the auspices of religious and aloof patrons. It has been written or painted equally well by the destitute; Rembrandt appears to accept painted likewise in prosperity as in bankruptcy; as a titled blueblood, Leo Tolstoy had to create around‐him a highly artificial poverty. We really don't know whether prosperity or poverty all-time favors art. It all seems to support the Yiddish proverb, " 'for example' is not an statement."
Even the more attainable issues are tricky to clarify. What should we know in gild to reach sensible conclusions about the meaning of the nail in civilization? Most simply nosotros demand to know more most the people who go to the plays, exhibitions, concerts and recitals.
HOW often exercise they go? Does interest in one art generally lead to interest in others as well? Is at that place a tendency for the aforementioned people to increment the corporeality of their participation or to decrease it subsequently a time, possible in favor of some other hobby? How many of the spectators are also amateur performers? How much trouble do the concert audiences accept to hear new music and to empathise what they hear? Are the theater groups content to produce, twelvemonth after year, Broadway hits of various vintages or practice they experiment with Brecht, Beckett and Ionesco? Do the apprentice music groups steadily better in technique and expertise or do they loyally echo the aforementioned chestnuts season afterward flavour?
Nosotros are dealing with i sort of audition for the arts if the largest part of it consists of restless, changeable and replaceable occasional visitors to the temples of music and drama; but an entirely dissimilar audience if its members consist essentially of men and women whose interests and perceptions sharpen with experience, grooming and comparing.
Information technology would be foolish to deny that much in American life favors the less cheerful of the ii possibilities. As a people we are impatient and have a weakness for novelty. The gratifications of art may come as well slowly and too hard for those among us who have been encouraged to believe that learning is easy. The very accessibility of art has had the paradoxical effect of reducing its importance. One sign of the ailment is the exhibition of Michelangelo's "Pieta" in the Vatican Pavilion at the New York World's Fair. Inevitably the keen work of fine art was cheapened by the breathy capitalism which was its background.
WestwardHEN paintings line the walls of banks, they become part furniture. When classical music soothes riders in automatic elevators, fine art becomes therapy. Fine art, like religion, similar intellect, stands in danger of conversion into the instrument of lesser goals than its own: social condition, mental health, even commercial advantage.
Even so, this cannot be the finish of the matter. For some, the boom of interest in the arts may indeed be equally empty of real significant as were some aspects of the recent "religious revival." But it is also possible that for others, the new attachment to the arts may be an expression of discontent with the flow of ordinary experience, a search for the intensity and the form which are missing in the American social mural. The civil rights movements and the Peace Corps accept expressed the aspirations of the idealistic immature. If it is conceded that even their affluent parents possess souls and immortal longings, then fine art, music and theater stand for more than than a style in consumption or an opportunity to join "cultural betterment and fiscal gain."
The argument is open rather than closed. Just maybe we are advancing in the management of the Not bad Audition which is advisable to the Bully Gild —an audience whose knowledge expands from yr to year, whose sensitivity deepens with experience, give-and-take, grooming and reflection, and whose openness to new modes of expresSion continually increases. Such an audition would certainly contain many amateurs of most professional skill At best the dialogue between the professionals and such amateurs might stimulate akin the creativity of the professional and the disquisitional enjoyment of the amateur.
Alternatively the blast in culture may plough out to be but that — a sheerly quantitative phenomenon, a fad in consumer expenditure fairly comparable to the vogue for professional sports and vintage wines, a condition indicator for the comfortable middle class akin to the sports car and European travel, a product to be merchandised similar Thousand Rapids Scandinavian or Stockbrokers' Tudor. The result is uncertain. That, possibly, is a very cheerful matter to say.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/12/13/archives/everybody-is-in-the-queue-the-culture-consumers-a-study-of-art-and.html
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