In Praise of Commercial Culture — 25 Years Later

Good morning, Tyler.

Good morning, Alex.

So today we're going to be talking about your 1998 book, In Praise of Commercial Culture. And let me begin with a little praise of the book. I'll try not to do too much, but this is, I think, my favorite book of yours. It's certainly one of your best books. Sort of the idea of an economist writing about culture, it brings to mind the quip that the economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing. And I think if most economists had written, you know, if Gary Becker, you know, praise Gary Becker, but if Gary Becker had written this book, I think that critique would have applied. But what you do is you have the economic scaffolding, the economic theory, but then you put in so many details and so much love of art and art history that I think that critique does not apply. It cannot be said on reading this book that you are a Philistine. This is clearly somebody who knows culture and who loves culture. As a result, the book cannot be dismissed as a shallow take. The other reason I like it is that I think it really filled a lacuna in the history and the literature on capitalism. You know, there are all these books on capitalism and growth, capitalism and, you know, women, and capitalism and X, and this one is about capitalism and the arts, and there's no other book which I think fits that mold. So I think on reading it, reading it again and preparing for this podcast, it also holds up. Thank you. There's a few references to compact discs, but other than that, It's really, I think, timeless. So before we get into the book in detail, into the theories and so forth, tell us a little bit about what you were thinking when you wrote this book. Why did you write it? Where were you in your career? And what was the background on the book?

Well, I don't even know if you know this story, but you deserve the credit for my having written this book.

What?

Yes. I barely knew you then. I knew you a bit. Yeah. But you came to me and said, oh, Camille Paglia has this new book, Sexual Persona. You've got to read it.

Right.

So I said, OK, I'll read the book. And at the time I was doing more narrowly academic work, and I saw that Paglia wrote a book that was passionate about art and full of information. It wasn't a low-level book, and it was very popular. And I just thought, I should try to do this. I wasn't so much influenced by the details of her content, but the fact that she did the book, which you brought to me, is the reason why I started In Praise of Commercial Culture. But it took me a long time to get the book written and then published. It had a very tough publishing history.

Oh.

It was turned down many times. Oh, wow. And Harvard University Press, they published it, but at first they turned it down.

Wow, I mean, that's surprising because it was reviewed everywhere. It kind of put your name on the map.

And there was another episode. I submitted it to University of Michigan Press, and they decided they would take it. It had positive reviews, and then their editorial book board read the book and just decided they hated it. Wow. And they vetoed Michigan doing the book. Wow. And then I went to my former advisor and by then friend Thomas Schelling. I was like, Tom, what can I do? And Tom said, well, let me write Harvard University Press. I said, oh, they already turned it down. And Tom says, well, let me write Harvard University Press. And that led to a path of events where maybe I started this book in '91, I would guess, and it was published, what, '98, you said? Yeah. That's a long time, and it took me 3 or 4 years to write the book, but equally long to get it out.

Well, selling point, right?

Exactly. But there has always been a lot of hostility toward this book because the notion that capitalism is ugly and violates the aesthetic is one of the criticisms that it was felt still held up, you know, even after communism fell. So it was knocking out one of the last pillars of what Mises called the anti-capitalist mentality.

Yeah. So let's begin with a little bit of the economics then. Let's— the most obvious, right? First law of economics, incentives matter. And the most obvious incentive, by far not the only one as we'll discuss, but the most obvious incentive is money. Now you might think that only the lesser quality artists are motivated by money, only the popular rock and roll, those guys are motivated by money, but the real artists, they're in it for something else. But here, you know, you bring the receipts sometimes.

Literally.

Literally, exactly. So tell us about Michelangelo and Beethoven and all of these guys.

Well, one simple example, if you read the letters of Mozart or Beethoven, they're obsessed with money. They seem to be quite good bargainers. They always want more money. You might think they're greedy, But also money is a means toward realizing your art. Like how good a piano can I buy? Or how good an orchestra can I work with? Or can I travel, you know, to give a concert in Prague or Vienna? So the more an artist cares about art in many situations, the more they're going to care about money. It's a very simple point, but at the time, or even still, you didn't hear it much. It's always money versus art rather than you can care about money as a means to your art. The Italian Renaissance artists also, they're great bargainers, they're highly commercial, they treat their enterprises like true businesses, which they were, and took commissions, wrote contracts, it was a commercial endeavor.

So Mozart is an interesting case because he was sort of in between moving from the patron sort of model like Haydn to the pure selling model of Beethoven. He was sort of in between, right?

You know, even as late as Liszt, you have great and famous composers who earn more money by giving concerts. And to this day, it can be the case that a tour for a popular music group—Taylor Swift, Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney—brings in more money than trying to sell the recordings. So that's longstanding in the history of music amongst other arts. For economists, it could be you can earn more money by giving talks than by writing a book, and the book is a way you might get to give the talks. The shift is still going on, you could say. So it's often the case you earn more money from the ancillary products, and just how frequently we saw that in the history of the arts was one of the things I learned researching this book.

So you say something else which is very interesting about the role of money and prices in the creation of great art. You say, I'm gonna quote, your book has got some of the great sentences. This is one of them. Art consists of a continual dialogue between producer and consumer. Consumers and patrons stand as the artist's silent partners. Inspired consumption is a creative act that further enriches the viewer and the work itself. So what's inspired consumption?

Very often you need great audiences to have great art. Someone has to be watching or listening and care. And you might think in a vacuum you could just have the artist make something, but it's hardly ever the case, if ever. If you try to have a brilliant musician write in a totally new style of music that no one appreciated, there's not the audience feedback, there's not the iterative process, there's not the evolution. So one reason why I think some artistic genres turn bad or sour or boring is just the quality of the audience goes away. And it's striking, say, in 19th century Germanic territories how well educated in music the audience is, how many people in the middle class played pianos, owned pianos, would sing in the evening. Obviously there's no TV, no internet, so your own music, music at home, Hausmusik, was a way in which you would become a fantastically high-quality audience. And we've lost that. We have high-quality audiences for popular music in other ways, High school kids play the guitar, heavy metal, whatever, so on. But I think that's an important part of how commerce boosts the arts is by channeling high-quality audiences and matching them to higher-quality performers.

So the other impact of commerce, of course, is that society gets richer, richer over time. There's more wealth. More wealth gives the artists more options. But this seems to cut in two ways.— the artists are then free with more wealth to not pay attention to the consumers. So how does this dialogue or this, you know, push and pull between the artists and the consumers work as society is getting richer and richer and artists perhaps don't need consumers as much as they did in earlier times?

I think it's the Adam Smith effect that the growing size of the market gives you greater division of labor, more diversity. So you have more artists who just quote-unquote sell out and they try to please the crowd. Some of them can be wonderfully good. And you have more artists who just go their own way, like say My Bloody Valentine, the Irish group with Kevin Shields. They went 20 years and did nothing because Kevin was not happy with how things were going. And you get both. Sometimes you get both in the same career. Like early REM was considered an indie band that made obscure albums like Murmur that were artistically a high reputation but not incredibly popular. And then REM becomes just an extremely popular generator of hits. And they have this evolution within the career. And you get both. And I think that's one of the virtues of the system of having more wealth and better developed markets.

So one of the things which actually you and I, a paper you and I wrote following your book, was an economic theory of avant-garde and popular art, or high and low culture. And we talk a little bit more in that paper about the division between what artists want and what the consumers want. And the artists are always kind of pushing up against the consumers. Is this one reason why the artists tend to dislike capitalism even though capitalism is actually supporting art in the bigger picture.

People judge things at the margin, right? In a friendship or marriage or if you have co-founders, at the margin, am I getting what I want? And getting out of that mindset is very difficult. Actually, you and I in our collaborations, I think we've done great on that. You look at the total value created. But, you know, there's this recent movie, The Brutalist, about an architect who's trying to build a building his own way, and the patron doesn't want to do it that way. And the moviemaker himself has been in similar positions. He wanted to make the movie his own way, and the rest of the world didn't necessarily want to cooperate. So I think you replicate that dynamic at all levels of wealth. You even get more instances of it because the company is just basically gonna wanna profit maximize even in a very wealthy society. And the artist who now has better opportunities or spousal support or whatever, tenured academic position, will want to indulge his or her fancies. So those conflicts only increase and it feels like they're getting worse all the time. They are getting worse all the time in equilibrium, but that's part of the system and how it works.

So the painter, they don't require all that much, right, to make the painting. They don't require a big company behind them. But the movie director does.

And the sculptor does more than the painter. It depends on the kind of sculpture, kind of painting, but on average, absolutely. So there's more conflicts in the movie industry, so you would expect movies to be more anti-commercial than some other artistic genres. I've never tried to measure that. It accords with my intuitions. Someone who's a poet, right? It used to be pen and paper, now maybe it's computer, but that doesn't cost much at all, and there's hardly any conflicts of that kind in poetry. Right.

So the director is always having legendary battles with the producer, right? Orson Welles is another example.

They wanted popular movies from him. He wanted to do his own thing, and he wouldn't finish projects on time. Don't think the creator is always in the right. Yeah, yeah. Very often the companies are. Right. Inspired consumption. Yes, and the companies will force compromises on the artists. But often are for the better. Like, Paul McCartney wanted Red Rose Speedway to be a double album. 4 or 5 years ago, he put out what that double album would have looked like. It wasn't actually that good. It was Paul being self-indulgent. The company, by insisting on a single album— Paul could have walked away from the company. He was Paul McCartney, right? But still, Paul went along with it, and for the better.

So I wrote down— I don't know if there's a quote from your book or if I wrote it down, but, uh, artists are low paid but well compensated.

That's right. We should tax them, you could say. Tax them more. They have fun. It's challenging. It's a kind of life and lifestyle that many people desire, even though it's not actually that fun. People like the idea of being a creative artist. And we as academics, you wouldn't say what we do is art, but it's some form of creating that we derive additional pleasure from, and we're in that sense underpaid.

—and there's a compensating differential. Right.

Control over your time is part of it.

Right. So this means, right, that artists are— they're always complaining about being low paid. But if the government were to sort of give them a stipend, then they're going to produce more art. They're going to work less in the sort of non-art sector, but also produce more art in tune with their own preferences. And less in tune with the market, right? Yes. So it's always gonna be that conflict because the more, the bigger the stipend, the more the artist moves away from the market.

One point I make in the book is that often government support for the arts does better when the government treats itself like a commercial customer with desires and whims and fancies of its own. And this was the case in the Italian Renaissance. Some of the support behind those great artistic creations was governmental or maybe quasi-governmental in the case of the guilds or how exactly would you count the Pope? But it wasn't unbureaucratically. There were people, often with excellent taste, who wanted particular things and demanded them and acted like customers, albeit with government money that they taxed from others. But when it's more of a market, you often do better than when it's more of a bureaucracy.

So here's a quote from the book. Art and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles.

So much of democratic politics, it's based on consensus. So much of wonderful art, especially new art, is based on overturning consensus, maybe sometimes offending people. All this came to a head in the 1990s. Disputes over what the National Endowment for the Arts in America was funding, Some of it, of course, was obscene. Some of it was obscene and pretty good. Some of it was obscene and terrible. But what ended up happening is the whole process got bureaucratized. The NEA ended up afraid to make highly controversial grants. They spend more on overhead. They send more around to the states. Now it's much more boring, and it seems obvious in retrospect the NEA did a much better job in the 1960s right after it was founded when it was just a bunch of smart people sitting around a table saying, "Let's send some money to this person." and then they just do it basically.

Right, right, so it can't really survive the, the greatness cannot survive the mediocrity of democratic consensus.

But there are plenty of good cases where government does good things in the arts, often in the early stages of some process before it's too politicized, and I think some critics overlook that or don't want to admit it.

Yeah, but the, one of the interesting things in your book was that the whole history of the NEA, this kind of recreates itself, has recreated itself many times in the past. So the Salon during the French painting Renaissance, right? The Impressionists hated the Salon, right? Right.

And it typically turned them away because the works weren't good enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there could be kind of rent-seeking going on, right? The artist get control. So sometimes it's democratic politics, but sometimes it's some clique of artists who get control and then funnel the money to their friends.

And French cinematic subsidies would more fit that latter model. It's not so much that the French voters want to pay for those movies, but a lot of French government is controlled by elites. The elites like a certain kind of cinema. They view it as a counterweight to Hollywood, preserving French culture. And the French still pay for, or indirectly by quota subsidize, a lot of films that just don't really even get released. And they end up somewhere and they just don't have much impact, flat out.

Let's talk a little bit about television because while you weren't pessimistic about television in 1998, you did tip your hat a little bit to the cultural pessimists on that ground. He said, well, yeah, television's not so great. But since that time, I think television has exploded in quality. And I'd mention—

And declined again, too. I would add.

Yeah, so— Yeah, but it had its moment. I'd mention The Wire, Veronica Mars, Succession, which is pretty recent, as just a few of the standouts.

They're not that recent, right? That's important. Well— Okay, but I keep in mind when I wrote that sentence— so this is published in '98, I probably wrote it in '92— and that there was not great material on TV was much more true in '92 than in '98. But I say in the book, well, I think it's going to get a lot better. Yes. So it turned out I was right.

Yeah, correct, correct. So that, that's what I want to get to. So why was television so bad before? I mean, I grew up in like The Gong Show, right? You know, I guess you could still see, but And why has it gotten so much better? What are the economics?

Well, there were restrictions on entry, and 3 networks were given privileged positions. And it had to be advertising funded, partly for legal restrictions, partly for technological restrictions. So ad funding favors consensus, least common denominator. You have 3 networks. It's just hard to break in with new ideas. There were pretty high fixed costs. But even given all that, I'm surprised it wasn't better. I like I Love Lucy. There's other shows from that era that I think are good, but at the end of the day, there's very little I ever want to go back to and rewatch. Star Trek was very good.

And speaking of I Love Lucy, because she funded it.

That's right. Yes. With her own money. Yeah. During pandemic, went back and rewatched some classic Star Trek with Natasha. That was rewarding. But again, there's just not that much. Yeah, and they're surprising, and maybe it's an audience issue.

But the fixed costs, the moving away from broadcast television where you're really just going after eyes, right? I mean, when you say advertising, what you mean, right, is that the advertisers, they just care about the number of eyes, right?

And not intensity of pleasure. And not intensity of pleasure, right? Not satisfying minorities, not giving someone thrilling that will change their life. Just getting someone with a TV dinner in front of the set, not walking away to the bathroom.

Yeah, maybe the whole family too, right? Right. Got to appeal to kind of mass.

And that's also, you know, groups. Group consumption can be bad for the arts. You want to appeal often to individuals.

Yeah. So now everybody's got their own Netflix subscription. They can appeal to their own particular tastes.

YouTube, internet. That's a mixed blessing in some ways, but you're not producing for groups as much as you used to.

So on page 46, see, you have again a nice kind of interesting quote. You say, "In 1947, only 85,000 books were in print in the U.S., but now the number has risen to 1.3 million, with 140,000 published for the first time in 1996." Now I went and looked up more recent figures, and of course we do hear a lot about everyone's You know, short attention spans. You know, people aren't reading anymore. They're visual, you know, audiences, YouTube, all of that. But here's what I found. Today, 2025, Amazon offers about 50 million books and approximately 500,000 to 1 million new titles are published annually in the United States. And that doesn't include the number of self-published books. Which if you do include those, it goes up to like 4 million. So what is the deal about reading? Is it, is it down? Do you see that novels are getting worse or reading is ending or what? How do you see this?

I think it's a complicated picture. So in terms of attention span, my current model is that at least recently the variance of attention span has gone up. So people will play computer games for many hours on end. Very long novels such as Harry Potter or these long fantasy series, they're extremely popular, you know, more popular than before. Lord of the Rings, it's not a super, super long novel, but it's not short. It's just increased in influence. But at the same time, you know, TikTok would be the easiest example. The super short form is more popular and maybe the middle is being hollowed out somewhat. So that will hurt some kinds of books. On airplanes, I see people reading less than I used to. That means something. It's true either in economy or in business class. It doesn't matter how elite the flight might seem to be. Hardly anyone's reading. People are looking at screens. So I do think reading of books in the United States, I suspect, is going down, but with huge spikes in a bunch of positive directions. Not a story of simple decline, but probably down on average.

So you say people are looking at screens, but of course sometimes they're reading on the screen, right?

Oh, of course, yeah. If you count that, reading is way up. But reading of books as physical objects or even Kindle objects, I believe is down, though I know the data on sales are fine. It's interesting what now sells better. So books about dogs as a category, that's done fantastically well. I'm not saying people aren't reading those, but like what people are reading matters. Nothing against dogs or books on dogs. I think within the classics there's enormous spikiness. So Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Lord of the Rings, truly enduring, more popular. Dostoevsky becomes a kind of must-read in some form. White Nights is now a hot thing because of TikTok, which is not otherwise that well-known a Dostoevsky— I guess you'd call it a novella. Now it's, you know, ranked quite high on Amazon. Some of those people are reading it, but a lot of other classics just seem to be forgotten.

Should Shakespeare and even Jane Austen, should they be translated into modern English?

Paul Novosad got into trouble on Twitter for saying this. Well, what we should have is AIs that will do any translating you want, and then the decision's up to you. But I feel it's wrong to read them in modern English. You lose everything. People should be free to do it. I'm happy if you want to do it. You know, the LLM will translate it for you, but I feel it's deeply immoral in some sense.

But Shakespeare wrote in modern English for his time, right?

You lose so much of the cleverness, the wit, the wordplay. It's just not translatable. I also think there's a lot of poetry from say French and Russian, I wouldn't say you shouldn't read it in English. You should read it for historical purposes, but you shouldn't think you're reading the poetry because you're getting something, no matter how good the translation, you're just not getting it. You should read poetry in languages you can read. And as I improved, like my German and Spanish over time, I just saw the difference. And to think you're reading poetry in some other language is a big mistake. Usually.

Here's another interesting quote from your book, and I like this because it's got some— you reverse expectations very quickly. This is interesting. Unlike established authors, newcomers do not capture most of the publishing profits in the form of high advances and royalty rates. Now, when you initially read this, it sounds like a left-wing critique. The newcomers don't capture these publishing profits in the form of high advances and royalty rates. But then the next sentence is, "For-profit publishing houses, therefore, have a continual incentive to discover and promote new writers." So a nice little twist there. Explain. Well, that's how they earn their money.

So if Stephen King, whether today or at his prime, has a new book to publish, everyone knows more or less how many copies it's going to sell. And they'll pay him more or less what it's worth. And everything proceeds in a fairly predictable manner, and there are not huge profits there. Plenty of places will publish Stephen King, but what you want is an unknown author where you— there's some kind of auction, maybe you pay in advance of low six figures, and then the book just sells for 10 years and hits the top of the bestseller lists. You know, something like Rebecca Kuang, whose books have done very well. We had a podcast with her, and I don't know what her initial advance was, but I'm sure they made a lot of money on her because she's not Stephen King, and now she's well known. Like, she is the Stephen King figure now. Right.

So you have to provide some skin in the game for the people who go out and discover.

And there's risk because most of the chances the publishers take fail to pay off, right? It's very hard to predict what will do well. It's a funny feature of a lot of these cultural markets. That nobody knows which books become bestsellers. Harry Potter, reviewed early by the New York Times, they don't treat it as anything important. They sort of pan it. It took a while for it to take off.

Turned down by I think 12 publishing houses. Yeah, so basically hardly anyone knew. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So talk about competition as a discovery procedure in Hayek, and you're thinking how was your, your thinking on this book influenced by reading Hayek and the Austrians and thinking about the market process as opposed to maybe perfect competition, neoclassical model?

Well, the book and most of what I've written comes from my background reading Hayek and the other Austrian economists. So the notion that the market is a dynamic process, it's not about its static properties, it's how do you discover and help create new art, that's what's valuable. New goods have this especially high value. It's also true in international trade theory. And that means that you think about these systems not in terms of have you gotten rid of every pocket of monopoly, which is a kind of antitrust approach, which I think is very harmful for culture, but just how dynamic is the system, how well-informed are your customers, what kinds of opportunities are there, is there some kind of creative ferment, do groups come together. In a useful way? Do you have institutions, say, of civil society that help, say, the Beatles to form? And they did. So it's a very different lens to view economies, but in particular the arts, and hardly anyone had done it. There's a big literature on the economics of the arts. Much of it is quite good, but a lot of it's static. There's identifying some wedge of an externality, and then you've got to subsidize or tax something. That to me misses the point. You want these Dynamic systems that are working very, very well, and that's how you get the big returns.

Another quote from the book: "Masterpieces usually arise in a climate full of pulp and trash." Well, the pulp and trash cross-subsidize the masterpieces.

So you walk into a bookstore, and we do still have them, go into a Barnes Noble, a lot of the sales are of pulp and trash, but that's how they can afford to put the store there. And if you wanna buy Dostoevsky or Shakespeare or whatever else or our books, the bookstore's there for you. So you need these cross-subsidies. They're essential to so much of artistic production.

One of the things which interested me in rereading the book is of course in the book you deal with the cultural pessimists and obviously you're a cultural optimist and so many of the, debates which we're having today, and including which you are having today, are recounted or preceded in this book. So you've been, for example, quite skeptical about some of Jonathan Haidt's work, you know, panning the cell phone and talking about— Haidt talks about how the cell phones are ruining creating suicide and making people miserable and lonely and so forth. Everything which hate says about cell phones, people also said about books.

And the opera, for that matter.

And the opera, right? Novels in particular, romantic novels.

Yeah, yeah. Now they might have been right in a funny way back then, like we shouldn't dismiss that, but the important point is the dynamic point. That especially with smartphones and AI, I'm not sure we've ever had technologies changing and developing more rapidly than what we're seeing with AI and the internet and smartphones right now. So the notion that you can usefully regulate something that's changing faster than any technology in human history, I think is a kind of hubris. There's a separate question, do the data support John's contentions? But aside from all that, it's a moving target, it's a rapidly moving target, and markets are there to help people solve problems. So when there are problems, there are endogenously created institutions to address those problems, and it's not obvious that government is the way to do that, especially when governments have such a bad track record on free speech.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was amazed to read that people were saying that books create melancholia. You know, depression, right?

They do when I read them even now. Like, ah, how could he have written this book? It's terrible. Another boring book on this topic. That's a little bit different. Where's the Hayekian perspective in this one? Hasn't he read Fisher Black?

So let me give you another quote. Modern techniques for painting display were in fact taken from the practices of department stores.

Sure. How's that? Department stores obviously want to sell their wares. They put things forward in a way that is visually quite attractive. Some of the most beautiful places, say in Dubai, are the department stores and their displays, and that's to make money. It becomes a kind of art, just like fashion becomes art, but people learn from those displays as they did in the late Parisian 19th century, and you present paintings in similar ways. How you use light, what kind of order you put things in, how much is in a room. So of course commerce and business are major inspirations for so much of the arts.

So it's not just Andy Warhol taking from the department stores, but it's—

it goes both ways, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a gallery, you go to a gallery in New York City, they don't call it a department store, but look, it's what it is. And it's the same people who go to the upscale department stores and the galleries. Now Warhol knew that and he made fun of it in a neat way, but yes.

Yeah. All right. Let's talk a little bit about so-called modern art, which is maybe where I disagree with you a little bit. I mean, so I completely agree with you about all of the dynamics of the cultural marketplaces and that capitalism supports the arts and creative destruction and the importance of wealth and prices and prices as signals and so forth, and yet some of the time, you know, some of the art which is produced is just terrible, it's just crap. Of course. Right?

It's like the pulp and trash surrounding the masterpieces.

Yeah, but sometimes I think the masterpieces are kind of trashy too. You know, so there's the famous, which you deal with in the book, you know, the famous Morley Safer episode. 60 Minutes episode on modern art, right? Or, you know, more recently they got the guy taping the banana to the wall. I don't know, Robert Ryman, Agnes Martin, these are famous people, I can't tell the difference between them at all. If you don't know, these are the minimalists, you know, Agnes Martin is just like a white piece of paper.

Come on. Robert Ryman in particular, his prices have held up very well. Agnes Martin also, they used to be somewhat cheap. Now they're quite expensive. They've gone from six-figure territory to seven-figure territory, and you can't blame it all on the Fed. The textures are wonderful. It takes a long time to appreciate, and it's best if you live with it. I think there are far worse offenders than those two. I would love to have works by Ryman or Agnes Martin. And Ryman, you know, there's small bits of green sometimes, or red. I'm Amongst the White. I think he's a fantastic artist, and yeah, same with Agnes Martin. Now, do I think there's a lot of conceptual art that is just a waste and not really any social value? Absolutely, but I wouldn't put those two up.

Okay, yeah, I mean, I'm willing to give, you know, like I'm not a big fan of rap, but I'm totally willing to say that's my fault, you know, I'm totally willing to say it's a great art form. But some of these guys really push, push it to the limit, I think.

But when you have a case where you could call them the experts, the critics, the auction houses, the galleries, the writers on art, and the market, if they're all agreeing, it's not a forcing argument, but I think it's a pretty good sign. And Ryman and Martin have been out there now for many decades. It's not new or contemporary anymore. Yeah, that's a very good sign that their right and the fault, even if you don't have to like it for yourself, but—

So in architecture, the Brutalist, you mentioned the Brutalist movie, but that type of architecture, people still hate it. I mean, it's been around now for well over 50 years. People still hate it, right? I mean, all of that stuff which suffuses Washington, D.C.,— you know, all these Department of Energy buildings and so forth. People didn't like it then. They still don't like it now. It's got to be bad, right?

Well, let me just make a general point. I agree a lot of architecture has gotten worse in the US and many other places compared to earlier periods. So I accept that. I don't think brutalism is that unpopular as you suggest. People come to Washington. They say it's a beautiful city. They're not thinking about the HUD building. But in fact, the HUD building, the Hirshhorn, the Metro, which gets a lot of praise, that's brutalist. All that is part of what makes the city look good. And I think people, when they're presented with brutalism in a different context where they don't know it's something they're supposed to dislike, they sometimes fall in love with it. The Metro's okay. The Metro's very good.

I don't know. All right.

But I agree, architecture in many, many spheres, especially at the neighborhood level, it's much worse compared to, say, the 1900s. Yeah. 1910s, 1920s, something. World War II is a breakpoint. Now, architecture, it's highly regulated, as you and I know. It's high cost. There's a lot of reasons to think it's a vulnerable area. Maybe economies of scale have been a problem. But I think it has to be— there's some problem gone wrong on the taste side. People want dull, boring homes with incredible interiors, but they just look quite mediocre from the outside. And it doesn't matter how much money the person has in many cases.

I mean, there's a problem with some homes, but it seems to be more in the public architecture, which is particularly bad. And that just seems to be a cabal of artists, architecture artists, who just revel in the fact that people dislike the building.

No, I'll blame too much bureaucracy there. New public buildings in the US, they're not that brutalist. They're just mediocre. There's all these planning processes, layers of veto, environmental review. You just are hoping you can build anything at all. And it's a very bad setup. It's not going to produce much that's great. Now Vietnam Veterans Memorial, that's incredible, right? That was a public process. Yes. So there are exceptions.

Yeah, there are exceptions, yeah. Speaking of conceptual artists, I mean, there are some good ones. I love the Christo, or the Christos.

The wrappings. The wrappings. Amazing the NIMBYs ever let him do that. Unbelievable, right?

That's right. It's interesting, often it took 20, 25 years to get permission to do it.

Returns to determination are high, right?

Yeah, the returns to determination, yeah, yeah. So in fact, if you understand how difficult the process was to produce these artworks, that just adds to the beauty of them, I think.

I have a Christo print in my office here at Mercatus, one of the Paris Review ones. The umbrellas, I think, was fantastic. Of course, the islands. I've only seen photos of the wrapped islands in Biscayne Bay, but it looks like one of the best ones. Central Park, and on and on.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so there's some good conceptual artists too.

It's a case, by the way, of cross-subsidies, so the projects don't pay for themselves, but he'll do offshoots of prints, sketches, other things, and sell them, and it helps him realize his artistic vision because we have this thick market, and a lot of the Christo offshoot works, they're not all that great, I would say. People are despising the name. You could be cynical about that, or some are getting ripped off, but, you know, it's what pays for his best stuff too. Yeah.

One of the interesting cases in the early history of rock and roll was payola, which is amazing to me that payola still has this kind of negative spin to it. Like, what a successful campaign to make this a dirty word, where even today payola has a dirty word, has a dirty connotation. You have a quite different story about payola and the early history of rock and roll.

In supermarkets, there are slotting fees. Where do they put your product? In bookstores, Typically, there are slotting fees, what gets to be on the front table. There are some people who criticize this, but it's not any sign of moral turpitude. You think you have something that will sell and you want to get it exposure, and it's like buying ads.

So explain the slotting fees at the supermarket. Tell us a bit. What do you mean?

Well, if you have a new product, you would much rather it be at eye level than be way at the top or way at the bottom, and you want it to be in the more heavily traversed aisles rather than others. So the rights to that are bought and sold for prices. This happens all the time. No one would say it's a perfect process, but it's often people who— with new products that use it because they need the exposure. You know, everyone knows what Kellogg's Corn Flakes is, and that will probably get a good spot anyway because people are inclined to buy it. But if you have some new kind of bar of soap or whatever and you want it to be in Whole Foods where people will experiment with it, You might pay a slotting fee and you pay for that privilege.

Yeah.

And it works. Yeah, it's fine. It's like marketing. It's like marketing. It is marketing. Yeah. So if this is done in music, I don't think there's any problem. The alternative back then was more music was financed by ads over the radio rather than payola. That led to some homogenization, least common denominator incentives. And you look at R&B or early rap, What was called payola was quite important for doing the marketing and promoting of those genres, and that's fine. Right. Now, is there some corruption in payola where you pay what was then the disc jockey when he or she doesn't have that right and they're violating their contract, you know, with the radio station? That's a problem of corruption that, you know, I would just leave to them to sort out, but it's not actually a problem for the music. In fact, it lowers the cost of promoting the music if you can be corrupt and just pay the disc jockey directly.

Yeah, so Alan Freed got a raw deal.

Yeah, he got a raw deal. And you know, it's because of him that Chuck Berry became famous. Maybelline, his name is still on the song as a co-writer. He really had nothing to do with writing the song, but that's how Chuck got him to promote the song, because he got the royalties. We still talk about Chuck Berry. And you know what the best Chuck Berry song is? Maybelline. And Chuck, like many other artists, he earned most of his money giving tours. You could say, yes, it's highly unfair. He had to share the royalties with Alan Freed. But, you know, so much of history of music, you've got to perform to earn. So, yes, it's unfair, but everything in life is unfair. Everything in the arts is unfair. Sometimes you just need a little bit of perspective.

Yeah. So you see on the movies all the time, there are executive producer credits, right? No one seems to complain about that, but everybody knows—

That's right.

People have gotten back onto payola in recent times, you know, complaining about streaming and Spotify in particular. Yes, Spotify.

Yeah, there's a whole new book out complaining about this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you would have the same critique?

Well, I think the details are quite different, but I don't see a problem with it. What's happening is Spotify will put you higher in algorithms if you agree to take a lower royalty rate. On the streams. So that's a— indirectly, how the payment is channeled is different. I think what we learned from Spotify and streaming, there's a whole bunch of listeners who are entirely passive. They don't care that much what they hear. What they want to hear, I would call crap. Am I allowed to say that? It used to be people would listen to Muzak, right? But because everything's so individualized, we now can really segregate those people and target them with crap and serve them very cheaply. And it's just, you know, AI-generated music. And I don't mean the more clever stuff. I mean the bad things. And they just get it. But they're not victimized. You know, they can leave that ecosystem at any time, and they don't. They want the crap. And you have plenty of alternatives. YouTube would be the most obvious, but many, many music services, or just clicking on something on Spotify and hearing what you want. So I think it's depressing how many people are quite passive as music listeners, but we segregate them. We actually somewhat remove them from the rest of the market, so there may be less of an incentive at the margin for the other performers to appeal to them. And let's hope it makes the rest of music, you know, just that marginal amount sharper. That's what I think is happening.

Yeah, I think there's a bunch of interesting cases where the consumers are more or less indifferent But the producers care very much about getting to the consumer. So like going back to the supermarket example, there's a lot of people, not everyone, but there's a lot of people who don't care whether it's Coke or Pepsi. But Coke and Pepsi, they care a lot. That's right. So they're willing to pay. And yeah, in the case of, you know, paying for to get on the playlist, there's a lot of people who don't care what's on the playlist. As you say, it's sort of background music.

Or they run to it, or they're talking over it, yeah.

They're doing the ironing, whatever, right? And, but the artists do care. So you have this system where there's a lot of money which is being spent to market or to get into those distribution rights, which seems to be, suggests that it must be anti-consumer, but the consumers actually, most of them don't care, and that's fine. And the ones that do care, If you do care whether it's Coke or Pepsi, you're not bothered by the fact that Coke is, you know, at eye level and Pepsi you have to look down a little bit.

I don't understand why Ted Joy is so falling apart over this. Like, the bad parts of the system, they have become more legible. Right. So like, when I was a kid, my father would drive his car, he would listen to Muzak voluntarily. I thought this was awful. I was rude to him even. I shouldn't have been rude. You know how kids are. Yeah. But no one other than me saw or heard what he was doing. And now it's a known thing that there are all these passive listeners who are fed slop. It's not the world ending, it's how matters always have been, but we just see it more clearly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Why did the Soviets suppress rock and roll?

They viewed it as capitalist, of course, and it was rebellious. You'd have a Beatles song like Revolution, which actually is anti-revolution, but no, people didn't know that at the time. That's the title, Revolution, right? Titles really matter. And the title of this book, In Praise of Commercial Culture, I was going to call it Enterprise in the Arts, a weak title, bad title. A number of people said, oh, you should call it In Praise of Commercial Culture. I'm glad I did. So rock music, some of it's about sex, which had an unclear status under communism, but certainly you were not supposed to talk about it too openly. And it was a sign of the West and a thing the West could do. But there were plenty of Soviet bands that tried to do some kind of Soviet version of rock, and they were allowed. I think it was seen as a way of defusing interest or making it more communist mainstream. They're not that good, but I know people from the Soviet Union who will still listen to it for nostalgic reasons. Right. Yeah.

So the final chapter in your book deals more with cultural pessimism, which we've already touched on a little bit, but the final chapter is sort of asking the question, why is cultural pessimism so common? It seems to arise in every single era. You know, it seems to repeat itself over and over again, and you have a number of different theories for why cultural pessimism appeals and is so strong. One is cognitive illusion. And you give really a beautiful illustration of this fact, which I haven't heard other people put in quite this wonderful way. So let me read you what you said. We are like observers on a shoreline watching ships sail away over the horizon. This is the arts which are declining in quality. We can see the departing ships dwindle in size, but we cannot observe the new ships approaching. We have a memory of each ship that is left, but no corresponding market for those in the early stages of their voyages to us.

You see this today with AI. I'm not aware that AI has produced any great art or music yet, or if they have, I'm not aware of it. But it's wrecking some things. It's injecting more slop into a number of processes. You don't see what's coming. It's probably not here yet. It may not be far away. And everyone is in a big panic over it. I think it will be fine. It will be incredible when we get the goodies. Artistic revolutions in the past, they're never totally smooth. You have these odd gaps of time, mostly just random. In the Italian Renaissance, oh, you know, what exactly was painted in 1523? Well, I'm not sure, but it's not always the case there was something. And And arguably we're in some of those gaps now. I see these very healthy infrastructures, a lot of talent going into most of the arts. Some things that have gone badly wrong, I would say like neighborhood architecture and Hollywood, to me right now are the two things that are the most screwed up. And I think the pessimists, they're right about some mix of the short term or the particular things they're focusing on, but cinema now still is incredible. At a global level, as good, I think, as it's ever been. Architecture needs some work. We have many wonderful standalone buildings, but we're not building new great neighborhoods. And there's an ebb and flow. We're not producing great Baroque music today. Maybe we never will again, or maybe the AIs will do it for us. But you have to get used to that and realize there's plenty of ways to consume the past and enjoy the new things being fed to you now. You can still just go to New York go to the Village Vanguard, pay $35, get there a little early, sit in the third row, and see the world's best jazz, and no one will stop you, and it's incredibly good. And somehow this doesn't count for very much because not that many people do it. That's why you can do it so easily. So all the opportunities like that, they're way undervalued.

Yeah, so you gotta be a certain kind of consumer to do that, right? Sure.

And if you want to do the slop while you're at the gym, that's fine. You're actually going to cross-subsidize what I do because you're boosting the profits of Spotify. And I use Spotify if there's a new review of a recording. I'll listen to it a bit on Spotify. It's not the main way I listen to things, and then I'll either buy it or not buy it, and then I proceed.

So we have a cognitive illusion of the past— the Baroque music has sailed away, and we're not yet being able to see what is coming towards us. The past is also much bigger than the present, and you point out that it takes time to kind of sift. The passage of time reveals that Haydn and Mozart are superior to Gluck, Cherubini, Cimarosa, and Gredi. I don't even know who those people are.

Cherubini's better than I thought when I wrote that sentence, but he's not as good as the others.

Most music critics in the 18th century did not understand the categorical distinctions between Mozart and his contemporaries. So the— it takes time to appreciate, and because— so there's another kind of, well, so the past looks much better because we've had time to figure out what is really great.

And your favorites are always in the past by definition. Yeah. My favorite movie, oh, that was from back then. My favorite music from Beethoven back then. So, oh, the past is so wonderful. What do I have now? But again, it's confusing stock and flow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There also seems to be just something inbuilt in the human brain, particularly with music, that the music that you hear in your adolescence just appears to cement itself in the brain, in a bind in the brain. In a much stronger way. So even though, like, I know it's false, like, the music of my youth just sounds better, deeper, more important, you know, than the Pavlov, than the Britney Spears, you know, my kids, you know, sometimes listen to. But, you know, some of them, they love a few of the songs from Britney. They love that, right?

You have to work hard to overcome this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Sibelius, I never listened to until I was, I don't know, over 50, and now I love it. Okay. But I can tell how much harder it is to appreciate also.

So how do you make— I mean, you've got less time, you know, going forward. So shouldn't you just be like— it makes perfect sense, right, that young people experiment more and have a wider variety of tastes because they don't know what they like yet. But as you get older, shouldn't you just focus on what you like, and isn't that just going to make you, you know, crotchety?

That's my stubborn arrogance, to stay young through the arts, and if something to me seems difficult, but there are some clues that might be good, like reviews from smart people, just keep on at it till I get it. So things like atonal music, Indian classical music, so many people don't like, but like at this point, I just know they're wrong. A lot of it, of course, isn't good, but they're just wrong. And if they don't have the time and energy, that's fine. Like, most people shouldn't pursue those things. There's no practical return. Maybe Indian classical music there would be, but not atonal music. People would just think you're weird and want to stay away from you.

So you dislike it too when you first hear it, but you think that because other people say that it's good, you want to— you work at it.

I don't think dislike is the word. So when I first heard atonal music, I was intrigued. I didn't enjoy it, but I felt there was something there and I didn't hate it. And then I just kept on at it, but it took many years of repeat, you know, going back to it, and maybe each time I liked it a bit more. And then you can use like Indian classical music and contemporary classical music to a bit make sense of each other. So there's this iterative process, but it's a lot of investment.

Yeah. I don't think I have the time.

But that's what I would call like the correct cultural perspective. Right. And it's quite hidden to people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't— I'm not sure I have the time or the energy or the capability to do that.

But you do it in other areas, right? Yeah, things in math. Sure. Not that easy to just master. Sure.

But I think I have the, the meta rationality to understand that my personal perspective is not actually revealing the truth about the global creative destruction and the flow of new artists. I think the music my kids listen to is probably at least as good as the music that I listen to, so I have the meta rationality, if not the ability to appreciate everything which comes my way.

Most people don't, and then there's generational conflict, so your kids might listen to something to irritate you, and you know that's their motive, so you're really inclined not to like it, —Right. —And parents will turn against it because it becomes rebellion, it's contested territory, and so on. So parental relationships are often not good for you as a consumer of culture.

—Yeah. Fashion changed a huge amount between like the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. Like you can take any one of those decades and immediately pick out, you have a picture, you know, what what decade it was, right? You see a picture from the 1970s, you know immediately it's the 1970s. From the 1990s on, nothing has changed. What's going on there? You have any thoughts on that? On the, like, it just, yeah, I mean, other than like the people using cell phones, fashion has not seemed to have a wave since the 1990s.

I think fashion's an area that overall has gotten worse. It could be we used to use fashion for signaling what kind of person you are, how much money you have. We don't need that anymore. People can Google you, they can ask the AI. You have many ways of establishing your reputation. So just how people dress, it seems to me has been getting worse. I was just watching a movie with mostly film clips from the 1960s, and every shot I'm admiring how well-dressed people are. Yes. It's not a style I want to wear, so I'm part of the problem. Suit and tie, you know, in a civil rights march. But it's a huge difference, and yeah, that's a case where it just seems to me it's getting worse, and if it's stagnated, maybe it just, it's so bad it can't even get that much worse, so it just stays put. It's a shame.

You have another explanation, another theory for cultural pessimism, and that is that the artists are trying to fool us. With their radicalism. So it's the Straussian interpretation of cultural pessimism is that the artists do this to hide their radicalism, and you point to Jonathan Swift in particular, right, as someone who did this kind of thing. He complained that the artists were too radical to hide his own massive radicalism.

And he faced a lot of censorship in his lifetime, so to be Straussian about some of these earlier figures It's common sense. It's not going off the deep end. I think another factor with Swift in particular, but many— a lot of top artists are highly neurotic or bipolar, schizophrenic, whatever. We don't necessarily know, but they're not normal people. They can be very depressive. So the notion that you'll get a lot of cultural pessimism from people with those proclivities, it's going to be correlated. And that seems to have been the case with Swift also. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the cheeriest guy, from what we can tell.

Right. So another kind of point which you make in that latter chapter is you draw a connection between cultural optimism and declining mineral prices, you know, right? You know, the famous Julian Simon, you know, bet and so forth. So tell us about, again, like how your cultural optimism connects with your understanding of markets and creative destruction and innovation and so forth.

Well, origins really matter. The very first piece I ever wrote as an economist, I think I was maybe a freshman in college, and I wrote a guide for high school debaters on how to use Julian Simon's The Ultimate Resource. In debate. And Simon, as you know, is an optimist about resources. He stressed innovation and creativity. He's a big influence behind this book, In Praise of Commercial Culture. And I imbibed his ideas very early. Later on I got to know him. The main book, I think, was 1981, The Ultimate Resource. And it just seemed the logic of that was quite general. The prices and incentives encourage creativity, whether it's with minerals or music.. And people hadn't really made those connections back then. So again, it's just dynamic Hayekian economics that Simon was practicing.

You say pessimism falls as a tax on consumers by leading them to neglect contemporary culture.

I think I would rewrite that. I think it's often an efficient tax. It's become increasingly clear over time what people do and do not care about. People are much more tolerant of slop than I thought when I wrote this book. Some of that is bad. I think it's one of the things I would have written differently. So without the pessimism, I don't think you'd get a much better outcome. The pessimism in a way is supported by the consumers because it gives them a rationale for often doing the slop and not trying to get into atonal music. And maybe that is in some way efficient, even if it's not, you know, artistically entirely correct.

One of the sentences I didn't understand relates to this. It's an interesting one. Cultural pessimism, insofar as it tries to provide an embracing account of modernity's failures, serves as a competitor to myth and magic.

Here's what I think I might have meant. Cultural pessimism is a story about the modern world. It's a story that people can run with. Religion is a story. Myths are stories. Belief in magic is pretty common. And the notion that some kind of mini or full apocalypse is upon us— and Peter Thiel still talks about this— it's in the mix and it's not ever going away. So it is this intellectual competitor. If you're going to have the Smithian framework with a lot of division of labor and more diversity, you're going to get a lot more pessimism. You might get better, more informed pessimism, more biting pessimism, more sarcastic pessimism, AI-generated pessimism. So like enjoy it. A lot of the pessimists, T.S. Eliot, Jonathan Swift, they were a lot of fun, you know.

Never underestimate the elasticity of supply. Exactly.

Especially of pessimism.

All right. Well, let's conclude with this. This is, I think, the most Tyler sentence in the book. Maybe the most Tyler sentence ever. It's a couple of sentences. So we'll conclude with this. We now know that women's quilts stand among the best American artworks of the 19th century and that Central African Pygmies are among the world's most talented musicians. In light of such discoveries, should we not upwardly revalue our estimation of the world's cultural prospects?

Thank you for rereading my book so carefully, Alex. It's a shame what's happened to Pygmy culture, largely due to war. Mm. It's become much, much worse. War in the Congo, problems in Cameroon. That's a tradition that is being destroyed, and it's one of the world's great traditions. I used to have this dream I would someday go and hear pygmy music in person. It was always a daunting endeavor, but now I think even if I were younger, there'd be no real chance that can happen.

But you recently introduced, uh, uh, Rick Rubin.

Rick Rubin, and he loved it. Yeah, yeah, pygmy music is incredible. Yeah. And it's now freely available. I know on YouTube. I've never checked on Spotify. It's a lot of vocal hocketing, highly sophisticated. You can't even really hear it in concert in the West anymore. On the verge of vanishing totally.

I agree with you about the quilts, by the way. As you know, I collect the quilts or tapestries from the Asian, mostly Indian, continent. And some of them, they're equivalent to like modern works of art, you know, and totally undervalued, totally underrated. It's women's work. You could buy them extremely cheaply, but they're amazing works of art.

It's weird how undervalued textiles have remained to this day, and everyone knows this and will say it and what a shame it is. And oh, we're not valuing women's work, whatever. But it continues. And if you want to collect something that's beautiful, the chance that you will find the best buys in textiles is really quite high. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

It's one of the things that a collector of modest means can, I think, get top quality work at very low prices, brought to us by the market process. It's a great arbitrage hack to know. All right. In Praise of Commercial Culture. Check it out. It stands up. It's a great book. I hope you've enjoyed our conversation. I know I have. Thank you, Tyler Cowen.

Thank you, Alex. Thank you, everyone. Bye!