Elites and the Market

Cultural elites have, Featherstone suggests, an inherently ambivalent relationship with the market. His argument, if I understand it, goes something like this:

Cultural elites want to preserve a monopolization of cultural products. Hence, for instance, peer review of scholarly work; work that hasn't passed peer review can be dismissed as amateurish, uninformed, not from around here. It needn't even be read. The (obscure) publisher's imprint is sufficient to pass judgment.

At the same time, cultural elites want to distribute their cultural products. A painter wants his paintings viewed, a poet wants his poems read, etc.

As a result of contemporary technologies, cultural elites are capable of distributing their products far more widely than ever before. People who have never set foot in a museum can see hundreds of reproductions on the web, or in a book at the library.

But this of course chips away at the elite's (or elites') monopoly of cultural production. As a result, they often resort to "strategies of separation and distancing to sustain and promote the autonomy of the cultural sphere" (eg, withdrawing into an avant garde enclave).

As Featherstone puts it: "Conditions that favor the autonomization of the cultural sphere will better allow cultural specialists to monopolize, regulate and control cultural production, to seek to place cultural production above economic production, and to place art and intellectual pursuits above everyday life, popular uneducated tastes and mass culture. Alternatively, conditions that threaten the autonomy of the cultural sphere, the demonopolization processes that discredit the 'sacred' intellectual and aristic hierarchies, will tend to allow outsider groups of cultural specialists, or encourage new alliances with other powerful groups of economic specialists, to endorse alternative tastes and seek to legitimize an expanded repertoire that may include the formerly excluded popular traditions and mass cultural goods." The fortunes of groups of cultural specialists, especially in their association with specialists and power-holders of other kinds, is essential to making sense of recent claims about the "end of art" or the "end of culture."

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 06:16 PM

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