Give the people what they want

Not a day goes by without a corporate-sponsored artist publicly spitting on his forebears, maligning swaths of his audience for imagined slights, or forfeiting the stewardship of a classic IP by producing some current-year parody. Surely there's a divine hand in so many people remaining plugged in to the Pop Cult after these repeated insults to fans' taste and character. Men will grumble and joke about Lucasfilm renaming Boba Fett's ship because of political correctness, then plop down $8 a month to catch new episodes of The Mandalorian so they can talk about it at the water cooler. Never in the history of the world has there been such diversity of entertainment, and this is what people choose.

The state of affairs in the arts is the clearest sign of the degeneracy of the culture, which seems to be rushing headlong to a date with judgment. "God gave them over," etc., etc. How did we get here? Robert Bork, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, attempted to give an answer:

It may be in the nature of intellectuals to oppose, but prior to the closing decades of the eighteenth century, open opposition was often not safe and certainly not prudent. Schumpeter makes the point that prior to the Enlightenment intellectuals were few in number and dependent upon the support of the Church or some great patron: "the typical intellectual did not relish the idea of the stake which still awaited the heretic." They preferred honors and comfort which could be had only from "princes, temporal or spiritual." What freed them was the invention of the printing press and the rise of the bourgeoisie, which enabled intellectuals to find support from a new patron, the mass audience. Schumpeter places the decline of the importance of the individual patron in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. James Gardner, art editor for the National Review, says that artists began to direct their anger at the bourgeois state three generations after the French Revolution. The modern universities, foundations, museums, etc. have provided patrons for tens of thousands of disaffected intellectuals. Perhaps, then, intellectuals were always potentially hostile to the social order in which they lived but were held in check by self-interest until the public relieved them of their dependence on private patrons and the bourgeois state lost the will to suppress.

Bork doesn't spell it out—he doesn't need to—that art made for mass consumption is wholly different from the weird sadomasochistic art funded by government grants and endowments. The former gains nothing from ridiculing the bourgeois morality the proletariat recognizes as the social glue that prevents a descent into anarchy. While early pop novelists like Charles Dickens routinely took the bourgeoisie to task, it was usually for not living up to their moral standards, which were recognized as good for everyone.

If it can be said art as entertainment still retains a sense of morality, albeit disconnected from its Christian and Greco-Roman roots—which I do—what precipitated the creative class's heel turn when they began to subsist on government grants and endowments? The mode of funding their art may be different, but the same social class foots the bill. You could blame it on the change from a hereditary aristocracy to a merchant/manager aristocracy if the social attitudes of those people were different. From where I sit there isn't much difference except in how they got their money.

The simplest answer is the social attitudes of the patrons changed. They became more aligned with the aggrieved intellectuals and artists instead of the other way around. Instead of being proud of their ancestors who they inherited from, or of the cultural climate that afforded them the opportunity to succeed, they feel shame. The bourgeoisie with their money fund the counterculture; however, by their morality they personify that which the counterculture sneers at. Charles Murray observed this strange duality in Coming Apart:

The hollow elite is as dysfunctional in its way as the new lower class is in its way. Personally and as families, its members are successful. But they have abdicated their responsibility to set and promulgate standards.

The dirty little secret Murray avoided saying is this: The reason the elite don't promulgate moral standards is they don't think the proletariat are smart enough or capable enough to live like they do. They think life lived rightly is the result of self-mastery (a la Ben Franklin), not of devotion to God. The art they fund reflects what little hope they have for that secular model to save humanity. In other words, the art fulfills its purpose; it delivers the intended message to the intended audience. How odd that the art the privileged bourgeoisie identify with would be dark and cynical while the art the oppressed proletariat identify with would be aspirational and uplifting!

That is, aspirational and uplifting on its good days, which the most massive of mass entertainments are having a lot fewer of lately. Bourgeois disaffection has infiltrated pop art and is in the process of transforming it for a new audience. The reason you don't like it is you're not supposed to like it. And that's okay. But you're going to have to get your entertainment elsewhere.

Brian Niemeier calls the future funding model of art neo-patronage. It's the sensible alternative to rolling the dice with corporate-sponsored fare. A patronized artist is a grateful artist and will respond to his audience. This is the way.

As always, let me know what you think in the comments. If you like science fiction, check out my books Seeds of Calamity and Tendrils to the Moon. You can find extended previews for each here and here.