What's Wrong with the Arts is What's Wrong with Society
Papers that changed how I see things: a series
Tibor Scitovsky’s “What’s Wrong with the Arts is What’s Wrong with Society” is published in the American Economic Review’s Papers & Proceedings issue of 1972. It is one of the first pieces I read of economists looking at the state of the arts.
Scitovsky is an interesting fellow. He was born in Hungary but came to the US quite young. In 1941 (he would have been just 31?) he published “A Note on Welfare Propositions in Economics”, which sounds rather innocuous but he identified a fairly big problem with the Kaldor-Hicks “compensation criterion” in cost-benefit analysis, this being the idea that a project is good on efficiency grounds if those who win from the project could, at least in theory, pay compensation to those who lose such that no one would be left worse off. In that essay he notes that it is entirely possible for the Kaldor-Hicks criterion to be circular: that situation A is superior to situation B is superior to situation A and so on.
In 1976 he published The Joyless Economy, one of the first books that spurred a now lively field involving the study of human happiness. As you can guess from the title, he wonders why we can be at the same time so rich and so morose.
In “What’s Wrong…” he writes about consumption in the United States of the high arts. Using the freedom of a conference paper, he does something you would never find in a contemporary social science article on arts consumption: he says that, on the whole, we have bad cultural habits. Economists and sociologists writing about the arts now refrain from making judgments about taste, for two reasons. One is that it is beyond the methods of social science to make such judgments. We might think privately about the state of cultural standards, but as an economist or sociologist we bring nothing from those disciplines to the question. This does lead to certain paradoxes in the field: if arts policy is generally meant to encourage people to take the time to enjoy more art, on what grounds do we say that is a good thing? I read a recent paper where authors asked whether there could be insights from behavioral economics - “nudges” and all that - in arts policy, but the theory of nudges assumes there is something we all agree people ought to be nudged towards: eat a healthier meal at the buffet, save an appropriate amount for retirement, etc. But to what is arts policy supposed to nudge people, and why? It seems hard to do without being able to say there is something especially valuable about the arts.
The second reason there is restraint in making judgment about taste, and I would say this is more common in sociology, is the idea that not only are social scientists not equipped to make such judgments, but that nobody can, and the whole idea of cultural taste and hierarchies in the arts is a sham to protect the status of those with the “cultural capital” to exploit their ability to identify a Brahms from a Beethoven, make allusions to Ulysses when speaking, and such. I don’t buy it, but if it were true, then the question of arts policy becomes moot: shut down the arts councils, they do more harm than good.
What does Scitovsky say? “I believe the arts are in a bad way in this country.” We do not attend live classical music or theatre in anything close to the per capita numbers in Europe, and in terms of recorded music, classical sales are a much smaller fraction of the total than in other countries.
Attempts to blame this situation on the economy have not been too successful. We have many serious economic problems in this country, but failure of the pattern of consumption to conform to consumers’ preferences is not among them. If the arts get insufficient attention and insufficient funds, consumers’ preferences are mainly to blame and changing them the best remedy.
Our orchestras and theatres struggle not because of cost disease, nor insufficient grants of public money, nor of failure to update works to be more relevant to younger audiences, nor of the need to perform in new, more inviting spaces.
There is an ongoing research program on “barriers” to arts participation, but Scitovsky sees this as the wrong approach. People don’t attend the symphony, not because there are barriers, but because they are not in to classical music. They don’t attend the community theatre production of “Twelfth Night” because they just couldn’t be bothered.
He notes that at one time, to be sure, the high arts were the province of the high class. But, he says, income and education levels in the US (and remember he is writing in 1972) lead the world, with average incomes certainly high enough to afford the live performing classical arts. His diagnosis brings reminders of Keynes’s “Grandchildren” essay, though Scitovsky does not cite it, and, unlike Keynes, is focused upon Americans: we work a lot of hours, are averse to vacations, and when we do look for pleasures want what is easy, in music, film, vacations (hence the increasing popularity of cruises) and even home cooking (he can’t help himself mentioning how dull American food is). Our education system is dedicated to preparing students to earn income, which, he admits, has certainly brought great productivity gains to the US. But:
For the majority of us, work has ceased to give pleasure and meaning to life and our puritan tradition and education also prevent our seeking them in consumption. We smile condescendingly over the prejudices of eighteenth century America, which morally disapproved of the theatre and frowned on wasting time and money on sports and the arts. But this is no smiling matter, because our behavior is still being governed by those prejudices. … The arts have become respectable in the United States, but the enjoyment of life has not. We are for Culture, because it is spelled with a capital C, not because we derive or know how to derive pleasure from it. The resulting ambivalence is what’s wrong with the arts.
It’s unthinkable that such an essay would appear in a highly-ranked academic publication now. But it is interesting to ponder what parts are dated, and what parts are not.
I have stated my case before that if the state is going to make a real effort to increase Americans’ involvement in the arts, it requires being up front that the judgment is being made that this is a good thing, and that there are standards in the arts - some works and genres are more culturally valuable than others, and participation in them should be encouraged. Reasonable people can disagree about that judgment, but there is a hill to climb for anyone who wants to justify an active “arts policy” while at the same time holding that there is no disputing tastes. Scitovsky is forthright in what he thinks is of greatest value, and even if someone thinks he is wrong, or is even willing to give a bit more slack to “cultural omnivores”, at least Scitovsky gives us something to argue about. Yes, we can dispute tastes.
He is valuable in seeing that American cultural tastes are the key in understanding arts participation. Changing the ending of Madama Butterfly is not going to bring all manner of young people to the opera if they really don’t like opera that much. In the end, new state funding for nonprofit theatre will not save the sector if people aren’t interested in live theatre. Scitovsky’s figures are dated, much has changed in the economy in 52 years. But not this.
When the consumer is unskilled and unwilling to exert himself to enjoy and enrich his life, the satisfactions accessible to him become pretty restricted. …The producers’ initiative has inevitably led to the stressing of satisfactions whose production yields the greatest economies of scale and to the extension of producer technology into the consumption sphere. Hence the largely defensive nature of our consumption, its focusing on the avoidance of pain, effort, discomfort, boredom, the unknown, and the uncertain. Such seeking of comfort and safety is very different from the active pursuit of pleasure the leisure classes of the past engaged in. Nor is the choice between comfort and pleasure a simple matter of economics imposed by budgetary constraints, except to a limited extent. We shall never be affluent enough to afford both pleasure and comfort, because pleasure depends on the assimilation of novelty, the relief of strain, the resolution of conflict, the understanding of complexity; and one cannot have the pleasure without accepting into the bargain the facing up first to initial shock. A predictable happy ending or too simple a piece of music is that much the less enjoyable; too great ease or explicitness turns much potential pleasure into a mere defense against boredom. The old leisure classes fully understood this and were adventurous enough to take the risks and make that investment of time and effort in the development of mind and body, senses and spirit, so essential for the enjoyment of the good things in life.
If American arts participation numbers in the high arts are really not ever going to shift that much, should policy makers just accept that and move on? That opera, ballet, the symphony, live theatre, are always going to only appeal to a small minority, and that this minority and the culture they love is worth protecting, but it will always be thus?
Your discussion of his 1972 paper got me looking at other things that he had written and I came upon his last published paper, "Boredom – An Overlooked Disease?", Published in Challenge, September-October 1999. There, he reflects on the Columbine High School massacre, suggesting that the killers' "motivation could well be boredom".
This leads him to remark that high schools are "preoccupied with teaching skills useful for earning income and that they consider leisure skills secondary, with sports the most important of these in the fine arts not even mentioned." But he thinks that the cultivation of these leisure skills is important in maintaining a more peaceful society.
In contrast with what he says that the 1972 paper, "that art education is not a matter of pump priming but a continuous process", in the 1999 paper he writes:
"The availability of enjoyable activities was very different in my youth. Television and video game screens had not been in- vented. No wonder my contemporaries and I acquired quite a number of leisure skills. Most of us learned to read and write at the beginning of elementary school, a few even earlier, and reading a few simple novels was compulsory in the higher grades of elementary school. In Hungary at the time, I read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, and my fascination with them turned me into a lifelong voracious reader of literature, history, and biographies. In England, novels by Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott were compulsory reading at the time - probably with the same happy consequences.
I also learned many other leisure activities, such as solving crossword puzzles, making my own radio when it was a novelty, playing the piano, enjoying jazz, classical music, dancing, skating, skiing, swimming, fencing, and tennis, and visiting museums, theaters, and the opera. I was not particularly good at any of these active leisure skills, but I never bothered to compare my skill with that of other youngsters, perhaps because being better or worse than others in any one of so many pleasant activities was not important."
He concludes his last published essay with these two paragraphs:
"That [an educational system that teaches the skills for many peaceful leisure activities] is not an easy task in our country, where even teaching children to read well enough to make them enjoy a fascinating book is a serious problem for thousands of our schools, and where the need to provide money for more and better teachers and more schools to keep up with our growing population usually leads to cutting back the teaching of music and the fine arts.
In short, the remedy lies in convincing our government, politicians, educators, and parents that culture and leisure skills are not luxuries we can easily do without if we want our society to become more peaceful, our streets safer, and our prisons less overcrowded."
Really interesting--this is a new citation to me. Thanks.