Marketplace Culture

Over the last year there have been numerous articles in the national print media on developments in American culture and intellectual life brought about by vast technological, social, and economic transformations. On this list are “The Death of the American Dance Critic” by Madison Mainwaring (Atlantic), William Dereziewicz’s “The Neoliberal Arts” (Harper’s), and “Among the Disrupted” by Leon Wieseltier (The New Republic), while several other authors of literary, performance, and art reviews have also commented on cultural issues. Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class is worth paying attention to for the disconcerting picture it creates of the decline in industries across the arts. He gathers a litany of facts that mark the decimation of bookstores, record stores, and video rental stores along with their “knowledge workers” and curatorial service, and the impact on alternative and classical radio, graphic artists, photographers, and arts journalists, in addition to the reported 260,000 jobs that were lost in traditional publishing and journalism in the three years after 2007.

Besides the jobs, there are the lost homes and medical insurance and secure professional lives. Indeed, Mainwaring’s Harper’s essay reports that there are now only two full-time dance critics in the entire country, at the New York Times and the Washington Post. Time Out is perhaps the latest well-known publication no longer to employ an in-house dance critic. Timberg uses ArtsJournal.com as a source to report that perhaps 80% of the arts writers in this country have been put out of work since 2000. Many websites now simply aggregate articles and reviews (often by unpaid writers), and then there are the proliferating blog reviews, often poorly edited and reasoned by scores of self-styled critics who have appeared out of nowhere, even on well-clicked sites. Yet, as some commentators have noted, the idea of “creativity” and a quasi-artist’s life of freedom and exploration is touted by Silicon Valley, though that “freedom” really signals a lack of security, and “reinvention” a loss of one’s profession. In what Timberg calls “market fundamentalism,” everything is bought or sold. What makes his narrative compelling is first-hand experience—he, too, lost his job and house, as did many of his friends and co-workers in the creative professions. Still, his compassion is intact, precluding any sense of bitterness.

He laments the drop in the authority of critics (a situation that has been going on for decades now) and the disregard of standards in today’s mass leveling processes of cultural life. The example of Goodreads, the Amazon-owned website notorious for not allowing any negative commentary on books, demonstrates the all-powerful PR machine in the marketplace of ideas. At the core of Timberg’s argument is the view that the human cost of technological and economic transformations for the “creative class”—his chief concern here—has not been a significant public issue. What he proposes is a “broad, middle-class connoisseurship.” American culture was once able to bring to its middle class serious artistic experiences in many art forms through a consensus of what was important to know—mainly through television and radio broadcasts and general interest magazines—before our own time of celebrity culture, hyper-professionalism, and demographic segmenting of audiences. The corporatization of the music industry is so great that, as the author acknowledges, a single Adele record sold more than 70% of all the classical albums that were bought in 2011, and more than 60% of all jazz records bought. As I write now, on this day of November 5, 2015, the front page of the New York Times online is featuring a story about a new Adele album: will she stream or won’t she?

CNN’s viewers are constantly force-fed news feeds that run along the bottom of the screen that splice together celebrity break-ups and illnesses and the day’s war news. Our greatest artists and thinkers are overlooked for the likes of Hollywood and rock and sports megastars...