Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Can Capitalism Save the Arts?
Can Capitalism Save the Arts?
Jun 4, 2025 2:28 PM

Capitalism is routinely castigated as an enemy of the arts, with much of the finger-pointing bent toward monsters of profit and efficiency. Other critiques take aim at more systemic features, fearing that the type of industrialization that markets sometimes tend toward will inevitably detach artists from healthy social contexts, sucking dry any potential for flourishing as a result.

But what if the opposite is true? I offer the argument over at The Federalist.

Free economies introduce their own unique challenges for artists and consumers alike. We are justified in cringing at the array of bottom-dollar pany execs and merchandising-obsessed Hollywood crackpots (though I will alwaysprefer their ilkto your run-of-the-mill Commissar of the Arts). But theincreases in economic empowerment that have led to these many marketing machines have also led to plenty ofartistic empowerment in turn.

In an article forNew York Times Magazine, Steven Johnson reinforces this verypoint, observing that the many apocalyptic prophecies about arts in the digital age have not quite manifested. “In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art,” he writes. “Instead, creative careers are thriving — but plicated and unexpected ways.”

Rather than being disempowered, artists actually have more opportunity to thrive than ever before, whether through access to instruments and equipment, channels for marketing and distribution (hello, Spotify andNetflix), or the mass amounts of leisure(/creativity) time e with a prosperous age.

The shape of what it means to be a successful artist may indeed be shifting, but rather plain about these new challenges, we’d do better to relish in the risk and seize these new avenues, cultivating new artifacts of beauty and sharing them in turn:

As we’ve seen with the Golden Age of television, such forces are not limited to the hearts and hands of the tasteless and trite. Indeed, despite the best efforts of the powerful and privileged, many artists are now finding themselves equipped and empowered to bypass the big shots altogether, taking their art and their audiences with them, from the production of their albums to the purchase of their paintbrushes to the publication of their portraits.

Thus, despite the critiques about capitalism, this larger shift from panies as investment banks to individual artists as rogue capitalists is actually an apt illustration of thebeautyof markets, demonstrating how the deleterious effects of distant and detached industrialization are checked no better than by the market itself.

Artists are only beginning to realize the ways in which those Big Art capitalists of yore are ing less and less necessary in the twenty-first century. As those roles continue to shrink, artists and patrons alike need not fret about a future where artists need to beg for their bread. On the contrary, we should continue to embrace the power of trade and pursue new ways of creating and sharing the beauty they’ve been called to cultivate.

Read the full thing here.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
American students: Raw material or individual persons?
Catherine Pakaluk The quality of K-12 education in America is a major concern. This is largely because, despite marginally high spending per student, the United States does pete very well against other countries on standardized tests. The economics of education particularly interested Catherine Pakaluk, who holds a doctorate in economics from Harvard and is an assistant professor of economics at Catholic University of America. Pakaluk gave a lecture, “Economics of Education,” on June 23 at Acton University. In this talk,...
How ordinary economic thinking helps constrain political chaos
In an age where chaos and cronyism seem to be the defining characteristics of our politics, and where the political system is increasingly decried as being “rigged” by populists from both the left and right, the time seems ripe for a renewed focus on political constraints. When such concerns arise, we are quick to point back to the U.S. Constitution, and rightly so. Yet economist Peter Boettke sees another guide that can also offer some value. For Boetkke, our politics...
The ‘end’ of work
In the Q&A part of a session I led at last month’s Acton University on Abraham Kuyper and Leo XIII(based on this recent volume), I was asked about specific areas where the two figures have something concrete to contribute today. One theme I highlighted was to their shared emphasis on the centrality and dignity of human work. Today there is a great deal of anxiety over the future of work in an age of increasing globalization, automation, and structural changes...
Dorothy Sayers, school choice, and long run student success
Today’s Wall Street Journal article on education choice, “New Evidence on School Vouchers,” might look oddly familiar for those of us who have read Dorothy Sayers’ The Lost Tools of Learning. The WSJ piece refers to two new studies that investigated student performance in states with voucher programs: Louisiana and Indiana. In Louisiana, a state with a program that allows for vouchers for private schools, 7,100 students attend private or religious schools. Meanwhile, over 34,000 students utilize Indiana’s statewide voucher...
Would school choice help conservatives recover from the ‘cultural massacre’?
The Spectator Australia published an article Monday claiming that the “culture war” between conservative and liberal values is, in reality, a “cultural massacre.” The carnage is evident in the numbers, specifically in education: in the United Kingdom, conservatives make up only seven percent of primary school teachers and only eight percent of secondary school teachers. In the United States, conservatives often focus on the lack of intellectual diversity on university campuses. They are not wrong to worry. In September, the...
Pulling out of Paris agreement is a ‘market distortion’: European leader
The G20 summit in Hamburg e to an end, and the dominant story remains America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. It’s been less reported that some European leaders have implied that the EU should take economic revenge on the U.S. because – in their words – limiting government intervention in the economy is a “market distortion.” Germany currently holds the presidency of the G20 summit, with Chancellor Angela Merkel overseeing the violence-plagued event. The final declaration notes the U.S....
Can health care be left to the free market?
In one of the worst opinion pieces published in the New York Times in recent memory, Farzon A. Nahvi, an emergency medicine physician, argues the free market cannot provide health care because some patients arrive at the hospital unconscious: As an emergency medicine physician in a busy urban hospital, I have patients brought to me unconscious several times a day. Often, they are found down in the street by a good Samaritan who called 911 on their behalf. We are...
Reading ‘Democracy in America’ (Part 2): What did Tocqueville mean by ‘equality of condition’?
This is the second part in a series on how to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America.” Read Part 1 and follow the entire series here. As we begin our study of Democracy in America, we bear in mind that the work’s distinguished author, Alexis de Tocqueville, blessed us with a clear, concise introduction to the two-volume work. The introduction is the most important chapter of the work in terms ing to grips with Tocqueville’s overall argument and purpose...
Macron’s African statement ignores human ingenuity
A French media outlet has captured an otherwise ment from French President Emmanuel Macron that Africa is overpopulated. When asked about a possible “Marshall Plan for Africa,” Macron listed among the continent’s current problems the need for “demographic transition,” lamenting the fact that some African “countries still haveseven to eight children per woman.” His concerns seem particularly worth examining today on World Population Day. During a July 8 press conference about the G20 summit, Macron began by naming truly concerning...
Is it cleaner to trade pollution?
Note: This is post #40 in a weekly video series on basic microeconomics. In an effort to reduce pollution, the government tried two policy prescriptions under the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, notes Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution University. The mand and control—mandated that each power plant lower its pollution by a determined amount. However, different firms face different cost curves and, because information is dispersed, policymakers don’t always know those costs. The second policy prescription—tradable pollution permits—empowered firms...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved