Lucky are those who are in house this week and can participate live in the Paul Cantor Seminar on Commerce and Culture.
I can’t imagine that anyone who cares about economics, society, the arts, and history wouldn’t find his topics incredibly fascinating. Cantor knows so much about art history and culture, and always brings a fresh perspective. After one speech he gave on literature, I came to a completely new understanding of how we can assess whether or not we can really say that the culture is is a free-fall decline (as is commonly said).
No matter how high your expectations are for his lectures, I’m betting that the reality will exceed them.
If you are not in house this week, you can follow every speech online, video and audio. Yes, it is going to break the bank in bandwidth fees (yikes) but, heck, that’s what we are here for. So take advantage of it while you can.
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This, in explanation of Cantor: “Conceiving of culture as a form of spontaneous order, he argues that market principles such as free trade and competition are as beneficial in the artistic realm as they are in the economy as a whole. He shows that commercial culture is at least as vibrant and varied as the elite culture championed by Romantics and modernists.”
–gets to the basis of my previous suggestion for having a “contest” to solicit designs for bullion coins. Obviously, it would apply to T-Shirts and other applications, limited only to one’s imagination.
As an aside, anyone, from academia, honest enough to include Roosevelt in this list: “The modern patrons of the arts: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Roosevelt”, must be worth listening to.
I finally got to watch one, at least part of yesterdays Shakespeare unit. Excellent!
I also admire the movie “Shakespeare In Love”, and it indeed does bring together the economic incentives (including thuggish loan sharks literally holding someone’s feet to the fire, now that’s incentive!) and the emotional drive to create that I’ve heard many writers/artists/musicians say they have.
“But, what is left over to pay the actors?”
“Share of the profits.”
“But there are never any profits!”
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh, Mr. Fenamin, I think you’re on to something!”
Yet the actors come because they want to. I’m really amazed that this movie came out of Hollywood, because its economics are just so un-Hollywood.
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