LET’S FORGET ABOUT STARVING ARTIST AND GET RIGHT to a more ominous conjugation: the artist in America is being starved, systemically and unashamedly. In this land of rumored bounty there seems to be a bounty of another sort on the foreheads of serious middle-class writers and painters, musicians and illustrators, dancers and sculptors. If it’s not a bounty identical to the one Comrade Stalin placed on the foreheads of certain Soviet-era artists, it nevertheless has an identical effect—silence, disappearance, unmanageable hardship for families.
In his incisive analysis of this mess, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, Scott Timberg delivers a potpourri of bleak statistics and appalling personal stories of talented and once-thriving artists reduced to penury or making-do, or else elbowed into different vocations entirely. One of the personal stories he relays is his own, which includes the now-familiar plot points of being laid off from his job as a journalist, missing mortgage payments, and then having to endure the absurdist indignity of being sued by a bank whose girth is global. The locksmith who showed up to bar Timberg and his young family from their tiny home drove a car “fancier and substantially newer” than Timberg’s own “seventeen-year-old Honda.” This is our world now, what we value, how we prioritize: locksmiths earn stabler livelihoods than the arbiters and facilitators of culture. Renovate the overfamiliar trio making ends meet and you’ll be closer to the mark: middle-class artists are meeting their ends.
Although Timberg reports no incidents of literal starvation, you shouldn’t doubt that crowds of onetime stable middle-class artists have been pummeled into the lower class, where they regularly feel the fangs of hunger. The marginalia in my copy of Culture Crash consists mostly of two words: Good God. You are confronted by information so astounding, so soul-stomping, that you read on hardly able to suppress moans of demoralization and barks of disbelief. You begin Timberg’s book suspecting that things are bad—you finish it convinced that they’ve never been worse.
Here’s a paragraph grim enough to wreck your week, a handful of distressing figures culled directly from Timberg’s scrupulous research. In the publishing and journalism trades, 260,000 jobs were nixed between 2007 and 2009. From 2009 to 2011, newspapers nixed 40,000 jobs. In 2009, 300 newspapers folded. Since the turn of the century, a mind-warping 80 percent of cultural critics writing for magazines and newspapers have been fired. There are only two remaining full-time dance critics in the entire United States of America. A not untypical yearly salary for a professional dancer is $15,000. Cellist/composer Zoë Keating made $3,000 from two million YouTube views and nearly half a million streams on Spotify. Between 2008 and 2012, there were sixty-six number-one songs, almost half of which were performed by only six artists (Katy Perry, Rihanna, Flo Rida, Black Eyed Peas, Adele, and Lady Gaga). Of a whopping 75,000 records released in 2010, 74,000 lost money or managed only to make back their production cost. At UCLA in 1966, 86 percent of students admitted that they valued a “meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2013, that percentage was amputated by half. Over the last two decades the number of English majors graduating from Yale University has decreased by 60 percent. In American universities, 76 percent of faculty are adjuncts, low-paid laborers with no medical insurance and barely a prayer to bolster them.
According to Timberg, there are a mélange of culprits here, culprits with robust histories and not, as some pretend, a single and sudden culprit in the financial conflagration of 2008. There are the Hobbesian market forces, the consumer-propelled capitalism so lovely for behemoth corporations who are its engine but not so lovely for those poets and photographers who wish to maintain their integrity and intransigence outside the corporate system. There’s the strafing autocracy of the Internet, which has led to a desperate restructuring of the music and publishing industries, and the necrosis of print. There’s the long-standing and nationwide dedication to anti-intellectualism. There’s the winner-take-all social credo that eradicates regard for any place other than first. (Timberg calls it “blockbuster culture”; in the 1980s, Thomas Whiteside called it “the blockbuster complex.”) There’s an academic obscurantism, prevalent since the 1960s, that prods students away from the tonic pleasures of literature. And there’s the widespread, erroneous caricature of artists as eccentric idlers we might be better off without. The dearth of public funding for the arts? It mirrors the dearth of public ardor for the arts.
At the same time, we’re suffocating in artists, especially in writers. Toss a stone into any urban crowd and you’ll hit a neophyte who’s writing a novel. (Yeats once opened his address to the Rhymers’ Club with: “Gentlemen, there are too many of us.” And in a 1987 essay, Elizabeth Hardwick says this: “The charms of publication, the escalation of the discovery that almost anyone can be a writer, have been accompanied by a devaluation of the product required.” If Hardwick were alive today she’d be downright apoplectic.) The very simple concept of supply and demand will not be debauched out of its simplicity: when everyone’s an artist and no one spends much money on art, art is denuded of economic value and most artists can’t earn a living. As a member of the creative class, Timberg never harbored those gluttonous American ambitions of fame and wealth; he preferred this comparatively muted, sensible idea of success: “I could get really good at something if I worked as hard as I could and surrounded myself with what someone once called—in a phrase that now sounds antique—the best that has been thought and said.”
The someone at the helm of that famous phrase is Matthew Arnold, and it appears in the preface to the 1875 edition of Culture and Anarchy. Culture is “a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world.” That “total perfection” is a characteristically Arnoldian construction and one that couldn’t be penned today without the self-defeating smirk of irony. A critic of unstinting earnestness, Arnold never blushed when asserting his cultural idealism, an idealism tinged with spiritual urgency: “Culture has but one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light.” That marriage, “sweetness and light,” reaches our ears as slightly saccharine now—it’s cousin to Horace’s requirement for art, dulce et utile (sweet and useful)—but Arnold, being Arnold, remains wholly sincere. Culture seeks to “make all live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, and use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely—to be nourished and not bound by them.” For Arnold, culture is still connected to cultivation, to tillage, to agriculture: till, plant, reap, and be nourished. Arnold couldn’t have failed to have in mind Candide’s final words in Voltaire’s novella: “We must cultivate our garden.”
In The Meaning of Culture from 1929, the English philosopher and novelist John Cowper Powys, writing a generation after Arnold, offers an updated version of Arnold’s defense of culture, one that emphasizes the redoubtable benefits and felicities of art. “The aim of culture,” Powys writes, “is to nourish within us”—that word again, nourish—“a sturdy yet sensitive organism that shall be able to deal with the eternal recurrences of life and death.”
For Powys, “the greatest of all obstacles to any deep, banked-up, sensitive culture is the inability to obtain leisure, the inability to be alone,” and consider the present searing truth of that claim, how insidiously plugged-in we all are, socially networked into an unsocial stupor, a mental truancy that teeters at the lip of catatonia. Powys sees the necessity of attaining “a mind sensitive to rare and gentle things,” a mind adequately armored against “the frothy nothings of the hour.” Those frothy nothings are no longer of the hour but are much more insistent—they are of the second. “There is no escape from machinery and modern inventions,” Powys writes, “no escape from the dictatorship of the uncultured,” and if that is not entirely true it’s seeming truer by the day as our minuscule machines ding and ring, quack and quake in our pockets. Timberg understands that “for generations with no memory of a world before the Internet, there is no outside, no independent ledge” from which to assess the madness.
If Arnold undertook Culture and Anarchy in part as a response to the Industrial Revolution and its spirit-sapping tendencies—he denigrates “our worship of machinery” and “our bondage to machinery” and “the faith in machinery,” certain that “culture looks beyond machinery”—and Powys’s The Meaning of Culture reacted to populist, consumer vulgarity, then Timberg’s Culture Crash wouldn’t have been possible without the always hungry Hydra of the Internet. The Net gets a bit of a lashing in this book, to be sure, but Timberg is aware of how effortlessly his study could have turned into an anti-Internet diatribe, how instantaneously he’d be branded a technophobic hysteric, and so he’s careful to point out, again and again, that the Internet is not the only bandit guilty of filching livelihoods from middle-class artists. He’s careful to show the confluence of factors, to show all the ill stars aligned to damn entire sectors of the creative class. He has no wish to banish our gadgets of distraction. When he advocates for the virtues of print, he doesn’t mean that all print is sacrosanct while online essays and reportage are organically besmirched, a position he knows is demonstrably untrue. (Although you don’t have to be a cyber-skeptic to see that you can’t go online to read something without simultaneously being prodded to buy something. Online advertisers and retailers such as Amazon know that the difference between inquisitive and acquisitive has become a difference without much distinction.)
Rather, Timberg laments the dissolution of the print-publication apparatus that allowed serious writers, editors, and photojournalists to maintain a middle-class life for themselves. If you were an artist subsisting on your copyrights, the revolution in IT vanquished that subsistence, as it vanquished so many bookstores and the bulk of the record industry. Timberg offers a concise tour of the Napster debacle, a reminder of how hard it was to sympathize with the record labels, those dreadnoughts whose galactic greed looked somewhat humble next to their hubris. If they couldn’t exactly claim to have been blindsided by the Net, they certainly weren’t very quick to catch on. But unhurtable bands such as Metallica shouldn’t have been the focus of that polarizing eventuality. There were untold small and mid-level bands also signed to record labels, labels whose stewardship of those bands permitted them to remain in the middle class, until Napster rushed in and snatched their earnings.
What the ardent anti-Internet scrum is slow to point out is that the problems associated with the Net are not inherent to the Net but rather to the ways in which we use the thing—the ways in which we conceptualize it. Most writers and musicians won’t earn a living online until we, the users, finally come around to the idea that we should buy what we read and hear on our computers, until we finally will ourselves from the clutches of complacency and indolence and lack of responsibility. This remains one of the egregiously democratizing effects of the Net: we’ve come to think of most online content the way we think of oxygen. “The human cost of ‘free’ becomes clear,” writes Timberg, “every day a publisher lays off staff . . . or a documentarian finds her film uploaded to YouTube without her permission.” There’s nothing stopping you from subscribing to a newspaper or magazine, from paying for your music and movies online, just as there’s nothing stopping you from snapping shut your laptop and reaching for a hardback of Homer. It should be said, too, that implicit in Timberg’s indictment of the Net is his disconcerting suspicion that the thing is not only bad for the bank accounts of middle-class artists but bad for the souls of us all.
You’ve heard of all those shuttered bookstores, the already undervalued librarians now thought members of the Pleistocene, the thinly attended performances of new musicians and artists because it burns fewer calories to stay home and Google something instead. The cyberspatial nooks we all live in have begun, says Timberg, “to disregard actual human beings,” and human interaction, its dynamism of merriment and conflict, is a crucial element to the creation of serious art. Timberg is particularly astute on the thriving art scenes experienced in Boston in the 1950s, Los Angeles in the 1960s, and Austin in the 1970s, the mélange of factors that needed to converge in order for artists to flourish—including institutional support, low rents, a humming population in urban universities, an inviolable sense of a shared culture—and then on what happens when these cities are infiltrated by Hunnish bankers. When Robert Lowell was reconfiguring American poetry in 1950s Boston, “a life of genteel poverty was still possible.” Let me tell you, as a Bostonian: a life of genteel poverty is no longer possible, and hasn’t been for quite some time.
American individualism has come to resemble a kind of hermitism, each artist before his own effulgent machine, without lifelines to his fellow strivers and makers, his community. The roiling and reciprocal group, so central to the early achievements of Lowell and Plath and Sexton, has been replaced by a synthetic community online, or by the cloistered academic department, which is how many artists in America, if they’re the fortunate ones, are able to remain in the middle class. But when you’re an artist in academia, you’re only a part-time artist, at best. Patti Smith, says Timberg, “was ultimately able to commit her life to music because of an infrastructure, a network of clubs, music labels, and publishers”—an infrastructure that has been dismantled for more than a decade now. We’ve fled our public places of reciprocity and dialogue, and jettisoned any commitment to a joint culture. After the upheavals of the 1960s, our polycultural ethos was codified first in American universities and then in the workplace and entertainment. But, says Timberg, “for culture to work, we need a common language . . . and it’s impossible to have one when we are becoming more culturally and economically divided every day. No wonder our common language has become celebrity gossip and reality TV.” America’s celebrity scourge, that Tinseltown bacchanalia of beauty, youth, and bathos, had invaded our living rooms long before the Net showed up. In the 1980s the term “couch potato” was never marshaled as insultingly as it should have been as entire zip codes were vegetized by Ted Turner and Entertainment Tonight.
At the hub of this mess is how we as a nation perceive the artist. Timberg quotes the cretinous opinions of market enthusiasts in Kentucky, who, after the Louisville Orchestra was pestled into bankruptcy, posted comments such as, “Pack up your fiddles and go home boys and girls. Maybe find real jobs.” Timberg urges us away from this bamboozled and deadening state in which we permit the market to dictate the value of things. The spirit-ennobling energies of poetry and classical music will never measure on Wall Street. Remember Osip Mandelstam’s quip about how Russia respects her poets enough to murder them? We’d be in much better stead as a people if we began to value our poets as much.
Of all the realities chronicled in Culture Crash, what would the worst manifestation of the worst realities look like? No new art but corporate-driven celebrity kitsch, essayistic advertisements tapped out by algorithms, the annihilation of independent ideas and the thriving of ideological herdthink, an aesthetical tundra everywhere, a society of philistines “tranquilized by the trivial,” in Kierkegaard’s phrase? And what is the most we can hope for, what would the best manifestation look like? If worse comes to worst is only slightly more exasperating than If better comes to best and the best is far from good enough. Artists of independence and seriousness and transgression must not be debased into having to choose between nothing and nothing much.
On December 12 of last year, Americans for the Arts emailed its supporters some buoyant news for a badly damaged ship, a buck-up for arts advocacy. The night before, the U.S. House of Representatives, in the midst of its characteristic convulsions and incompetence, and by dint of some abracadabra, managed to pass a spending bill it dubbed “Cromnibus,” which sounds rather like a beast from Homer but is an alloy of the Continuing Appropriations Resolution and an omnibus bill. The one-trillion-dollar government funding included nearly $300 million for the NEA and the NEH, $30 million for the Office of Museum Services, $25 million for Arts in Education, and $445 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. If you squinted during the midterm elections last year you might have spotted some morsels among the famine. Citizens of Utah, the great red bastion of the West, voted for six ballot initiatives that would augment arts programs, and Rhode Islanders voted for $35 million to be distributed to various arts organizations across the state. Anorexic though they may seem beside the obese information revealed in Culture Crash, and irrelevant as they may be when it comes to individual artists surviving year to year in a society that doesn’t care if they perish, those facts and numbers nevertheless look miraculous, an indication that perhaps all is not lost.
The American hatred of literature and art did not develop all by itself but is an outcrop of odium generis humani, an unconscious loathing of what is human and an unwillingness to understand ourselves. Still, Timberg has no choice but to end Culture Crash with a modest toll of uplift, just as some have no choice but to find meaning in life after they learn that the cosmos is an achingly pointless accident. His rallying cry amounts to more of a rallying whisper; he has no blueprint for betterment, though his final lines are a lovely picture of the world he’d like to live in. The journalist can’t be faulted for coming up short on solutions; his mission is to report from the ditch, to slap us awake to the carnage stacking up around us. Because the artist’s woe has its origin in Washington and on Wall Street, in the very steel of our socioeconomic structure, and in the ceaseless buzzing of the electronic marketplace, reversing that woe will take a revolution. In the meantime, poke your elected representatives on the shoulder and say you won’t be voting for them again unless they have a cure for this pox upon the serious middle-class artist. Donate to arts advocacy organizations. Purchase physical books from independent and used bookstores. Hide your face in shame should you partake of pirated music. Keep your mouse off Kim Kardashian’s ass. If you believe that the life of your mind is inseparable from the health of your life, that serious art and artists are an essential component of human nourishment, then you have an obligation, to yourself and your children and us all, to do something about the grave circumstances Timberg sets before you.
—The New Republic, FEBRUARY 2015