[Aiwendil]

Well, I never dreamed I'd see this thread come back to life.

Fordim has correctly and eloquently noted that it is greed that drives the markets, not art. While I agree with his cynicism, I feel a distinction ought to be made. It is one thing to talk about what the market for literature is like, and why it's that way. It's quite another to talk about what the literature on the market is like, and why it's that way. And lurking somewhere in the latter question is the issue of what constitutes good art.

A (perhaps oversimplistic) way of putting it is: bookstores sell that which sells; but why does that which sells sell?

There was a general concensus back in the early days of this thread that the post-Tolkien fantasy of Terry Brooks, Robert Jordan, and the like is significantly inferior to Tolkien's work. Why then does the market demand that kind of book? Why doesn't it demand works like Tolkien's, which are widely considered better (and indeed sell better)? Is there some strange force of capitalism at work that keeps the demand for this more popular, better liked type of book low and the demand for the less liked type of book high? Or is it not a market issue at all, but an artistic one - most writers are simply incapable of producing works like Tolkien's?

Fordim wrote:

If books-as-units were widgets, then anyone could be trained to write the kinds of books that different people want to read. But we can all agree that there is still some kind of speical non-quantifiable talent behind good writing, such that the people who produce book-units in response to a market demand, still do so from within a 'talent' or skill-set that is uniquely their own.

I'm not sure about the non-quantifiable bit. The specifications for a succesful book could be completely quantifiable and still the book could be difficult to produce. The specifications for an efficient heat engine are quantifiable, but I certainly couldn't build one. Of course, I must admit I'm the sort of reductionist who insists that everything is ultimately quantifiable.

Nonetheless, I think you make the right point - writing books that sell is a talent.

So art is independent of the artist, and perhaps controlled by the publishing houses

Of course, it's not literally true that the publishers and booksellers control what art is produced. The artists control that. The publishers and booksellers control what art is published and sold; and of course this exerts a strong influence on the artists. But Tolkien, for example, wrote without much thought of the demands of the market.

With this view, the cultural productions -- pieces of 'art' -- that we consume appeal to us because they reflect the significations that we have all developed to explain and order our world.

This view significantly fails to distinguish between art that sells and art that is considered good, though I suppose it could be applied coherently to each. Nonetheless, it looks to me like it leads to a condemnation of all art, from Mozart to Tolkien to the junk in the romance section.

Tar-Ancalime wrote:

there has always been bad art.

This is a very good point. There is, I think, a natural human tendency to be very melodramatic about one's present situation.

Fordim again:

Sadly, I must take issue with this. From Victorian pornography to Renaissance nationalist doggerrel (the Pope is a horse's a**, Spaniards are all b*****s, etc) there is lots of bad art that has come to us 'through the ages'. The old "test of time" theory does not quite hold up, I'm afraid, given these and a whole host of other examples. . .

Yes and no. A lot of bad art is preserved, but it's usually not well known - and I still think that good art is preserved more consistently than bad. Salieri, for example, is often brought up as the quintessential mediocre artist as opposed to Mozart the great; but Salieri was undoubtedly a far better artist than many of his contemporaries, whose names nor works are often heard.

Further, I think that even if all bad art was preserved and widely known, it would not be enough to dismiss the "test of time" theory, the idea of which is not that only good art survives but that only good art retains popularity or critical approval (there's a big difference between those two, of course, but that's a separate issue). Nobody seriously thinks that Victorian pornography is better art than Shakespeare, and its certainly not as popular.

There is no "gold standard" of historical transmission that can guarantee quality and worth in art -- it's all still just the market place. Gone With the Wind continues to outsell the roughly contemporaneous Ulysses, and while I enjoyed Margaret Mitchell's buccolic romp through the Old South (passing quickly over the text's racism and classism) I would not in a million years make any claim that it is a better book than anything produced by James Joyce!

I agree that historical transmission is not a "gold standard". It is not true that the quality of a work of art is directly proportional to the success with which it retains popularity over time. But I do think that such success is often diagnostic of quality. But Ulysses and Gone with the Wind are really fairly recent works in the grand scheme of things.

By the way, doesn't your placing of Joyce over Mitchell require that you have a notion of "good art", and doesn't that contradict the claim that:

the cultural productions -- pieces of 'art' -- that we consume appeal to us because they reflect the significations that we have all developed to explain and order our world. They are not imposed on us from without, but spring up from within ourselves, all of us, trapping us all in the same prisonhouse of consumerist, ideological representation.

. . . or am I reading a value judgement into Althusser's view that isn't really there? Or do you perhaps not really share his view?

Lalwende wrote:

I always rant at people that there is no real 'alternative', that anything we do is ultimately driven by business and media and general 'powers that be', even that really obscure shouty CD we buy would never have been available if someone didn't think we would 'buy in' to it

This seems to approach things with the assumption that people buy music with the goal of escaping consumerism. I don't know about anyone else, but I buy music because I think it sounds good, and as long as it does I don't really care what sinister forces made it available to me.