Not so long ago, high art was the preserve of the wealthy. Chamber music was performed in the private homes of the rich, where guests could also admire the fine paintings on the walls, glass and ceramics in cabinets. There have been public theatres, galleries and opera houses for a long time but their cost and the social codes that required formal dress kept hoi polloi safely outside.
We’re not talking ancient history here. When I took my mother to her first classical concert in the 1980s, she was terrified she would not look the part. I felt compelled to wear my first suit, which I suspect may have been bought deliberately in time for the occasion. Even in the 2010s, she was reluctant to take her classical-music loving second husband to the Royal Opera House for his birthday because she thought they would stand out. They saw the musical My Fair Lady instead.
It’s tempting to think that we now live in a golden age of cultural democratisation. Anyone can go to pretty much any cultural event in jeans and a t-shirt without raising an eyebrow. Most of the world’s great art is on public display. Live screenings of ballets, operas, concerts and plays are beamed into cinemas and homes, where audiences arguably have a better view (and more comfortable seats) than those watching in the flesh.
However, the limits of this democratisation hit me when I recently went to the Netherlands, building a short trip around the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum. 27 of the artist’s 37 extant works were on display (slightly fewer by the time we saw it, as a couple had been returned from loan early). It was billed as a “once in a lifetime” opportunity and we were keen to take it.
We had a good trip but the exhibition turned out to be the worst part of it. It was simply too crowded for it to be possible to look at the paintings for any length of time, with close attention, unless you were prepared to selfishly muscle your way to the front and hog the best position, again and again.
The reviews had not prepared us for this, although having been to a couple of other over-crowded “blockbuster” exhibitions in recent years we suspected it might be intolerable. The reviewers had all seen the exhibition in much more congenial preview conditions. They had praised how the works had been thoughtfully spaced out, not taking into account that fact that no matter how far apart the works are, if too many people are being funnelled through, there still won’t be enough space to look at them.
Here was an example of cultural democratisation not only at breaking point, but as a kind of con. Yes, anyone prepared to cough up €30 and who could afford to travel could get in. But the only people who could really enjoy it were the critics and those invited to private viewings, such as sponsors. For everyone else, the fact that anyone could go and the museum would let as many as they could do so, ruined it for everyone. This was indeed a once-in-a-lifetime experience for a small elite, and the vaguest simulacra of one for everyone else.
The reason why democratisation fails in such instances is a simple one. There are some things that can be made more and more widely available as global wealth and productivity rise. As Andy Warhol said, “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.” The same can be said of a Pink Floyd album, a copy of War and Peace, or a Ford Mondeo.
The promise that a market economy and democracy can deliver a more egalitarian society is premised on the idea that most good things are similarly scaleable. Many are. Domestic appliances that were once luxuries are now ubiquitous in developed countries. In Germany, for example, 93% of households have a cooker, 72% a dishwasher, 79% a microwave, 95% a refrigerator, and 94% a vacuum cleaner. We take this so much for granted that your reaction to these numbers is probably not awe but the thought: “how on earth do the 7% of households without a cooker live?”
But on closer examination, most goods are not truly scaleable. Yes, we could have a society in which everyone has all these domestic appliances. But white goods are not all made equal. Whereas some have Bosch, Siemans, Smeg and the like, most have too be satisfied with cheaper Bush, Hotpoint or own-label equivalents. Henry Ford have have realised his dream of wide-scale car ownership but the BMWs, Audis and Mercedes are concentrated in leafier districts.
The problem is even more acute when goods or services have inherent limits to their scaleability. There are many foods that can only be produced in certain regions so the more people want them, the higher their price and the harder they are to get. So champagne socialism is an impossibility: Only 300 million bottles of champagne are produced each year, which if distributed equally across just the EU, would give every citizen two-thirds of a bottle each. Globally, it would mean a ration on 2ml per person.
Culture can be scaled without practical limit when it is recorded or printed. But in-the-flesh cultural experiences cannot. Venice can’t get any bigger, so once a certain number of tourists is reached, it is spoiled for ever and can never be appreciated in its full glory, not even by the elite. There can only be so many tickets for live performances, so as more seek them they tend to get ever more expensive and harder to get. I remember standing by my computer to try to get tickets for Kate Bush’s live show and being thwarted in seconds. This can be mitigated by moving into bigger venues but having twice paid to see Radiohead perform what looked like a very good gig, only one that was going on way over there, I’m loathe to set foot in an arena, stadium or massive field ever again.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that many of these limited scaleability issues concern what economists talk of “positional goods”. The Economist defines these as “products that confer status and are thus both limited in supply and carry premium prices. Examples include properties in highly residential areas, fancy sports cars and upmarket hotels.”
This seems a little outdated in several ways. First, positional goods can be services as well as products. Second, most positional goods these days are not fancy cars and high-class restaurants: concert tickets, speciality foods and treks up Machu Picchu are also limited, desirable and command high prices. Perhaps most importantly, it’s not just about status. I don’t want to eat craft chocolate or see Vermeer paintings to enhance my status. I want to have these experiences because they are life-enhancing.
Still, the fundamental dynamic of positional goods remains the same, whatever people’s motivations to get them. It makes me wonder whether there is a dark side to the much-discussed switch from a goods to experience economy. The standard story is that as people’s material standard of living increases, they increasingly look for satisfaction in experiences rather than products. This is often framed as a move to a “post-consumer” society. This is a Good Thing because it shows were are becoming less materialistic.
A more cynical view is that because so many experiences are positional goods, there is more opportunity to make money from them. Persuading people to seek experiences rather than goods is therefore a way to make them spend more money, not less. By becoming less materialistic, they become more consumerist.
This hypothesis fits in with my experience of being at several major paid-for “experiences” in recent years. It always seem that a lot of people are there not because they genuinely love what’s on offer, but because it is an “event” that they don’t want to miss. At the Radiohead concert in a London Park, I was surrounded by people drinking, eating overpriced “street food” and chatting endlessly: anything other than actually listening to the band they had paid a lot of money to see. At Lords, the crowd for a short-form T20 cricket match was busier drinking, singing and checking the progress of a major football game on their phones than they were following the action on the pitch. In art galleries, most people seem to spend more time collecting selfies of themselves by the most iconic artworks than looking at them.
Democratisation in its best sense is a levelling-up in which everyone gets to participate in what used to be the preserve of an elite. But too much of what we actually get is that form of democratisation loathed by the likes of Plato and Nietzsche: increasing participation by shifting to the lowest common denominator. This should not surprise us: the key driver for getting more people to spend their money on experiences is not high-minded concern for their well-being but an economic imperative to increase customer numbers. In the arts this is called “increased participation” but for all the good intentions this suggests, the bottom-line demands that this is measured primarily by bums on seats and higher revenues.
This isn’t the only, or even main way in which there has been a failure of the promise that a market economy and freedom would lead to the democratisation of culture and material wealth. The nature of positional goods means that they can never be fairly distributed without diluting them so much that they lose their value. A thimbleful of champagne or a view of a Vermeer from behind a crowd of heads is not fine art and wine for all.
There are two ways in which this trend could develop. Business as usual suggests that democratisation has already peaked, far short of where it was supposed to have done. There has been a “golden age”in which the global middle-class minority has been granted access to what used to be beyond them. But as this middle class grows, there is not enough to go around. They will have to be satisfied with less, or a worse, more crowded experience. The elites will once again have a monopoly on the really good stuff: resorts and holiday homes in beautiful nature away from the madding crowds, private views of art exhibitions, the best seats at concerts and sporting events, separated from the hordes viewing through binoculars or on big-screens. Meanwhile, some pleasures are just lost forever. No one will be able to enjoy Venice, Florence or Bruges without the tourists and the traps waiting for them.
The alternative is that access is not left to the market but controlled by the state. In Soviet Russia, it was a matter of pride that everyone had their turn to go the Bolshoi Ballet, even though it meant most who wanted to went only once or twice a lifetime. Of course, there is mythology in this, as apparatchiks got more of their fair share. But the principle is a noble one.
If that sounds too dirigiste, there may be ways of spreading and limiting access in ways that allow for more choice. There could be lotteries for major cultural events, or “culture credits” for everyone to spend on what matters most to them. That way you’d get fewer uninterested boozers at concerts and more real lovers of the artists.
Whatever the solutions, I think it’s clear we have a problem. Democratisation is proving to be harder to deliver than we thought. And the market alone is not up to the job of delivering it. In fact, it makes matter worse, by stoking competition for positional goods and so making them harder, not easier, for the great unwashed to access them. The fact that I can drink the same Coke as the president is scant consolation.
News
I failed to send out an edition of this newsletter two weeks ago. I have been very busy finishing up the second edition of The Ethics Toolkit, co-authored with Peter S. Fosl. I almost wrote that we’ve finally done it, but of course there may be revisions to come as it goes through the peer review and editorial process.
I’m taking part in an online webinar on May 10 with the intriguing title “Interplanetary Kitchen: The Science, Philosophy and Hard Problems of Food in Deep Space.” If this seems a bit left-field, I can assure you it’s a subject I’ve been doing bits of work on behind the scenes for some time now. There’s a great panel and it should be really interesting.
The current series of the Microphilosophy podcast, exploring how the exemplary habits and principles of the best philosophers can help us to think better, is coming to its end. Episode five featured Nilanjan Das and Leah Kalmanson on the value of contemplative practices and shifting the burden of proof. Episode six featured Simon Kirchin and Anil Seth on the problems of “reification” – thinking of concepts as though they were things – and anthropomorphism, and finding the balance between confidence and humility in your own ideas, practices and arguments. Episode seven, with Myisha Cherry and Catarina Dutilh Novaes, will be out in the next few days. You can subscribe to the series at Apple, Google and all the other usual podcast outlets.
My latest philosopher-at-large column for Prospect ask “Should we ban billionaires?” I argue that “a billionaire ban should not be viewed as an extreme measure by anyone who recognises that it is only possible to get extremely rich by extracting more wealth from society than you could ever create by yourself.”
I have reviewed Ravenous by Henry Dimbleby with Jemima Lewis.along with Healthy Eating Policy and Political Philosophy by Anne Barnhill and Matteo Bonotti for the TLS. It is behind a paywall, but if you are a supporter and would like to see it I’ll send you a copy. Talking of which, I haven’t done an online café philosophique for supporters this month but will do three in the next two to make up for it.
I’m chairing and event with Daniel Chandler on his book Free and Equal at Toppings of Bath on Tuesday 16th May. I’m also in Glasgow in May for the Aye Write festival and in Wigtown for its 25th anniversary book festival in late September.
No “on my radar” section with links today: I’m still playing catch up and time is even harder to find than a positional good: you can’t pay to get more it it….
That’s it for now. Remember that if you enjoy these newsletters and would like to support my work, you can get access to exclusive content and regular online discussions by becoming a supporter.
Until next time, if nothing prevents, thanks for your interest.