{"id":441,"date":"2025-09-24T05:19:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-24T05:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/09\/24\/art-and-democracy-in-praise-of-commercial-culture-marginal-revolution\/"},"modified":"2025-09-24T05:19:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-24T05:19:07","slug":"art-and-democracy-in-praise-of-commercial-culture-marginal-revolution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/2025\/09\/24\/art-and-democracy-in-praise-of-commercial-culture-marginal-revolution\/","title":{"rendered":"Art and Democracy : In Praise of Commercial Culture &#8211; Marginal REVOLUTION"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>TABARROK:&nbsp;Here\u2019s a quote from the book, \u201cArt and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>COWEN:&nbsp;So much of democratic politics is based on consensus. So much of wonderful art, especially new art, is based on overturning consensus, maybe sometimes offending people. All this came to a head in the 1990s, disputes over what the National Endowment for the Arts in America was funding. Some of it, of course, was obscene. Some of it was obscene and pretty good. Some of it was obscene and terrible.<\/p>\n<p>What ended up happening is the whole process got bureaucratized. The NEA ended up afraid to make highly controversial grants. They spend more on overhead. They send more around to the states. Now, it\u2019s much more boring. It seems obvious in retrospect. The NEA did a much better job in the 1960s, right after it was founded, when it was just a bunch of smart people sitting around a table saying, \u201cLet\u2019s send some money to this person,\u201d and then they\u2019d just do it, basically.<br \/>\n\u2014 Read on <a href=\"https:\/\/marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2025\/09\/the-return-of-the-mr-podcast-in-praise-of-commercial-culture.html\">marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2025\/09\/the-return-of-the-mr-podcast-in-praise-of-commercial-culture.html<\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TABARROK:&nbsp;Here\u2019s a quote from the book, \u201cArt and democratic politics, although both beneficial activities, operate on conflicting principles.\u201d COWEN:&nbsp;So much of democratic politics is based on consensus. So much of wonderful art, especially new art, is based on overturning consensus, maybe sometimes offending people. All this came to a head in the 1990s, disputes over [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/441\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.adlington.fr\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}