Commerce as culture
Do art and commerce mix? Conventional wisdom says they don’t. Art and commerce are seen as polar opposites—commerce aims at profit, while art aims at beauty. As a result, commercial practices are viewed suspiciously in the arts world, and are assumed to have a corrupting effect on artistic integrity.
As usual, conventional wisdom is wrong. The St. Petersburg Times has just run an excellent two-part story exploring the intimate—and symbiotic—relationship between commerce and art in, of all places, 19th century Russia:
From the Times:
The piece is based on Ph.D. work by Andrei Shabanov, who’s associated with the art history program at the European University at St. Petersburg.
Read part one here. Read part two here.
More on GMU economist Tyler Cowen’s well-known work on commerce and art here. Read a sample chapter of his In Praise of Commercial Culture—a good introduction to the way economists think about art and commerce—here.
Posted by Andrew on Thursday May 27, 2004 | Feedback?
