Are commerce and culture perennially at odds with each other? Does the marketplace inevitably corrupt artists? At most colleges and universities across the country, the answer to these questions would be "yes," but the Mises Institute offers another perspective.

Paul Cantor, Clifton Waller Barrett Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is a pioneer in literary criticism from an Austrian perspective. Having studied with Ludwig von Mises, he has been working to counter the Marxist understanding of culture that dominates in the humanities today.

Conceiving of culture as a form of spontaneous order, he argues that market principles such as free trade and competition are as beneficial in the artistic realm as they are in the economy as a whole. He shows that commercial culture is at least as vibrant and varied as the elite culture championed by Romantics and modernists.

In this week-long seminar, Cantor will discuss a variety of case studies of commercial culture, including Shakespeare's theater, classical music in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the serialized novel in Victorian Britain, the Hollywood studio system, and the development of the Fox network on television. He will also consider the alternatives to commercial culture, from aristocratic and church patronage to totalitarianism and other forms of government support for the arts.

The seminar will consist of two primary lectures per day for five days, July 24-July 28, 2006, and discussion time with the professor. Morning sessions are 10:00 - 11:30 Central Time, and afternoon sessions are 2:00 - 3:30, Monday through Friday, with a pizza party on Thursday evening.  A shuttle will depart from the front of Commons Dormitory Monday through Friday at 9:30 a.m. going to the Mises Institute and return each afternoon at 4:00 p.m.   REGISTER ONLINE NOW .

Monday, July 24:

• 10:00-11:30am: LECTURE I — THE ECONOMIC BASIS OF CULTURE: An introduction to the basic systems of supporting the arts—patronage, commercial markets, government funding; Culture and spontaneous order.
•  2:00-3:30pm: LECTURE II—SHAKESPEARE’S THEATER: A study of the first example of "mass market" culture, and its intersection with aristocratic patronage. Shakespeare as businessman.
• 7:00pm: Film: Shakespeare in Love

Tuesday, July 25:

• 10:00-11:30am: LECTURE III—THE ECONOMICS OF PAINTING—PATRONAGE VS. THE MARKET: Case studies include Michelangelo and Rubens. Answer to the riddle: "When is a Rembrandt not a Rembrandt?"
• 2:00-3:30pm: LECTURE IV—THE ECONOMICS OF CLASSICAL MUSIC—PATRONAGE VS. THE MARKET: Case studies include J. S. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, and Wagner. The Church, the Court, and the Middle-Class Piano.
• 7:00pm: Film: Amadeus

Wednesday, July 26:

• 10:00-11:30am: LECTURE V—THE SERIALIZED NOVEL IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: A study of the first form of culture mass-marketed as a commodity. The distinctive nature of print culture. Focus on Dickens. The art of the cliffhanger. Mass culture and artistic feedback.
• 2:00-3:30pm: LECTURE VI—THE ECONOMICS OF MODERNISM: Modernist hostility to the market. The return to patronage and the turn to the academy and government funding. Case studies include T. S. Eliot, Pound, and Joyce, with some attention to modernist painting and music. 
• 7:00pm: Film: Shostakovich Against Stalin 

Thursday, July 27:

• 10:00-11:30pm: LECTURE VII—TOTALITARIANISM AND THE ARTS IN THE 20TH CENTURY: The modern patrons of the arts: Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and Roosevelt. Case studies include Wilhelm Furtwängler and Dimitri Shostakovich. How to rub a dictator the wrong way.
• 2:00-3:30pm: LECTURE VII—THE RISE OF THE MOTION PICTURE: The great example of commercial culture; The studio system vs. the auteur; Critique of Frankfurt School critique.
• 7:00pm: Film: The Simpsons and The X Files

Friday, July 28:

• 10:00-11:30am: LECTURE IX—HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE TUBE:Television as the test case of commercial culture;National Networks vs. Cable TV;In defense of Rupert Murdoch and Fox TV (The Simpsons and The X-Files).
• 2:00-3:30pm:"LECTURE X—CONCLUSION—CULTURE AS POP CULTURE;The advantages and disadvantages of the market as support for the arts. Comparison with other systems. Toward a theory of media change. Video games and the future. The spontaneous order model.

No advance reading is necessary for this seminar; the lectures will not assume any prior knowledge. But if you wish to prepare in any of the areas, Dr. Cantor offers the following suggested readings. If you want to purchase one book for the seminar, he recommends Tyler Cowen’s In Praise of Commercial Culture (readily available in paperback ), which Dr. Cantor will refer to frequently.

Many of the other books are available in paperback and all should be available in any good academic library. Dr. Cantor has divided the readings into primary and secondary; "primary" means that it provides a basic introduction to the topic; "secondary" means that it delves into the topic in greater depth. Annotations have been supplied where the relevance of the book is not obvious.

LECTURE I
Primary: Tyler Cowen, "Introduction" and "The Arts in a Market Economy" in In Praise of Commercial Culture (1-43)
Secondary: John Storey, Inventing Popular Culture (a good representative of Marxist views of popular culture)

LECTURE II
Primary: Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (an excellent overview of the economic basis of Shakespeare’s theater, arguing that he was interested not only in the performance but also in the publication of his plays)
Secondary: Lisa Jardine, Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (a study of the economic basis of the Renaissance, relating cultural achievements to commercial developments)

LECTURE III
Primary: Tyler Cowen, "The Wealthy City as a Center for Western Art" (83-128)
Secondary: Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market

LECTURE IV
Primary: Tyler Cowen, "From Bach to the Beatles: The Developing Market for Music" (129-80)
Secondary: F. M. Scherer, Quarter Notes and Bank Notes: The Economics of Music Composition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

LECTURE V
Primary: Tyler Cowen, "The Market for the Written Word" (44-82) Jennifer Hayward, "Introduction" and "Mutual Friends: The Development of the Mass Serial" in Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera (1-83)
Secondary: Ludwig von Mises, "Literature Under Capitalism" in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (48-72)
Lee Erickson, "Marketing the Novel, 1820-1850" in The Economy of Literary Form (142-69)

LECTURE VI
Primary: Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture, especially Chapter 2-Joyce, Chapter 3-Eliot, and Chapter 4-Pound (42-145)
Secondary: Paul Delaney, "Paying for Modernism" and "T. S. Eliot’s Personal Finances, 1915-1929" in Literature, Money and the Market (147-71)
Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word (an incisive—and amusing—critique of modernist painting and the way it is marketed)

Lecture VII
Primary: Frederic Spotts, "The Perfect Wagnerite" and "The Music Master" in Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (223-307)
Solomon Volkov, ed., Testimony: The Memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich (this book is highly controversial; the authenticity of the "memoir" has been questioned; nevertheless, it remains fundamental to the Shostakovich-Stalin issue)
Secondary: Peter Adam, Art of the Third Reich
Brandon Taylor & Wilfried van der Will, The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture & Film in the Third Reich

LECTURE VIII
Primary: Tyler Cowen, "Why Hollywood Rules the World, and Whether We Should Care" in Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World’s Culture (73-101)
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception" in Dialectic of Enlightenment (120-67; the classic Marxist attack on Hollywood)
Secondary: Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio
Era Colin Haskins, Stuart McFayden, and Adam Finn, Global Television and Film: An Introduction to the Economics of the Business
Jack Stillinger, "Play and Films: Authors, Auteurs, Autres" in Multiple Authorship and the Myth of the Solitary Genius (163-81)

LECTURE IX
Primary: Daniel Kimmel, The Fourth Network: How Fox Broke the Rules and Reinvented Television
Secondary: Paul Cantor, Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (chapters on The Simpsons and The X-Files, 67-198)

LECTURE X
Primary: Tyler Cowen, "Why Cultural Pessimism" in In Praise of Commercial Culture (181-210)
Secondary: Don Lavoie and Emily Chamlee-Wright, Culture and Enterprise: The development, representation and morality of business (an attempt to apply Austrian economics to cultural issues)

NOTE: At the seminar, Dr. Cantor will provide a more extensive bibliography on all these topics.

The Seminar is open to full-time students (no charge for qualifying students). Registration is $125 for Mises Institute Members (click HERE to join, or to update your membership) and faculty, and $195 for non-Members. Registration includes daily boxed lunches, refreshment breaks, closing pizza party, transportation between the dorm and the Institute each day, and the use of Mises Institute research libraries and computers. You may register online. Dormitory rooms are available for $35 per person per night double-occupancy or $45 per night single-occupancy. For other Auburn accommodations, go here. For Atlanta-Auburn airport shuttles, see Express85.

Students may apply for tuition scholarships by submitting the online application form along with a copy of student ID and an informal transcript copy. A limited number of travel scholarships are available. This information can be mailed to Cantor Scholarship Committee, Mises Institute, 518 West Magnolia Avenue, Auburn, Alabama 36832, or faxed to 734-448-8148, or emailed to pat@mises.org.