ARTIST AGAINST SOCIETY
69
packaging of goods is a chance for the artist, and no one can deny
that since 1900 the common objects and common sights of our
urban life have improved artistically beyond the most sanguine
expectation. Even advertising-that obsessive and stupefying my–
thology of our marketing system-has learned the rudiments of
art and has unconsciously advanced public taste by very competently
aping modem creative techniques.
It is easy enough to pooh-pooh these results and call the means
sordid; it shows nice feeling to wish that all our artists could be
supernaturally fed, by Elijah's ravens or the spirit of the Medici.
But we may ask what is the next step to be taken if we are to
oppose commerce and its bourgeois institutions? Do we abolish copy–
right and go back to the sweatshop system of publishing? Do
theatrical companies revert to guarding jealously the scripts of their
plays? Does the painter live on your bounty, as a household retainer
in
the kitchen of your three-room apartment? The mere posing of
these questions is enough to show that turning back is imposc;ible.
The earlier modes of patronage belong to a narrow and lop–
sided economic system, based on agrarian and monarchical ideas
that we cannot recapture, save in Mr. T.
S.
Eliot's utopia-a utopia
which, to the unbeglamoured eye, is simply a chromolithograph of
England under the first Georges.
This does not mean that Mr. Eliot's grievance against the
present state of culture is groundless, any more than is the demand
for government support of art. The two complaints are interlocking:
one states that commercialism lowers public taste and makes it
harder for good works to find their audience; the other, that existing
agencies are not equal to absorbing and paying for all the good
work that is being done. Hence the government must act as a
sort of high-minded ' purchasing agent for a heedless or misguided
nation.
For my part, I have not the slightest objection to the use of
public funds to make up certain deficits in the finances of going
concems--orchestras and theaters, museums and libraries, whose
traditions are set and whose management remains in private hands.
But any initiative or any participation in the conduct of the fine
arts is another matter. For it raises the delicate and sometimes
sin–
ister questions of quality, tastes, genres, and vested interests. Here
