A Modest Proposal:

Richard G 1 Minute

A Modest Proposal:

Recent estimates suggest that the top 1% of households hold about 40% of all household income in the US.

I wondered how this compared with the France of Louis XIV or XVI – turns out that in 1781, engineer cum economist Isnard estimated that the top 5.5% held 29% of total wealth, while Morisson and Snyder (below) say tax records show the top 10% holding 62% or thereabouts (with all the usual caveats about such estimates, that they leave out the royal family, church etc). Sadly the top-of-the-top – royal and church incomes – are excluded from the French numbers. As you get into the narrower strata above the 1% in the US the incomes soar ever upward away from the mean – one in 1000 Americans earned over 6 million in 2011 (so that’s 300,000 people with disposable income in the multi-millions).

http://inequality.org/income-inequality/

Here’s the proposal: why don’t we relaunch truly elite culture? If you’re a producer of original art/writing/work, instead of pursuing a distributed market, trying to cater to mass tastes, looking for a big break, why not pursue a patron and try to reignite in them a sense of artistic virtue? Trickle-down elitist appreciation gave us Michelangelo, Vivaldi and Mozart – most of all it gave all those conspicuous consumers something of lasting value to preen and fight over. Face it, otherwise they’ll only spend it on gold toilets and racehorses and ultra-rare Bourbons with stupid names. How about getting them to invent fashions again, rather than just trailing around after them?

Yes, I know – yet again you’ll be fighting the philistinist Trump zeitgeist. That might make this the perfect time, though – how many very rich people really want to be associated with that?

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/MorrissonSnyder2000.pdf//cdn.embedly.com/widgets/platform.js

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Published by Richard Grenville

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31 thoughts on “A Modest Proposal:”

  1. Treat your potential patron like any other business: do your research, make contacts, launch oblique assaults, consider adjacent markets (lovers, friends, enemies, rivals, hangers-on, fitness coaches etc). Don’t approach them as part of a class of patrons: personalize! If you spend 3 years learning your target’s habits, routines and hatreds, compare it with the time spent by an auteur director or inventor, scraping together the resources to get their stuff made.

    Architects have been doing this uninterrupted for centuries – Frank Lloyd Wright got his big break doing houses first for the managing director of Johnson Wax, then for more and more members of the board and high-ranking employees. AFAICT, though, musicians have been a little hypnotized by the recording industry. Film-makers… well, there was that time Bannon commissioned a film that made Anthony Hopkins swear off acting (for a few months)

    https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2016/11/29/titus-in-space/

    …nowadays his talents for fiction seem to be focused elsewhere.

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  2. I love the strategic thrust but suspect that in many of our favorite categories the creators are as undercapitalized socially and culturally as on more traditional metrics. Figure one suitably enthusiastic millionaire patron can replace 20 middle-class customers. How much does it cost to meet much less cultivate even 10-15 millionaires? If you’re already chummy with these people, sure, start that interior design firm and have some fun.

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  3. That’s been the trick for many for a long time. Trouble for “creative workers” (personally, I prefer the ear-jarring kreakly (Russian contraction for “creative classes”) is attaching itself to an elite with sufficient legitimacy that simultaneously meets its high standards of taste. That’s significantly harder to do now than in the 18th century. An additional and related problem is that the low-brow plebs are not particularly accepting of a Baroque restoration right about now, and will hold those who are particularly visible proponents to account (typically, by stringing up one by the entrails of another). And I, for one, have little faith that the 1% will risk its own skin for those who purport to create durable cultural values on its behalf.

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  4. Scott Martin I agree but you know, it’s lonely at the top.

    Funny, I got out of the artist trade because I didn’t want to live like a courtesan. Twenty years later I’m whoring it up for academia. 

    …and now I’m tempted to write a thing about 18th century mistresses but all in the marketing speak of brand managers and reputation networking. The Valliere stock has risen since she learned to leverage her ankles.

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  6. The glorious thing there is that I instinctively crossed courtesans with Valliere and came up with Greg Valliere, noted market media fixture by mistake. It is probably better to seek out high-class dates if anyone has the resources and ambition to do so. The “genteel” bourgois thing to do is (a) sell gear to the strivers and/or (b) steal aspirational tastes from Olympus and figure out how to market to the mass at aspirational price points. That way, you don’t have to come too far in house on a billionaire. I was in-house for close to a decade. If I could do it all again I’d focus early on heir education . . . Prunesquallor plays another traditional bourgeois in-source role and it’s fun to help set taste for the next cycle.

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  7. Example of stealing fire from Olympus in our thing: Glorantha with its maybe 20-25 big collectors who subsidize everything else. The other 2000 or so fans are great but having the big accounts has helped Greg and company drift through business decisions that would kill any purely mass-driven franchise.

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  9. See also the weird porn factory brothel and bootleg Young Lady’s Primer operations in Diamond Age. Selling billionaire taste back to the mass becomes really interesting, especially for figures who are already marginal in one respect or another. It’s helpful to employ a narrator who absorbed fancy cultural capital early on but still needs or wants the work.

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  11. Boris Stremlin I guess I’m calling for neo-Baroque tolerance!

    Like so many issues of aesthetics (and ethics) it seems to me that the past century’s reliance on valorization by mass approval – using audience size as a gauge of quality – is really a feature of the market. When the means to partake of art are democratized, then art puts on a democratic face and artists think of themselves as representatives of The People (as long as lots of people support that self-representation economically, by buying their records/books/youtube videos/whatever). My feeling is that anti-elite posturing is going through a spectacular, theatrical phase right now exactly because we’re approaching a tipping point in the market. Wounded animals fight desperately etc. I wonder if there was an equivalent hyper-aestheticism around the end of the 19th century as the balance shifted the other way. Probably someone’s already theorized all this and I wasn’t paying attention because I’ve been deliberately pursuing a study of architecture that isn’t all about aesthetics.

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  13. Scott Martin yeah well I was thinking about Wilde and Whistler and so on, being a bit coy I suppose. In this context the Bright Young Things (Munro, Sitwell, Waugh, Peter Fleming et al) adopting modernism and writing about trips in exotic lands look like an ingenious adaptation of the aristocracy into democratic tastes – so pulpy, all that gallivanting around Asia and Africa, so newsprintable.

    My professor told me I should write up my impressions of Turkmenistan for the New Yorker back in 2004. I felt like I’d be too much of a cut price Robert Byron if I did.

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  14. I’m not speaking of continuing to valorize culture through mass approval. Though I’m not entirely free of a certain family-inculcated elitism (to my own detriment, I might add), I see the future of cultural values surviving in something closer to monastic scriptoria (or watchtowers, if you are of a more Trotskyist bent), where nameless ascetes labor for posterity or some sort of transcendent value than for the largess of benefactors in hopes of immortalizing my name for the ages.

    To me the best depiction of Baroque tolerance is in the supercilious Chris Elliot offering Cabin Boy, in which a rouged and powder-wigged fancy goes hopping off from boarding school to Hawaii only to become embroiled in a Candide-like caper with mangy cur pirate underclass companions.

    On the whole, I agree with Scott – our own Baroque elite doesn’t have the economic (and I would add, ideological) power to sustain cultural production at a level significantly higher than that of Cabin Boy (which was very prescient in that regard two decades ago).

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  15. These are beautiful thoughts for a thing going on in another channel. I love you use Saki’s Christian name. But yeah, reportage! The right kind of journalism will always sell up and down. And the delight of getting to see a Turkmenistan while it’s there.

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  17. This would involve declaring war on some firmly entrenched interests, though, from the gallery owners to the nonprofit industrial complex. You do not want to make the Poetry Society of America’s list; trust me.

    I keep waiting to see if those particular shackles get thrown off and some sort of Wiemar theater scene gets going on the street corners. But I think artists these days seem to dig the market. It’s like a hard-to-reach parent. When it finally validates your effort, the sentimental value is through the roof!

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  18. Handy Haversack a few years ago there was a rash of animated features in which distant fathers were the catalyst for revolutionary inventions by their sons – I joked at the time that if I really wanted teleportation then it was my duty to snub all my son’s requests for approval and let him know he would never be a proper lumberjack Viking.

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  19. The easiest rich kids to reach want sex, drugs & steppenwolf, all you have to do is provide a magical mystery show and they’ll pay for your drinks. Well, you also have to circumvent the family security teams, but again, the right “client” can help with that. (As for Cabin Boy yes! Or Peter Cook’s involvement with Yellowbeard.)

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  20. Richard G  – Their pockets are deeper than ever, but on the whole, profits are declining and global economic growth is slowing, which means cultural production is slowing also. Globalizers promised that we would all live in a knowledge economy, engaged in personally rewarding manipulation of symbols, but instead, we have legions of out-of-work academics, artists and graduate diploma-holders who simply cannot all be sustained by the patronage of the 1%. Now, they’re also increasingly shut out from political power, having been told for decades that striving for state power is a waste of time (and now, they don’t know how to do it). It’s not particularly surprising that in this atmosphere, retro rules the roost.

    And that’s all assuming that the shrinking elite can hold on to what it’s got. Syria was a fairly prosperous country a few decades back, and now its main product is refugees. After our own election, many members of the creative classes began to talk about fleeing elsewhere. Sure, some may be able to find patrons in Germany. But we are fast running out of places to go.

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  21. For us a stray Driver post reminds me that Shkreli is one of the biggest whales in Magic card markets ever. He could literally buy and destroy all the voxes or whatever if that was his thing. He’s also one of Wu Tang’s top patrons even though they don’t like him. How would people around here cultivate fans of this magnitude? Or would they look down and whisper “no?”

    I’d posit we have it now and it is Kingdom Death.

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  22. Boris Stremlin sounds like too many underemployed art grads –> high-powered symbolic revolt. Best jobs in field already agitprop on all sides.

    Last thing with me I hope because I know people get tired of the IDEAS but there’s that persistent layer in cyberpunk representations where the minuet comes back on electronic instruments . . . OMD b-sides, I’m sure . . . and things like the periwig come back as an aspirational class barrier as well as a way to hide the radiation scars or whatever. We have met the digital baroque before and it is our ’80s nightmare. Who thrives in that kind of environment? How?

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  23. Possibly final thought – at the very least this should be good for a cautionary comedy movie – now that we’re resurrecting dead film stars Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers can hatch a madcap scheme to hijack pop music and force it to reflect the tastes of their secret oligarch client, while Nathan Lane and Zero Mostel try to convince a lonely billionaire that the best way to win his love is to executive priduce their movie. It all goes south when the oligarch’s taste turns out to be extremely prudish noise-metal, while Lane and Mostel’s billionaire gets overexcited by Hollywood life and leads them on a drug-fueled, debauched binge-chase through every one of LA’s suburbs. The Emperor has no clothes!

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  25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Xg2v_T2XH8

    Hoping this stuff comes back. Kingdom Death works because it hits the entire spectrum: 2000 casuals paying an average of $38 for access, close to 6000 hardcore spenders at $750+ and then the entry level sweet spot of close to 12000 actual players ponying up nearly $500 apiece. The casuals are really the classic DIY market and then there’s a business and a patronage scheme layered on top of that.

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  26. YES. Multiple prints of the movie released into different markets advertize whatever is most divisive in that place – private schools in the Bronx, golf course futures in Phoenix…

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  27. I feel like the wealthy elite are already doing elite artistic patronage, it’s just that they are too few in number to fund all that much stuff.

    And they don’t like just wasting money. They’ll prefer to spend money on art which is both highly concentrated in value and which increases in value. Since the wealth we’re talking about is so heavily concentrated, it will inevitably favor gold plated diamond encrusted stuff over large volumes of paintings of above average artistic quality.

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