Markets and "taste"

God of the machine makes a good observation about the Forbes list and my take on it – that Hollywood sees the “bad” business as producing schlock. This reinforces my point that filmmakers see themselves as artists beleaguered by the capitalists. Godofthemachine also correctly observes that Hollywood misunderstands and underestimates the power of markets to sort the schlock from the quality, so that quality can produce profits after all. So far so good.

But gotm makes another point that I question: “Bad art makes more money than good art, in general because bad taste is more prevalent than good taste, and in the specific case of movies because the audience for them is overwhelmingly young, and the taste of the average adolescent is even worse than that of the average adult. These are depressing facts if you work in the taste business.”

There are two things wrong with this statement, in my view. First, markets are not necessarily antithetical to culture and taste, as Tyler Cowen usefully shows in his In Praise of Commercial Culture. Even filmmakers recognize this, as in the examples gotm cites, Executive Suite, Tucker and Sabrina.

In Executive Suite, the Holden character defeats the short-sighted Frederick March character by arguing that quality does produce profit in the long run, exactly what the filmmakers would like to argue to their moneymen. Tucker was brought down, not by markets, but by government in league with politically powerful competitors. More about Sabrina in a minute.

Second, and more importantly, markets are useful because they give people what they want, even if the elites would prefer to live in a world where the public only gets what they, the elites, want. The William Holden character in Executive Suite was wrong in believing, not that quality sells, but that a world in which schlock also sells is somehow a bad one.

In Holden’s dramatic scene, he easily smashes the cheap “KF” line chair that Frederick March wants to sell. Surely, he argues, the Treadway company would not want to be known for such a product, and its workers would be ashamed to make it. But what’s so wrong with making furniture, or anything else, that people who don’t make a lot of money can buy? I’m struck by this every time I go to Wal-Mart or Las Vegas. The elites, including the filmmakers, may look down at this end of the market, but I see a kind of beauty in markets that can serve a variety of tastes. As did the Humphrey Bogart character in Sabrina when he extolled the beneficial effects of business to his brother, played by William Holden (another love letter to business by Billy Wilder, who in his early life saw what many Americans have not -- just how bad the world was outside the “crass” American culture where elites had all the power).