Author: Levine, Faye

Publication Year: 1975

Media Type: Book

Summary:

Whether or not the Culture Barons are archfiends in cahoots with the CIA and other assassins, playing reckless games with each other and plotting new wrinkles in the cold war all the time, who they are and how they think is important to the hundreds of thousands of artists in this country and the millions of patrons of the arts. Are their aesthetics the best ones possible? Or, as some critics suggest, are the businessmen who run the arts actually the archenemies of the artists? Who are the Culture Barons indeed? And what are their interests, presuming we can identify them; are they pernicious, puritanical, parochial? Who are the men or women who stand at the intersection of power, money, and art, the crossroads of commerce and culture?

Abstract:

Whether or not the Culture Barons are archfiends in cahoots with the CIA and other assassins, playing reckless games with each other and plotting new wrinkles in the cold war all the time, who they are and how they think is important to the hundreds of thousands of artists in this country and the millions of patrons of the arts. Are their aesthetics the best ones possible? Or, as some critics suggest, are the businessmen who run the arts actually the archenemies of the artists? Who are the Culture Barons indeed? And what are their interests, presuming we can identify them; are they pernicious, puritanical, parochial? Who are the men or women who stand at the intersection of power, money, and art, the crossroads of commerce and culture?

The reading for the course includes everything from Mills' The Power Elite to Susann's The Love Machine. I spoke with persons at every level of the artocracy (in what I consider a statistically good sample of Culture Barony), and I have attempted to chart the astronomics of the constellations of the great and the systems of art that galaxy around them. One always hopes to psych out the powerful. Somehow, when the effort's successful, they seem to lose their jobs soon afterward. Why is this so? Is our culture, in all its baronage, corrupt? I cannot answer that question. But I met the fellows who seemed - sometimes with protestations I disbelieved - to consider themselves, and to be considered by others, as the Culture Barons. Their words, their biographies, and a description of their surroundings are useful for the light they shed both on power structures in the arts and on the ways in which the specific powerful individuals themselves work.

Culture is all that is not strictly economics, in the Marxist or anthropological sense. It is in this sense that I would most like to pursue the identity and interests of the Culture Barons. For strictly political reasons, however, I have had to limit the scope of this book. In manuscript it was already five hundred pages long, and thus I have had to omit any discussion of radio or television, most of the record industry, symphonic music, and the many facets of literature - newspapers and periodicals, publishing houses and the noncommercial poetry establishment. Having apologized in advance for these and other glaring omissions, I look forward to the work that others will do in delineating the power structures in these areas.

What I am left with as a definition of the word culture is very much conditioned by the Culture Barons themselves. Because of the heavy influence of the Rockefeller family on New York City's Lincoln Center as well as on its museums, and because of the pervasive influence of these structures on the contents of my book, I am subscribing, for the purposes of this work, to a Rockefellerian position on the meaning of culture. I will consider as culture all the kinds of activities that go on at the official palaces of culture: chiefly the museums and the performing arts centers. This, then, would include both grand opera and rock music, that form of dance called classical ballet, and film as well as live theatre. Some of these activities also transpire in the halls of painting and sculpture just as a bit of painting and sculpture finds its way into the music and dance areas. The Rockefellers, it will be seen later, are not particularly adept at verbalizing their cultural commitment. However, they play a big part in determining the status quo in culture as in other areas. To accept prevailing norms for a definition of the arts is to fall within their camp.

CONTENTS
Preface: A fantasy of culture barons.
What is a culture baron?
The battle for control of Lincoln Center.
Opera: a legacy to the Met.
Ballet: The monopoly.
Theatre: Broadway's heroes and hoaxers.
Painting: Among the princes.
The money pool.
Film: Whose visions in the final end.
Rock: Dividing up the Aquarian age.
The labor counterforce.
Postscript: The ideal political economy of art.
Index.

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