Tag: Art history

The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 8

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Ideological Capture and its Cure Within the corporate system, counter-cultural ideological capture requires that a few conditions be met. First, the company in question must be large enough to have a bureaucracy with a highly distributed power structure. Small publishers can’t be converted because owners and presidents have too much direct knowledge of the employees and too much direct control over the final product. A large conglomerate with a strong HR department and many independently empowered units with many managers is ideal. Second, the market must have enough total conglomeration that competition is either weak or also in the process…

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Beyond Profits, The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 7

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Some interesting effects occur when a company grows large and powerful or even hegemonic in a given market. You can expect it to exploit the lack of competition and raise prices for consumers, and perhaps also exploit labor with low wages if it is the sole employer in a given labor specialty or geographic location. This inverse is called a monopsony, a single-buyer situation. However, for the purposes of the arts, the corporation becomes not just an economic force but a cultural force, and that draws certain people to it as well as allows for an approach to production that…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 6

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Unavoidable Conglomeration Books from major publishers have suffered stagnation and decline since the 1990s, but contrary to popular belief, this is not because schools are failing to teach kids to read. The hegemonic nature of the corporate system has a specific weakness that is also its strength, which is the concentrated power of management. Since trends are subject to the whims of a small number of people, all one needs to do to shift trends and culture is capture the management positions of the corporation, and that’s what happened in the literary world. It actually began decades before 1997, when…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 2

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Hyperdrive Media The model which defines the corporate period could not function without two important factors. First, the model requires the ability to legally collectivize resources and use them as if they belonged to a single person. This is the concept of the corporation, with “corporate” meaning body, as in the company acts like a person and can own property like a person without being “a” person. The other critical ingredient is mass media, which allows the distribution of a media product to large numbers of people while maintaining a low cost to the end consumer. The technological revolutions of…

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The Corporate Period in the Arts, part 1

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The origins of corporate art If you’ve ever taken an art history or music history course, or surveys of architecture or literature, it’s likely you have seen various styles and trends in the arts cordoned off into various “periods” beginning and ending at certain dates. For instance in music the Classical period is generally said to begin in 1750 (the death of Bach and the end of the Baroque) and end in the early 19th century, about 1820, at which time the Romantic period begins. Today, I’d like to introduce a recently ended artistic period: The Corporate Period. But before…

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