In Praise of Commercial Culture

Does the market economy encourage or discourage music, literature, and the visual arts? Do economic forces of supply and demand help or harm the pursuit of creativity? This book seeks to redress the late 1990s intellectual and popular balance and to encourage a more favourable attitude towards the commercialization of culture that we associate with modernity. Economist, Martin Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting both high and low culture, helping consumers and artists refine their tastes, and paying homage to the past by capturing, reproducing, and disseminating it.