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Summary of 45 pages for the course Cultural Entrepreneurship and Innovation at UvA
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Bradshaw, A. & Holbrook, M. B. (2007) Remembering ChetTension between the creative and the commercial:
“...competing career orientations arising from the contradictory demands for musicians to produce
aesthetic experiences for an audience of experts, cognoscenti, or devoted fans while also facing the
need to earn cash in the mass market constituted by non-experts.
“...unfortunately – pushing the artist past the need to scuffle to make a living – the market, geared
to Romantic expectations, may demand an additional component of self-destruction. “
Fast aging of Chet Baker, has a strong relevance to the business model of his career. A symbol for
self-destruction.
When you are extremely successful this creates a prejudice towards you artistically. Chet Baker:
strategy: public self destruction. No prejudice, so could never be about the money. Successful
commercially without losing artistic credibility. So, there is an implicit demand from the consumer.
Reflecting on the typical distancing behavior of jazz musicians labeled as deviant due to their ‘bizarre
and unconventional’ lifestyle, often entailing drug consumption, Becker (1991: 79) argues that jazz
musicians form deviant groups of ‘cats’ and develop distinctive ways of life and ideologies of
contempt for ‘squares’ in the non-musical community. Consequentially, jazz caters strictly to ‘cats’
and is understood to be ‘produced without reference to the demands of outsiders’
(Becker, 1991: 82). As a market phenomenon, this cultural schism creates an unusual political
economy in which the intended audience for jazz – that is, the relevant set of consumers – becomes
the community of musicians themselves, as opposed to the paying public who are deemed ‘too
square’ to appreciate the complexities of the artistic offerings. In other words, the artist is both the
producer and consumer of his or her own offering (cf. Hirschman, 1983; Holbrook and Zirlin, 1985).
Despite this conflation of production with consumption, as any self-respecting marketer will
attest, the audience of ordinary consumers nonetheless constitutes the paying public on whose
patronage the musicians rely for income and, hence, for financial survival.
How the artist negotiates this precarious trade-off tends to position the resulting creative offering
at one or another level on the bohemianism dimension.
At the other extreme, a term such as alienation would refer to music made purely for the
commercial pursuit of a monetary reward and aimed at an audience of non-expert consumers who
have no special knowledge of the art form, who are cultivated for the dollars they can provide rather
than for the sincere appreciation they can bestow, and who will respond favorably to the
music only if it is dumped down in ways that make it easily accessible. Conversely, the strategy of
playing primarily for the profound aesthetic satisfaction experienced by a large audience of informed
consumers is equally self-contradictory – precisely because of the scarcity of listeners with the
requisite refinement of sensitivities and sensibilities. Inevitably, then, the available options array
themselves along various gradations of degradation from defiant bohemianism at one extreme to
abject alienation at the other. Of course, many artists escape these extremes by settling for some
form of scuffling that preserves a degree of artistic integrity while managing to make ends meet in
a way that will avoid starvation. Often such struggles involve moonlighting at a second job such as
giving music lessons, playing in a pit band, doubling as a dog walker, or working part-time at H&R
Block.
In this scheme of things – as an embodiment of the pure Romantic ideal – bohemia carries the
potential of a double-edged sword. On the bright side, bohemia might manifest itself as
authenticity based on the integrity of playing for the aesthetic appreciation of expert judges (say,
professional critics or other artistic savants or, as previously mentioned, oneself). At the other
, extreme from bohemia, the alienation associated with pure pandering represents complete
subservience to the marketplace.
The previously-mentioned cases of self-destruction in general and that of Chet Baker in particular
serve to illustrate the difficulties of achieving credibility in a marketplace that makes mutually
contradictory demands. For musicians, the major challenge lies in overcoming the fundamental
contradiction between producer-as-consumer (pure bohemianism through creative integrity) and
consumer-as-producer (pure alienation through pandering) so as to achieve some degree of self-
actualization as an artist who can satisfy, at least partially, the bohemian expectation of
autonomous production but who nonetheless manages to survive or even thrive rather than self-
destruct – without of course moving too far past scuffling into the murky waters of alienated
pandering. Tragically enough, we suggest, musicians ill-equipped to navigate these murky waters can
and often do succumb to this conceptual challenge by embarking on a path of self-destruction
wherein they attain what Grana (1964: 78–80) calls the ‘only airtight bohemia’ manifested by death
through self-abuse.
Dubois (2012) Recognition and renown in the market for poetry
Alternatively, sociologists insist on genre distinctions and the division of the literary field into two
distinct poles of production.
The first is the ‘‘pole of restricted production’’ that creates highbrow literature and is governed by
concerns about artistic purity. The artistic forms and reputations of limited appeal tend to relegate
innovative, artistic works to niche markets.
The second is the ‘‘large-scale production pole,’’ focused on mass-market literature. According to
this model, large firms invest in artistic products whose conventions (Becker 2006) are widely shared,
while smaller firms focus on genres that are of limited appeal. Broadly shared conventions can lead to
the larger market. This is particularly true since via a long process of concentration that is still
ongoing, major firms have gained control of the core of the market and now monopolize the most
widely distributed products, in fulfillment of the well-known 80/20 principle: 80% of the market is
dominated by 20% or less of firms.
Renown: Broader reputation. Even unaffiliated groups will recognize your name as a household
name. Chet Baker: Renown. Some don't know his instrument, but do know about his drug use.
The central argument here is that the structure of markets corresponds to that of reputations,
which array themselves according to the two stages of recognition and renown.” Scarce commodity
is reputation. Commercial success follows in obtaining and retaining reputation.
The label/reputation must thus create consensus, and serve as a vector of information, a signal for
the actors of a given social world. Reputation functions along vertical and horizontal axes: vertically,
reputation orders individuals within a hierarchy; horizontally, it is shared among a more or less large
community. Reputation comes from success (or failure) in a series of competitions.
“Everything hinges on the market in question and its particular means of constructing reputation. Art
worlds may need to create reputations that last over time in order to stabilize the slow-moving
markets that would not survive without those at the head of the pack. The major poets of the time
pull the market forward on the strength of their stable reputations. By contrast, speculative markets
like the contemporary markets for art or pop music rely on reputations that fluctuate wildly in the
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