In short, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok’s An Economic Theory of Avant-garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture, attempts to figure out why painters and sculptors tend to seek smaller audiences than film directors. Artists (I use this term in the general sense) do not only seek to make money; rather, they also seek to make art for its own sake. Hence artists will take pay cuts to work on projects that they like and refuse projects that seem shallow to them. What main ideas do I draw from this work?
(1) Charles Ives could compose what he liked, because he sold insurance for money and made music according to his tastes. A full-time composer like Irving Berlin, meanwhile, had to bow to popular tastes in his compositions.
(2) Government support for the arts could make popular art even more “philistine” (239). Artists who most…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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