In Praise of Commercial Culture

In Praise of Commercial Culture PDF Author: Tyler COWEN
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029933
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
Does a 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 current intellectual and popular balance and to encourage a more favorable attitude toward the commercialization of culture that we associate with modernity. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a plurality of co-existing artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, 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. Contemporary culture, Cowen argues, is flourishing in its various manifestations, including the visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and the cinema. Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture. Shakespeare and Mozart were highly popular in their own time. Beethoven's later, less accessible music was made possible in part by his early popularity. Today, consumer demand ensures that archival blues recordings, a wide array of past and current symphonies, and this week's Top 40 hit sit side by side in the music megastore. High and low culture indeed complement each other. Cowen's philosophy of cultural optimism stands in opposition to the many varieties of cultural pessimism found among conservatives, neo-conservatives, the Frankfurt School, and some versions of the political correctness and multiculturalist movements, as well as historical figures, including Rousseau and Plato. He shows that even when contemporary culture is thriving, it appears degenerate, as evidenced by the widespread acceptance of pessimism. He ends by considering the reasons why cultural pessimism has such a powerful hold on intellectuals and opinion-makers.

In Praise of Commercial Culture

In Praise of Commercial Culture PDF Author: Tyler COWEN
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674029933
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book Here

Book Description
Does a 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 current intellectual and popular balance and to encourage a more favorable attitude toward the commercialization of culture that we associate with modernity. Economist Tyler Cowen argues that the capitalist market economy is a vital but underappreciated institutional framework for supporting a plurality of co-existing artistic visions, providing a steady stream of new and satisfying creations, 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. Contemporary culture, Cowen argues, is flourishing in its various manifestations, including the visual arts, literature, music, architecture, and the cinema. Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture. Shakespeare and Mozart were highly popular in their own time. Beethoven's later, less accessible music was made possible in part by his early popularity. Today, consumer demand ensures that archival blues recordings, a wide array of past and current symphonies, and this week's Top 40 hit sit side by side in the music megastore. High and low culture indeed complement each other. Cowen's philosophy of cultural optimism stands in opposition to the many varieties of cultural pessimism found among conservatives, neo-conservatives, the Frankfurt School, and some versions of the political correctness and multiculturalist movements, as well as historical figures, including Rousseau and Plato. He shows that even when contemporary culture is thriving, it appears degenerate, as evidenced by the widespread acceptance of pessimism. He ends by considering the reasons why cultural pessimism has such a powerful hold on intellectuals and opinion-makers.

Commercial Culture

Commercial Culture PDF Author: Leo Bogart
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195090985
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
This critique of the American commercial media comes from a writer who has wide experience in both the media business and in academia. Bogart explores how commercial demands affect the substance and form of American media, and argues that the future of the

Faith in the Market

Faith in the Market PDF Author: John Michael Giggie
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813530994
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
Reveals the many ways in which religious groups actually embraced commercial culture to establish an urban presence. [back cover].

Brand New China

Brand New China PDF Author: Jing Wang
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674044821
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
One part riveting account of fieldwork and one part rigorous academic study, Brand New China offers a unique perspective on the advertising and marketing culture of China. Jing Wang’s experiences in the disparate worlds of Beijing advertising agencies and the U.S. academy allow her to share a unique perspective on China during its accelerated reintegration into the global market system. Brand New China offers a detailed, penetrating, and up-to-date portrayal of branding and advertising in contemporary China. Wang takes us inside an advertising agency to show the influence of American branding theories and models. She also examines the impact of new media practices on Chinese advertising, deliberates on the convergence of grassroots creative culture and viral marketing strategies, samples successful advertising campaigns, provides practical insights about Chinese consumer segments, and offers methodological reflections on pop culture and advertising research. This book unveils a “brand new” China that is under the sway of the ideology of global partnership while struggling not to become a mirror image of the United States. Wang takes on the task of showing where Western thinking works in China, where it does not, and, perhaps most important, where it creates opportunities for cross-fertilization. Thanks to its combination of engaging vignettes from the advertising world and thorough research that contextualizes these vignettes, Brand New China will be of interest to industry participants, students of popular culture, and the general reading public interested in learning about a rapidly transforming Chinese society.

Commercial Cultures

Commercial Cultures PDF Author: Peter Jackson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
This study overturns the assumption that it is commerce that works by logical economic models while culture is invoked to explain the behaviour of the international consumer.

Consuming Environments

Consuming Environments PDF Author: Mike Budd
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813525921
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
This is an exploration of how much TV people watch, why they watch too much, and what they see. The authors argue that while people may have good reasons for watching television, they seem to be unaware that such habits might be harmful to their environmental health. The book examines how advertising and media companies have shaped the commercial content of most television, tracing industry motives and operations and their increasing concentration in fewer hands.

Advertising Cultures

Advertising Cultures PDF Author: Sean Nixon
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761961987
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
The economic and cultural role of the `creative industries' has gained a new prominence and centrality in recent years. These worlds are explored here through the most emblematic creative industry: advertising. Advertising Cultures presents a case-study of the social make-up, informal cultures and subjective identities of these creative practices.

Selling under the Swastika

Selling under the Swastika PDF Author: Pamela E. Swett
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804788839
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Selling under the Swastika is the first in-depth study of commercial advertising in the Third Reich. While scholars have focused extensively on the political propaganda that infused daily life in Nazi Germany, they have paid little attention to the role played by commercial ads and sales culture in legitimizing and stabilizing the regime. Historian Pamela Swett explores the extent of the transformation of the German ads industry from the internationally infused republican era that preceded 1933 through the relative calm of the mid-1930s and into the war years. She argues that advertisements helped to normalize the concept of a "racial community," and that individual consumption played a larger role in the Nazi worldview than is often assumed. Furthermore, Selling under the Swastika demonstrates that commercial actors at all levels, from traveling sales representatives to company executives and ad designers, enjoyed relative independence as they sought to enhance their professional status and boost profits through the manipulation of National Socialist messages.

Public Relations Capitalism

Public Relations Capitalism PDF Author: Anne M. Cronin
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319726374
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 123

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Book Description
This book argues that we are witnessing the emergence of ‘commercial democracy’ in which public relations, promotional culture and the media play a new, central role. As the conventional democratic promise of political representation loses traction with the public in many countries, commercial culture steps into this vacuum by offering mirror forms of democracy. Commercial democracy promises representation, voice and agency to the public and in doing so creates new forms of social contract. Based on empirical material, this book examines the Public Relations (PR) produced by corporations and communications produced by charities in an intensely mediatized society. It presents a novel analysis of the shifting significance of brand and reputation. It analyses the ascendancy of commercial speech, PRs’ relationship to post-truth politics, and the transformation of cultural intermediaries into ‘social brokers’. As PR and promotional culture come to inhabit the realm of the social contract and new forms of politics, ‘the public’ and the very idea of ‘publicity’ are transformed.

Advertising Cultures

Advertising Cultures PDF Author: Sean Nixon
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761961987
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
The economic and cultural role of the `creative industries' has gained a new prominence and centrality in recent years. These worlds are explored here through the most emblematic creative industry: advertising. Advertising Cultures presents a case-study of the social make-up, informal cultures and subjective identities of these creative practices.