THE ROMANCE OF COMMERCE AND CULTURE: Capitalism, Modernism, and the Chicago-Aspen Crusade for Cultural Reform

by James Sloan Allen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1983

The story of Aspen from humanist ideal to narcissist haunt--or, in headline terms, from Albert Schweitzer to Claudine Longer--is perhaps the purest, most ironic illustration of the commodification of culture in our time. That much we recognize: what has awaited elucidation until now is the reality behind the original ideal, and the process of transformation. The story begins in 1930s Chicago with Walter Paepke, the compulsively energetic, broadly imaginative head of the Container Corporation of America, and three messiahs whose visions he seized upon: Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, of the Bauhaus, technological aestheticism, and the Institute of Design; and, incongruously, Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler, of the University of Chicago, humanist anti-""scientism,"" and the Great Books. The first product of this union was the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial bash at Aspen: prototype of postwar cultural festivals and the making of Schweitzer's saintly-innocent American reputation. The second, incorporating Ortega y Gasser's antimaterialist ""'Spartanism' and 'elegance',"" was the Aspen Institute: a scheme for cultural reform through summer-education courses in the remote, pristine setting of Aspen. But when 1950 attendance was poor, Paepke quickly took up participant Henry Luce's suggestion that the Institute turn away from the bookish and ""toward 'the great intellectually unwashed of America: the business man.'"" So Aspen, even in 1949 a PR as much as a cultural triumph, undertook to upgrade American business culture by educating the ""power elite."" (The music and design components went their own, different ways.) Allen, chairman of the academic department at the Manhattan School of Music (a Great-Books offshoot), tells the story as an often-fascinating interweave of personal, commercial, intellectual, and visual-arts history. If we haven't a pressing need to know the prehistory of Aspen, an intact Victorian relic when the Paepkes found it (and WP bought-up much of it), Allen's close examination of other strands--Bauhaus typography, modern advertising, and the celebrated Consumer Corp ad campaign; the Great Books--from John Erskine's General Honors course to Adler's long-running ""Fat Man's class""; the several, discordant Goethes of the Festival speakers--is rewarding for readers of many interests. Only toward the close, moreover, does he wax judgmental; through the ""polyglot congeniality"" of the Festival itself, he holds commerce and culture in high, bemused tension.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION