Crowds: A Moving-Picture of DemocracyLee, Gerald Stanley
Philosophy
Crowds: A Moving-Picture of Democracy
Lee, Gerald Stanley
Crowds; Social problems
The only way sufficient capital for fine things can be obtained is by
having millionaires who appreciate fine things, and believe in them, and
believe the public in time will believe in them.
The only way in which a millionaire can recognize and believe in the
fine things and in the best artists is by being, in spirit and
temperament at least, an artist himself.
The only way in which a millionaire can be an artist is to work every
day in the spirit in which the artist works.
This means the artist in business.
(1) The artist in business is the man who makes things people already
want enough to make money, and who makes things he is going to make
people want enough to make new values and to be of some use.
(2) The artist in business is the employer who makes new things and men
together. He lets the men who make new things with him become new men;
and when the things are made, they go forth in their turn and make new
men and make new publics. New publics have had to be made for
everything: for the first umbrellas, for the first telephones, the first
typewriters. New publics have had to be made for Wagner, for Sunlight
Soap, for Bernard Shaw; and it is the men who make new publics--be it
for big or little things--who are artists. They are in spirit, prophets,
kings, and world-builders.
(3) Incidentally, the artist in business--the employer who creates new
values and is creative himself--will like creative men in his factory,
and will treat them so that they will put their creativeness into his
business; he not only will be an artist himself, but he will have,
comparatively speaking, a factory full of artists working with him. And
when the factories pour out the men at night, and the smoke and the
murmur cease, and the windows are dark, they will go to creative and
live men's plays.
So it has come to pass that the modern business man of the artist sort
holds the arts of modern times in the hollow of his hand. He is a
past-master of creating new publics.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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