I’d like to return to this book as it had an appearance in our wedding. This essay is a profound reflection on art and its place in the world.
Hyde begins with the premise that there is an irreconcilable conflict between gift exchange and a market-oriented capitalist society, and that, as a consequence, the artist in the modern world must suffer a constant tension between what the author theorizes as the gift sphere to which an artist’s work pertains and the market society that dictates its context.
An artist begins with a gift, a talent (think Mozart, who was born with
something inexplicable, something that he had to train, and something very few musicians in the history of humanity shared), and as a caretaker of this gift must use it wisely. This gift becomes part of a gift cycle that, Hyde theorizes, must constantly be kept in motion. For gifts to grow, they must be circulated. It is important that its circulation not involve “selling” but pure giving. In this practice, the gift cycle, gifts remain alive.
Hyde gives examples of this cycle using the traditional practices of many cultures throughout the world, but to give an example, he mentions how the American Indian tribes of the Pacific Coast of North America had a special relationship with the ocean and the creatures that inhabited it, particularly the salmon (who represents another important cycle in itself). Like other tribes, the Maori or the Jews of the Old Testament, “the North Pacific tribes developed a relationship to the natural abundance of their environment based upon a cycle of gifts.” They believed that animals like the salmon lived in tribes and in lodges in human form. They become fish form when they sacrifice themselves by swimming up the rivers once a year so that their Pacific tribe brothers may have some food. The old Native Americans welcomed and celebrated this sacrifice by parading the first salmon of the year to a special altar in a ceremony that would encourage the rest of the salmon to follow suit by swimming up-river. Everybody in the tribe shared the meat of the first salmon. Most importantly, the bones of the first were returned to the sea in a way that recognizes where the first salmon came from and how its appearance is a gift.
This is what makes the salmon part of the gift cycle.
This ceremony may sound primitive and unnecessary at first glance. But it does have an important symbolic as well as an ecological basis. When the Pacific tribes recognize the salmon as a gift that comes from a higher source (whether it be a god or a living earth), they respect its origins and learn not to abuse them. When, in the modern age, we forget where our food comes from, we tend to forget that we are stewards of the earth. And then we are presented with issues of over-fishing and depletion of animal populations. In this illustration, we see a practical interpretation of both Gaia theory and how it functions as a gift cycle. The ceremony establishes an important gift exchange relationship with nature, recognizing human beings’ participation in and dependence on the cycles of nature. It also provides “a built-in check upon the destruction of its objects; with it we will not destroy nature’s renewable wealth except where we also consciously destroy ourselves.” Hyde goes on to mention the concept of the potlatch (an indigenous word that purportedly means “gift”). In these events, what was important was not receiving. A man of position established himself by
giving property, thereby insuring the prosperity of a community.
The gift cycle apparent in the salmon ceremony and in potlatches also works in a similar manner for artists. An artist establishes himself and the future of his community by giving. And it is important that he is not
selling because when a work of art becomes a commodity, it ceases to take part in the perpetual movement of the gift cycle. “A commodity is truly ‘used up’ when it is sold because nothing about the exchange assures its return.” The gift exchange, fundamentally an “erotic” form of exchange, is neither exhausting nor exhaustible. Its practice assures a plentiful bounty because those that take part in it establish themselves by giving and not receiving. (It must be noted that Hyde recognizes that there are negative aspects to the gift exchange; the most obvious being the giving of gifts that put us in precarious situations or the giving of gifts that expect a return).
This gift cycle, as we have seen in the examples of the salmon ceremony and the potlatch, makes a community grow. Hyde remarks on how a community harms itself when we have the arrival of organizations like the Hudson Bay Trading Company that established systems of trade, thereby abolishing the gift cycles of the Indians, who as a result, learned to trade for firearms and alcohol rather than working together as a community.
In Hyde’s conclusion, he reflects that his position has changed during the process of writing the book. Although he still adheres to the idea that the commerce of art is a gift exchange, that a work of art, a gift, can be destroyed by the marketplace; and, in essence, that in the world of art, without the spirit of the gift, there is no art; Hyde acknowledges that the two spheres—the art world and the market—do not have to be so polarized.
Throughout the essay, Hyde presents the problem of an artist, whose work is essentially a gift, and his/her survival in a society dominated by the market, and he resolves this dilemma by noting that the artist must make some peace with the market. In other words, “the artist who wishes neither to lose his gift nor to starve his belly reserves a protected gift-sphere in which the work is created, but once the work is made he allows himself some contact with the market.”
Hyde makes the point that patronage of the arts is essential to the artist because the artist has a special need to live outside of society. Whenever there is an official attempt to destroy this detachment, such as the case of the Soviet Union and its state-sanctioned propagandistic art, art is likely to suffer. The Cold War presented the inherent problems involved with the state’s role in art and research. Pondering the decline in funding for the arts and scientific research, Leon Lederman, Nobel laureate in physics, said: “We always thought, naively, that here we are working in abstract, absolutely useless research and once the cold war ended, we wouldn’t have to fight for resources. Instead, we found, we
were the cold war. We’d been getting all this money for quark research because our leaders decided that science, even useless science, was a component of the cold war. As soon as it was over, they didn’t need science.” This problem is exacerbated in public institutions that think of themselves as private businesses. In other words, universities fund themselves by “selling knowledge rather than creating, preserving, and disseminating it, as their old mission statements once asked them to do.”
This has created further problems in the world of art as the “ever-expanding reach of copyright has removed more and more art and ideas from the public domain.” For example, Disney built its empire on folk culture (think Snow White or Pinocchio) but nowadays “any folk who try to build on Disney can expect a cease and desist order.” Hyde partly resolves these issues in his descriptions of the Music Performance Fund, which operates with a recycling feature in which the wealth moves in a circle. This is like the gift cycle that Hyde theorizes in the first half of his essay.This fund supports musical culture by giving performances in schools in a way that allows the business side of the art to nurture young musicians. Therefore, the arts are able to support the arts. Another component that the contemporary artist must keep in mind is that all who have succeeded as artists are indebted to those who came before them and should give back to the communities. In this way, Hyde concludes, “[t]hose who can be clear about supporting the arts not as means to some other end but as ends in themselves, those who can shape that support in response to the gift-economy that lies at the heart of the practice, those who have the wit and power and vision to build beyond their own day: for artists, those will be the good ancestors of the generations of practioners that will follow when they are gone.”
