ABSTRACT
The business corporation, since its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, has become a significant social institution. This is a theme pursued by Richard Eells (1967: vii) in The Corporation and the Arts, a project/book funded by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund: ‘I found myself seeking to explain the interrelationship between the arts and the corporation as decisive institutions in our society’. Certain Americanisms populate the text like ‘freedom of creativity and innovation’ (in opposition to political totalitarianism of both the Left and the Right) and the language can be evocative: ‘Artists and enterprisers at their best are among the prime questioners of our time, along with the philosophers and scientists’; ‘They have a common goal in opposing the authoritarian suppression of questioners and the totalitarian pretense of monopolizing all innovation’; and ‘All this entails heavy responsibilities both for the artist and corporate executive’ (Eells 1967: 220-21). Yet the book retains value more than four decades later. For example, Eells (1967: 222) recognized a corporate-arts antagonism of conflicting cultures (materialism versus idealism), with a hope that ‘out of hostilities there may yet arise a synthesis of great value’. This included reference to the spiritual dignity of art. Eells (1967: 284) proffered profitable reading for the corporate specialist in arts relationships: Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), one of the foundation stones of liberal humanism, and the then contemporary work by Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957), which has become recognized as a pioneering work in cultural studies.
