And it all affects how civilians take those paintings -- how much they see in them, how moved they are by them, etc.

Works similarly with art. What you're told about a painting affects how you take it. The buzz around it -- critical, historical, what friends say, coolness factor, its price, its display placement -- all have their effect. Recent-ish example: Bouguereau. A French academician, he was huge in the 19th century. But Impressionism triumphed, "everyone" decided that academic art was kitsch, and his paintings wound up in attics, selling (if at all) for next to nothing. Though he'd been very successful, his name was dropped from art histories. In other words, art fans looked at his paintings, if at all, and sneered.  
 
Then, back in the 1980s, a few people shyly started to make a case for his work. The time was right, something caught fire, his reputation started to grow again, and these days his paintings are selling for big bucks, and his name is back in the art history books. These days, art fans look at his paintings and don't sneer at them as kitsch, they go "Wow!"  
 
But they're the same paintings. 
 
So: the buzz around them circa 1870 was: "The man's a genius! Greatest painter of the century!" The buzz around them circa 1940 was: "Bouguereau? Who? Oh, that corny sellout?" The buzz around them today is "Wow, amazing! That academic art has a lot of virtues!" It's the buzz, not the paintings themselves, that made the difference.

FWIW, one of the things I had to learn to become a functioning and useful person in the culture-world was that 2/3 of what people think they're getting from art is stuff that they're in fact putting there.  
 
People bring expectations, and they project too. And context affects both these mechanisms.  
 
Which is fun and cool as far as I'm concerned. Those people who reported enjoying the wine more because they'd been told it was more expensive than it really was? Well, their enhanced enjoyment was real. Can't sneeze at that. 
 
One of the things an effective artist or entertainer does is create objects or performances that audiences' emotions, desires, and fantasies can adhere to.

A few questions for all of you who say you weren't into fiction as kids ... Did you enjoy movies? Did you have favorite TV shows? Did you read comic books? The comic pages in newspapers? That's all fiction too.  
 
FWIW, I enjoy the brain's tendency to arrange everything into stories. One way of enjoying narrative art: as a way of exploring this ability and tendency.  
 
Razib -- Have you read Mark Turner? He does a great job of opening up little channels between science and art. Try "The Literary Mind." His website has a lot of info too: 
 
http://markturner.org/

Interesting, tks. No expertise or thoughts of my own to offer here, but I want to volunteer that I loved Patrick Allitt's Teaching Company lecture series America Religious History. One of his arguments is that the free-market approach to religion keeps it strong here -- we're always coming up with new ones, people always have a lot to choose from. So the scene is vibrant and appealing by comparison to cultures where religion is top-down-or-nothing.  
 
Check out a blogposting I wrote about the Allitt. Allitt's great, by the way -- I've enjoyed all the Teaching Company series he's done.

FWIW, my sister has perfect pitch. There's no reason she should. Grew up speaking English, in a not very musical household, and doesn't have a lot of musical talent herself. She just has no problem recognizing which note a given sound is. She was pretty young when we in the family noticed it -- maybe around five. We were monkeying around at the piano, talking about keys and notes, and from the other room she volunteered what the note was we were talking about. If she's away from the piano for a looonnnnnggggg time (like a few years) she may need to get oriented before she's back on track, but it only takes a few seconds. 
 
So, in her case: genetics? Learned?

Fun exercise.  
 
Just to join in the fun of being picky, can I suggest one tweak? Where you refer to "Western composers," maybe it'd make sense to call 'em "Western composers in the 'classical' tradition," or some such. There are loads and loads of important, influential, and popular composers in the West who haven't worked in the classical tradition -- just in America, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington (who did try a few ambitious, concert-hall experiments), the Brill Building gang.  
 
And of course all those great black musical artists whose genius and influence go a little underdiscussed around these parts, I can't imagine why ... 
 
But very interesting to eyeball your stats and thoughts, tks.

Excellent job!

You've got the touch.

Too many econ people take "rationality" for granted and see non-rationality as needing explaining, if not correcting. That seems all wrong to me. How about looking at matters in the opposite way: non-rationality as normal, and economic rationality as what's weird and in need of being explained? (Let alone being justified ...)  
 
Anyway, have you run into the Post-Autistic Economics movement? In many cases just a pretty and up to date wrapper for boringly lefty thinking. But good points are made by some others.  
 
Link.

A woman once ventured this theory to me: that femaleness is to some extent about taking pleasure from taking things in ... And that taking food in is a much safer way to enjoy the "taking in" thing than sex is. What a terrible trick on women that taking in too much food makes them fat, and even less sexually plausible ...

I dunno. I've been low-carbing it (not obsessively, but consistently) for about a year, and I've never felt better. Eating satisfying amounts of excellent food, active and alert ... Time for y'all to read a little Gary Taubes. 
 
Of course maybe this is just a case of me thinking I'm feeling good. But how could we tell the difference?

A sign of what a divide there is between sci-fi fans and the rest of the fiction-readin' world: until this posting I'd never heard of George R.R. Martin.

Fun and interesting discussion. Two quick things: 
 
* FWIW, Mormonism was born in central-western NY State, not New England. That part of the country these days is pretty bland, but back in the day it was a krazy place, full of fervor and forever going nuts for revivals and new religions, and known as the Burned-Over District partly for that reason. I'm no authority on the history of the region, but I did grow up there, and FWIW these days anyway it's certainly fair to say that it's more akin to Ohio than it is to New England. Don't know that that makes any diff to your thesis, though. 
 
* PBS's pretty-recent series about the Mormons was good, I thought. I learned a lot anyway. You can watch the whole thing online here.

More. 
 
Now I'm off to drink some whiskey, kill some Indians, and watch some NASCAR.

Here's a book about the Scotch-Irish that I read years ago and liked. Don't remember much, but I do recall feeling that my life was enriched by the effort. Rang true about the Scotch-Irish side of my family too.

That's hard to imagine! 
 
All that said, is there anything necessarily wrong with cultural anthro being done in softer ways? I mean, there's such a thing as good lit crit, and there's certainly been a lot of impressionistic cultural writing around over the years that has been helpful, sharp, etc.  
 
There's an obvious peril in this approach, which is that work will get too personal, or the political assholes will take over the field, etc. But that's why the hard-nosed data-and-science types are also needed -- to keep bringing things back to facts and reality.  
 
I dunno, I sorta think fields like anthro and econ and sociology would lose a lot if they got too hard-nosed. I even think there's a bit of a danger in insisting that they be too hard-nosed. I'm not even sure they qualify as sciences, and maybe they're best dealt-with as semi-sciences-at-best. When they get beaten up on and forced to behave like hard sciences they can turn into real monsters.  
 
But of course they're real monsters of a different kind if they don't get regular reality checks...

Thursday -- You're living in a fantasy world, one where responsible serious people -- whose seriousness and eminence are recognizable at the very instant they're working, by, presumably, other trustworthy and serious people (hahahahaha) -- make trustworthy judgments that endure for centuries.  
 
I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you, but that isn't the way the actual cultural world works. Reputations come and go. Periods (and individuals, and schools) interpret the past to suit themselves. Ensuing periods then reinterpret the past to suit them. Talented work and artists get overlooked and forgotten. Everyone has a career they're looking out for.  
 
Work that no respectable person championed (giallo films, or Gold Medal Books, for instance) turns out to have more of a lifespan than the work that all the serious, responsible people thought would be enduring.  
 
It looks like some people's judgments were freakily prescient (aka "wise") only because we're looking back at them.  
 
Out of this free-for-all, something called "an artistic tradition" has emerged. But no one has control of it. It's an emergent phenomenon in the evo-bio sense -- no one's in charge, and we're all part of the bewildering churning process. Perhaps we have a few microseconds now and then when we seem to have a bit of perspective on it all -- but then we're submerged in the tumult once again. 
 
There are probably some general rules to be deduced from the meta-ebby-flowiness -- but what are they? And do they function as any kind of guide to the future? Because there's always the possibility, after all, that the things we think of as trustworthy general rules have embedded in them a kind of telomere-like sell-by date. We may think we understand the game, we may feel certain that we've gotten to the very heart of it -- and then the game itself may evolve. Can you trustworthily predict in what way it's likely to evolve? Can anyone? 
 
Besides, since "art history" and "literary history" as we know them didn't really get started until the 18th century, they may well come to an end. They had a birth, after all -- why shouldn't they also die? It isn't entirely unlikely that in 350 years, art history and literary history will expire. No one will care about the art of the past. The reason this isn't a totally unlikely scenario is that that's pretty much how people lived for most of human history. Our little stretch may prove to be a little blip of an exception to some far more major and fundamental General Rule. 
 
Incidentally, yes of course I've read Johnson, Hazlitt, etc. The 18th century was my academic specialty. Once I left school, though, and got a look at the way the real cultural world works, I had to go back, dig in, take a fresh look at it, and finally revise nearly everything my teachers taught me. Have you read "New Grub Street," or the first half of "Los
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Thursday -- You're making a basic mistake. You're projecting current-day critical rankings back onto past eras. You're assuming that what we now consider great was self-evidently Great at the time. No. 
 
Look, what a work's reputation is today often has zip to do with how it was taken (and what it represented) when it was produced. What we now consider great was often taken for granted at the time, or looked-down-on. Defoe's novels are just one example. At the time they were published they weren't taken to be novels in our current sense. They were made-up fantasies that pretended to be works of reportage -- in other words, they were aesthetically and morally dubious productions akin to today's scandal sheets and reality TV, or maybe even to those books that turn up every few years about alien encounters in Australia. It took more than a century before many people started wondering if maybe "Robinson Crusoe" wasn't a pretty good novel. Works often become "literature" in hindsight, not at the time of their production. 
 
No matter how great we recognize "Tom Jones" to be today -- and I'm a big fan myself -- the early British novel was a scrappy and aesthetically scorned form, far more akin in its time to what journalism and TV are these days than to today's "literary fiction." The early English novel was a middle-class market phenomenon, not a serious or intellectual or literary one. We've learned to seee structure, complexity, grandeur, and depth in these books only in retrospect. 
 
From Wikipedia's "literature" entry: "Early novels in Europe did not, at the time, count as significant literature, perhaps because 'mere' prose writing seemed easy and unimportant." 
 
From an online resource about Jane Austen: "In Jane Austen's era, novels were often depreciated as trash ... In Jane Austen's day, novels actually had something of the same reputation that mass-market romances do today." 
 
No matter what your opinion of Austen's books these days, and no matter how seriously Austen took herself, in other words, novels at the time were taken to be a lowclass medium. 
 
More from that same page: "Though she always had her admirers, Jane Austen was not the most popular or most highly-praised novelist of her era (none of her novels were reprinted in English between 1818 and 1831), and she was not generally considered a great novelist until the late nineteenth century." 
 
None of this is a big secret, btw. Here's a passage from the NYTimes critic A.O. Scott: 
 
"Since its beginnings in the 18th century, the Western novel was a bastard form, the chaotic hybrid of art and commerce as likely to offend norms of high literature as to uphold them. The 'high-art literary tradition' was, in Augustan England, the preserve of Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and the great figures of antiquity, in contrast to whom the popular novelists o
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Yeah, I think that's a really smart series of thoughts and reflections. My own hunch is that movies have become a little passe, that they've had their moment (the 20th century, roughly), and that videogames and such are the popular media of the moment. But I could be jumping the gun on that.

ConradG -- I'm happy to mock and taunt feminists myself, but where writing, literature and such goes I think they have some points. What's "serious" has generally been defined by men, and in their own terms. So, no surprise that the work for fairly few women measures up. Besides, why does serious-as-defined-by-men automatically mean "worthy of consideration"? Many rowdy early novels are still in print; many "minor" novels of no "serious" intent at all continue to live and be loved ... The "greatness" game is something some people find rewarding to play, but (FWIW) it strikes me as fairly funny. Why not read for pleasure and out of curiosity instead? 
 
Oran -- Contemporary "literary fiction" as we now know it was very literally an invention of the '60s and '70s. Read more here. And yes, of course, you're right: colleges and writing schools had a lot to do with this. But not everything. The NEA and various fouindations played big roles; so did the post-war art appreciation racket; so did the eagerness of Boomers to think of themselves as artists. 
 
There was a general feeling at the time that "if we could win WWII and put a man on the moon we can do anything" -- including deciding ahead of time what pieces of written fiction qualify as "literary." I was there at the time, btw, and I remember being completely amazed that some people would say, "Oh, I write literary fiction." I'd ask, Well, don't you think it might behoove you to let history decide whether you've made it into the 'literary' category or not?" But no: over the course of about a decade, "literary fiction" became a kind of genre unto itself. 
 
It might help to think of it as a species of top-down aesthetic social engineering, akin to urban renewal. We thought we knew how to make cities better; we slapped these gigantic plans down on 'em; and the result was that cities crumbled and people fled 'em. As the lit-fict crowd has more and more taken on the role of arbiters of what qualifies as "serious" and what doesn't, regular people have lost all interest in their products.

ConradG -- The "serious, literary fiction" thing has its own interesting history. If we're mainly talking about novels ... Then novels themselves were quite disreputable at the outset -- the reality TV and tabloid-TV of their day. It was only in the second half of the 19th century that some novelists started putting on airs -- started self-consciously composing novels that had "art" qualities: unity, design, fussiness, etc. Modernism (early 20th century) kicked that up a few notches, partly in response to movies, which seemed to have taken over the popular storytelling side of things. Then, in the '60s, our current genre of "literary fiction" was invented -- and I mean that literally. It was quite a conscious creation, rather like LBJ's welfare programs. Its claim is that it's the inheritor of the "serious fiction" tradition, haha. Meanwhile and all along many many writers wrote novels more in the spirit of novels as they originally were -- lotsa story, loose and free-wheeling, irreverent, often somewhat messy ... "Popular fiction," basically. This is only my opinion but I certainly think that the popular-fiction thing is quite the equal of the "literary fiction" thing -- actually I think it outshines literary fiction by several zillion lightyears, but I try not to make too much of that.  
 
As for the gals ... As far as I know, women have always read novels in greater numbers than men have. I'm pretty sure they've written them in greater numbers than men have too, but I'm less certain of that. I think your idea of connecting "serious literary fiction" with men is pretty shrewd -- I think there's often something of a macho attitude informing debates about "greatness" and "seriousness." Men often show off a lot of ego, while women often gnaw away at feelings.

Caledonian -- Sorry, I'm not sure what you're getting at. 
 
Conradg -- Women have been the primary consumers of fiction for the last few centuries, at least in the west. What's new in the last couple of decades is that women are now predominant in the editorial side of the book-publishing business. That's never been seen before, and along with some other developments (conglomerization, the influence of the chain stores, the advent of big-box stores, and Amazon), it's been one the major factors in the way book publishing (and the products the business produces) has evolved recently.

Caledonian -- My reaction when I read sci-fi is "This isn't for me." Doesn't go much further than that. But I'm not about to conclude that sci-fi is bad, just because it doesn't work for me. That'd be either dumb or fantastically egocentric. So basically I shut up about it.

I think Laura's points are good ones.  
 
I'd add one thing: the books that are thrown at boys in most schools (and by the press generally) these days couldn't be better-designed to put boys off reading. They get Toni Morrison in school and from the critics. But they don't get -- and the critics don't make much of -- Joseph Wambaugh, who is (IMHO of course) not only a much greater writer, but also action-oriented, profane, funny -- and deep, too, if in a totally guy way.

Oh, two quick things: I love "Tale of Genji" myself, but Thursday's characterization of it as a lot of gossip is pretty accurate. Beautiful gossip, dreamily presented maybe -- for me, reading it was like spending days in the Japanese Wing at the local museum. But gossip nonetheless. If you're a plot, ideas, and action guy, skip it.  
 
Other thing: Tom Disch is an interesting guy you might enjoy getting to know: critic, novelist, playwright. Very smart, very literary, very pop, very mischievous ... Wrote sci-fi novels during an era when counterculture people were doing innovative sci-fi. I read a couple myself, but since I basically don't respond to sci-fi I couldn't tell if they were good. Some love 'em, though. He writes hyper-perverse literary stuff, which I love. And he wrote a great, great critical book about sci-fi. Lots of history, context-setting, insight ... He's someone who has all the brain and credentials who argues that sci-fi is a great and legit form.  
 
A little GNXP-style data-point from my own life ... My wife and I co-write fiction. And it's hilarious the way our strengths and contributions break down along GNXP lines. I do action, energy, and story-engineering. Male-stuff, in other wrods. She does hooks and characters. I'm weak at what she's good at, and vice-versa. And we didn't set out to do things this way -- it just evolved as we continued working. It's like being attuned to different frequencies. Funny thing is that once she's got the characters up and alive, I often find that I can pitch in with the character stuff. Once I've got the story moving along, she often comes up with great story ideas. But I need her help to tune into the "character" frequency, and she needs mine to find the "story" frequency.

Great posting, great comments. Here's a comment I dropped on Tyler Cowen's posting linking to you: 
 
A couple of additional things y'all may get a kick out of chewing on: 
 
When you're talking about contempo fiction, most of you seem to be thinking about contempo "literary fiction." Literary fiction generally sucks. It's wimpy, depressive, and fussy. It's also an artificial construct. Literary fiction as we currently know it is an invention of the '60s and '70s, something in arts terms akin to the Great Society programs of the era. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, O'Hara ... There were higher and lower forms of fiction being written in those days, but it was all part of a continuum. They wrote for popular magazines, after all; they had bestsellers. More about this here. 
 
One of the reasons contempo fiction seems weak to many people is that ... well, to be frank, book publishing is one of the most feminized industry around. Back in, say, 1970, the editorial side of book publishing was probably 80% male, and many of them were hetero. These days, the editorial side of book publishing is probably 75% female, and many of the guys are gay. Good for them, of course, and they bring many virtues. Unfortunately, the ol' rampaging-male-stallion energy is not one of them. Book publishing is a bit like Vassar or Smith these days. Guys sense this, and they avoid the field -- red-blooded yet arty types tend to go into music, or TV, or movies instead. Same holds for creative types. The more outgoing, dynamic creative guys are writing TV these days, or creating webseries, not trying to put their thing across in book publishing. 
 
Despite all this, there's some awfully good new and newish fiction out there, even for the tastes of people who prefer action to contemplation. The reason you may not know this is that you're being ill-served by the reviewers and the press. They're anxious, striving, Ivy wimps, generally, eager to impress each other with their fussy taste. A couple of suggestions: try more crime and western fiction -- Westlake, Richard S. Wheeler, Leonard, Gorman, Hillerman, Crais and many more in America ... Ruth Rendell, Peter Dickinson in England ... And have any of you read Steven Pressman's "Gates of Fire," about the Spartans' defence at Thermopylae? That's a really amazing, stirring novel. This is high-quality fiction. But a lot of it is flying under the radar.