music and pleasure

Clearly, we need to view pleasure and pain more broadly. One way of regarding pleasure of any kind is to see it as inherent in the satisfaction of anticipations. This is a variant on what philosophers call "motivational" theories of pleasure. We've seen how our nervous systems forever model the world they perceive, spawning a flux of anticipations at every level of perception and action and understanding. Stress and anxiety occur to whatever degree reality collides with anticipations, making the brain struggle to quickly reassess the world in a way that makes sense (that is, in a way that can it be anticipated more successfully). Conversely, perfectly fulfilled anticipations are resolved without friction, and this resolution is what we call pleasure. Even "animal" pleasures like sex and eating fit this conception in that they are led by strong anticipations ("desires") that become intensely pleasurable upon their fulfillment.

This conception implies that pleasure is really no more than a retreat from pain, and so suggests that our lives must be pretty distressing for us to find so little opportunities for pleasure. On the surface, life's moment-to-moment pains don't seem so grand; but then neither do life's moment-to-moment pleasures. The world is an untidy place. Where we would like to find simple patterns and deep connections, we encounter complexity and conflict and confusion. And so all ordinary existence is accompanied by a certain amount of strain. When trains of anticipation go consistently well, we register pleasure of well-being. When resolution is consistently rocky, we register broad anxiety. Only in a handful of activities, including music and the other arts, do our minds partake of experience that is so perfectly organized that every anticipation is roundly satisfied, filling us with intense pleasure

The matter of pleasure and pain is complicated by the fact that most activities take place at many levels in the nervous system. Someone derives pleasure from cooking, but not from the sting of peeling onions. And the pleasure of cooking may be overshadowed if the cook had anticipated going to a party that night but had been disappointed. Similarly, in music we encounter pleasure or distress in the quality of a clarinet's tone, in the melody it plays, in the harmony that supports the melody, in the rhythm that drives it all along, and in many other factors we've touched on in earlier chapters. When we speak of "the" pleasure of music, we are actually referring to the sum total of all music's pleasures and disappointments, a sort of running average of the good and the bad.

From this standpoint, it's easy to see how we take pleasure in musical devices. As music's promises (anticipations) are fulfilled, we experience pleasure; as they are betrayed, we feel anxiety or worse. When skillful composition arouses strong, far-reaching anticipations, intense pleasure accompanies their fulfillment; by comparison, the weak anticipations generated by poor composition hardly touch us.

Yet the deepest pleasure in music comes with deviation from the expected: dissonances, syncopations, kinks in melodic contour, sudden booms and silences. Isn't this contradictory? Not if the deviations serve to set up an even stronger resolution. Banal music raises common anticipations that immediately satisfies them with obvious resolutions. There's pleasure to be had, but it is the pleasure of the bread roll, not of caviar. Well-written music tales its time satisfying anticipations. It teases, repeatedly instigating an anticipation and hinting at its satisfaction, sometimes swooping toward a resolution only to hold back with a false cadence. When it finally delivers, all resources of harmony and rhythm, timbre and dynamics, are brought to bear at once. The art in writing such music lies less in devising resolutions than in heightening anticipations to preternatural levels. If this process sounds as much like the recipe for good lovemaking as for good music-making, it's because the nervous system functions the same way in all its reaches. The same basic mechanism applies to all pleasures, artistic and otherwise, for the simple reason that this mechanism is pleasure.

Consider harmony. Once we've mastered the harmonic system of our culture and know how to follow tonal centers and anticipate harmonic resolutions, we bring a flood of anticipations to all our listening. Particular chords lead in particular harmonic directions, and so long as harmony travels in that direction we register immediate pleasure. Conversely, an inappropriate change of key can be quite jarring, even painful. However, carefully controlled dissonances are frequently employed to postpone the resolution of harmonic anticipations, and thus to make them larger, sometimes integrating many smaller anticipations into a towering hierarchy. Most such dissonances are related to the underlying harmony so that they will not be too jarring. They do not so much violate anticipations as reshape them.

Melodic pleasure arises in similar fashion, but through the anticipation of melodic contour. When contour rises and falls "naturally"—that is, in ways that we anticipate—we register pleasure; when contour wavers recklessly, we register distress as our brains struggle to make sense of the patterns before them. To some degree, melodic anticipations originate from the gestalt rules we considered in Chapter 3. But anticipations also arise from culturally acquired vocabulary of melodic devices.

The role of anticipation in rhythmic pleasure is equally clear. We enjoy meter by anticipating a train of pulses. Any sudden deviation in tempo, or in the number of beats per measure, sends our nervous systems reeling. But carefully controlled syncopations can set us up for a pleasurable reaccentuation of the underlying beat.

The rhythm of phrase is more elaborately constructed, relying on a panoply of cues that make us strongly anticipate phrase boundaries. Composers meticulously construct sequences of evolving phrases, each suggesting the next, but sometimes deviating toward the unexpected, then moving to reaffirm the overall form.

This way of thinking about pleasure may explain the surge we feel in the climax of a Beethoven symphony, but what of the "simple" pleasure we find in the individual sounds of instruments. Because the experience of music arises as our brains model hierarchies of relations among sounds—hierarchies that are "invisible" in the sense that they can't be readily shared with others, or even described to oneself—it's impossible to sort out the degree to which the pleasure we find "purely" in instrumental sound actually arises from surrounding musical relations. Any three notes on a viola can sound uninteresting when heard as the violist tunes up, yet might ravish us when they appear at the climax of a piece. Although pleasure appears to be embodied in the "sound" of the notes, it mostly resides in high-level relations that we keenly experience, but to which we bring little self-awareness.

Still, just a lone note from a viola can bring bliss to a keen ear. How is this possible? In truth, no one has a clue. But it's likely that, at the micro-scale of music cognition where auditory cortex assembles individual sounds, somehow anticipations are suggested and fulfilled, but too quickly to be consciously observed. Significantly, we find no pleasure in a pure-frequency tone generated by a computer. Lacking variation of any kind, such sounds have no basis for generating anticipations. As we saw in Chapter 2, musical sounds are complex, constantly changing entities of many undulating components. The architecture of such sounds varies with the skill of the musician. We celebrate a violist who "has good tone." Somehow, through years of practice, such a violist learns to tease sounds of a particular structure out of the strings. He does this without understanding how, just as we tie shoelaces without having to think about it. Conversely, a novice violist can torture a sensitive ear by producing sounds that are "grating"— that is, sounds broken into disconnected segments, where one moment does not lead to the next, where every nascent anticipation is foiled.

Music's large structures can as readily result in wincing pain. When a well-trained but overambitious composer generates strong anticipations and then fails to deliver on them, we're soon in agony. Most such music quickly disappears from the concert repertory. But new music often inflicts pain upon its audiences until they learn how to anticipate it properly—or until they realize that the fault is not theirs and that the composer has failed to achieve his aims.

We also experience pain in music—even very good music—when we apply the wrong vocabulary of devices to it and anticipate it wrongly. Thus one style of melody will be pleasurable to those who are well-acquainted with its twists and turns, but unpleasurable to those who bring to the melody a different style of anticipation that produces one jarring mismatch after another.

Such arguments may clarify how we derive pleasure from musical emotionality, but they don't explain why we seek out the experience of negative emotions in music, such as melancholy or grief or violence. After all, most of us prefer to avoid negative emotional states in our daily lives. But in music we somehow enjoy such experiences—and not as remote spectators, as one might view a Shakespearean tragedy, but by being made to feel melancholic or grief-stricken or violent, as if something unpleasant had happened to us.

In his The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde wrote:

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.

Wilde alludes to the reputed "meaning" of music that we considered in the last chapter. As we saw, most compositions lack a specific, agreed-upon reference to the contents of the world. But when we bring our own life situations to music, we make of what we will. Music idealizes emotions negative and positive alike. By so doing, it momentarily perfects our individual emotional lives. The "meaning" we feel is not in the music as such, but in our own responses to the world, responses that we carry about with us always. Music serves to perfect those responses, to make them beautiful. By so doing, music imparts dignity to experience that is often far from dignified. And by imparting pleasure even to negative emotions, music serves to justify sufferings large and small, assuring us that it has not all been for nothing.

Wilde could not be more wrong about how a man "who had led a perfectly commonplace life" would be propelled to such emotional extremes. Music most affects people who already have a deep emotional existence. It is the force of our own lives that drives musical anticipation, and our own joys and pains that are rewarded by musical resolutions.

- Robert Jourdain

the definition of art

Increasingly, aficionados of the arts seek out material that is interesting, engaging, exciting, and unexpected, reacting positively when material that satisfies those desires is present. Many artists have responded to this demand—and perhaps they have helped to create it—by fashioning exotic objects or carry out sensational activities and making sure that these activities are 'performed in galleries and observed by critics. At times, and for some people, the object or experience may be awful; at other times, for other persons, it is awe-inspiring. But at the very least it elicits interest.

Why create interesting objects, or perform interesting actions? A whole branch of experimental aesthetics documents how, whenever a sight or sound becomes familiar, individuals avert their eyes or tune out. And, as a contrast, when deviation from the "new norm" emerge, these attract attention instead, unless they have become so complex that they cannot be assimilated. But once the new stimuli become familiar, they too lose the capacity to command attention. Therefore, to maintain interest, one must continually raise the ante, though not always in the same direction. That is, when interest in A has piqued, one moves on to B, and then to C, but sometimes a return to A proves more attractive than a continuing movement in the direction of D, E, and F. In a version documented frequently by experimental psychology, over time individuals prefer to look at polygons with increasingly many sides (say, more than twelve or twenty) until a peak is reached, at which point preference reverts to simple, classic geometric forms having a small number of sides.

These "trajectories of interest" transcend the experimental laboratory and emerge across the range of art forms. Consider the evolution over the centuries of serious orchestral music. Following the classical work of the Mozart-Schubert era, romantic composers like Berlioz, Wagner, and Liszt began to challenge the supremacy of tonality. Then, in their respective ways, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg created alternative systems of sound. Thereafter, as twelve-tone classical music became ever more complex and recondite, minimalist forms of music—constituting the sharpest possible contrast—gained in attractiveness. In the words of minimalist composer John Adams: "In comparison to the flamboyantly Baroque display at the New Complexionists [a self-styled intricate musical style of the middle of the twentieth century], the matter-of-fact notation of my own music was like a pup tent squatting next to the Chartres Cathedral. I had to move away from this setup and had to remind myself of how the notion of 'complexity as progress' is in fact a posture, an intellectual house of cards and always has been." Comparable forms of minimalism arose in the literary arts (Samuel Beckett) and in the graphic arts (Donald Judd), with much the same line of justification as that proposed by Adams.

Interestingness in itself, of course, is not particularly symptomatic of the arts—if it were, then mere newsworthiness would qualify an object or product as artistic. For me, this stretch does not compute—a single symptom signals neither a disease nor an objet d'art. But once the element of interest is embodied in a form or format sufficiently powerful or evocative that it will be remembered in that form, one has clearly moved toward the arts. In this way, we approach the possibility of experiences of beauty.

Conceptual art provides an intriguing example. It might seem that conceptual art is about an idea, and it suffices just to repeat or paraphrase that idea. But that is not the case. In One and Three Chairs Joseph Kosuth presents a chair and a photo of that chair alongside a dictionary definition of a third in a whimsical version of a classroom punishment of earlier decades, John Baldessari has his wayward pupil repeatedly write: I will not make any more boring art. In each case, a potentially interesting idea-what is a chair, how to avoid boring art—is wedded to a format, that is itself memorable, even unforgettable.

Joseph Kosuth - One and Three Chairs (1965)

John Baldessari - I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971)

With memorability of form, the artist distinguishes herself from an epistemologist or an exhibitionist. An intriguing example comes from the contemporary performance artist Marina Abramovic. In one of her flagship performances, Abramovic sits motionless in a chair facing whichever visitor to the gallery chooses to sit in the second chair; the visitor can sit as long as he likes and the artist remains essentially immobile for seven hours. This unusual behavior certainly elicits interest. While anyone with fortitude could assume the Abramovic role, this artist takes consummate care in selecting the color and style of her costume, her head and hand positions, the expression on her face, her bodily posture. Not only does Abramovic stimulate us to reconsider what it means to attempt to have a relationship to a startlingly unreactive fellow human being; her appearance and behavior often remain unforgettably poignant for the participant and those who view the encounter. More casual, informal, or ill-considered choices could undermine the effectiveness of the artistic performance. Just as actor Laurence Olivier long "owned" the role of Hamlet, Marina Abramovic sets the parameters for others who would hope to emulate her seated performance.

The third antecedent of the experience of beauty is the impulse, the inclination, the desire to encounter again, to revisit the object, scene, or performance. What I'll term the invitation to revisit can arise from each of several factors: One likes the experience, one has curiosity to learn or to understand better, or one has a feeling of awe—which can derive from wonder, scintillation, overpowerment, or uncanniness. Absent a desire on the part of an audience to revisit, an experience does not qualify as beautiful—immediately or ultimately.

- Howard Gardner

modernism / postmodernism

Discussions of the arts, design, fashion and sub-cultures during the late 1970s and early 1980s were notable for the frequency with which the terms/concepts 'pluralism' and 'post-modernism' occurred. Before these concepts can be defined it will be necessary to examine, briefly, the earlier term/concept 'modernism'.

Modernism was an aesthetic ideology which developed during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and which informed the thinking and practice of many radical artists. Modern architecture, art and design encompassed a variety of movements, styles and groups. While they did not all share the same checklist of essential characteristics, certain assumptions and principles did recur:

1. Modernists reacted against the blandness, sentimentality and historicism of the academic art of the nineteenth century. They also rejected the stylistic anarchism and eclecticism typical of Victorian art and design on the grounds that a new age of machines and technology had been born which demanded a fresh beginning. Some modernists thought it was essential to create a new style, based upon such engineering principles as 'form follows function' and the dictates of new materials, machines and methods of construction; others believed that any art and design based on such principles would be styleless.

2. Since modernists believed a new age had dawned - the modern age - they insisted on a break with the past, with history and tradition. Experiment, innovation, novelty and originality became overriding values as far as the shock troops of modernism - the avant-garde - were concerned. 'Rebel, reject what has gone before' became the rule which new generations of artists were expected to obey. Soon this became a tradition in itself (which explains Harold Rosenberg's paradoxical phrase 'the tradition of the new').

3. Some modernists rejected ornament on the grounds that it was superfluous and a residue of primitive habits such as tattooing. They preferred geometric to organic forms; they espoused the values of simplicity, clarity, uniformity, purity, order and rationality. Others sought to rejuvenate modern art by appropriating the styles and motifs of 'primitive' and exotic arts (tribal art, Japanese art, the art of the insane, naive art, folk art, and so on).

4. Modernists rejected national, regional and vernacular styles. They favoured an international style because, in their view, the tenets of modernism were universally applicable.

5. Modernists were orientated towards the future. Some were inspired by utopian visions and socialist ideals and wished to sweep away the old order in order to create a brave new environment which would in itself improve human behaviour. They saw themselves as experts who knew best, and as a consequence tended to impose their architectural and town planning solutions on the masses without regard to popular tastes, and without any consultation. Some impressive modern buildings were constructed but the cruder, cheaper, system-built tower blocks and public housing estates which appeared in the 1960s were hated by those condemned to live in them.

By the 1960s disillusionment with modernism had become widespread. On the one hand, it was a success: despite its revolutionary rhetoric, it had become the official culture of the ruling elites in western democracies; it was preserved in the very museums the futurists had sworn to destroy; it was now an orthodoxy. On the other hand, it had failed: the disasters of modern architecture; the rapid turnover of art movements and styles of little or no substance, typical of the post-1945 period. At this point, the term 'post-modernism' began to gain ground.

As Chafles Jencks, a leading architectural historian and theorist, has explained, the term 'post-modernism' signifies a half-way house: it is clear what is being left behind, but it is not yet clear what is replacing it.(The label does not supply any information about the characteristics of the works subsumed by it.) Jencks went on to argue that in the post-modern era, modernism continues - he employed the expression 'late modernism' - but it loses its dominant position as the authentic style of the modern age and becomes simply one style among a range of styles from which artists can choose.

What then were the recurrent features of post-modernism? As one might expect, they reversed or modified many of the tenets of modernism:

1. The modernist idea that there was only one authentic style for the modern age was rejected in favour of the idea that a plurality of styles - some old, some new - existed. Eclecticism, hybrid styles became fashionable again. No one style appeared to be dominant.

2. History and tradition - including the history of modernism itself - became available again; hence, 'retro-style', recycling old styles, the use of 'quotations' from the art of the past, parodies and pastiches of earlier works.

3. Ornament and decoration made a comeback.

4. Complexity and contradiction (the title of a highly influential book by the American architect Robert Venturi) and ambiguity were the values which replaced simplicity, purity and rationality. Mixtures of high and low culture, fine art and commercial art styles were encouraged as a way of producing buildings with multiple meanings capable of pleasing audiences with different levels of sophistication and degrees of knowledge.

5. In post-modern architecture and design, issues of form, space and function became less important. Architecture and design were regarded as 'languages' or sign systems capable of communicating messages. Pleasure was emphasized by means of playfulness, humour, bright colour and ornament.

6. A basic characteristic of art - intertextuality - was heightened in postmodernism. 'Intertextuality' is a term used mainly by literary theorists to signify the fact that most literary texts allude to, cite or quote, other texts. Aesthetic pleasure is often to be derived from the inter-textual play of different styles within, say, a collage.

- John Walker

music is about identity, not pleasure

When it comes to improving our purchases of music, we must grapple with the Love of the New. Most people buy only very recent music, rather than mining history for the very best music of the entire past. Niche fans—such as in classical music—tend to focus on recently released or rereleased recordings, even when the composition is old. Like everyone else, they are excited by the new arrivals in the marketplace. Some people really do just want Verdi and Mozart, but this is part of the reason why classical music is well under 5 percent of the market in recorded music releases.

Every now and then rereleases make a big splash. The Beatles' catalog was rereleased circa 1976, and many of the songs were hit singles again. But such successes are the exception and not the rule. Buddy Holly's "Every Day" was one of the most charming songs of the

early 1960s. James Brown's "Bewildered" was some of the most powerful two minutes of music of the twentieth century. Both are accessible and easy to appreciate. Yet there is no push to rerelease either song on a widespread basis to compete for hit status. There are plenty of rereleases, including recordings by these artists, but they are targeted for sale to a relatively small number of aging baby boomers or collectors. No one tries to make these songs major hits again.

Presumably music company executives do not think that either song would bring in much additional money. The profits would not be worth the marketing expenditure.

Most of the music in the United States is bought by people under thirty years of age. I can assure you that most of these people do not already own these songs. Most older music is simply not on their radar screens. But why not? Buddy Holly and James Brown are great. Okay, some of you may be thinking that Tyler is an old fogey. Maybe Buddy Holly and James Brown are, on reflection, totally "lame." That is a matter of taste. But there isn't much music being rereleased—with an aim toward hit status—from 1969 either. Nor from 1970. Nor from 1980. Nor 1990. Get the picture? The phenomenon goes well beyond the possible defects of my favorite older songs. It can't all stink. Buyers want the new. Why? I look to the Me Factor. Music is about identity. It is also about a differential identity. The problem with old music is simple. Somebody else already liked it. Even worse, that somebody else might have been one's parents. Or grandparents. I believe that Grandpa's fanship is less offensive than that of the parents, but it is hardly cause for youthful cheer.

In many cultural markets—most of all in music—many of the buyers seek artistic secession. That means liking something new, or at least liking something that will appear new to one's peers. This secession does not occur every year. If Nirvana reaches peak popularity in 1994, people who start listening to "cool music" in 1995 need not reject Nirvana. Nirvana is associated with the school class one year ahead and of course with slightly older siblings. While youthful feelings toward the slightly older are decidedly mixed, there is a strong element of emulation and some degree of toleration. The two groups simply are not that different. Nirvana can remain cool one year (or more) past their peak popularity.

But as the years accumulate, Nirvana loses acceptable status. For the class of 2004, Nirvana was loved by the twenty-seven-year-old guy just finishing his MBA. Or perhaps they are loved by "the loser pumping gas," or by "the guy who runs the produce department." How cool is that? Suspicions set in. At some point Nirvana is no longer a good means of establishing one's identity. Many current fans of indie rock like Nirvana as an ancillary interest (after all, they did inspire later indie acts, such as The White Stripes), but few stake their identity on the group.

A few hipsters will invest their entire identities in the idea of "retro," such as wearing 1970s bell bottoms or listening to ABBA. But this is best thought of as rebellion against all other time periods, and a new and more radical form of difference, rather than wishing to take on the true vibes of the chosen retro attachment. Few of these people enjoy the TV shows or the cars from that same period, except as an occasional source of amusement.

For those who don't believe that music markets are largely about identity, how is it that musical tastes are so predictable? Take a girl who is twenty years old, grew up in suburban Connecticut, is Jewish, and majors in English at an Ivy League school. What is the chance I hat she is an avid partisan of heavy metal? Very small. Most likely her tastes run in the direction of "indie rock." She might also like classical music, especially if she grew up playing an instrument. She will cringe at the thought of country and western. Regaling her with the glories of Hank Williams, Sr., and early Johnny Cash will hardly make a dent in this armor.

- Tyler Cowen

prosume culture

A good way to understand the self-assembly of cultural hits and how it creates an ordered, synthetic mental world is by way of contrast. Consider Mozart's opera Don Giovanni. The music and libretto together, express a wide gamut of human emotions, from terror to comedy to love to the sublime, and more in between. The opera represents what is most powerful about the Western canon, namely its ability to combine so much in a single work of art. The libretto, even taken on its own, is worthy of high praise but its integration with Mozart's music brought Enlightenment culture to new heights.

Today, we don't usually receive comedy, tragedy, and the sublime all in ready-to-consume, prepackaged form. As I've stated, we're more interested in this idea of assembling the bits ourselves. For all its virtues, it takes well over three hours to hear Don Giovanni straight through, perhaps four hours with intermission. Plus the libretto is in Italian. And if you want to see it live, a good ticket can cost hundreds of dollars plus travel costs.

So we instead pick up the cultural moods and inputs we want from disparate sources and bring them together through self-assembly. We take a joke from YouTube, a terrifying scene from a Japanese slasher movie, a melody from a three-minute iTunes purchase, and the sublime from our memories of last year's visit to the Grand Canyon, perhaps augmented through a photograph. The result is a rich and varied stream of inner experience.

If you read what many critics say about the arts of the Renaissance or the seventeenth century, it is that human creativity then had a fierceness, a resonance, a brilliance, and a strength that it has not since attained. In the seventeenth century we have Velazquez and Rubens and Rembrandt and Brueghel and Caravaggio painting, Monteverdi composing, and Shakespeare and Milton and Cervantes writing. That's an impressive lineup. It's all so strong and so real. Most of those creations are still available to us in one form or another, at least with a bit of travel or a tolerance for digital reproductions. But in reality this older culture is losing out, in relative terms, to the competition with the internet and the iPod, and thus it is losing out to assembled small bits.

Let's say that you could carry around a perfect copy of a three-dimensional realization of a Caravaggio painting (or if your tastes are more modern make it a Picasso). You would carry a small box in your pocket, and whenever you wanted, you could press a button and the box would open up into life-sized glory and show you the picture. You would bring it to all the parties you attended. The peak of the culture of the seventeenth century (or say the 1920s if you prefer Picasso) would be at your disposal.

Alternatively, let's say you could carry around in your pocket an iPhone. That gives you thousands of songs, a cell phone, access to personal photographs, YouTube, email, and web access, among many other services, not to mention all the applications that have not yet been written. You will have a strong connection to the contemporary culture of small bits. Most people would prefer to carry around the iPhone, and I think they are right.

This preference has led to a corresponding shift in the meaning of cultural literacy. What cultural literacy means today is not whether you can "read" all the symbols in a Rubens painting but whether you can operate an iPhone and other web-related technologies. The iPhone, if used properly, can get you to a website on Rubens as well. The question is not whether you know the classics but whether you are capable of assembling your own blend of small cultural bits. When viewed in this light, today's young people are very culturally literate indeed and in fact they are very often the cultural leaders and creators.

- Tyler Cowen

why pop culture reigns

The difficulty of access influences what kind of enjoyments we pursue. For instance, when it comes to romance not so many people are willing to fly across the country for a peck on the cheek. When the cost of a trip is high, usually you want to make sure it is worth your while. Otherwise why not just stay home? You might drive across town for a kiss if your town isn't too big, or if the traffic isn't too bad.

In the early nineteenth century, it was common for a classical music concert to last five or six hours. If people were walking long distances or arriving by slow coach, the trip had to be worth their while. A concert wasn't just about the music, it was an entire social occasion, involving drinking, the playing of cards, and a big night out. Today the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., puts on popular and free "Millennium Stage" concerts for no more than an hour. The hope, which so far has been borne out, is that enough people are nearby, or can get there quickly by cab, car, or Metro, to make the concerts a success. You go hear the music and then you head off to somewhere else.

Some people leave before the hour-long show is over so they can make a quick escape. They're busy and they have somewhere else to go.

If I'm going on a long trip to Brazil, which doesn't have many good English-language bookstores, the cost of getting another book to read can be pretty high. So maybe I'll bring Moby-Dick to reread or these days I'll bring my Kindle, stocked full of classics. The read will take a long time and I am sure it will be gripping, so that book is a good choice for a trip where access to further books is difficult. If I'm at home, access to books is quite easy. I'll grab a huge pile of (free) books from the public library and browse them. If the first nine picks off the shelf are no good it is no big deal; I can easily put them down and find some more, not to mention raid my spare books pile sitting in the dining room. There are five good public libraries within a twenty-minute drive of my house.

The general point is this: When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces. Through this mechanism, costs of access influence our interior lives. There are usually both "small bits" and "large bits" of culture within our grasp. High costs of access shut out the small bits—they're not worthwhile—and therefore shunt us toward the large bits. Low costs of access give us a diverse mix of small and large bits, but in relative terms, it is pretty easy to enjoy the small bits.

The current trend—as it has been running for decades—is that a lot of our culture is coming in shorter and smaller bits. The classic 1960s rock album has given way to the iTunes single. The most popular YouTube videos are usually just a few minutes long and most of the time the viewer doesn't stay for longer than the first ten seconds. The two-hour weekday lunch is losing ground even in Spain and Italy. Some radio ads are three seconds or shorter. In the last twenty-live years, virtually all print media have dramatically reduced the length of their articles.

The trend toward shorter bits of culture makes it easier to try new things. If you are taking items in bit by bit the tendency is to indulge your desire to sample.

The very pleasure of anticipating and trying—for its own sake—further encourages the new culture of small bits. When it comes to culture, a lot of the pleasure comes from the opening and unwrap­ping of the gift, so to speak. So you want to be trying new things all the time so you have something to look forward to and so you have the thrill of ongoing discovery.

- Tyler Cowen