Cultural output has exploded enormously since the mid-twentieth century.

Evidence

The organization and conditions of labour prevailing within what we might broadly refer to as the ‘image production industry’ are also quite special. An industry of this sort has to rely, after all, upon the innovative powers of the direct producers. The latter have an insecure existence, tempered by very high rewards for the successful and at least a semblance of command over their own labour process and creative powers. The growth of cultural output has in fact been phenomenal. Taylor (1987, 77) contrasts the art market condition in New York in 1945, when there were a handful of galleries and no more than a score of artists regularly exhibitiflg, and the two thousand or so artists who practised in or around Paris in the mid-nineteenth century, with the 150,000 artists in the New York region who claim professional status, exhibiting at some 680 galleries, producing more than 15 million art-works in a decade (compared to 200,000 in late nineteenth-century Paris). — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 1830

Categorization

• XREF: Concrete quantitative anchor for the flexible-accumulation comparison against rival periodizations of postmodernism. — connects to: The 21st century’s signature is the collapse of cultural invention into entertainment and profit — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 12; Rapid stylistic succession defined 20th-century culture but halted after 2000 — W. David Marx, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the…, 16

Broader Connections

• Rapid stylistic succession defined 20th-century culture but halted after 2000 #contradicts (0.75) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 16
• The 21st century’s signature is the collapse of cultural invention into entertainment and profit #contradicts (0.70) — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 12