The Myth of Selling Out: Aristotle, Lydia Goehr and frameworks for excellence
The figure of ‘the artist' is burdened with dualities: the maker and the marketer, the innovator and the imitator, the creator and the purveyor. This is a tension that is particularly pronounced in the world of classical music, a tradition which has long maintained ideals of artistic purity, where commercialism, business and marketing are seen as the antithesis of the artistic process and where any efforts and any success therein are treated as a corrupting force. Accusations of ‘selling out’ linger in the air at any event where figures such as Pavarotti are mocked as caricatures of crass commercialism. But what does it mean to sell out, and does the act of doing so, be it real or imagined, alter the nature of the craft in any way at all?
Luciano Pavarotti, giant of the operatic tradition and global phenomenon is a vivid case study. His collaboration in the “Three Tenors” concerts, alongside singers Plácido Domingo and José Carreras, established a bridge over the perceived gap between high art and popular culture. These concerts brought opera to unprecedented global audience, with Pavarotti cited in the Herald-Tribune as declaring “the word ‘commercial’ is exactly what we want. We’ve reached 1.5 billion people with opera”. Critics accused him of diluting art in the pursuit of mass appeal.
Martin Bernheimer, for instance, interviewed by Paul Arendt for the Guardian, wrote “The Three Tenors-era Pavarotti was a creation of the PR industry and his own ego. Somewhere along the line he lost his sense of adventure”. To some, Pavarotti’s efforts were an act of cultural diplomacy, ensuring opera’s survival in an age of the decline of its popularity. To others, they marked a betrayal of the art’s higher aspirations and served as evidence that even the most revered musicians are not immune to the seductions of commerce.
Lydia Goehr’s Pragmatism: Context Defines Purpose
To begin to understand what the accusation of selling out might mean, first we must examine the question of what constitutes ‘authenticity’: to what extent is the meaning of a musical performance defined by the musician’s individual mastery and to what extent is it shaped by the audience’s reception, the institution’s approval or the whims of the market? For Lydia Goehr, the answer lies not in the music itself, but in the relation between music, its performer and its audience. Music, Goehr insists, is not a sacred or timeless object, but a dynamic, ever-shifting force that is enmeshed in social, historical and contextual conditions.
In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Goehr refuses the traditional idea of music as an autonomous entity with unchanging purpose or a reflection of an immutable, transcendental ideal, and instead proposes that musical works are ‘invented’ through performance, that only live insofar as they are experienced and that evolve with each act of interpretation. This interpretation is not shaped by the musician’s choices, but by the audience’s expectations, societal norms and even the cultural ‘moment’ in which the performance takes place. “Musical works”, Goehr writes, “are not timeless objects that can be grasped or understood in isolation; they are created, performed and interpreted within a specific context, defined by the conventions of performance and the needs of the audience”.
Music, for Goehr, is not an essence that can be preserved, but a living, breathing phenomenon that is constantly being redefined by the contexts in which it is taking place. Her stance renders the classical distinction between ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’ irrelevant, instead asserting that the value of any given performance rests on its reception and therefore cannot be separated from the marketplace in which it circulates.
To accuse an artist of ‘selling out’ is to presume that there are fixed and strictly enforced boundaries between high art and mass entertainment, boundaries that, for Goehr, are illusory and limiting. This reveals the central tension in Goehr’s argument. If the meaning of the music is always contingent, always responsive to the social dynamics of a given moment, then what happens to the artist’s authenticity? For Goehr the distinction between artistry and commercialism dissolves: a musician does not ‘sell out’ by appealing to a broader audience because the very meaning of the music is defined by that appeal.
The artist becomes, in essence, a conduit for the audience’s desire, a creator whose identity is (re)shaped by the public’s reception of the work. Thus Pavarotti’s commercialism is an expansion of his art, not a betrayal.
Yet, as the critics of Pavarotti’s Three Tenors concerts might argue, this framework places the musician at the mercy of the audience’s whims, reducing the artist to nothing more than an instrument of reception. It is here that the limits of Goehr’s relativism become apparent. If music is defined solely by its reception, if a musical work only exists in the context of its audience, then the artist becomes nothing but a facilitator of cultural trends, an artist for the sake of the marketplace.
Pavarotti’s music, under Goehr’s framework, loses its autonomy entirely, existing only as a reflection of what the audience demands. There is, in this view, no distinction between a ‘sellout’ and a ‘true artist’, as both are equally defined by the same market. Therefore, if ‘selling out’ can alter the artist’s brilliance, as Pavarotti’s critics would claim, it follows that ’brilliance’, ‘authenticity’ and any other so-called intrinsic quality of a musician that critics claim distinguish a good from a bad artist does not exist at all independent of audience perception.
Aristotle’s Telos: The Hierarchy of Purpose and Virtue
Where Lydia Goehr sees music as a fluid and contextually determined phenomenon, Aristotle begins with purpose. For Aristotle, every object, action and being possesses a specific telos, a purpose that defines its excellence. In Aristotle’s discussion of justice, he imagines a single flute and asks to whom it should be given.
His answer is the flute should go to the best flautist and the best flautist is the one most capable of actualising its telos. For Aristotle, this is a reflection of natural order; the good of the community is best served when each thing fulfils its purpose and is placed in the hands of those most capable of realising it. Where Goehr would argue that the flute’s purpose is contingent on how it is used, whether for high art or popular entertainment, Aristotle argues that its telos is fixed, independent of circumstance.
In Goehr’s framework, which defines music by its reception, the act of ‘selling out’ fundamentally alters the nature of the artist’s craft. For her, a poor musician who ‘sells out’ is no different than the virtuoso who does the same; both are equally defined by their relationship to the audience.
For Aristotle, the idea of ‘selling out’, a musician prioritising commercial success over artistic integrity, would not in any way negate the musician’s skill. A great flautist who performs for the masses in a concert hall, a stadium or on social media, even if motivated by profit or fame, would not cease to be a great flautist in doing so; their excellence would remain intact because it is rooted in their ability to fulfil the music’s telos. This separation of virtue and circumstance, skill and reception, is key.
To insist that ‘selling out’ compromises artistic excellence is to betray a fundamental misunderstanding of what excellence entails. If one genuinely believes in the sanctity of artistic brilliance, as critics so often claim to, then one must concede that the act of ‘selling out’ is irrelevant as a parameter for judgment of a performance’s quality. The snob who simultaneously worships artistic genius while denigrating commercial success, inadvertently affirms this very idea: to claim that art should be judged by its purity rather than its popularity is to accept that artistry and commercialism belong to different domains. By this logic, ‘selling out’ does not and cannot exist as a meaningful category. It becomes instead an empty accusation that reveals more about the accuser’s cultural anxieties than the artist’s skill at all.
The Myth of ‘Selling Out’
The hypocrisy of cultural snobs lies in their unwillingness to face the implications of their own beliefs. If they hold that artistic brilliance is intrinsic and transcends material and commercial consideration, then they must also concede that ‘selling out’ is a meaningless term. To sneer at Pavarotti for singing to a stadium audience is to admit that one’s disdain stems not from his skill, but his success. This hypocrisy reveals the true nature of the sellout accusation: it is less about defending artistry and more about enforcing exclusivity, a way of keeping art ‘pure’ by keeping it inaccessible and confined to those who imagine themselves its guardians. In truth, the snob’s disdain reveals only their desperation to separate themselves from the masses, to convert taste into a badge of superiority. It is nothing more than a symptom of the snob’s insecurity, a projection of their fear that music is no longer theirs to control.