Sometimes it almost seems as if The Man has a sense of irony.

On July 17, Amazon.com pulled copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 from its new, fancy-schmancy electronic Kindle readers. These digitized books were apparently “illegal copies” that the website had inadvertently offered for sale. The company quickly refunded readers for the misunderstanding (and cognitive dissonance). Ha!

Was this, one wondered, a mischievous work of performance art? A sly wink-and-nudge at the British paranoiac on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his fictional dystopia? Or was The Man — understood here as anything big / mean / worthy of a conspiracy theorist’s blog post — not just pulling our books, but our legs?

The answer, it seems, was none of the above. Amazon is a rather humorless corporation (oxymoronic, I know), and the symbolic resonance of its digital book burning appears to have flown over the well-coiffured heads of its managers.

(What a shame, as the website is usually such a mine of comedy gold, at least in its reader’s comments section. Cf. Ari Brouillete’s “The Secret saved my life!”: “At age 36, I found myself in a medium security prison serving 3-5 years … This was stiff punishment for drunkenly defecating in a mailbox but as the judge pointed out, this was my third conviction for the exact same crime.” Hilarious!)

But we demur. The point is not just that Amazon didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that, by pulling Orwell, it was also pulling some seriously meta shit. What’s really at issue here is the consolidation of our cultural commodities into the hands of a few powerful institutions — the gathering of the clouds over the artistic landscape, the tightening of the noose around our inventive necks (hyperbole). But in a world where huge auction houses set the terms of “good” art and a handful of record companies and promoters dictate the sound of popular music, there seems to be increasingly little room for the iconoclastic creator.

This is nothing new, obv — art and artists have always been at the mercy of the rich and powerful. Ever since Ovid was sent on a permanent vacation to the Black Sea, poets, painters and pluckers have been made all too aware of the fact that money speaks louder than beauty (and all that other pansy crap). And the results aren’t necessarily bad — many of our greatest cultural treasures, especially the big, imposing ones, exist thanks to the largesse of proto-capitalists like the Medici. But you only have to consider The Beatles: Rock Band to understand that money and artistic integrity are not the most comfortable of bedfellows.

So what’s changed?

The variety and nature of the artwork, for one. Before the twentieth century, we thought of a urinal as something you pissed on — how could we have been so naïve? Duchamp and others showed us that being a smartass and offending your superiors were valid artistic attitudes, and a whole slew of very good (and very, very bad art) followed.

In a similar vein, the cult of the artist developed. Prior to the Romantics, your average poet or painter typically wasn’t some distraught, disheveled type staring wide-eyed at the tree branches: he was just some government employee working (ostensibly) for the glory of God and country. The likes of Beethoven, Keats and Van Gogh changed all that — now we wanted our artists weird, we wanted them off-putting — we wanted their personalities to match their products. Hence mistakes like Michael Jackson.

But most transformative, perhaps, was the exponential increase in the importance of an artwork’s monetary value. Before capitalism really sank its teeth into the bare ass of Western civilization (I’m thinking of Boticelli’s “Story of Nastagio degli Onesti” — google it for a nice mental image), novels weren’t defined by their “bestseller” status, songs weren’t judged by the number of EPs sold and paintings weren’t valued according to the number of boners they inspired at Christie’s — or at least, not to the same degree as they are today. And although art’s always been chained to the demands of the economy, it’s hard to see how our shift to a largely corporation- and government-funded scheme can enhance creativity; institutions, by their very nature, cannot have artistic taste.

So, with the artist conceived as an autonomous creator hacking away at god-knows-what, his services hired out to the highest bidder, we have an updated patronage system in which it is not the quality of the work, but the work’s profit potential, that sets the rules.

It could be that I’m mistaking a few observations for an overall trend. My grand historical narrative obviously has its holes. For the cynic, there’s ample evidence throughout the ages of a monetary influence on art. For the optimist, there’s more than enough great art being produced in the heyday of capitalism to debunk any theory of negative correlation between the two.

But consider the comments of painter Bobby Neuwirth, one of the talking heads on Martin Scorcese’s Dylan documentary No Direction Home: “In those days, artistic success was not dollar-driven … if you had something to say, [that] was basically the way people were rated.” And he’s talking about the sixties, man: What would Bobby make of our iced-out performers today? Our writers slouching to Hollywood? Our artists selling their souls to advertising (I’m looking at you, Shepard Fairey)?

Maybe he would see … opportunity. A chance to turn the tables. To slay the beast from within. To practice irony. If Big Bad Amazon can so effectively channel one of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists — and all by accident — then surely our young artists can pull off similar feats of head-scratching profundity.

The genius of Orwell’s doublethinking despots is “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” It’s a fine prescription for the postmodern poet: to be both creator and capitalist, salesman and siren, The Artist and The Man.

But here’s to hoping that the lines aren’t totally erased.