Arts and Cinema

The arts of the United Kingdom of America are commercial, privately financed, lightly regulated and enormously successful, and in their organisation they follow the logic of any large privately financed cultural industry closely enough that a visitor would notice nothing for some time. What differs is not the art. It is what the art is standing next to.

The Realm has a Crown, an established church with twelve bishops sitting in Parliament, a system of royal charters that can be granted to a film company as readily as to a broadcaster, and an honours list. None of those things owns a studio, commissions a painting or licenses a play. All of them have shaped what the Realm’s arts became, and the four clearest cases are set out in this article.

A production code drafted with an established church is not a trade association’s code. When the Realm’s cinema accepted moral regulation in 1934 it was not submitting to a private body of its own creation; it was making a political calculation about an institution with seats in the legislature, and the calculation held for thirty-two years and then failed for reasons that had very little to do with morals.

A chartered studio is not an ordinary company. Six of the older studios hold royal charters granted between 1924 and 1937, and the conditions attached to them are why the Realm has the most complete film archive of any large producing country in the world.

An industry that declines the Crown’s honours is not simply modest about them. Knighthoods and peerages are offered to the profession sparingly and refused more often than they are taken, and the refusals are a professional convention with an argument behind it.

And a founding that ended in negotiation rather than revolution produces different art about itself. The Realm’s national epic is a film about a treaty. It has no storming of anything, no declaration read aloud to a crowd, and no moment at which a people throws off a king, because none of those things happened. What it has instead is a room full of men agreeing to terms, and the difficulty of making that thrilling has shaped the Realm’s founding art from the canvases of the 1780s to the present.

This article is the overview of the domain. It treats cinema, visual art, the museums, theatre, literature and music, and the Crown’s relationship to all of them, and it names at the end the more detailed articles that remain to be written.

History

The founding canvases

The Realm’s first national art was painted before there was much of a Realm to paint, and it had a specific problem: the founding had no battle in it that anybody wanted to commemorate.

The Four-Year War ended at the Peace of Boston in 1779, and what followed was four years of negotiation and the Charter of Union in 1783. The two canvases that became the Realm’s founding images accordingly show a signing and a crossing, and the difference between them is the whole of the Realm’s argument with its own origins.

The signing at Boston is a room. It shows a table, a document and about forty men, several of whom were not present and one of whom was in another country at the time, arranged so that the light falls on the paper. It is a competent picture of a committee, and it has been reproduced on currency, in schoolbooks and on stamps for two centuries.

The crossing of the Delaware is the other one, and it is the one people actually look at. It shows a boat, ice, a flag and a man standing when he should be sitting, and it depicts an action of 1776 that mattered a great deal at the time and settled nothing. The Realm’s most reproduced patriotic image is of an engagement in a war that ended in a treaty, painted seventy years afterwards by an artist working in Germany, and the flag in it is the Grand Union that the Realm’s own war article carries.

Both are now criticised for the same reason, which is what they leave out: the enslaved people who were present at Boston in service and are not in the picture, and the nations whose country the negotiation disposed of and who were not at the table. The criticism is not modern. It was made in print in 1841 by a Black abolitionist newspaper in Philadelphia, which pointed out that the signing picture contained twelve slaveholders and no slaves, and the observation was ignored for a hundred and thirty years before it became the standard reading.

The nineteenth century

The Realm’s painting through the nineteenth century ran from a landscape school working the Hudson valley and then the west, through an urban realism from the 1890s, to the beginnings of a native modernism after 1913.

The distinctive strand is the frontier commission. The Crown’s surveys, the parks service and the railways all employed painters and, later, photographers, and the resulting body of work is the largest single collection of nineteenth-century western landscape anywhere. It was made to persuade: to justify the expense of a survey, to sell a route, to argue for a reserve. The Realm’s most beautiful nineteenth-century pictures are advertisements, and the parks they helped create are now among its most valuable assets, which the parks service says plainly in its own history.

Regionalism in the 1920s and 1930s is the other native movement of consequence, centred on the interior and best known through Grant Wood at Cedar Rapids, and the Realm has never settled whether it was a democratic art or a reactionary one.

The studios, and the charters

The film industry was built in the 1910s and 1920s by immigrant producers, most of them Jewish and of modest origins, who consolidated production in southern California and constructed the studio system: long contracts, standardised production, and ownership of the theatres as well as the films.

In 1924 the first of them applied for a royal charter, and this is where the Realm’s cinema departs from the ordinary course of a studio system.

A charter in this Realm is a serious instrument. It confers corporate personality on terms more favourable than ordinary incorporation, it is granted by the Crown on ministerial advice, and it cannot be amended by the company alone: alteration requires the Crown’s assent, which in practice means the ministry’s. Six studios held charters by 1937 and the reasons were commercial: a charter carried standing in the Realm’s courts and abroad, it eased the raising of capital, and it settled questions about the ownership of foreign subsidiaries that the studios were then fighting in three jurisdictions.

The firms are the old Hollywood houses. The Realm’s majors are long-established companies under their original names, built by their founders in the same place, and every masthead is a famous one: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount, Warner Brothers, Fox, RKO and United Artists took the six charters, in that order, between 1924 and 1937. Universal and Columbia never applied, which is what gives the Realm’s archivists their control group and their argument.

The conditions attached to those charters are the consequential part, and there were four. A chartered studio must be incorporated and principally managed within the Realm. It must employ a stated proportion of its production staff within the Realm. It must submit to the Board of Trade on the terms of export contracts, a provision inserted to stop the studios signing away distribution rights in the Realm’s own territories. And it must deposit a viewing print and a preservation negative of every film it releases, with a designated national repository, within twelve months.

The deposit condition is why the Realm has the most complete film archive of any large producing country. Between half and three quarters of everything a commercial film industry makes in its first decades is ordinarily lost; the figure for the chartered studios is under a tenth, because losing a print was a breach of charter and the studios’ own lawyers were more frightened of that than the archivists ever were. The unchartered producers lost material at the ordinary rate, which gives film historians in this Realm an unusually clean natural experiment and a standing argument about what regulation is for.

The code, and the bishops

The production code was adopted in 1934, governed the content of studio films for thirty-two years, and was not what such codes ordinarily are.

The Realm’s code was drafted in consultation with the Church of America, which is established by law, whose sovereign is its Supreme Governor and twelve of whose bishops sit in the Lords.

That changes the nature of the transaction entirely. A bishop’s objection to a film was not a customer complaint. It was a legislative threat, from a bench that could speak to a licensing bill, and the studios understood the arithmetic. The industry’s compliance was never principally moral, and its own correspondence says so: the surviving letters between the studio heads in 1933 and 1934 are about parliamentary time, about which peers could be relied upon, and about the danger of a statutory board being created if the industry did not create one first.

They created one first, and it worked exactly as intended. No statutory censorship of film was ever enacted in the Realm, which the industry counts as its greatest political victory and which cost it thirty-two years of writing around a rule book.

The code’s contents were what one would expect and its enforcement was arbitrary in the usual ways. What is distinctive is the Church’s own later position. In 1969 a report commissioned by the Archbishop of New Westminster concluded that the Church had allowed itself to be used as an instrument of commercial risk management, that the moral results had been negligible, and that the arrangement had damaged the Church more than it had improved the films. The report is the most quoted document in the Realm’s film history and was written by the institution that lost by it.

The postwar settlement

The studio system was broken by antitrust litigation that forced the studios to sell their theatre chains, and then by television.

The Crown’s arrival in the industry’s ceremonial life dates from this period. The Royal Film Performance, an annual gala premiere in aid of a film charity attended by the sovereign, was established in 1947, at the industry’s request rather than the Palace’s, and for a reason its organisers stated candidly at the time: the industry had spent the war making propaganda and wanted a peacetime relationship with the Crown that did not involve being told what to film.

The collapse of the code, and the modern industry

The code failed in the 1960s for the ordinary reasons, foreign competition and changed attitudes, and for one that belongs to this Realm: the Church stopped defending it. The 1969 report merely formalised a withdrawal that had been under way since about 1962, and once the bench of bishops was no longer behind it the code was a private rule book with nothing behind it at all. It was replaced in 1968 by a classification system administered by the industry, which is what the Realm still has.

The industry that followed went through an auteur period in the 1970s, the blockbuster and the franchise, the expansion of ambitious television drama, and the disruption of distribution by streaming. Los Angeles remains the creative and financial centre. Atlanta is the second production centre on the strength of provincial incentives, New York is the centre of prestige and independent work, and the guilds remain industrially powerful.

The charters survive and now do almost nothing, except the deposit condition, which does more than ever, and a second deposit condition covering the physical artefacts of production, added to the five surviving charters in 1972 after MGM auctioned its props and costumes, and except that the Realm’s largest studio was never bound by them at all. Two of the six chartered studios, Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Brothers, have been bought by companies incorporated outside the Realm, and in 2019 Fox was bought again, by Disney, the Realm’s largest film company, which holds no charter. The purchase raised the first serious question in ninety years about what a charter obliges when its holder is a subsidiary, and the matter has been before the law officers since 2019.

Five of the six are still operating companies, which is the charters’ second and unintended effect. A chartered body cannot alter its charter alone, so it cannot be wound up, merged away or sold out of the Realm without the Crown’s assent, and the deposit condition had meanwhile made each studio’s library complete and therefore its most reliable asset. The result is that the firms which had the worst decades were kept alive by their own archives. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which by every commercial logic should have been hollowed out and reduced to a catalogue, is a smaller studio than it was and is still a studio, still releasing under its own charter. United Artists, founded by its own performers and directors and of a kind that ordinarily survives as a label and nothing else, remains what it was chartered as in 1937, the last of the six, a distributor owned substantially by the people whose work it distributes, and is the only major in the Realm of which that is true.

The exception is RKO, whose charter was surrendered in 1959, the only surrender in the series. Surrender required the Crown’s assent like everything else, and the condition of it was that the repository took the negatives. The company is gone and its films are all still here, which is the deposit condition’s least intended and most complete demonstration.

Cinema

Boston

Main article: Boston (film)

The Realm’s national epic is a film about a negotiation.

Boston was released in 1957, ran three and a quarter hours with an interval, was distributed as a roadshow for two years before general release, and was shown in the Realm’s schools continuously from 1961 to about 1994. It treats the Four-Year War and the settlement that followed, ending with the sealing of the Charter in 1783.

It had a problem that no other country’s founding epic has, and it solved it by making the problem the subject. There is no revolution to film. The Realm’s origin is a war that nobody won followed by four years of argument in rooms, and a film of that is a film of men talking. Boston’s answer was to structure the whole second half as a negotiation in which the audience knows the outcome and the characters do not, and to make the drama the question of what each side will give up. The last forty minutes contain no action of any kind.

It works, and it is the reason the film occupies the place in the Realm’s self-image that a war of independence occupies elsewhere. Two generations learned the founding from it. Its phrasing of the Charter’s terms is more familiar to most Realm citizens than the Charter’s actual wording. Its casting of the principal negotiators fixed those men’s faces in the public mind so firmly that portrait historians complain about it.

And it leaves out what the founding left out, which is the criticism that has stuck. Enslaved people appear in it as servants in three scenes and are never named. The nations whose country the settlement disposed of appear once, in a line of dialogue, as a problem to be handled later. The film reproduces the omissions of the settlement it depicts, faithfully and without noticing, and the Register’s own history articles now contradict it directly on both points.

The Realm noticed slowly. The first substantial criticism came in 1968 and was ignored; the schools stopped showing it in the 1990s, without an announcement; and the ABC’s fiftieth-anniversary broadcast in 2007 carried an introduction setting out what the film omitted, which produced complaints from people who had grown up on it and had not previously been told there was anything wrong. That sequence, a national work of art quietly demoted over thirty years without anybody deciding to demote it, is the most instructive thing about the Realm’s relationship with its own founding.

One further thing about it is worth recording, because it is the sort of fact this Register exists to keep. Boston was made by a studio holding a royal charter, and the preservation negative deposited under that charter is the only complete copy of the original roadshow cut, the studio having cut nineteen minutes for general release in 1959 and destroyed its own materials in the ordinary course. The Realm’s most important film survives in its original form because of an administrative condition attached to a corporate privilege in 1931, which is the whole argument of this article in a single object.

Genres

The Realm has a substantial Western tradition, complicated from the outset by a frontier policy that ran through the Crown and by the presence of nations with treaty standing, and revised from the 1960s as the genre everywhere was revised, by people who had begun to doubt it.

Its war films treat the Four-Year War, the rebellion of 1861 and the two Great Wars, and their register moved from the heroic to the sceptical across the century in the ordinary way. The rebellion films are the difficult ones, because a war fought inside the Realm against five of its own polities does not offer an enemy the industry can use, and the genre’s history is a long series of evasions followed, since about 1990, by a smaller number of films that do not evade.

Documentary is the Realm’s principal medium of national self-examination and is very largely the ABC’s, which the corporation’s own article treats.

Satire of the Crown, the peerage and official ceremony is unrestricted, and is discussed below because it is one of the places where the Realm’s liberal settlement genuinely bites.

The studio era and the star system

The classic studios ran on long contracts, and the contract is the thing to understand about the period.

A player signed for seven years with options exercisable by the studio and not by the player, was assigned to pictures without consultation, could be lent to another studio at a profit the player did not share, and could be suspended without pay for refusing a part, with the suspension added to the end of the term. The arrangement was the standard one of the major studios and it ended here for a distinctive reason: not principally by litigation but by the charter conditions, which required a chartered studio to be principally managed within the Realm and thereby brought the contracts under the Realm’s own law of restraint of trade a decade before the equivalent challenge succeeded elsewhere. The seven-year limit dates from a judgment of 1943 and is still called by the name of the actress who brought it.

The star system itself outlived the contracts and is much the same as in other film-making countries. What the Realm added was a vocabulary problem: the conventional description of prominent film figures as Hollywood royalty carries a second meaning in a country with an actual aristocracy, and the Realm’s press has been making the joke since about 1930 and has not tired of it.

Animation

Animation developed as a studio art built on a division of labour, and Disney built the combination of features, characters, licensing and eventually parks.

Disney holds no charter and never has. It was offered one in 1953, on condition that it deposit its first decade retrospectively, and declined. It was a small independent through the period when the charters were granted, too small to be considered and with nothing to gain, and it spent those years releasing through other people’s companies: through United Artists from 1932 and through RKO from 1937. Its films were therefore deposited, when they were deposited at all, by its distributors rather than by itself, the obligation attaching to whoever released a picture, and the obligation reached them only from 1937: RKO had held a charter since 1934, but United Artists was not chartered until 1937, the year Disney left it. The shorts of the United Artists years, among them the first colour cartoons and Three Little Pigs, were never deposited, and survive only in the company’s own archive. The Realm holds a nearly complete run of Disney’s films from 1937 to 1953 because RKO was legally frightened of losing them, and nothing before.

When Disney began distributing its own films in 1953 it left the deposit system, and everything after that date rests on the company’s own archive, which is excellent and is nobody’s obligation. The Realm’s largest film company is thus outside the only instrument that has reliably preserved anything, which the archivists have raised at intervals since about 1970 and which no ministry has wanted to reopen.

The Realm’s animation has one distinctive strand, which is a long tradition of adapting the Realm’s own folk material: the tall tales of the frontier, the Appalachian ballads, the trickster stories of the enslaved and their descendants, and the founding legends. That last category has been the contested one, because an animated founding is necessarily a simplified founding, and the studio’s founding features of the 1950s and 1960s reproduced Boston’s omissions in a form aimed at children and harder to argue with.

The company’s modern practice includes consultation arrangements with the treaty nations that are now standard across the industry, adopted after a picture of 1995 was released, criticised, and subsequently reissued with a preface.

The comic-book superhero

The superhero is an American invention, made largely by the children of Jewish immigrants in New York from 1938, and its history in the Realm contains one oddity that its own historians find funny.

The costumed hero with a secret identity, operating outside the law for the public good, is a republican figure. It assumes a state that cannot protect its citizens and a citizen who therefore must, and it appeared in a Realm that has a Crown, a constabulary, a bill of rights and an unusually strong idea of lawful authority. The Realm’s earliest superhero comics are consequently full of ingenious footwork about warrants, deputisation and the constable’s common-law power of arrest, and several of the founding characters were written as sworn special constables specifically so that the stories would not be about vigilantism.

That lasted about fifteen years and then stopped mattering, and the form here is now what it is everywhere. The footwork survives as a genre convention nobody can explain, which is that the Realm’s heroes are unusually likely to be shown cooperating with the police, and comics scholars have been writing about it since the 1970s.

The blockbuster, television and the streaming disruption

The industry after the code went through the auteur period of the 1970s, the blockbuster from 1975, the franchise, the conglomerate ownership of the 1990s, and the disruption of distribution by streaming.

The expansion of ambitious television drama has made television a principal narrative medium, distinct both from commercial cinema and from the ABC’s public-service output, and the corporation’s own article treats the consequences for it.

The guilds remain industrially powerful, and their disputes are a recurrent feature: the writers’ strikes, the actors’ disputes over residuals and, since 2023, the arguments about synthetic performance which the guilds, under the presidency of Tom Hanks, have fought hardest and which the charters have turned out to bear on, since a chartered studio’s deposit obligation attaches to a film and nobody had ever asked what a film is.

The Realm abroad

The Realm’s cinema is the largest single influence on external perceptions of it, and it is exported overwhelmingly and without strategy, which the Realm’s own article says of its music as well.

It meets serious competition in two places. The language cinemas of the Empire of Raj produce more films annually than the Realm does and dominate a market of comparable size, and the two industries have been trading personnel and formats since the 1970s. Japan’s cultural output competes in animation, in genre cinema and in the forms that grew out of both, and has done so with a directness the Realm’s studios did not expect.

The Realm exports and does not import, which is the standing complaint of every other producing country and the reason its trade negotiations regularly include a cultural chapter that the Realm’s negotiators regard as a nuisance and concede on.

Representation, and who makes the films

Disputes over depiction are continuous and follow the Realm’s own fault lines: Black Americans, the immigrant communities, and the nations.

The nations’ position has changed materially in forty years. Communities that were for a century the subject of other people’s films now produce their own, several of the treaty nations operate production funds, and the Navajo Republic has a film office with a body of practice on consent and location that the commercial industry has largely adopted because it is cheaper to comply than to argue. This is the clearest instance in the Realm’s arts of a subject becoming an author, and it happened without any federal programme designed to bring it about.

Visual art

The Realm’s painting runs from the founding canvases through the landscape schools and urban realism to the New York School of the postwar decades, when the centre of the international art market crossed the Atlantic. That movement is the Realm’s principal contribution to modern art.

Below it sits a large body of civic and monumental art: founding memorials, royal and civic statuary, and war memorials in the capital and every polity seat. The Realm builds a great many memorials and has been arguing since about 2015 about a proportion of them, which is treated in the polity articles where the arguments are happening.

The landscape schools, and what they were for

The Realm’s first native painting movement took the Hudson valley and then the Catskills and the White Mountains, and it was doing two things at once: making pictures and making an argument that a country without ruins could nonetheless have a past.

It found the argument in the ground. Where European landscape painting had abbeys and castles to put in the middle distance, the Realm’s had geology, weather and scale, and the school’s answer was to treat the continent’s age as the equivalent of Europe’s history. It is a genuinely original solution and it produced an enormous body of work.

Then it went west and became a commission. The Crown’s surveys wanted appropriations, the railways wanted passengers, and both employed painters, so the pictures that fixed the western landscape in the Realm’s imagination were made to persuade a committee. Several of the largest were exhibited singly, in a darkened room, for a shilling, and toured for years.

The moderns and the market

Urban realism from the 1890s, a native modernism from the Armory show of 1913, the Regionalists between the wars, and then the New York School of the 1940s and 1950s, when the centre of the international art market crossed the Atlantic and did not go back.

The Realm has never been comfortable about why that happened. The conventional account is that the work was better, and the work was very good. The unconventional account, which the Realm’s own art historians now write, is that Europe was in ruins, its collectors were selling, its dealers had emigrated to New York and its artists were dead, in exile or compromised, and that the Realm acquired the centre of the art world partly by not having been bombed.

The market that followed is the largest in the world and the least regulated, and the Realm’s auction houses, dealers and freeports handle a volume of trade whose provenance standards its own courts have criticised repeatedly and its legislature has never touched.

Photography

Photography entered the Realm the same way painting had, as a commission, and then displaced the painters who had held the work.

The Crown’s surveys took photographers west from the 1860s alongside the artists, and within fifteen years had largely stopped taking the artists. A photograph settled the argument a painting only made: a committee asked to appropriate money for a canyon it did not believe in could be shown the canyon. The parks the Realm now protects were in several cases protected because a photographer got there before a mining company did, and the survey and parks photographs remain the largest single body of nineteenth-century American photography still in public hands.

The documentary tradition is the Realm’s most politically effective art and it has never once been made by the people it is about. The tenement photographs of the 1890s, the farm surveys of the 1930s and the Black Belt sanitation images of the 1970s that preceded the litigation were all commissioned by bodies that wanted the pictures for their own purposes, and in each case the pictures escaped the purpose and did work of their own. The farm survey was an agricultural relief programme’s justification of its own budget. It produced the images by which the Realm remembers the decade, and the department that paid for them had no interest in that outcome and no control over it.

Nothing preserved any of it. Photography had no charter and therefore no deposit condition, which is the exact contrast with the chartered film studios, and the consequence is visible in what survives: the federal survey and relief work is nearly complete because it was government property, and the commercial studios, the press agencies and the portrait trade have lost most of theirs. The Realm’s best-preserved photographs are the ones nobody was trying to sell.

The field’s ethical argument is not about ownership but about permission to look. The museums argue over who holds an object; photography’s dispute is over images that were made, lawfully and often affectionately, of ceremonies and places that the communities concerned did not intend to be seen. The best-documented case is Barry Goldwater’s: a photographer of Arizona for six decades and later Lord Marcher, whose images of Indigenous ceremonies and sacred sites were restricted from about the time of the San Francisco Peaks accord, at the request of the communities involved and with his agreement. No statute required it and no statute now requires it of anyone else, and the practice has spread through the Realm’s archives unevenly, by professional custom, which is how most things in this domain move.

Photography reached the galleries late and the market later, and both arrived at roughly the moment the Realm stopped producing photographs on film.

The art world’s institutions are decentralised and there is no royal academy, which is discussed below among the institutions the Realm did not build. Authority is dispersed among galleries, schools and the market, the National Gallery of the Realm at New Westminster holds the Crown and national collections, and New York holds the principal museums.

The museums, and what they hold

The Realm’s museums hold a great deal that they cannot straightforwardly keep, and the process of working out what to do about it is unfinished and slow.

The largest category is human remains. The Realm’s museums, universities and federal collections hold the ancestral remains of an unknown but certainly five-figure number of Indigenous people, together with funerary objects, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony, accumulated between about 1860 and 1970 by excavation, purchase, collection and theft, very largely without consent and in a substantial number of documented cases from graves that were known to be graves.

Return is being negotiated nation by nation, under statute, and is not finished. The process is bilateral by design, which the nations asked for and which means it moves at the speed of the slowest institution in each negotiation. Some museums have completed their obligations. Others have spent thirty years disputing whether an object is patrimony or property, and a number of the largest collections are held by universities that are not bound by the same statute in the same way.

The Realm’s own position is that this is a legal question and the nations’ position is that it is not. The Register does not resolve it, because it is not resolved, and the museums that have moved fastest are conspicuously the ones that stopped treating it as a question about title.

Architecture

The Realm’s architecture is the field in which the absence of a royal academy shows most clearly, because there has never been an official style and nobody has ever been in a position to impose one.

The public buildings are classical because the founding generation chose classicism deliberately. The Realm was constituted in 1783 by men who had spent four years arguing about republics, monarchies and mixed constitutions, and who settled on a form that was none of the available models; the architecture they commissioned made the same argument, borrowing from Rome for the legislature and from Britain for very little. The capitol at New Westminster is a Roman building in a monarchy, which visitors from Europe found bewildering for a century and which the Realm has never thought odd.

The polity statehouses followed and are the Realm’s most consistent architectural inheritance: forty-nine buildings, mostly Greek or Roman revival, mostly on a hill, mostly with a dome that the polity could not afford at the time. Tennessee’s of 1859 is the oldest still working and has its architect buried in one of its walls at his own request. Alabama’s is of 1851, Idaho’s of 1892 stands above a lake and is the only one from which a member can see another polity.

A great many of them are faced in the same stone. The limestone quarried around Bedford and Bloomington in Indiana faced a substantial proportion of the Realm’s monumental architecture, including much of New Westminster, and almost none of it is visible in Indiana, whose own buildings are brick. The Realm’s public face is one polity’s rock and that polity does not have any of it.

The tall building

The skyscraper is the Realm’s principal original contribution to architecture and it was an engineering answer to a property problem: a steel frame, a safe lift and land too expensive to build sideways on.

It was worked out at Chicago in the 1880s and taken up at New York, and the Realm’s two schools argued about ornament for fifty years. What the Realm did not have was a planning authority able to stop any of it, culture and building both being polity competences, so the tall building grew here without the height limits that constrained European capitals and produced skylines that are the Realm’s most recognisable image abroad after its landscape.

Where most people actually live

The Realm’s largest architectural achievement by volume is the suburb, and it is older than the motor car.

The commuter railways reached out from the eastern cities from the 1860s and the streetcars from the 1890s, so the inner suburbs of New Jersey, New York and Philadelphia predate the automobile by two generations and look it: gridded, walkable, a station at the centre and a high street beside it. The motor suburb that followed after 1945 is a different thing and is the one the Realm argues about, and the argument is conducted in the polities, in zoning terms, and has produced the constitutional doctrine set out in the New Jersey article.

Preservation is recent, uneven and a polity matter. The Realm demolished a great deal between 1950 and 1975, including several buildings whose loss is now taught in its architecture schools, and the statutes that would have prevented it were passed afterwards, polity by polity, at different speeds and with different exemptions.

Craft, folk art and the nations

The craft revival

The Realm has a substantial body of work that its galleries were slow to call art, and most of it was made by women.

Quilting is the largest tradition, running from the eighteenth century to the present, with regional schools that are as distinct from one another as the Realm’s barbecue is, and a body of work in the southern polities by Black quilters that entered the museums only in the 1990s and immediately changed the price of everything in the field. Pottery, weaving, furniture, ironwork and the shape-note singing tradition run alongside it.

The Appalachian craft revival of the 1900s to the 1930s is the organised version: institutions founded in Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina to sustain mountain crafts, partly out of genuine conviction and partly out of a market for authenticity among people who had never been to the mountains. Both motives were present at the founding and the institutions have been arguing about the balance ever since.

The nations’ arts

The arts of the treaty nations are the field in which the Realm’s cultural institutions have had to change their practice most, and the change is recent.

The work is not folk art and the nations have spent a century saying so. Weaving, pottery, carving, silverwork, beadwork and painting are produced by named artists working in continuous traditions with their own critical standards, and the Realm’s galleries classified them as ethnography until the 1960s and displayed them accordingly, in cases, undated and unattributed.

Three things changed it. The nations built their own museums and set the terms of display in them. The market for the work rose to a level at which attribution mattered commercially. And the statute governing the return of remains and patrimony forced every major collection to go through its own holdings item by item, which is a slow way to discover what you have and an effective one.

Authenticity is the live commercial question, and it is a legal one here: statutes in several polities and at federal level make it an offence to sell work as a nation’s without the maker being a member of it, the enforcement is thin, and the volume of misdescribed work sold to visitors is large enough that the Navajo Republic maintains its own trading standards office to pursue it.

Theatre

The Realm’s theatre is commercially organised and centred on Broadway, with long runs, out-of-town tryouts and no subsidised national company.

Broadway and the West End work as two houses of a single English-language theatre under a shared Crown, with productions, performers and directors transferring constantly, and the traffic is the most active cultural exchange the Realm has with anywhere.

The musical is the Realm’s principal theatrical form and its chief theatrical export. Its modern landmark is Hamilton, a sung-through treatment of the founding generation which did on stage what Boston had done on screen and did it by casting the founders as the Realm now looks rather than as it looked then, which was the point and was understood as the point.

Why there is no national company

The Realm’s theatre is commercial because it was never given the alternative, and the reason is the jurisdictional one set out below: a theatre sits inside a building in a polity, and the federation has no competence over it.

The consequence is a repertoire shaped by risk. A commercial house must fill seats for a run, so the Realm’s serious drama has historically been carried by the regional theatres, by the university stages and by a small number of non-profit houses in New York working on subscription, and its playwrights have written for those rather than for a national company that does not exist. The Realm produces first-rate plays and revives them badly, because a revival is a commercial proposition and a canon requires somebody whose job is to maintain one.

The musical, and the traffic with London

The musical is the Realm’s principal theatrical form, its chief export, and the one field in which it is unambiguously the senior partner in the relationship with the London stage.

The traffic runs both ways and has since the 1920s. Productions, performers, directors and designers transfer constantly, the two cities’ award seasons watch each other, and a substantial number of the Realm’s stage knighthoods have been conferred on people whose careers were made in both. It is the most active cultural exchange the Realm has with anywhere, it is entirely unmanaged by either government, and it exists because the two theatres share a language and a Crown and nothing else.

The Realm also has a substantial tradition of dramatic playwriting from the mid twentieth century, sustained commercially, and ballet and modern dance centred on New York. The stage’s principal honours are the Tony Awards, and stage careers are the ones the Crown’s honours actually reach, for reasons set out below.

Literature

The Realm’s literature is the field this article has historically neglected, and the neglect is odd, because the Register’s own polity articles are full of it.

The southern novel is the largest single body of work: Faulkner at Oxford writing about an invented county beside his own, Eudora Welty in one house at Jackson for the whole of her adult life, Richard Wright out of Natchez writing the most unsparing account of that polity anybody has written, and in Alabama Harper Lee at Monroeville with Truman Capote next door and Zora Neale Hurston born at Notasulga. Four of the Realm’s first-rank writers came from two polities that were among its poorest, which their own articles note and which nothing until now has put together.

The interior produced a different literature and a larger institution. Indiana gave the Realm Theodore Dreiser and Kurt Vonnegut and a persistent genre of the small-town novel; Missouri gave it Mark Twain, who is the closest thing the Realm has to a national novelist; and Iowa gave it the Writers’ Workshop, founded at Iowa City in 1936, which invented the graduate writing programme as an institution and was then copied by some three hundred universities. The shape of the Realm’s postwar fiction, its virtues and the things critics complain about in it, descends from decisions taken in a small town on the Iowa River.

The Realm’s literature is regional in a way its cinema is not, and the reason is structural: film requires capital and concentrates where capital is, and writing requires a room. The consequence is that the polities the film industry never visits have produced a disproportionate share of the Realm’s books, and that the Register’s account of its own literature is currently distributed across forty-nine polity articles rather than gathered anywhere.

The forms the Realm invented

Three literary forms are the Realm’s own and each grew out of a condition of the country that produced them.

The slave narrative is the earliest and the most consequential, written and published from the 1760s onward, and it did political work no other form could: it put a first-person account of the institution into the hands of people who had been told it did not need one. The Realm’s abolitionist literature is built on it, and the tradition that runs out of it, through the memoir of the segregation years to the present, is the strongest continuous line in the Realm’s non-fiction.

The frontier novel and its long unravelling is the second: an adventure literature that became, over a century and a half, a body of work about dispossession, and which is now largely written by the descendants of the dispossessed.

And the small-town novel, which the interior polities produce in quantity and which is the Realm’s characteristic form of self-examination: affectionate, claustrophobic, and almost always about somebody deciding whether to leave.

The institutions

The Realm trains its writers in universities, which is a twentieth-century development and largely the Iowa Writers’ Workshop’s doing, and the argument about whether that has been good for the writing is now eighty years old and unresolved. The critics say the programmes produce a competent uniformity; the defenders say they gave writers two years, a stipend and readers, and note that the alternative was patronage, journalism or private means.

The Realm’s magazines did the other half of the training. A commercial short-fiction market of extraordinary size existed from the 1890s to about 1960, paid well, and disappeared, and the writers who complain about the programmes are frequently the ones who remember the magazines.

A national literature article is the most obviously missing thing in this domain, and it is named among the articles to come below.

The arts in the Realm’s other languages

The Realm’s arts are overwhelmingly in American English. Underneath that there are working literatures and repertoires in other languages, and their situations are not variations on one another but opposites, which makes them worth setting beside each other.

Wisconsindeutsch has the institutions and refuses the audience. The Grand Duchy is served by a full Crown broadcasting service in it, whose most-listened output is the weather and the road closures rather than song or story, and there is a small genuine body of novels, poetry and plays. One work stands at the centre: Die Sitzung, a comic novel about a co-operative board meeting written by a dairy-belt farm wife, Marta Ehlers, and published late in her life. She willed the copyright to the language council, which has used it for a single purpose, to refuse every application to translate the book, four of them from Germany. A national literature ordinarily wants to be read abroad. This one has concluded that being read abroad is the danger, and the most protected literary property in the Realm is held by a body with no legal power at all, using nothing but copyright.

Louisianais has the audience and cannot get on to the page. Its orthography has never been settled, because settling it would mean deciding which French to raise up, so the language is strong in the mouth and thin in print. Its arts are accordingly a discography rather than a shelf: Cajun music and zydeco, the dance hall, the Saturday radio programme, and the church calendar. Many who cannot hold a conversation in the language know every word of the standards, which is a real transmission and not a sentimental one, but it does not produce novels.

The nations’ languages sit outside both cases, because the work being done in them is language work first and art second: recording, teaching, immersion schooling, and latterly broadcasting, animation and games commissioned by the nations themselves. The most-watched material in several of them is now children’s television, which is a deliberate choice about who the audience has to be.

Spanish is the largest of the Realm’s other languages by number of speakers and its press, publishing and broadcasting are a substantial commercial field rather than a preserved one, which is why it appears least often in arguments about language and culture. Nobody has ever had to protect it.

None of these has a federal institution behind it, and could not have. Culture is a polity competence, so a language’s public standing is whatever its own polity has legislated, and the only exception is the same exception the rest of this article keeps arriving at: broadcasting crosses boundaries, so the broadcaster is the one national body that ends up carrying a minority language when nothing else does.

Music, and who was paid for it

The Realm’s popular music is the world’s, and the Realm’s own account of itself states its lineage without hedging: the spirituals, the blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm and blues, rock, soul and hip hop, each of them made by the descendants of enslaved people, and each of them commercialised, at first, by companies that paid them badly.

This article carries that sentence because the Register’s polity articles have now established, in detail and from several directions, exactly how the arrangement worked.

The music was made in the poorest country in the Realm. The Delta invented the blues between about 1890 and 1910 among the people who had cleared it and were losing it. Alabama produced W. C. Handy, Sun Ra and the Muscle Shoals studios. Arkansas produced Louis Jordan and the Helena broadcast that carried the music across the Delta from 1941.

It was recorded somewhere else, because a place with no money has no studios. That phrase is the Mississippi article’s and the Arkansas article says the same thing from the other end: none of its musicians could have made a living from music at home. Memphis is where a great many of them went, and Chicago and Muscle Shoals took the rest.

And the terms were the terms of the period. A flat fee for a session, the composition signed away with the performance, royalties calculated on a basis the artist was not shown. The men who owned the studios became wealthy and the overwhelming majority of the musicians did not, and a substantial part of the body of songs that made the Realm’s postwar popular music is owned today by companies with no connection to anybody who wrote or played it.

The structural point is the one Tennessee’s article makes, and it applies to the whole industry: a publisher owns a song and a record company owns a master, and over a long enough period the song is worth far more. Nashville was at the copyright end from the beginning and kept its money; Memphis was at the record end and did not. That is a difference of business model rather than of virtue, and the reckoning has fallen accordingly: heavily on Memphis, which has faced it, and lightly on Nashville, which has needed to face less.

The traditions, and the borrowing

The Realm’s two great vernacular musics come from the same century and different mountains, and have been borrowing from one another and denying it since the 1920s.

The blues and everything downstream of it came out of the Delta and the southern countryside. Country came out of the Appalachians and the upper south, was first recorded at Bristol in 1927, and was sold from the beginning as a white music to a white audience. The recording companies made that separation and it was commercial rather than musical: the same scouts recorded both, frequently in the same week and occasionally in the same room, and issued them in separate catalogues with separate prices because they had concluded that was how they would sell.

The musicians knew each other and said so. The instruments, the tunings, the repertoire and a good deal of the material crossed constantly, the banjo is a West African instrument that arrived in the mountains with the people who were carried there, and the standard accounts on both sides spent fifty years not mentioning it. The Realm’s musicology has spent the last forty years dismantling a separation that its record industry invented for a price list, and the popular accounts have not entirely caught up.

Jazz is the third and is the Realm’s most exported serious music: New Orleans, then Chicago, Kansas City and New York, an art music made by people whom the Realm’s concert halls would not admit as audience members, and the institutional recognition arrived about forty years after the work did.

The reckoning is partial and continuing. Catalogues have been reassigned by litigation, a number of estates have recovered rights, several museums are unusually candid about the arrangement, and the Realm has not legislated.

Concert music, and who paid for that

The Realm’s concert life was built by cities and paid for by industry, which is the same answer as everything else in this article and produces an unusually fragile result.

The great orchestras were founded by subscription between about 1840 and 1900 at Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago and Cincinnati, endowed by the fortunes those cities had just made and governed by boards drawn from the families that made them. Culture being a polity competence, none of them has a federal counterpart and none was ever meant to. The consequence is that the Realm funds its orchestras from endowment, subscription and the box office rather than from a ministry, so a bad decade in the markets is a bad decade for the repertoire, and several cities have lost an orchestra and got it back twice.

The Realm’s concert music was German, and here it stayed German. The conductors, the training, the repertoire and a good deal of the audience came from the German lands through the nineteenth century, and an inheritance of that kind is ordinarily broken by war, the language driven off the programmes, opera was sung in translation, conductors were interned and the connection never fully recovered. The Realm fought both Great Wars with Germany rather than against it, so nothing was purged. The conservatories kept their German faculty, the orchestras kept their German seasons, and the Realm’s concert life is more continuously European than any comparable country’s, which is a divergence its own historians notice mainly by reading other countries’ histories and finding a rupture that is missing.

Opera is a city institution and an argument. There is no national company, for the reason given below, and the Realm’s houses are subscription bodies attached to particular cities, singing in the original languages and defending the practice at intervals since the 1880s. The recurring question is whether opera here is a foreign art being maintained or a domestic one being written, and the answer has changed with the commissioning budget rather than with the argument.

The Realm’s composers spent a century deciding whether to sound like the continent or like Europe, and the ones who chose the continent generally did it by taking material from traditions whose makers the same concert halls would not seat. That is the uncomfortable joint between this section and the one above it: an art music built on borrowed vernacular by institutions that excluded the people the vernacular came from, and the recognition arriving, as it did for jazz, about forty years late.

The one national patron is the broadcaster. The ABC maintains orchestras, commissions new work and records what the commercial catalogues will not, and it does so for the same structural reason the rest of this article keeps returning to: broadcasting crosses polity boundaries and therefore had to be federal, so the Realm acquired a national music patron by accident, through a charter about transmitters.

The Crown and the arts

The Crown owns nothing, commissions little, censors nothing and licenses nobody. It nonetheless shapes the Realm’s arts in four ways, and this section sets them out because they are the part of this subject that belongs to the Realm and to no other.

Honours, and the convention of refusal

The Crown’s honours reach the Realm’s artists sparingly, and are declined more often than they are accepted.

The pattern is well established and the professions differ. Stage careers attract honours and take them; the theatre has knights and dames in numbers, and the profession regards the honour as a recognition of a body of work rather than of celebrity. Commercial film does not. Screen knighthoods are uncommon, most of the industry holds no title, and the offers that are made are frequently refused.

The convention began with Louis B. Mayer, the head of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who refused a knighthood in the Coronation Honours of 1937 in a letter to the press, the first ever offered to a studio head. The reason given is consistent enough across the century of refusals since to count as a convention. An industry whose product is sold on the proposition that it speaks for and to the ordinary person cannot be seen to accept a distinction from the Crown without cost to that proposition, and the actors who have refused have very largely said so in similar terms, several of them publicly and one of them, in 1971, in a letter to a newspaper that is still reprinted whenever the subject arises.

The Crown has never taken offence at this and the Palace’s private position, disclosed in papers released in 2015, is that it regards the refusals as healthy. Ministers have occasionally taken more offence than the sovereign, which is the ordinary shape of these things in the Realm.

Satire

The Realm satirises a monarchy that actually exists, and that is a materially different act from satirising an elected head of state.

There is no legal restriction and no convention against it. The Crown is a fixed target that cannot answer, does not sue, and has no term of office to be voted out of, and the Realm’s satirical tradition has accordingly treated it as scenery rather than as an opponent: the jokes are about ceremony, inheritance, absurdity and money, and almost never about legitimacy.

Ministers are the ones who complain. The ABC’s own history records that its satirical tradition dates from a programme of 1962 which treated ministers as fit subjects for ridicule rather than deference, and which produced the first serious ministerial demand for a Director-General’s resignation in decades. The Crown took a century of mockery without recorded complaint and a Cabinet took four years of it before demanding a sacking, which the Realm’s commentators produce whenever anybody suggests the monarchy is the thing constraining speech.

Patronage, and the Royal Film Performance

The Crown’s active patronage is ceremonial and thin: the Royal Film Performance from 1947, attendance at particular occasions, patronage lent to institutions, and the opening of galleries.

It is worth less than it looks and the institutions say so. Royal patronage in this Realm brings no money and confers no obligation on anybody to give any, and the museums and orchestras that hold it are candid that its value is in what it signals to private donors rather than in itself.

Charters

The fourth instrument is the one described in the history above and it is the only one with teeth. A royal charter binds a studio to conditions it cannot alter alone, and one of those conditions has preserved the Realm’s cinema almost in its entirety.

The institutions the Realm did not build

The Realm has a Crown, an established church and a considerable appetite for chartering things, and it has no national theatre, no royal academy of arts, no national film school and no ministry of culture. The absence is peculiar enough to require explaining, and the explanation is constitutional.

Culture in this Realm is a polity competence. Article XVII.9 of the Charter places the internal arrangements of a polity beyond federal reach, and the settled understanding since the nineteenth century is that theatres, galleries, schools of art and the licensing of performance sit inside that. A national theatre would have to be a federal institution imposed on a field the federation does not have. The proposal has been made four times, in 1919, 1937, 1965 and 1998, and has failed each time on the same objection, raised each time by different polities for different reasons.

What the Realm has instead is the chartered non-profit corporation with a board of local money, which is the American pattern with a chartered wrapper, and a federal arts endowment that is modest and periodically threatened in supply debates. The subsidised arts here are smaller than Europe’s and more dependent on private endowment, the polities fund unevenly, and an orchestra in a rich polity is a different institution from an orchestra in a poor one.

The ABC is the exception that proves the arrangement. The Realm was willing to charter a national broadcaster, with an endowment, a licence income and a constitutional obligation, because broadcasting crossed polity boundaries and could not be a polity competence. Everything that stays inside a building stayed with the polities, and the Realm’s cultural institutions are the shape they are because of a jurisdictional line drawn in 1783 for reasons that had nothing to do with art.

Newer forms

Games

The Realm is the largest producer of video games in the world by revenue and the field is barely treated in its own cultural criticism, which is a gap the Register notes rather than fills.

The industry grew out of the technology heartland of California and out of a scattering of independent studios in the polities, it employs more people than commercial film does, and it earns more. Its critical apparatus is thin because the Realm’s cultural institutions treated it as a toy for thirty years and are now short of anybody qualified to write about it, which is roughly the position the Realm’s galleries were in about photography in 1930.

Two constitutional questions have reached it. The first is the deposit problem: games are not films, no charter obliges anybody to preserve them, and a substantial proportion of the Realm’s early output is already unplayable, which is precisely the loss the film charters prevented and which nobody has legislated about. The second is that the industry’s labour practices have produced the first serious union organising in the Realm’s creative industries since the 1930s, and the guilds of the film industry have been watching it with interest.

The comic stage

Stand-up comedy is a Realm form and is treated here rather than under theatre because its institutions are different: clubs rather than houses, a circuit rather than a season, and no producer between the performer and the audience.

It has done political work. The Realm’s comics have been among the more effective critics of its official life, the satirical tradition described above began in broadcasting and moved back and forth with the clubs, and the obscenity prosecutions of the early 1960s, all of them eventually unsuccessful, are a small but genuine chapter in the Realm’s law on speech.

Dance

Ballet and modern dance are centred on New York and are the fields in which the Realm’s dependence on private endowment shows most sharply: two companies of international standing, a handful of regional ones that are chronically underfunded, and a training pipeline that runs through private schools and is therefore socially narrow.

Modern dance is the Realm’s own contribution and was made very largely by women working outside institutions that would not have them, which the field’s own histories now say directly and its programmes said nothing about for fifty years.

The criticism

The Realm’s arts criticism is commercial, dispersed and has no national organ.

There is no equivalent of a national broadsheet’s arts pages, because the Realm has no national newspaper: the press is metropolitan and polity-based, so criticism is written from New York, from Chicago, from Los Angeles and from about twenty polity capitals, and a work’s reception depends heavily on which of those noticed it.

The ABC is the nearest thing to a national critical institution and is uncomfortable about it, since a Crown broadcaster reviewing the commercial output of a chartered industry is a position with obvious difficulties, and the corporation’s practice is to review generously and analyse sceptically.

The academic criticism is large, well funded and largely disconnected from the popular one, which is not peculiar to this Realm. What is peculiar is the absence of the intermediate layer that a national press provides elsewhere, and the Realm’s writers complain about it in every generation.

Money, and the forty-nine ways of finding it

Because culture is a polity competence, the Realm has forty-nine arts policies and no arts policy, and the practical consequences are larger than the constitutional principle suggests.

The polities fund unevenly and by different instruments. California and New York run substantial provincial programmes; Georgia does almost nothing directly and instead offers the production incentives that built Atlanta as a film centre; Louisiane funds through a cultural ministry answering to the Grand Duke and does so more like a European state than like any of its neighbours; and several of the smaller polities fund nothing at all and rely on private endowment and the federal endowment’s grants.

The federal arts endowment is modest and periodically threatened in supply debates, which is the ordinary shape of its politics. It cannot fund a national institution, because there are none to fund; it makes grants, it supports touring, and it underwrites work in the polities that have no programmes of their own, which is where the argument about it is actually conducted.

The incentive competition is the modern form of all this and nobody is happy with it. Polities bid against one another for production with tax credits, the credits are worth more than most of the polities’ direct arts spending combined, and every published study finds that the aggregate return to the Realm is negative while the return to whichever polity has the best credit this year is positive. Nine polities have proposed a compact to limit the bidding, and none has signed one, for the same reason nobody ever does.

Private endowment carries the rest, in the chartered non-profit form described above: an orchestra, a museum or a theatre is a corporation with a board of local money, and its fortunes follow the fortunes of the money. The result is that the Realm’s cultural institutions are excellent in the cities where wealth concentrated and precarious everywhere else, and that a polity’s museums are a reasonably good index of where its nineteenth-century industrial fortunes were made.

The awards

The honours the professions actually care about are their own, and there are three.

The Academy Awards are the film industry’s and remain the profession’s highest distinction and the centre of the Realm’s film calendar. The Tony Awards are the stage’s. Both are administered by the professions themselves, neither has any connection to the Crown, and the Realm’s honours list is a separate matter that a good many recipients of the first two decline.

The Realm has no dominant domestic film festival, which is a real oddity for the largest producing country in the world, and its films are frequently premiered abroad. The usual explanation is that a festival needs a city with a season, a jury with standing and a market attached, and that the Realm’s industry never needed one because it owned the distribution. Four attempts to establish a national festival have been made and none has held, the most recent in 1998.

Assessment

The honest description of the Realm’s arts is that they are the ordinary arts of a large Atlantic country with four alterations, and that the alterations are larger than they look.

The first is the archive. A condition attached to six royal charters between 1924 and 1937 means that the Realm’s cinema survives almost entire, where that of other producing countries does not. That is not a difference of tone or context. It is the difference between a national art that can be studied and one that has to be reconstructed from stills and memory, and it happened because a company lawyer in 1926 was more frightened of a charter breach than of a warehouse fire.

The second is the code. An established church with seats in the legislature is a different regulator from a trade body, and the Realm’s cinema submitted to thirty-two years of moral supervision as a political calculation about parliamentary time rather than as a concession to opinion. It bought what it wanted, which was that no statutory censorship of film was ever enacted here, and the institution that lost by the arrangement was the Church, which said so itself in 1969 in a report nobody has been able to answer.

The third is the founding. A Realm that began in a negotiation has no revolution to depict, and it has spent two hundred and forty years making art about a room with a table in it. That is a genuine artistic problem and Boston is the one substantial solution anybody has found, which is why a single film of 1957 occupies a place in the national imagination that no film occupies anywhere else. The Realm’s founding art is quieter than other countries’ and more argumentative, because a treaty can be criticised clause by clause in a way a revolution cannot.

The fourth is the refusal. An industry that declines the Crown’s honours as a matter of professional convention is telling the public something about itself every time it does it, and the Crown, which could take offence and does not, is telling the public something in return. The relationship between the Realm’s popular culture and its monarchy is conducted almost entirely in gestures of this kind, and it works because neither party has any power over the other and both know it.

What has not changed is who made the art and who was paid for it. The Realm’s music is the invention of the descendants of enslaved people and was commercialised by companies that paid them badly, and no Crown, charter, church or honours list altered that in any particular. The most valuable thing the Realm produced was made by the people it treated worst and the money went elsewhere, which is a sentence the Register has now written from four polities’ articles and which this one gathers.

The Realm’s arts are therefore neither a monarchy’s arts nor a republic’s. They are a commercial culture of extraordinary reach, operating inside a constitutional order that touches it at four points and leaves everything else alone, and honest about roughly half of that.

Chronology

Articles to come

This article is the frame for a domain that is still being built. Four articles are planned and none is yet written.

• The cinema of the Realm: the industry, the charters, the code, the studio era and the modern period at length.
• A national literature: the writers this article has had to gather from forty-nine polity articles, and the institutions that trained them.
• The American stage: Broadway, the musical, the playwrights, and the traffic with the West End.
• The museums and the collections: the national galleries, the polity museums, and the unfinished business of return.

The two articles that exist in this domain, The Broadcast Era and The Digital Age, treat the media environment rather than the arts, and the ABC article treats broadcast drama and comedy in detail.

Trivia

See also

• The American Broadcasting Corporation, the Crown broadcaster, whose article treats broadcast drama and comedy
• The Broadcast Era and The Digital Age, which treat the media environment
• National and Patriotic Music
• The Four-Year War, the subject of Boston and Hamilton
• Charter of Union of the American Colonies
• State of Tennessee, where the music was recorded
• State of Mississippi, where a great deal of it was made
• Commonwealth of California, which contains Hollywood