Art and the Arts

by Greg Sandow
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More than 20 years ago - when I was writing about new classical music as a columnist for The Village Voice in New York - I got a call from someone in the New York City government. He was working with a city program that reserved some downtown lofts for artists, and he had a question. Sting had applied for one of the lofts. Was Sting an artist? Should he get the loft?

I asked what the problem was. The answer was simple enough - Sting was (horror! horror!) commercial. So how could he be doing art? And yet his music didn't sound unartistic. What to do?

I think if I were asked this now, I'd suggest that the city shouldn't try to balance art and commerce, and instead might simply have a means test. If you made piles of money, no matter whether you're Sting or Lorin Maazel, you should find your loft on your own. What I did say was a softer, less confident version of that. I couldn't solve the problem, I declared, but if they rejected Sting, I hoped they'd reject big-league opera stars, who in their way were just as commercial as any pop star (and were comfortably wealthy, even if they didn't earn pop-star fees).

So why am I telling this story? To introduce my thought that art and the arts aren't the same thing. Art is an activity, sometimes sublime, and also the result of that activity. By now we know - or certainly we ought to know -- that it might be found anywhere, in vacant lots, in silence and graffiti, in overheard remarks (see the poetry of Jonathan Williams, an advocate of outsider art, who died not long ago), and in popular culture. The arts, by contrast, are a set of interest groups, whose claim to glory (and to funding) is that they speak for art, which is only partly true. They don't speak for all art, and when someone speaking for the arts - by which I mean for the interest groups - says that only the arts can offer meaning in our society, we've strayed so far from reality that we might as well be jumping off a cliff. Especially if we're looking for a younger audience!

Here's an example. Dana Gioa, the chairman of the NEA, gave a widely circulated commencement speech at Stamford, in which (among much else) he longed for the good old days, when art was in its glory, and opera singers like Robert Merrill could be heard on network TV... But Robert Merrill didn't have a brain in his head. I can say this affectionately, because I love opera, and Merrill can ravish me with his voice. But he had nothing to say in his singing (something that certainly was noticed back in the day), and to imagine that putting him on TV brings art in all its glory to an audience of millions is really pretty funny.  Contrast what happens now, when we have pop stars like Bruce Springsteen, who write their own words and music (something Robert Merrill couldn't do), who sing about serious things, who both reflect profound things in our culture, and influence them (see for example the book about Springsteen - Springsteen's America: The People Listening, a Poet Singing -- by Robert Coles, one of our most profound and literate psychologists). And who go on 60 Minutes, talking about society and politics, in a completely serious, compelling way. Is that a step backward? I'd call it a big step forward, at least if you want art to mean something, and to help form both our consciousness and our reality.

But wait! How can Springsteen be an artist, if he's a pop musician, and therefore (horror! horror!) commercial? To me that question is based on a misunderstanding both of commerce and of art. Or at least of the history of art. My field is classical music, and you can't study its history without noticing that many great musicians of the past were commercial, including many of the great composers, or maybe even most of them.

I've just been reading a lively little book - Liszt: My Travelling Circus Life, by David Lee Allsobrook -- about one of the greatest pianists of the 19th century, Franz Liszt, and his two tours of England in the 1840s. He made those tours purely for money, flacked for a piano manufacturer, whose pianos he endorsed, and packed his programs with popular opera arias and comical songs, all to please an audience that would have run away from more serious music, by the likes of Mozart or Beethoven.

Handel was thoroughly commercial, and wrote his famous oratorios only because the market for his operas had dried up. Beethoven tried to be commercial, though he wasn't very good at it (he threw a fit when the premiere of his Ninth Symphony didn't make much money). Verdi and Puccini were commercial stars; Rossini was one of the greatest commercial successes in the history of any kind of music. And the list could go on. Brahms made his fortune by writing popular piano music. Why was commerce, for an artist, OK in past centuries, but bad in this one? Someone's going to say that our culture has degenerated, but I don't buy it. Things were better in the days of slavery? Should we look back with admiration at an age when women were their husbands' property, just because people (or so we think) liked better music then? Picasso knew exactly how to sell himself. Should we condemn his art?

And no, I'm not forgetting that many artists - including, just for instance, Webern, one of my favorite composers - stand (or stood) apart from commerce. But we also should understand the nature of the commercial world today. In the arts (and certainly in classical music) we all too quickly think that there are just two choices, to be commercial, and to create only what the market wants, or to be an artist, and be true to our inner selves. But that's not at all how it works. Pop music is a good guide here. Not everyone making pop records tries to sell 10,000,000 copies. Many people work in alternative genres - alternative rock, dance music - and don't expect to sell anywhere near that. One of the leading people on the edge of dance music, Aphex Twin, sells about 50,000 copies of his CDs. Another dance artist on the same label, Clark, sells just 5,000. And not many people calculate their position in advance. More likely, you make the music you want to make, and then find who's going to buy it. Maybe you sell ten million records, but more likely you sell many fewer - 100,000, 50,000, 10,000, 500.

And is commerce really bad? In pop music, it can be noxious, but for honest artists, it's also a way to reach the people who love your music. And are the arts really free of it? Again I'm going to speak about classical music, because that's the art I know most about. A few years ago, I saw a public conversation at Juilliard, between Reneé Fleming, one of the world's top sopranos, and Stephen Sondheim. Had either of them, they were asked, ever had to compromise their art for commercial reasons? "Very often," said Fleming, who then gave chapter and verse. In order to make recordings she cared about, she said, she had to make others that her record company wanted to make, recordings they thought would sell. Sondheim's answer? "Never."

So here we have Reneé Fleming, an opera singer working (or so the myth goes) in the sacred precincts of high art, and Stephen Sondheim, working in the commercial world of Broadway. And he's the one who never compromises! Fleming also was very funny about the role she was singing back then at the Metropolitan Opera, the lead in Massenet's Manon. "That's not art," she said, or words to that effect. "That's fluff, that's just entertainment." We'd be silly, in any case, to think that what arts organizations do is always art. Again, a classical music example. Orchestras and opera companies, not to mention big classical record labels and classical radio stations, are terrified of their audience. They're afraid to program things that their audience won't like. Yes, they do it sometimes, but they always know that some large part of their audience might not like anything new or adventurous - and that it would be commercial (that word again) suicide for them to do too much of that. Then you have some part, maybe a biggish part, of the classical music audience - see Roger Paterson's blog for this (he's a radio guy) - that loves classical music because it's a refuge from the rest of the world...that's not art. It's nostalgia. Or at the very least it's not a mindset that'll endear classical music (as it currently manifests itself in our culture) to younger people intensely engaged with the world around them.

And then - moving back to the rest of our culture - we have Bob Dylan, who decades ago realized that he didn't want to write novels, and didn't want to write plays. All he wanted to do is write songs, and sing them. (You can see him saying this in Martin Scorcese's tremendous documentary on him, No Direction Home.) So that's what he's done, in album after album, and concert tour after concert tour, whether anyone was listening or not, no matter how many albums he sold, no matter what critics said. He made familiar songs unrecognizable in his live performances. He turned away from his fame, and wrote songs. If that's not how an artist acts, what is? Dylan has done what Schoenberg (the 12-tone composer) said that artists do, produce art because they can't help it, the way an apple tree produces apples.
But Dylan's not part of "the arts." (Neither is Bruce Springsteen, whose impeccable art-like work is documented in the DVD on the making of his Born to Run album, included in the 30th anniversary Born to Run boxed set.)

And many younger people aren't recognized by the arts, even though they're artists. Consider an important essay by Henry Jenkins and Vanessa Bertozzi, "Artistic Expression in the Age of Participatory Culture," published in Engaging Art, edited by Steven J. Tepper and Bill Ivey, a largely tentative examination how changes in our culture affect the arts.
 
But Jenkins and Bertozzi mostly aren't tentative. They introduce us to a 17 year-old high school student, Chloe, who makes costumes based on characters from anime, or on singers in Japanese rock bands. She studies Japanese at a nearby college, and delves deeply into traditional Japanese novels and poetry, of course doing all this on her own. Her high school didn't teach her any of it. There's also a woman who, when she was in high school, used comics to come out as a lesbian, and now is a successful comix artist. And a 14 year-old whose art is designing what she wears to school - a different look every day, no matter what the other kids might think. And a kid who recorded music in his bedroom: "I used a belt buckle and a glass ashtray and made just like a clinking sound. My mom is an elementary school music teacher so she gave me children's instruments, like a recorder and little sand-blocks you scrape together to make percussion sounds." He put together tracks on his computer, posted them to MP3 sites, and eventually got signed to a record deal. His band is Grizzly Bear, a star attraction in far-alternative New York clubs; in March it appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Though Jenkins and Bertozzi quite properly treat these kids as artists, there's one hesitation in their essay, a decision to avoid asking "whether making media is the same thing as making art." To even note that question seems to me like a step backward, a bow toward lines artificially drawn by the arts that have some kind of official sanction. Paint a painting - that's art. Assemble a collection of pink objects, and show it in a gallery - even that will be acknowledged. But make a comic book? Record noises in your bedroom? Dress up differently each day? Suddenly that's "media," and might not get official sanction. This is one way that "the arts" preserve their sense of their importance (and along with that, their claim on funding).

But I think these kids are artists, just like the college-age son of a friend of mine. He's a musician. He has a band. He made an album, and released it on vinyl - yes, as an LP record - though the songs were available as downloads. Once the album got some attention, a small indie label picked it up, and released it on CD. But the original idea was to have it for sale only on vinyl. This musician also does noise music improvisations, which he releases on cassette! This - and the same goes for the people Jenkins and Bertozzi write about -- is how artists act, doing things to please themselves, and deliberately moving away from the mainstream, something not exactly unknown in the history of art. Think of Guillaume Apollinaire, early in the 20th century, walking a lobster down the Paris boulevards. He did this as artistic self-expression, though his claim to art was his poetry. In our age - after a generation of performance art -- the lobster might be art all by itself.

So my friend's son is an artist, but I doubt the arts know about him, just as they don't know about the kids that Jenkins and Bertozzi write about. That has to change. Especially if the arts - which we now have to define as only part of the larger world of art, and most definitely not as all of it - want to reach a younger audience!

How to do that would be yet another long oration. But it starts with getting smarter, avoiding empty middlebrow talk of sublimity and masterworks. (Maybe only the classical music business talks that way. I hope so!) In fact, to reach a smart younger audience, those of us in the arts will have to talk about how smart the art we represent is, how it's offbeat, even quirky. And how creative people can participate in it, by playing with it in their bedrooms.

Which, to me, is wonderful. At the very least, we'll have more fun than we're having now.  

To hear more from Greg Sandow, read his blog.
To learn more about NPAC sessions such as "Taking Art off the Shelf: What Do Today's Audiences Really Want?", visit the website.