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That — “Time to join the rest of the world” — is what I called a keynote talk I gave last week, at an arts marketing conference in Spain.
And what I had in mind was radical — I think — at least to some people. Maybe not to my Spanish audience (plus some people from the UK, and from Latin America). While I spoke, a few people tweeted — and OK, I’m really tickled — that if I had a fan club, they’d join it.
What I said
What was my message? That art — the artistic impulse, artistic creation — thrives in our world as never before. But that much of it, maybe most of it, happens outside the industry we call the arts. We now find art in film, TV, graphic design, fashion, cuisine, children’s books, and of course in pop music. And in other places, too, more than I can list.
When we realize what that means, it’s a shock, especially for those of us who work in the arts. It means that the arts aren’t any longer necessary. They don’t represent art in our society. They of course include some art, including some important art, but they don’t include everything.
So a lot of our arts advocacy is based on what’s now a false premise: That without the arts, some central core of meaning in our world would be lost. That just isn’t true. (And, very much to the point, a lot of the people we want to reach with our advocacy don’t come near to believing it.) The arts, as we know them, could die, and art would survive. And so the arts aren’t needed for the cultural and artistic health of our society.
Giving an example
Strong stuff! When I’m finished revising the slides I used in my presentation, I’ll link them here, so you can see my entire talk. But what I’m saying now is the core of it. One example I gave was The Wire, the much-admired TV series shown on HBO from 2002 to 2008. It was a commercial TV show, so it wouldn’t be included in the arts. (The link I gave goes to Wikipedia. Here’s the show’s homepage.)
But — as I’m seeing once again, as I rematch the first season — it has the depth and texture of the greatest novels and plays. And it probes deeply into our social institutions, showing how they don’t serve us. If this isn’t art, what is?
At lunch after I’d given my talk, two of the people at the conference — solid arts professionals from outside the US — so strongly seconded what I’d said. They’d watched The Wire. And of course, they said, it was art! But until I’d pointed that out, they hadn’t thought of it.
Which doesn’t mean that they were backward, or that I’m a genius. It simply shows how out of touch we’re gotten in the arts, in ways that only now are sneaking up on us.
Traveling outward
So where do we go with this?
First, I think it helps to show why we often seem so baffled. Why we talk about creating more demand for the arts, but can’t quite figure out how to do it. Or who our audience should be.
We’re baffled because we don’t understand that — very likely — we can’t create demand for the arts, as we’ve known them. I asked the people at the conference to imagine a commercial company, which discovers — as we in the arts have — that there’s less demand for its product.
If the fall in demand lasts just a year or two or three, the company might repackage the product, and mount a sharp new ad campaign. But if the demand falls for 10 or 20 years (and a chart showing precisely this for the arts was part of another conference presentation), then the company says it needs a new product. The old one doesn’t meet the needs of a changed world, and so it’s time to market something new.
This scares us
As I’ve said in a previous post, we’re scared of that. Or many of us are. (I was talking about changes in classical music, but I think my point is valid for all the old, high formal arts.) We’re afraid we’ll dumb our art down.
But I’ll leave you now with the thought that, very likely, the truth is just the opposite. Our problem is that we aren’t smart enough.
I asked my audience to imagine a cultured person of today. She’s a graduate student in comparative literature, or maybe a professor. Or a lawyer, or (in Washington, DC, where I live) someone pondering healthcare policy at an NGO.
She’s a deep fan of electronic dance music, or maybe indie rock. Like me, she can’t wait for the next Tarantino film. And she’s a passionate locavore, seeking out small, edgy restaurants where chefs whose names she knows do striking things with local meat and produce.
That’s a highly cultured person. And she’s doing it with no reference to the arts, as we’ve defined them, or anyway with very little reference. (She might go to a museum now and then, but you won’t see her at the opera.)
This is the kind of person we need to learn to speak to. And not — oh, Lord, no — by creating “access points,” or other simplified portals, designed to give her entree into what we do.
To even think of doing that is arrogant. Very likely this woman is smarter and more cultured than we are. The truth is just the opposite of what we think: It’s we who need access points, access points that take us into her life.
And of course if she’s part of the non-white majority that’s emerging in the US, then her distance from us is even greater.
Which is what I mean by joining the rest of the world. We have no business talking about bringing people to us. Instead we need to travel outward. We have go to the people we want to reach, become part of their culture, learn to breathe the air they breathe.
And then we can create — as of course some of us already do — transformations of our art that truly speak to the present day.
Bravo! I couldn’t have said it better.
You point to the area without naming it, that the arts need to dwell in in order to understand who their future audience members might be, that is, psychographics. There are plenty of otherwise educated and ambitious people who are somewhat cultivated, who could become ardent patrons of our various forms of high-art. But then you slide in to demographics (white or non-white) designations that really don’t reveal anything about the inner workings of a person that might indicate whether they are a good match for what we do. I like that you described this person, full of potential for enjoying something that matches with their values. But, I wouldn’t put someone on a pedestal just because of their picky consumer choices. To be cultured means having done the hard of of cultivating ones self. There are no short cuts and the person you described most likely noticed that they derive the most pleasure for the things in which they invested themselves in earnest.
Well put as always Greg. I’m definitely a fan. But I think the paradox simply depends on which side of the coin we’re staring at. In the arts (professional) universe, nothing seems to have changed: art still seems best when it is presented purely. Outside of course, art means little because everyone considers themselves creative if not artistic, and that’s good enough: in fact, it’s even MORE meaningful because it’s personal. Art has been democratized and redefined without input from the pros, BECAUSE we’ve been so disengaged with the larger culture (slipping clutch).
What are we pros to do? Well, we should first take classical music to them and share on whatever level the various communities best communicate. Next we must validate the creative impulses of the people we’d like to see come to concerts. Then we should make clearly demonstrate WHY we choose this music, using words, body language, humor and participation on top of exaggerated musicianship. When someone new has that epiphanal moment, THEN we realize that the “dark side” of the coin (outside?) is just as artistic, profound and rewarding as the first side (inside). The future for classical is out THERE!
In the Age of Enlightenment, music was considered the highest art. It is perhaps the oldest art, tracing back 30,000 years. Hearing is the first sense to develop in embryos and it is often the last to leave. This gives it a special place amongst the arts. Further, it is very much integrated into our biology. Human voices co-evolved with hearing, and the embedded intelligence of our opposable thumbed hands yielded our skill in producing sound from musical objects and sensing vibration.
Other arts are based in the respective medium – painting to canvas, sculpture to clay, marble and bronze, film to celluloid. Music is based on the physics of air, wood, cane, skins, gut and horse tails. It comes from fingers and lips and touches our perceptions with direct infinitesimal nudges of our ears.
There is no technological substitute that yields the same feelings of joy, sadness and connectedness as the performing arts and being in a room with musicians. This is a fundamental part of culture, society, religion and human experience that is not satisfied by pop music through internet streaming and film soundtracks. It is stronger yet when it is participatory, as in tribal singing and dancing.
To suggest we abandon hope is to admit the disintegration of society. Humans are not machines, and mechanistic technologic substitutes like video and audio recording, samplers, loops, synths and PAs do not address basic human needs. In the same way that mechanized agribusiness is producing endemic health problems like the obesity epidemic, I see the music “Business” as pathological and locked in a downward spiral of sound quality and therefore diminishing return for the consumer.
The latest evidence is that playing acoustic music (and likely listening to it) during developmental years boosts neurogenesis of many critical brain functions like left-right coordination, spatial perception and creative problem solving. My research has proven that musicians HEAR differently, and live in a much richer world of sound and space.
Framing this discussion outside of entertainment and in the realm of health and personal development erases the relativism that pervades your argument. Musicians are the priests, the warriers, the gadflys and the standard bearers of what it means to be human.
The degradation is sound quality of live amplified, recorded, broadcast, streaming and portable music is responsible for the decline in status, attention and value of music measured in time and money. This is why music has become background for visual activities like video games, browsing and film, whereas I find acoustic music so engaging that video is a negative distraction.
I welcome all to come hear my grand experiment at SpectrumNYC to make an acoustic environment so enveloping, intimate and articulate that it regularly produces euphoria. Once you remember what our culture is missing, you will share my evangelical fervor for the future of REAL, face-to-face physical music for its own sake.
This is not a program of standard repertoire, it is New Music, experimental music, ethnic, folk and Jazz fusion, new combinations in the Third Stream modality. We do incorporate electronics for functions impossible in the physical world like unbalanced orchestration and fast modulation of microtonal temperaments – but using unique technology designed to the model of musicians’ hearing. This bridges the gap between the previously unreproducible nuance and depth of traditional music and the yearning for new sounds.- and is that not the REAL music, familiar and novel at the same time?
You make some good points, but I recommend that you never use the sentence: “Musicians are the priests, the warriers, the gadflys and the standard bearers of what it means to be human:, or the ideas that underlie it again. It is a gross insult to most of humanity, including vast numbers of people who are richer in life and feeling and achievement than most musicians. To any non-musician, reading such a nasty demeaning self-regarding condescending statement about the rest of us from a musician is liable to seem like evidence that music makes one a worse person rather than a better one.
_”In the Age of Enlightenment, music was considered the highest art.”_
Yeah, well, it was also a profoundly commercial art. Whatever the merits of your “too good for microphones” position, if you think it makes you philosophically akin to those Enlightenment opera buffa mongerers, Haydn and Mozart, or, going back a bit further, to Handel “with his hundred hands,” you’re probably wrong. (Akin to Gluck, perhaps.)
(The above should not be mistaken as an endorsement of the equally incorrect and currently fashionable view of Handel, Mozart, etc as unpretentious craftsmen.)
Very nicely put, Graham. Including your caveat at the end, which is so important. I remember the days back in the ’80s when opera and musical theater combined forces at the NEA, leading to comments like, “Verdi was just doing what Broadway musicals do now.” Or something I saw on an orchestra website — that Rachmaninoff was the Barry Manilow of his time. He wasn’t.
Music in fact was a somewhat utilitarian art in the 18th century. Wasn’t till the 19th that it began to be thought of as something transcendent. James Johnson’s book Listening in Paris is enlightening (hah) about this. In 18th century France, music was considered more or less on a par with fireworks. Something delightful, and certainly entertaining, but not deep. It wasn’t considered deep because it didn’t have words (obviously vocal music does, but music itself doesn’t), or any other way to communicate thoughts. The 19th century then turned this on its head, and made music the greatest of art because it _couldn’t_ communicate anything concrete. That put it in a realm beyond everyday life, and made it (in the view of the time) transcendent.
We shouldn’t have any trouble understanding that someone can work in a commercial arena, and be very popular, without considering him- or herself to be that unpretentious craftsperson you shook your head about. Stephen Sondheim, Bruce Springsteen. (To cite just two names.) Intensely serious about their art, but not at all ashamed to be commercial.
Fortunately, we are still connecting college students at the University of Pittsburgh with the symphony– 50 undergrads signed up for a program with 40 tickets this weekend. Last weekend we had 110 Pitt undergrads sign up for the ballet Sleeping Beauty, another program with 40 tickets. However, sometimes, the smaller arts organizations’ offerings are a harder sell. This weekend we have a program with a small opera organization this same weekend and even though the subject matter is awesome (an opera about Frida Kahlo) it has been pulling teeth to get this one filled.
So it appears that Pitt students tend to be enamored with classic European fare, but have a difficulty with other outstanding programming, either because they don’t understand it, or because the marketing on our end and from the organization is not hitting a nerve. What do you think, Greg?
Hey, Annabelle, nice to hear from you. I’ll venture a bold thought. What you describe happens elsewhere. I think it’s a selection effect. Those younger people who can be drawn to the traditional arts (a relatively small number) have the same conservative taste (or pretty much the same) as the established audience. And why not? They’re being attracted to the same thing the older audience likes.
Go far outside the arts, and find those not attracted, and they’ll have more adventurous taste. Assuming, that is, that they have it in the non-arts culture they’re already into.
Please get over the idea that the US acquiring a non-white majority makes classical music less meaningful. It is a corpse already, and I don’t really understand why I am still reading this blog, but demographics have nothing to do with its expiration. There are a billion white people in the world and will be for generations to come. That would be more than enough to sustain something that was sustainable, and anyway the one (almost certainly temporary) area of growth for Western classical music is among the non-white population of East Asia.
Would you ever dream of suggesting that a decline in the Chinese, or Indian, or Arab share of the world population made an aspect of their historic culture less meaningful? Of course not. Your false guilt-based double standards are a form of inverted racial discrimination.
Did I say a nonwhite majority makes classical music less meaningful? We have a cultural mix. Western culture is part of that mix.
What the nonwhite majority does mean is that the old model of the arts — so strongly based on European culture — isn’t sustainable, for reasons ranging from human decency to finance. And including political feasibility. It’s going to be very hard to expect/request/demand extravagant funding for art that largely speaks only to and about one strand of our culture, especially one so strongly identified with the elite of the past.
There’s much more to be said on this issue, and I know that the discussions can be incendiary, both because they challenge some strongly held preconceptions — preconceptions, I’ll add, with much sympathy, that are in part rooted in a deep love for European/Western art. The discussions also intersect with incendiary conversations happening throughout our society.
But that’s no reason to jump to conclusions about what anyone is saying. For a very detailed and nuanced discussion of the purely musical implications — and limitations — of sticking with the old model, in which classical music is given hegemony over other kinds of music, you might read a report just issued by the College Music Society, calling for a radical change in university and conservatory music curricula. The report stressed the importance of musical traditions that stem from Africa, not Europe, stressing their importance on purely musical grounds, as well as for their role in our lives today.
If you read the report, try a thought experiment. Imagine the discussion in the report taking place in a society where whites, with a Europe-derived culture, are the vast majority of the population. Then imagine it taking place in a society that’s 75% nonwhite. Suddenly, I’d think, the conversation gets a lot more urgent. That’s the kind of thing I meant in citing the importance of the emerging nonwhite majority, not anything about the nature and importance of classical music taken on its own.
Philip Arlington seems to mostly be having a conversation with himself here, but in any case, there seems to be a need for some clarification:
Nobody is actually predicting that the United States is going to have a “non-white majority” (the confusion is between “non-Hispanic whites,” who will become a minority, and all whites, who won’t). More relevantly to this essay, non-black people of European and Latin American ancestry are projected to remain an overwhelming majority (more than two thirds) – and of course European classical music is MORE of a mainstream institution in Latin America than in the United States.
As for black Americans, the notion that the descendants of slaves or third-plus generation descendants of black immigrants have a particular connection to the music of Africa is sentimentality. African music IS certainly an important influence on contemporary American music, but so is Indian (South Asian) music. If somebody wants to add the former to the curriculum, she should add the latter too (though of course there’s less of a POLITICAL incentive to require the inclusion of Indian music).
In the past we have had students with more adventurous taste. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the Frida chamber opera is on Halloween. We always like to offer an alternative to students dressing up and going to alcohol fueled parties. Last year we had a film screening of Night of the Living Dead on this date. Perhaps people don’t know how macabre those Frida paintings are. And even more likely they have never seen the excellent Julie Taymor film, and likely do not even have a clue who Frida Kahlo is. When I was their age knowing about Frida Kahlo was a big deal. I wonder if students are not as expansive as they once were, and are not learning ab0ut the arts the way I did when I was younger.
I had the opportunity to see a number of Kahlo paintings at the Albright Knox Museum in Buffalo, NY. They are diminutive but still extraordinarily striking.
Thanks for your comments Greg, as ever they do have teeth.
Such an enthusiastic defence of the consumer society and an endorsement of the new conformism! Apparently today’s artist is someone who knows the buzz words, the trends, creates a new product and finds a sales niche for it. Here we still are: anything goes; never criticize; we’re all oh-so politically correct; you’re and artist, I’m an artist; don’t bother trying to think; and, by the way, what sitcom are you watching tonight?
And I’d like to point out that your successful female locavore sitting in Jean-Pierre’s edgy restaurant and twitching to indie rock isn’t, as you say, a cultured person. She’s acculturated. (I’d call her a zombie.)