Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
I’m off to Missouri today to spend a few days with my family. I’ll be bringing along my iBook, and insofar as possible I’ll be posting from there, but don’t expect a Mississippi-like flow of fugitive thoughts.
The good news is that Our Girl will most likely be putting in her oar from time to time, and I’ll be back in Manhattan Thursday afternoon to resume Balanchine-related activities, not to mention a certain amout of blogging.
Be nice while I’m gone, O.K.?
Some things to think about as I head out the door:
(1) What book have you owned longest–the actual copy, I mean?
(2) If you could wish a famous painting out of existence, what would it be?
(3) If you had to live in a film, what would it be?
(4) If you had to live in a song, what would it be?
(5) What’s the saddest work of art you know? And does experiencing it make you similarly sad?
Says James Tata:
In my dream, music pirating, by destroying the recording industry, and with it the concept of musicians getting paid for the recordings they have made, destroys the very concept of music recording. Instead of stars whose talent is primarily charisma rather than artistic substance, songwriters are the new stars, like they were when the music business consisted of sheet music publishers. Music then returns to its original state: if you want to listen, you have to be in the same room as the musicians. The ranks of paid performers swells–suddenly we all know several people who make a living singing or playing instruments. Musicians are as common as accountants. Better still, most of us spend a large part of our youth learning how to play instruments. The piano again furnishes every middle class home. And, because we are all so musically sophisticated, we never have to listen to disco during halftime at the Super Bowl again.
Needless to say, James has bought himself a ticket to Fantasy Island. But of course (as he says) it is a dream that he’s recounting, one in which he envisions an ideal state by whose imaginary coordinates we might steer a bit closer to something that might actually come to pass.
Like, say, what? Well, I wrote a long essay for A Terry Teachout Reader called “Life Without Records” in which I speculated about the possible effects of the coming collapse of the classical recording industry (which I foresaw several years ago) on the culture of classical music. Here’s some of what I wrote:
The collapse of the major classical labels and the rise of the Internet as a locus for decentralized recording activity will almost certainly prevent the re-emergence of anything remotely resembling the superstar system. What would classical music look like without superstars? A possible answer can be found by looking at classical ballet. Few ballet companies tour regularly, and some of the most important, like New York City Ballet, are rarely seen outside their home towns; videocassettes are a notoriously inadequate substitute for live performances, and thus sell poorly. For these reasons, the major media devote little space to ballet, meaning that there are never more than one or two international superstars at any given moment. Most balletgoers spend the bulk of their time attending performances by the resident companies of the cities in which they live, and the dances, not the dancers, are the draw. (It is The Nutcracker that fills seats, not the Sugar Plum Fairy.)
In the United States, regional opera works in much the same way. Only a half-dozen major American companies can afford to import superstars; everyone else hires solid second-tier singers with little or no name recognition, often using local artists to fill out their casts. Audiences are attracted not by the stars, but by the show–that is, by dramatically compelling productions of musically interesting operas. If the larger culture of classical music were to be reorganized along similar lines, then concert presenters, instead of presenting a small roster of international celebrity virtuosos, might be forced to engage a wider range of lower-priced soloists, possibly including local artists and ensembles with a carefully cultivated base of loyal fans. Similarly, regional symphony orchestras would have to adopt more imaginative programming strategies in order to attract listeners who now buy tickets mainly to hear superstar soloists play popular concertos in person. It is possible, too, that with the breakup of the single worldwide market created by the superstar system, we might see a similar disintegration of the blandly eclectic “international” style of performance that came to dominate classical music in the Seventies. Performers who play for the moment, rather than for the microphones of an international record company primarily interested in its bottom line, are less likely to play it safe–and more likely to play interesting music.
In the midst of these seemingly endless uncertainties, one aspect of life without records is not only possible but probable: henceforth, nobody in his right mind will look to classical music as a means of making very large sums of money. Of all the ways in which the invention of the phonograph changed the culture of classical music, perhaps the most fateful was that it turned a local craft into an international trade, thereby attracting the attention of entrepreneurs who were more interested in money than art. Needless to say, there can be no art without money, but the recording industry, by creating a mass market for music, sucked unprecedentedly large amounts of money into the classical-music culture, thereby insidiously and inexorably altering its artistic priorities….
Read the whole thing here–when the book comes out, that is. (You can order it in advance by clicking on the link.)
AMANDA: Don’t laugh at me, I’m serious.
ELYOT [seriously]: You mustn’t be serious, my dear one, it’s just what they want.
AMANDA: Who’s they?
ELYOT: All the futile moralists who try to make life unbearable. Laugh at them. Be flippant. Laugh at everything, all their sacred shibboleths. Flippancy brings out the acid in their damned sweetness and light.
AMANDA: If I laugh at everything, I must laugh at us too.
ELYOT: Certainly you must. We’re figures of fun all right.
No
I don’t respond to people who write dumb stuff about me, nor do I link to them. But I do appreciate being defended by bloggers who know it’s dumb. Thanks, guys–and gal.
(Now, aren’t you curious?)
The New York Times reports that a technical glitch at Amazon Canada last week caused the real user names of reviewers to be displayed instead of their chosen pseudonyms. Hilarity ensued:
John Rechy, author of the best-selling 1963 novel “City of Night” and winner of the PEN-USA West lifetime achievement award, is one of several prominent authors who have apparently pseudonymously written themselves five-star reviews, Amazon’s highest rating. Mr. Rechy, who laughed about it when approached, sees it as a means to survival when online stars mean sales.
“That anybody is allowed to come in and anonymously trash a book to me is absurd,” said Mr. Rechy, who, having been caught, freely admitted to praising his new book, “The Life and Adventures of Lyle Clemens,” on Amazon under the signature “a reader from Chicago.” “How to strike back? Just go in and rebut every single one of them.”
[snip]
But even with reviewer privacy restored, many people say Amazon’s pages have turned into what one writer called “a rhetorical war,” where friends and family members are regularly corralled to write glowing reviews and each negative one is scrutinized for the digital fingerprints of known enemies.
One well-known writer admitted privately–and gleefully–to anonymously criticizing a more prominent novelist who he felt had unfairly reaped critical praise for years. She regularly posts responses, or at least he thinks it is her, but the elegant rebuttals of his reviews are also written from behind a pseudonym.
Numbering 10 million and growing by tens of thousands each week, the reader reviews are the most popular feature of Amazon’s sites, according to the company, which also culls reviews from more traditional critics like Publishers Weekly. Many authors applaud the democracy of allowing readers to voice their opinions, and rejoice when they see a new one posted–so long as it is positive.
But some authors say it is ironic that while they can for the first time face their critics on equal footing, so many people on both sides choose to remain anonymous. And some charge that the same anonymity that encourages more people to discuss books also spurs them to write reviews that they would never otherwise attach their names to.
Jonathan Franzen, author of “The Corrections,” winner of the National Book Award, said that a first book by Tom Bissell last fall was “crudely and absurdly savaged” on Amazon in anonymous reviews he believed were posted by a group of writers whom Mr. Bissell had previously written about in the literary magazine The Believer.
“With the really flamingly negative reviews, I think it’s always worth asking yourself what kind of person has time to write them,” Mr. Franzen said. “I know that the times when I’ve been tempted to write a nasty review online, I have never had attractive motives.” Mr. Franzen declined to say whether he had ever given in to such temptation.
The suspicion that the same group of writers, known as the Underground Literary Alliance, had anonymously attacked his friend Heidi Julavits prompted the novelist Dave Eggers to write a review last August calling Ms. Julavits’s first novel “one of the best books of the year.”
Mr. Eggers, whose memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” made him a literary celebrity, chose to post his review as “a reader from St. Louis, MO.” But the review appeared under the name “David K Eggers” on Amazon’s Canadian site on Monday, and Mr. Eggers confirmed by e-mail that he had written it.
Oh, that Dave Eggers, always so shy and retiring. Will he ever come out of his shell?
Terry and I have been following the Don Cherry story this week, and he suggested I blog about it. But I couldn’t find the remotest arts angle to hang a post on. If you don’t know who Don Cherry is (think Canadian hockey) or don’t know about the events of the last week, Colby Cosh’s site is the best place to go to catch up.
Meanwhile, guess what? The Canadian government has handed me my arts angle on a silver platter. After the Conan O’Brien show taped in Toronto the last few days, with a Canadian government subsidy, Ottawa is scandalized by what they saw, and on the offensive:
Canada’s government on Friday condemned a show by U.S. late-night television host Conan O’Brien that insulted people in French-speaking Quebec and seemed to suggest everyone in the province was homosexual.
Ottawa and the province of Ontario paid $760,000 to help O’Brien–who appears on the NBC television network–bring his show to Toronto for a week to boost the city’s profile after a deadly SARS outbreak last year.
But the federal government said O’Brien had gone too far with the show broadcast on Thursday in which he went to Quebec, a province which has had separatist governments for much of the last 20 years and is a delicate political topic in Canada.
“We want to disassociate ourselves from the comments which were broadcast last night because we do not support them in any way,” junior government minister Mauril Belanger told Parliament.
At one point in the show, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog–a hand puppet that is a regular on the show–said to a Quebecer: “You’re French, you’re obnoxious and you no speekay English.” It told another: “I can smell your crotch from here.”
O’Brien’s team were also shown replacing street signs in the province with those that read “Quebecqueer Street” and “Rue des Pussies.”
Alexa McDonough, a legislator for the left-leaning New Democrats, described the program as “racist filth” and “utterly vile” and demanded the government seek the return of the C$1 million subsidy.
This is pretty surreal. To someone who has a soft spot for most all things Canadian, it’s also a glass of cold water in the face. Clearly a lot of the jokes that offended were allusions to the Cherry affair; as such, they seem at least as much aimed at Cherry as at the Qu