Any dive into the data of leisure time leads to a strange and contradictory place. Extracting just a few of the factoids from the recent Getty convening background paper (noted and linked in my previous post):
- The percentage of U.S. commuters using private vehicles in 2005: 88
- The percentage of these commuters driving alone: 90
- In 1940, the percentage of U.S. households consisting of a single person: 7.7
- That percentage in 2000: 25
- Number of sleeping pill prescriptions filled in 2000: 26.25 million
- Number of sleeping pill prescriptions filled in 2005: 42 million
- Number of square feet in the average American residence, in 1950: 983
- That number in 2005: 2434
- Number of leisure hours gained by Americans over the four decades leading to
the twenty first century: 6 to 9 per week- Percentage of American workers whose lunch lasts less then 30 minutes: 55
- Percentage of workers who spend lunch ”working with colleagues”: 49
So the data tells us we have more free time, but we also work more intensely and have trouble turning off…that we’re more connected, yet more often alone…that we’re living in bigger houses, but subject to more income inequity…that we have more choices and opportunities than any civilization before us, but feel less in control than our parents did.
So, where do cultural organizations and cultural experiences fit in this increasingly fractured world? Are extended, immersive, and focused cultural events antidotes or anachronisms? And do cultural managers change with their audience, or remain true to their traditions?
Therein lies the interesting conversation…
I don’t know what a cultural experience is anymore. It has slipped my grasp.
Supposedly, we now have the technological means to communicate in ways that put us more in touch with people (IM, email to name two) anywhere in the world. I am able to work with my other filmmakers who could ostensibly be on a set in Shanghai. Or I could be sending my work to a curator in Seattle.
One would think.
I don’t understand the art world. I don’t understand the world of publishing.
I don’t like the people in either world much.
They’re more uncommunicative, threatened, annoyed, offended, defensive, nasty, and downright hateful than they ever were. It’s never been good. Being at the mercy of editors, curators, directors, agents, gallery owners, and cultural gatekeepers. I’m glad that I am not young and breaking into any area of this business. The indifference and the arrogance will take your breath away on a good day.
The reality that these people have so much technology immediately available to them has made them more remote, not less.
The typical (I get this on an average of twice a day) response by a book editor or a museum curator to receiving a query or email is: where did you get my address.
The typical response NEVER has anything whatsoever to do with art or work.
Is it a fractured world. Yes. If art managers today are remaining true to a tradition, it is one of animosity, and while they might scream it isn’t so, they don’t live on this side of the creative brick wall, it is so, and that barely simmering anger I do consistently confront is one that does affect their relationship not simply to artists, but to whatever medium those artists are working in.
Every editor in Manhattan will claim they love books. I don’t believe it.
How can you as an art manager tell me that you love painting when you treat every painter that walks into your gallery as if they are irritating and expendable and they should go away and stop bothering you because you are important. This is the norm.
How can you as an cultural gatekeeper sit there with a straight face and tell me — someone who deals in such ephemeral milieu as film and video — that your procedures dictate a submission process that involves a proposal, and slides encased in plastic when what I do doesn’t fit in that paradigm and that sending you work electronically is an act of treason worthy of public execution.
It doesn’t always come encased in plastic and people wonder why I roll my eyes and have a righteously bad attitude.
I profoundly believe that the cultural keepers of the brick walls and the gates often get exactly what they deserve. I have gone out of my way again and again to see to it. Art is not a cultural experience. Art is war.
These people used to hide pretty effectively, but today when you find them, the lashing out vindictively like a snake has become the average reaction.
Why are you bothering me.
You all have assistants and staff and gadgets and cash. You seem to have no concept of what it’s like to live on the other side of the brick walls you tend to and how dare you spit fire and brimstone when we are reduced to doing whatever it takes to survive one more day so we might live long enough to storm your walls tomorrow.
Fractured, seamless, alone, and connected. How dare any of these gatekeepers who design the cultural experience demand that those of us who do not breathe in such a lofty stratospheric environment exhibit patience and understanding and restraint and not be utterly fractured, broken at the seams, alone, and hopeless.
There is only one thing that saves someone like me and that is the awareness that you want me fractured, broken, poor, powerless, broken at the seams, alone, and I simply will not in any way, shape, or form, give it to you. You are the enemy and if you think I am the only artist alive who feels that way, you’ve been on the Other Side of the brick wall so long you now assume it is fundamentally the universe.
The key is variety of outlets — arts on television, arts on the radio, arts in the schools, arts in service agencies, arts on the web, arts in the parks, in the streets, in the shopping malls and hotels and restaurants, in museums and galleries, in theaters and civic centers and concert halls and dance halls and public squares, in books and magazines and newspapers, in festivals and conferences, in vacations, road trips, and spas. The arts should be, and in many cases are, all-pervasive. Through an all-pervasive variety of outlets, anyone who is inclined will have the opportunity to participate, consume, or create the arts, regardless of their leisure time capacity.
In addition to maximizing distribution, the other challenge is converting those not so inclined to pursue the arts.
“You all have assistants and staff and gadgets and cash.” <— I don’t. Maybe Tim’s directing his “righteous” anger at the giants who treat the rest of us like bugs but, for the most part, cultural workers like me are just as broke, if not more so, than the artists we serve. And yes, I serve them, I don’t treat them like crap. Time for some anger management, I think. Or at least directing the anger at those who deserve it: politicians who pay lip service to the value of the arts in their cities but who do everything in their power to make sure artists and arts orgs. are penniless and powerless.
Hum. As an artist with a day job as a consultant and lots of contact with “arts manager” types, I’ve managed to survive 17 years in the studio and 25 years consulting by keeping MY perspective. People are people and attitudes are attitudes. It really is up to me to control what I respond to and who I give power over my creative life. Now, I readily acknowledge that is easier said than done. But having sat on both sides of the artist-administrator divide, I have found as many jerks on either side: shallow or narcissistic or venal or whatever. I think the point that Andrew raises has to do with our culture more broadly that even “art.” That’s the power of the story they tell – best of times, worst of times. When I can get out of my reaction, I am (sometimes) able to channel positive and creative energy. That’s how I want to respond to all of that.
Cheers,
Marco