Trendwatching.com has yet another useful trend to watch in their report on ”(Still) Made Here.” In brief:
”(STILL) MADE HERE encompasses new and enduring manufacturers and purveyors of the local. In a world that is seemingly ruled by globalization, mass production and ‘cheapest of the cheapest,’ a growing number of consumers are seeking out the local, and thereby the authentic, the storied, the eco-friendly and the obscure.”
The report offers several reasons for the new emphasis on local production. The rising awareness of carbon use is leading many consumers to consider how far their goods and services have traveled (by diesel). The rising homogeneity of global culture is giving new power to place as a unique selling proposition…suits made in Milan, bikes made in Amsterdam, etc. (this dynamic tends to contradict the first, but consumers are fickle). And, finally, local purchasing is becoming a form of advocacy for many communities, who hope to retain local ownership and flavor by forgoing national chains.
For arts and culture organizations — which are so often geographically based — this trend suggests yet another assessment of your organizational voice, your communications strategy, and your inclusion of place in all that you do. Could your symphony be from anywhere? Or are there aspects to your work that are rooted in your specific region? Would a performance by your local professional theater be different than a national tour? If so, say so. If not, why not?
Arts organizations are creatures of place — of the artists, audiences, supporters, and contexts that surround them. This trend reminds us to remind our audience of that important point.
Creatures of place. We were recently asked to do a video on global warming. I should have been the first person to have jumped at it. But the “place” in my head can’t really reconcile humanity as being worth the time or the trouble. As animals who walk this earth, we don’t see the earth as a place or at least one small enough to represent the fact it is the only place we have. Place seems somehow relevant to hope. I don’t have that, and our doing a video on global warming would have been disingenuous. I turned it down. I have no hope that the contribution would have any meaning whatsoever. Place is now this space I share with the people I live and work with. It is not an island, a market niche, or a reservation. If the world is shrinking, it would seem almost like something one could manage. But this is an illusion. One that says the more you are related to the “place” the more relevant (or successful perhaps) your art will be. Authenticity is also an illusion. You are from everywhere because it’s all around you. Place is sometimes, too, the cage.
This is one of the few blogs that has real meat (real issues) to it and makes me think where so many are simply spotlights for egos. Art critics just don’t interest me. But you’ve got me thinking about why I reject “place” as being relevant to what I do.
I made a video a few months ago that captured my feelings about the War in Iraq. It featured an American flag being flushed down a toilet.
There was no outrage. No one really cared but a few people close to me made comments about how knowing me was always trouble.
One viewer on le Tube told me he wantted to do something horrible to the French flag which was interesting because I am not French and could care less.
The loyal connections to a “place” are quite beyond me. I am not connected to any one place and don’t want to be. I am writing this from Shinjuku.
While living on the Mariano Lake school compound on the Navajo Rez, you couldn’t get away from Art being defined by the conventions of place. I wanted to turn all of that upside down and did.
“Art” being extended to the art of writing and the art of writing that goes to place.
And who owns what place.
Terminal creed couched in the vernacular of colonial nostalgia according to essentialist logic, has Indian identity manifested in outward appearance alone. That such manifestly racialist ideas are being expressed illustrates the pervasiveness of the problem that Native people continue to face when it comes to the “place” they have been assigned.
Although many Native scholars and writers are quick to denounce this perception as “myopic,” “bigoted,” “mean-spirited” and “ignorant,” scholars and researchers have long recognized the genocidal logic behind federally imposed blood-quantum requirements, but when Native people themselves continue to use these hegemonic standards to dictate to other Native people who is or is not Native, it is clear that internal colonization continues to be one of the most serious challenges Indian people face if they are to continue to be recognized as unique cultural groups.
If any cultural group is actually unique even if loyalty would suggest so.
In fact, they are neither unique nor a cultural group. They are — like the rest of us — stereotypically portrayed; share 99.9% of the same exact genetic markers all humanity shares. Most “tribes” have genetic markers that can be traced anthropologically and geographically to such disparate locations as Northern Europe and China. Cultural diversity is a cultural mechanism employed to keep people in their social place. It is a phenomenon of politics, class, empire, and the mythology of manifest destiny. Not science.
The myth of cultural diversity is kept alive by second-rate artists, second-rate writers, editors who don’t really fathom the cultural complexity of genetic science, advertisers convinced they’ve found gold within a niche market, politicians and lobbyists who believe they are speaking to segments and fragments that fragment, a public that doesn’t care to admit we are more alike than unalike, and that culture itself is invented by man and not something he is imbued with inherently.
Publishers simply use it — “place” — to make a buck. Art agencies (in the States, the policies of the National Endowment for the Arts in its many tokenisms) are not immune and often need the fantasy of diversity within the context of a “place” to prop up a philosophical and second-rate artistic paradigm that does not scientifically exist. It is simply a convenient fantasy of historical racism disguised as contemporary liberation. It is politically correct. It is used as an illusion of equality. It prevents the dynamics of equality by eliminating the level playing field. It is historical nonsense. It is also a tool of a slow but sure strangulating genocide in its ability to keep people separate (only “special” by their exclusion, not their inclusion) and anything but equal.
Allegiance to a “place” keeps us as artists in that place. I want to see beyond it and I want my work to transcend its limitations.
Andrew, I’ve been thinking something similar. http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2598 points to the notion of relocalization. http://wkkf.org/default.aspx?tabid=75&CID=19&NID=61&LanguageID=0 points to a long-standing program at the Kellogg Foundation to encourage local production of food.
There’s another side effect, too, I think. Page 8ff. of http://jayforrest.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/systevol.pdf points to an emerging idea that mature markets evolve to having roughly (an effective number of) three suppliers for any particular need.
The question becomes how big you want to make the market for music. If it’s a national or global market, driven by recordings, tours, and, to a lesser degree, TV, then you might expect to find a handful of major symphony orchestras across the country (the big five?). If an orchestra or a region works hard at making their market a local one by playing up their unique qualities, their fit with the local environment, and the advantages of hearing live music played by people they can know, then might you be able to get to having roughly three suppliers per region? I don’t know, but it seems to be an intriguing piece of the puzzle.
A Local organization used to mean one cut off from knowing about the world or cut off from larger centres
where “the world” met in universities, large theatres and well appointed concert halls.
Each local is not however equalized and globalized by virtue of being online. One can’t therefore make a general statement about how many arts groups every local can support as though it were numbers of people alone -size of population -that defined the nature or meaning of a local. A local is defined by what creatures are able to grow in its biologically unique environment and be sustained only by its own physical interactions.
If you look at a major large city which appears to support at least three orchestras and numerous galleries
and ballet companies etc, what you probably are really seeing is a city probably made up of dozens of local places like small villages or neighbourhoods grown together, and its residents all able to travel to the major performing halls, galleries and schools in an hour or so. What supports the best International level organizations -of which there are usually only one of each kind if you actually look carefully- is the highly educated elite of each local neighbourhood.
So the truth of arts support is not one of numbers of people whether small or large but of what kinds of local neighbourhoods a city or a rural region has.
Do all the neighbourhoods in a large city ethnically share the same cultural values and create the same sorts of cultural elites who support their major arts organizations? An interesting question might be what is the arts result in large cities of a multi-cultural immigration policy which has created neighbourhoods of non-western nations which don’t value western arts? We have larger populations today than 30 years ago and often even wealthier, but it hasn’t resulted in more support for western live arts. Do we differ from the States in our neighbourhoods’ homogenaity or lack of it?