Here’s a final question from my series on The Getty Center convening on leisure trends and cultural organizations: Does the knowledge of dramatic shifts in the lives of your community require you to change what you do? It sounds like an obvious and leading question — of course you do, duh. But I’m not sure it’s that simple.
Several participants at the Getty Center session remarked on the change of tone in the conversation over the past decade. Not so long ago, a conversation among nonprofit and public cultural organizations would have been much more entrenched and less receptive to changing behavior — Change the art? Respond to the market? How dare you even mention it.
But now, even the most entrenched cultural institutions are considering the idea of dramatic and structural change — in their management, outreach, and yes, even in their programming. It’s a refreshing and positive evolution, but as ever, the danger lies in oversimplifying the question.
Should you change the content, context, and process of your cultural work in response to your community? I’d say it actually depends. Artists and organizations that claim to be responsive and community-focused in their mission and marketing materials, and claim a portion of the public purse as a result, have essentially promised to be relevant, and therefore must change. But what about small, focused, innovative, expressive cultural organizations that don’t make such claims and don’t grab such money? Consider all the astounding works of expression that were completely disconnected from their audience when they were born.
There is and will ever be a continual tension between staying true to your voice and being relevant and connected to your audience. I’m thrilled we all seem more ready to explore that tension, and our individual responses to it, but we’ll never make it go away.
The issue of community — and how we change within that community — is one I have to wrestle with every day, and, often, in visceral ways. I am not only a shapeshifter, I am compelled to shape the shifts from institutions that come my way. This includes but is not limited to commercialism. An advertiser might come to me today, but I am not required to necessarily conform my product to their exact specifications because the days of Beaver Cleaver’s mom selling laundry soap are over. Today, you might even have to spend some energy attempting to figure out what I am selling you at all. It’s not a theory for anyone in the Art World who is depended upon by the people who work for them. I don’t have time to chase golden geese that in the end turn out to be to be sterile. The eggs have to be real for me to keep all the disparate ropes tied together that hold down a house for creative enegy to run through. Whether it’s productive or not. It is a house that mostly wants to fly apart in winds of change and change is most definity THE issue especially for them where it’s an animal, both internal and external, that shapes and molds what they do and how they do it. For me, the challenge isn’t the audience; it’s within the creative community I keep the lid on so change itself walks a tightrope between the revolutionary and the conventional.
They’re at war. It is a culture war. Art IS war. There is nothing either quaint or comfortable about it bbecause the real issue is survival.
I have sat in auditoriums where an audience saw films I’ve made and the connections between us were in your face. Publishing does this, too, when it sends writers out on book tours (a dreadful idea). Now, my audience sits at computer terminals all over the planet and I have no idea who they are. They can access my work anytime they want and reciprocity itself has changed and I have had to give up any real dialogue with them beyond 500 words in a comment. In fact, at YouTube we mainly disable comments because they shift our focus away from the work. YouTube is free and our survival is not dependent on the size of the audience. It is dependent on WHO these people are and whether or not they can connect to our abstractions in ways that facilitate them to throw commercial work our way. Your existence is your advertisement. Nevertheless, these are two very different worlds. In one, I’ll put my name on the thing. In the other, I’m willing to sell you designer perfume and my name isn’t anywhere near it nor will it ever be. One supports the other. One brings us work that pays. The other is the work that pays.
There is no one more responsive to change than a whore. Sometimes you’re giving them what they want. Other times, you’re utterly bored with them, and you’re giving them what you want.
As a writer, I was always being told: know your reader. This was patently absurd. Making video, it is even more absurd. I would change all of this around in much the same way technology can turn our world upside down. It isn’t about my being relevant. I am relevant because I am. I exist. It’s about the institutions around me that need to worry about being relevant. The fact that they exist can be ephemeral and they know it.
It is now less relevant for me to be relevant than it ever was. Such dynamics — let us say the power of the critic who is now most likely blogging versus sitting in a cubicle at a newspaper — have been completely turned inside out let alone upside down. Critics just don’t have the gravitas they used to. A review today is nice but it will not symbolize your life or death. The weight for the consumer just isn’t there. How does this translate. To wit: that commercial I’m shooting today probably won’t even mention the “brand” because comparison is the actual mileu and you can be your own critic and you don’t need me to lead you by the nose to choices. The advertiser simply needs me to evoke an environment that symbolizes temptation. Change: it’s minute to minute and from the ground up. It will even seep into institutions like the Getty.
This is not a disjointed rant. The very definition of what is a revolution is changing because institutions themselves are having to change or die. I would suggest that what this goes to is a reality where it is simply NOT me who has to remain steadfastly relevant to the changing needs of an institution but the other way around. If any arts organization is going to survive in this earthquake of an environment, it has to be in one way or another an instrument of change (like any good whore, I want my clients to try other ways) were we are facilitating institutions to be relevant to US, and not entirely the other way around.
It is a two-way-street with a fast lane and a sidewalk for pedestrians. The one way street it used to be has changed paradigms. The arts organization that has become adept at the bow and scrape is doomed. It has to evolve to became that instrument of change or perish because the culture is changing so rapidly, IT is the entity that has no time for the dinosaur. The National Endowment for the Arts has a hidden agenda that speaks to my being relevant to it. My message to them is: until you become relevant to ME, you will always be weaving baskets and making craft. The threads connect. They only seem unrelated. What all of this will be leading to is the total redefinition of what is art.
Art isn’t made by managers. Their more difficult task is to allow their arts organization – whatever art it might serve – to actually respond to current ARTISTS rather than any social trend. Commercials respond to trends. The advertising industry responds to the “market”. An arts organization is fundamentally there to allow art to be presented to the public, if that creation/presentation involves more than the artist can do by him/herself. If the public doesn’t want to see it – let the manager of the arts organization give them entertainment if you can stomach being an entertainment manager. But lets get the categories straight at least.
If we currently have sufficient audiences, ticket buyers and donors, we might not need to change. If not, we might consider adjusting the location, time or length of performances to accommodate changing leisure time patterns.
Much can be done while still maintaining artistic integrity.