In the financial crash of ten years ago, the S&P 500 lost almost 60 percent of its value. Millions of people lost their houses and jobs. Entire industries – banking, cars, airlines, housing — were on the verge of collapse. And yet, if you had wealth, you probably did fine. More than fine actually. For some the crash was a huge opportunity.
The auto and banking industries got bailouts, and within a few years were thriving. Numerous industries figured out how to restructure and emerge stronger. If you had invested in the S&P at the bottom of the market in March 2009, you would have six times your investment as of last Friday. If you’d bought stock in Amazon.com at $73.44 that March, you’d have seen your investment increase 40-fold to more than $3000 a share.
Crises have a way of making those who have the means to invest fabulously richer, even while they crush those who are marginal or who live on the edge. The gap between rich and poor has never been as wide as it is now. Bernie Sanders said this week that 467 American billionaires have so far made $731 billion more between March 8 and August 5, “a period in which 5.4 million Americans recently lost their health insurance and 50 million applied for unemployment insurance.”
But it isn’t just about more money. Healthy industries and companies recognize crises as opportunities. They rethink how they operate and use it to fix longstanding problems, reinvent, shed things which haven’t been working, identify new opportunities and pursue them. They can do this not just because they have wealth, but because the larger infrastructures in which they work are set up to support and reward their investment.
Many corners of the arts have still not recovered from the financial crisis ten years ago. While banking and other industries used that downturn to advantage, the arts were forced to downsize and struggle along with millions of displaced homeowners and unemployed workers. Survival came at a cost; infrastructure was damaged for the long term and even after a decade many arts organizations and artists are in even worse position to survive a crisis than they were then.
The COVID shutdown is a massively bigger crisis than the last one, one that will continue for at least the next year and threaten the survival of much of the sector. Assistance so far has focused on survival, on propping up, but the needs so outstrip resources that an already impoverished arts infrastructure is being further damaged for the long run. Even when operations become viable again, it is likely to be under further reduced circumstances. And the amount of artistic talent that has been laid off and likely won’t return is enormous.
Many in the arts continue to be Restorationists, hoping to ride out the crisis until “things get back to normal.” Even the Opportunists who recognize the need to reinvent or who sense the possibilities of new opportunity seem to be stuck for specifics or plans for achieving them.
The crisis has exposed gaping weaknesses in our infrastructure. But in contemplating recovery, does it make sense to just hang on and try to rebuild inevitably lesser versions of systems that already were failing?
I think not.
And yet, while artists and arts organizations scramble to survive, there are heroic efforts by funders to help, and attempts to plead with lawmakers for bailouts or for some sort of a new WPA-style public artworks program. I wonder though if we’re missing an opportunity to address longstanding problems which have hobbled the arts in good times and proven debilitating in bad. The shutdown has suspended usual rules, positions and behaviors, suggesting there may be opportunities to not just rethink but take action.
So I want to suggest five places to start, and I’ll follow up with more specific ideas on each in subsequent posts.
Five Reforms:
- Business models
- Technology
- Equity
- Institutions
- Leadership
- Business Models
There is no one business model for the arts, but most of the models have been broken for years. The non-profit model was designed to generate working capital but has increasingly fallen behind in doing so. The for-profit model has been under stress as the internet helped separate the ability to access art from the need to pay for it. Artists themselves have been squeezed worst of all – our funding mechanisms are primarily designed for institutions and corporate industries at a time when traditional institutions and industries are falling behind in the digital economy.
Though many artists move easily back and forth between models, the non-profit and for-profit institutional worlds largely eye one another with suspicion as if they were of different species. The movie, TV and commercial music and design business models have reinvented numerous times, but the digital revolution has hollowed out the meat of many commercial industries.
The non-profit model has lurched from crisis to crisis. There is little risk capital or R&D. The dwindling lists of funders and donors have way too much control over what gets made and how. Non-profit arts are too commodity-based, and many arts institutions have become lumbering, self-absorbed, self-interested and uncreative. Not because they’re run by bad people, but out of the necessity of survival. Efforts required to keep the lights on, funders happy, and box office humming (and with no room for failure), make it little surprise that core missions take a back seat to survival and sustainability, which are the measures of success.
What to do? We need a significant new politically-insulated stable source of cultural funding. We need to disaggregate and networkize the arts sector (rather than consolidate, as some are calling for). We need to break down barriers between non- and for-profit models. And we need to invest in and develop virtual platforms and technology that both enhance arts experiences and make them accessible to broader audiences.
- Technology
The arts have always been driven by technology. Technology drove musical instrument design, how theatres were conceived and how books were published. Our audiences are the product of technology – our relationships to screens, the intimacy (or lack of it) in theatres, the ability to make, discover, access, consume and share art.
And yet, because there is so little R&D for technology in the arts, our technology infrastructure is weak. Sure – we can kinda sorta make virtual platforms and services work okay. It’s functional (if we’re lucky). But the current state of technology is way beyond that. Big tech companies understand that making tech platforms alluring makes people want to use them and come back. Big tech companies have invested billions in trying to understand user behavior and create interfaces that aren’t just functional, but addictive. Little of that is reflected in arts tech platforms.
Meanwhile, we still don’t have a decent listings service that can easily sort through what’s on tonight. It wasn’t until last year that music recording databases made classical music searchable in an almost usable way. Our commerce platforms for the arts are clunky and awkward to use, and at a time when technology has captured the popular imagination, innovation in arts lags.
Moreover, increasing use of algorithms to push/influence audience choice is narrowing aesthetic taste and making it more difficult to reach new audiences. And dependence on social media has put arts organizations at the mercy of companies who are not transparent about how posts are spread. There’s no single solution or magic bullet, but in a world increasingly shaped by technology, the arts are falling increasingly behind. - Equity
The structures of our cultural institutions were created to serve a different time and different ideals. They are built as temples to hierarchies – artistic, social, financial and political — and merely letting more or different groups of people have seats at the table to participate in the same systems of hierarchies doesn’t make them more equitable. We’ll have to change the structures if we want to increase equity. - Institutions
One way of framing the digital revolution is as a challenge to institutions. Disruptive digital technologies have upended institutions by being more nimble and building on the power of dynamic networks that can scale quickly up or down. Traditional institutions locked into staffing, buildings and overhead are at a disadvantage in trying to compete. Though some parts of the creative sector such as the movie and commercial music industries have gone through business cycles of consolidation and divestment, the non-profit institutional models are essentially unchanged over the past 60 years.
Artistic and mission objectives are often in conflict with structural survival and top-down institutional models seem out of tune with the times. As the economy has shut down and along with it, performances and exhibitions, there is an opportunity to rethink the structures of our institutions. Hotel chains don’t own their buildings anymore. Should theatres own theirs? Big brands don’t run their own marketing; they outsource. Should orchestras? Some are suggesting that our institutions consolidate to survive. But maybe now is a time of smart, networkized disaggregation instead? - Leadership
Nothing has exposed leadership issues like responses to the pandemic shutdown. What is the old saying – when the going gets tough the tough get going? Artsjournal has been full of stories these past several months about artists and organizations rising to the challenge and figuring out how to do their work. Many say they have learned things that will change and improve the ways they work forever.
But there are also institutions — including some of the biggest — which simply shut down, laid off their workers and then appealed for donations to help them survive.
If you think of yourself as a product, a venue, a transaction, and everything shuts down, then you do too. If you’re an idea, you understand that now is an even more important time to find ways to lead. There’s nothing wrong with being a product, a venue, a transaction, but the arts have tried to make the case that they are more than that, that artists build community and are deserving of public investment. Now is the time to prove it.
Moreover — to think of the period we’re in now as merely a time to get through until things resume is an abrogation of leadership. Remember what happens during crises to those who can only survive? Right now experimentation is not a frill, it’s an opportunity to learn. Audiences have great tolerance for experimenting right now because nothing is normal. To not use this time to make yourself stronger and better and learn as much as you can is a failure of leadership. As choreographer Mark Morris put it this spring: “the idea that you’re waiting to come back to your life — I’m sorry everybody: This is your life.”
I’ll follow up this week and next with ideas in each of these categories.
Photo by Ivan Vranić on Unsplash
A few thoughts:
1. The for-profit and non-profit worlds are fundamentally different, so attempts to say the arts world should orient itself toward the marketplace is mistaken. Your suggestion fits with the neoliberal idea that the market (i.e. relatively unmitigated capitalism) should be the model of almost all human endeavor, but the idea is becoming increasingly discredited.
2. Corporate capitalism is not only built to constantly change and adapt, but to even actively destroy the past, hence the term “disaster capitalism, which is yet another mainstay of neoliberalism. The arts non-profits, however, work not only to develop new kinds of art, they also has the specific purpose of maintaining a canon that has existed for about 7000 years in the visual arts, about 2500 in theater, and about a 1000 in music. We only need to look at the effects Hollywood and its ethos of the lowest common denomenator had on the live performance of theater and music to see that the corporate/capitalist model can actually be a part of cultural destruction. This is recognized and compensated for in every developed country in the world except the USA.
3. The current pandemic has not changed the problems in the arts world, it has only exacerbated them. The arts have made massive use of technology, but this technology has by nature replicated the same disadvantages the arts in the USA have always had.
4. The USA has a far worse problem with equity in the arts because it is the only developed country in the world without comprehensive systems of public arts funding. Germany, for example, initiated a $50 billion dollar relief fund solely for the cultural sector. The arts are faring far better there because people know that they are fundamental different than the for-profit world. (By the same measure, the Europeans are appalled at the American handling of the pandemic in general.)
5. The arts need brick and mortor institutions. Germany has 83 full time year round opera houses. The USA has zero. Even the Met only has a 7 month season. San Francisco and Chicago just barely half year seasons. Most opera companies work with pickup musicians in rental facilities and with the resulting mediocrity. You get what you pay for.
6. In Europe, leadership knows that the so-called fine arts need public funding systems. I do not know of a single higher level administrator of an actual arts institution in the USA vocally advocating for public funding of the arts as exists in every other developed country in the world. We are leaderless because the American political system does not have a left wing. It was purged between about 1940 to 1970. Americans live in denial of this obvious reality.
It is unfortunate to see the promotion of a vague sort of neoliberal disaster capitalism on ArtsJournal.. As if a radicalized form of capitalism and a political system with no left could somehow properly deal with a pandemic. I guess one needs to have lived in Europe for the last 40 years as I have to see the difference. On the positive side, Bernie Sanders, who you mention, has awakened more Americans than I thought possible. Maybe there’s hope yet.
Oh my. I’m afraid you didn’t read very carefully.
I didn’t make a single neo-liberal argument. The marketization of the arts has been a disaster. It’s not a neoliberalism to suggest that both the non- and for-profit models for the arts have largely failed to keep up. I mean to suggest that we take this moment of disruption to consider different ways of supporting creativity and the arts – including different business models.
I’m not suggesting that the current pandemic has presented these as new problems. The problems I’m suggesting have long been issues (as I stated). This disruption, however, offers an opportunity to consider solutions which might have been unthinkable only eight months ago. We should take advantage of the opportunity to explore.
Your comment about equity being tied to funding a la Germany’s model seems very wrong-headed in the American context. In the US equity is of course affected by funding, but not primarily so. It is about the power to have voice and representation in our cultural institutions. Bottom-up influence. Europe’s cultural institutions are much more top-down and have their own issues.
About institutions: I’m not in favor of doing away with institutions, but we need more flexible and nimble models, and it’s no accident that some of the best creativity out there now comes from small groups using very different organizational models. You keep trying to prove your argument with quantity. So what if Germany has 83 full time opera houses! Different culture, different ways of producing culture.
America has no left wing? Interesting. Every arts administrator I know is out there advocating for more funding. The American system is just different. In some ways it works better, and in other ways not. In Seattle, where I live, we have a progressive city council and our culture is very much on the left. It hasn’t resulted in a windfall of cultural funding.
It’s difficult to defend American competence in the Trump era, with his assault on American institutions – particularly as witnessed by the response to the virus. But surely the longer arc of American leadership (and competence) also needs to be acknowledged. The failure of institutions isn’t only happening here – it’s also happening across Europe and the rest of the world. Which is why, as I wrote, we need to look at the ways our institutions are organized and figure out if there are better ways to make them successful.
William – every single argument you and I have had over the years comes down at some point to your citing the number of opera houses in Germany, as though this is the ultimate gold standard for culture. Perhaps it is for you if you want to make it so, but your dismissal of American culture because the political realities here are different essentially invalidates the arguments you’re trying to make. The culture here is different. It’s clear you neither understand it nor have interest in diagnosing it except to say that it doesn’t have 83 full time opera houses and case closed.
Your comment reflects how strongly neoliberal philosophy is established in the States. People espouse its values without realizing they are doing so. It’s simply become normative. Without consciously trying, you’ve espoused a sort of neoliberal disaster capitalism in the arts. Let destruction be an opportunity to shift things to new business models, using as a model and example the successes corporate America has had exploiting a pandemic. unmitigated capitalism. The ethos of neoliberal disaster capitalism is there for all to see in plain writing. Or at least those not in denial.
I’m not sure on what basis you generalize that Europe’s cultural system is controlled more from the top. In Europe, people get to vote for their top cultural administrators, and for the politicians who hire them. Europeans have a say that Americans don’t have.
One also sees this equity in the demographics of arts attendance. Class dichotomies are not so marked. For one thing, ticket prices for classical music are generally about a quarter or third of what they are in the States. And public funding allows for far more cultural institutions close by. And far better and more comprehensive educational programs.
Yes, Germany has 83 full time opera houses and the USA has zero. It’s not a different way of producing culture, but simply a neglect of culture. Let’s stop calling the sinking Titanic a swimming party.
Name one example and give documentation of even one American high level national level arts administrator who has made public arts funding a central and clearly asserted part of his or her work. I’d love to know who these phantom people are. I fear you won’t be able to give any clear examples.
It strikes me that Americans don’t even know what a left wing is by international standards. And how could they. Such parties are not present in our government. If Seattle were a European city, it would have a full time opera house and about three or four full time orchestras. And with comparable numbers for ALL the other performing arts. (Not just opera.) That’s what public funding does. Americans can’t even comprehend it. And sadly, arts journalists like you tell us that’s just something American and that we should just accept it.
I don’t see European arts institutions failing. Please provide some documentation for such a general assertion. The claim is a trope of neoliberalism which at every turn tries to discredit Europe’s public funding systems for the arts so it can further its arguments of small government and privatization. In the process, they just make things up and even intelligent and relatively well-informed people like you begin to believe it. So please ground your assertion with some documentation. Tell us about Europe’s failing cultural life with some hard, documented facts.
I mention opera houses simply as one clear example, but if that’s not enough, let’s take orchestras. Germany has 133 full time, year round orchestras owned and operated by the state. The USA has about 16 full time year round orchestras for four times the population. Even if one added in our 9 month season orchestras the number comes to about a fourth or fifth the number Germany has per capita. There are similar comparative numbers for ALL genres of the arts, not just opera, so don’t make that specious argument.
Or we can simply look at the numbers for cultural spending per capita. The NEA spends about 50 cents per capita on the arts. When the sums paid by states and localities are included the amount comes to about $3.60 per capita. Private funding for the arts comes to about $26. Public and private funding combined come to about $30 per capita.
By comparison Austria spends $324 per capita, Denmark $374, Norway $667, Germany $146, Italy $147, and Netherlands $333. The average for these countries is $331 – 11 times higher than American spending, both public and private.
And the numbers for pandemic relief for the arts blow the USA even further out of the water. Germany has spend $50 billion.
Or we can look at orchestral bankruptcies. In recent years the orchestras in San Diego, Miami, Kansas City, Albuquerque, Syracuse, Tulsa, San Antonio, New Orleans, Denver, San Jose, Colorado Springs, Honolulu, Miami, and Philadelphia declared bankruptcy. Many more are in continual financial trouble. There is nothing comparable to this in Europe. (And no, the closures in Germany after the wall came down do not compare. East Germany had a large excess of orchestras as part of its communist system, and there were also redundancies created when orchestras only a few miles apart were no longer separated by the wall. But as always, neoliberals jumped on these closrues to distort the truth and make the false claim that Germany’s arts funding system was in trouble. They were flat out lying.
So I’m afraid, Doug, the questions I raise remain open however much you want to close them. It’s exactly the American denial I mentioned. To solve this, you should begin by trying to be more factual and document your claims, especially as a noted arts journalist.
Perhaps it is implied in your article, but I also believe we also need to address the broken relationship between art makers and audiences. Quite often I feel, both as a performing artist and as an audience member, that we tend to make art that preaches to the choir. According to the 2017 NEA Survey of Participation in the Arts, barely half (53%) of all Americans attended at least one performing arts event, the most popular being an outdoor performing arts festival at 24%. Musicals clock in at 16.5%, non-musicals at 9.4%. Other art forms are similarly dismal. Art makers need to repair their relationships with their audience members by becoming more deeply embedded into local communities and not only creating art more attuned to their community’s needs, but also to help their community members make art themselves. Until we stop this mad rush of artists concentrating in three urban areas looking for fame, recognition, and fortune, we will never achieve a holistic sense of art in this culture. Thank you.
As long as we have a system of arts funding by and for the wealthy, the arts will remain concentrated in the few financial centers where the wealthy are concentrated.
I could care less about opera houses, when independent venues for any sort of live performance are being shuttered by ongoing overhead expenses in a period of no income from attendees. And of course these being for-profit venues, they are not supported by private philanthropies or public funds, legislation like ENCORES, the Restart act, and the #SaveOurStages initiative is designed to address this problem, but await passage.
But the greater problem which Doug alludes to is that our funding mechanisms focus on institutions and businesses rather than networks of activity generated by individual artists, presenters, and attendant actors in the arts ecosystem. My personal hobbyhorse is arts journalism – and as far as I can tell there is zero interest/ability to guide pandemic-fighting resources to the typically small publishers, individual writers, photographers, broadcasters, videographers, producers, promoters, online platform creators who make up that arts-enabling sector. We remain beneath the radar that spotlights the need for societal support.
An American who could care less about opera. Gee, I’m surprised. And never mind that the numbers for opera directly correlate with funding for all of the performing arts in the EU, and at all sizes and levels of institutions. Virtually every city has funding set aside for small institutions. The funding for these institutions, and their numbers dwarf the situation in the USA.
And as for jazz, the situation in Europe is better since jazz clubs benefit from the same funding sources. The last full time non-military big band in the USA ceased to exist decades ago, but countries like Germany, France, and Italy all continue to have full time big bands owned and operated by the public radio networks. In Germany, they have been under attack and some have been moved to private contracting models as a response to American neoliberalsm’s ethos of privatization.
We should also note that so much of American jazz’s history during the 60s up to about 2000 would have been lost if European public radios hadn’t made recordings and video of their work for broadcast. They institutions essentially stepped in for American neglect.
But of course, all of these hard facts will be denied in order to rationalize American exceptionalism.
America is exceptional – it is a market, not a society. A good chunk of the public does not care if their neighbors live or die. A substantial fraction of those would dance on the graves. There was substantial resistance to improving access to health care before COVID, public investment in education has been on the ropes for decades, and any attempt to improve infrastructure is met with threats of insurrection. Are these people going to flock to cultural institutions small, medium, or large all of a sudden?
If by some miracle the arts get any public money, that money will be co-opted just like the recent stimulus packages have benefitted the few already-haves at the expense of the many have-nots. Technology will only make problems worse unless there is serious thinking about how to make it a means and not an end. Every cable channel initially focused on education or culture has been diverted to pandering to the lowest common denominator. Every bit of tech that makes metrics possible has been redirected to making them mandatory. Doctors and artists alike spend more time typing than they do practicing medicine or craft.
And, I am with Howard Mandel. I like symphonic and chamber music, I attend and support live theatre to the extent that I can but you could not pay me to set foot in an opera.
A good summation of the problems the USA faces. We can solve our problems because our political system is truncated and dysfunctional. And I also understand what you’re saying about opera. Within about 150 years of its first conception by the Florentine Camerata, it became so buried in a preoccupation with the bel canto voice that it became a travesty of itself. It is little wonder that Americans have lost the taste for it. (Or is it that the loss has been socially engineered by a radical form of capitalism?) If there were any country that could fix the problems with opera and create successful new visions for the genre it would be America. How sad that our crippled society can’t meet the wonderful challenges and opportunities the arts in the 21st century present.
But of course, the topic here isn’t opera. It is how to approach the current crisis in the arts. No classical music environment can be fully functional and healthy without an adequate representation of opera. In many respects, it has been the foundation and driving force of classical music for centuries. Every new era, renaissance, baroque, classical, romantic, and modern was for the most part initiated by new developments in opera. Montiverdi, Gluck, Mozart, Weber, Wagner, and Berg are just a few striking examples. Opera creates and defines the eras. Putting music to the portrayal of human life itself is the fertile ground from which most of the most important classical music ideas have evolved. How exciting it would be if the American mind were fully unleashed in this endeavor.
But alas, we must solve the problems Doug articulates so well before we can really begin.
that should be “can’t solve”
“And I also understand what you’re saying about opera. ”
No, I don’t think you do. Opera addresses a small set of problems of an even smaller set of people and mucks that up with a lot of infernal singing. It is more than adequately represented, your protestations of “It’s better in Germany” notwithstanding.
Robert Ashley, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Davis, George Gershwin, Philip Glass, Larry Harlow, Jerome Kern, George Lewis, Frank Loesser, Stephen Sondheim, Virgil Thompson, I wish I could think of women besides my ex=’s projects like Hildigurls produced by American Opera Projects — the work has already begun.
The funding for opera in Europe correlates to all of the performing arts, and all of the other arts, and at all levels and sizes of institutions.
And BTW, support for jazz is also better in Europe including a good number of full time radio big bands. There hasn’t been a full time non-military big band in the USA in decades even though it could be seen as the quintessential American art form. (The budget for military bands is three times higher than the entire NEA’s.)
But never mind, all of this will be buried under the rationalizations of American exceptionalism.
I see you’ve edited your remark, but I didn’t write that I don’t care about opera — I wrote that I don’t care about opera HOUSES. Opera HOUSES, Orchestra HALLS, and other real estate-burdened institutions as well as European-heritage art forms (“classical” music, ballet) have received the bulk of cultural funding from the US gov’t to the detriment (IMHO) of American-born art forms that have relied on market forces, or survived regardless of them.
And Mr. Osborne, you are wrong about there being no “full time non-military big band in the USA in decades.” We might argue about “full-time” but there are many big bands that have performed and recorded, such as the currently active Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, Maria Schneider’s Jazz Orchestra, Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Arturo O’Farrill’s Afro-Latin Jazz Orchestra, the Sun Ra Arkestra, DIVA, the Count Basie Orchestra led by Scotty Barnhart, MONK’estra, Orbert Davis’ Chicago Jazz Philharmonic, the Chicago Jazz Orchestra (formerly Jazz Members Big Band) led by Jeff LIndberg, the now-defunct Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, Creative Music Studio Orchestra led by Karl Berger, Eddie Palmieri’s orchestra, Tito Puente’s, and so on. Seek and ye shall find. Of course the culture has changed a lot since the Swing Era, and most Americans no longer dance to such ensembles, just as most people no longer go to opera because it’s the most grandiose entertainment imaginable and available..
I don’t believe in America First exceptionalism, but I believe we have a different history of the arts than Europe. It strikes me — tell me if I’m wrong — that national support for the arts in Europe derives from the history of royal patronage there, which we’ve never had. Our “royals” – uber-capitalists – put their money into buildings bearing their names. It saddens me there is so little support for indigenous American art forms in this country, but I don’t look to the government to provide it, I hope for audiences to be drawn to it because it speaks to something deep in the attendees. Despite governmental support, the local jazz scenes in European cities and fests I’ve been to over the past 20 or so years (London, Leeds, Berlin, Ponta Delgada Portugal, Budapest, Yerevan, Kiev, Tampere Finland) seldom seems as deeply embedded in or ;directly speaking to the local population as what I’ve found in Chicago, New York, Boston, New Orleans, San Francisco, Portland OR, Minneapolis, Philadelphia or Washington DC. despite or due to little or no direct gov’t funding.
Thank you for these interesting thoughts. Yes, we have some igreat big bands, but none of them are full time. Even LCJO works with temporary contracts even if they use a regular group of players. Europe’s full time radio big bands offer a stark contrast in how the arts are supported, and what full time groups can achieve that temp groups can’t.
Another aspect of Europe’s radio big bands is that they can do more experimental things on a regular basis because they aren’t so bound by a profit margin. Sun Ra might be an exception, but just that, an exception. And I think he could have done a lot more with a better support structure.
The EU bands also provide huge forums and publics for some of America’s best jazz artists that are all but unobtainable in the USA. Here’s just one of countless videos for national television that the West German Radio Big Band has made:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ0QxE2Pbxw
There are about five or so full time radio big bands left in Germany, down from about a dozen, since as I mentioned, they are under attack by neoliberal economic policies.
It’s true that the Europeans don’t have anywhere near the connections to jazz that we do. (It takes, for example, a while to get used to jazz sounds and nuances that sound a bit like Tirolian folk music…) But for me, that is why we should be strongly supporting with public funding this most American of art forms. Just when Stan Kenton, for example, was opening up entirely new worlds, the whole thing collapsed. It was an incredible loss.
And it’s true that feudalistic patronage was the historical basis for the European arts. With the rise of cultural nationalism in the 19th century and the establishment of national republics, the state took over these functions. Meanwhile, the capitalistic neo-aristocracy in the USA assumed a sort of feudalistic form of arts funding that we still use today which is deely anachronistic, but we lack the political choices to change this.
Up into the 1930s, orchestras and opera companies in the USA still had very large audiences including people in their 20s and 30s. (There are interesting articles with the numbers.) Most every bigger city had an opera house or even two. Due to the popularity of opera they could even be run as commercial enterprises.
With the rise of the mass media, classical music was marginalized not long after WWII. Boston even tore down its huge opera house to make way for a parking lot. Countless cities let their opera houses fall to ruin. Philadelphia and Detroit have recently renovated their houses, but like the opera house at Kennedy Center, they remain little used for opera and remain general purpose venues.
Europeans, by contrast, took measures to preserve the so-called fine arts and not simply surrender our range of choices to the marketplace. I think we need to do the same. And if it were my choice, jazz, and especially big bands, would be first on the list. Nothing is more American than a big band. As we saw with the New Deal arts programs, arts funding can be deeply and quintessentially American.
“Meanwhile, we still don’t have a decent listings service that can easily sort through what’s on tonight.”
This is a solved problem. The Schema.org vocabulary, which is licensed under the Creative Commons, provides a machine-readable protocol for any kind of arts happening. Here’s MusicEvent:
https://schema.org/MusicEvent
If artists and organizations were publishing announcements with the appropriate markup, an aggregator could scoop them up and we would have wonderful automated listings. But they don’t, so there’s nothing to aggregate. This is to your point that “because there is so little R&D for technology in the arts, our technology infrastructure is weak.” In fact an enormous amount of work has been done for us already and the would-be beneficiaries don’t have the initiative to adopt it.
I know how to write that aggregator. I don’t know how to solve the initiative problem. If anyone has ideas, please reach out.
But I wonder whether we’re in a broader crisis than is being entertained overhead. The cities have provided us with most of our culture, and it’s not clear that you can sustain a modern city given current conditions of economic lockdown and disdain for lawful order. Cuomo is begging wealthy New Yorkers to return from their retreats even as homicides in the city are on track to exceed the numbers of 2018 and 2019 combined. Chicagoans looted the Magnificant Mile last night. Portland just marked its 73rd night of mayhem. At one point a chunk of downtown Seattle was attempting to secede from the Union. Et cetera. Add to all this, 62% of the populace feels afraid to share their views in public because of the political climate, as one recent study found. “Smart, networkized disaggregation” of the arts may have to route around the foundering urban centers and lack of a sense of shared humanity. In that case, maybe a listings aggregator isn’t the right thing to work on.
I look forward to your upcoming posts.
Doug:
I want to thank you very much for the ongoing service to the Sector that artsjournal.com provides and particularly this post. On a ZoomConference last week, a well-respected leader in the field reflected that gathering closely packed in concert halls might be a thing of the past. That it’s time to imagine what our future(s) of five and ten years from now might look like.
Your insight: “If you think of yourself as a product, a venue, a transaction, and everything shuts down, then you do too. If you’re an idea, you understand that now is an even more important time to find ways to lead.” is particularly valuable today. It is time for leadership, both of our field, and also the leadership our field can provide for our nation.
I also just read your stirring post about what I would describe as our “collective complicity” that added to the “populism (I don’t think that’s the correct word) of Trump supporters”.
I encourage you to keep observing, thinking and writing. Hopefully action will follow.
Oh dear, the pandemic will become the first permanent one in human history, so concert halls are a thing of the past. So let’s jump in with disaster capitalism and think of new ways of pushing the arts into the marketplace which is so flexible and creative and has no need of a historical canon. The hidden agenda: When there’s no financial support and no education, creative destruction is proposed as the new norm and the way forward. Neoliberalism wins.
Thank you, Doug. Your words are Insightful and appropriately provocative, and much needed right now.
Many of us appreciate you helping us to think this through,
Keep it coming!
Frank Byrne
I think it might help overall if people considered the narrowness of our political spectrum and how this affects our systems of arts support.
Below is the political platform of Jill Stein when she was the Green Party presidential candidate. These 18 points (or analogous situations) are standard practices in almost all of Europe. The Green Party has ruled my state in Germany, (Baden-Wurttemberg) for about the last 15 years. A ruling Green Party in any state is unthinkable in the USA, hence the idea that we have no political left wing.
1. Cut U.S. military spending by at least 50%
2. Increase taxes on areas such as speculation in stock markets, offshore tax havens, and multimillion-dollar real estate.
3. Nationalize the Federal Reserve and place it within the Treasury Department instead being managed by the big banks
4. Raise taxes on the wealthy
5. Creation of sustainable infrastructure based in clean renewable energy generation and sustainable communities principles
6. Increasing intra-city mass transit and inter-city railroads
7. Creating ‘complete streets’ that safely encourage bike and pedestrian traffic
8. Regional food systems based on sustainable organic agriculture.
9. Lowering unemployment: (Says real unemployment is 10%)
10. Cancelling all student debt – she says 43 million young people are trapped in predatory student loan debt
11. Opposition to school privatization.
12. Transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030.
13. National ban on fracking.
14. Elimination of nuclear energy which she says is dirty, dangerous and expensive
15. Ukraine should be neutral and that the United States should not arm Ukraine. She says United States helped foment a coup in Ukraine.
16. Pardoning Edward Snowden. She says she will put him on her Cabinet if elected President.
17. Repeal of the Affordable Care Act , replacing it with a “Medicare-for-All” healthcare system.
18. Stop “agri-business” for their advertisements which encourage unhealthy eating