This week I report to you live from the National Performing Arts Convention in Denver. In many ways, conferences such as this one are a time for reflection on the big picture, away from the nitty gritty details of everyday office life. That said, I don’t think I have shut up since 7 a.m., so I am seriously doubting how well I am reflecting. It seems like every time you turn around here there’s some amazing new person to talk to, and it’s hard to stop.
I did lock it down long enough to take in some great thoughts (yes, other people’s thoughts) today, however. Anna Deavere Smith took the mic during the opening session to speak about why the institutionalization of art can be a dangerous beast, why “public” is not a dirty word, and why we might do well to reconsider our architecture. She got my mind churning.
1. Beware the well-organized closet: Are we really looking for art to come from the reasonable man? Smith suggested that she’d rather engage with the foolish person, and I see her point. Sure, it’s a crazy, messy business, but when artists are all toeing the line, isn’t that really and definitively The End? In an age when the Fourth Estate is slacking in its duties, can we afford the comfortable, centralized, sanctioned artist?
2. Somewhere along the way, public art got perceptually aligned in the public conscience with the public toilet. Smith didn’t go much further here, but it’s not hard to see what the implications are. Art designed for use by and engagement with the public is not the 8th sin but the 9th wonder. No need to hold your nose.
3. We need tents not stone buildings. Art is not General Electric, and we need to value mobility into the community over perceptions of grandeur. The image of the gilded hall loomed large in my mind at this point in the talk. Are we artists, or are we bankers? What were our goals when it came to audience perception that led to how we present it, and what should our goals be? How do we realign?
And so that was an hour of thinking here in Denver. Three more days to go. I’ll try to start talking a little less and typing a little more.
Oh how I wish I were in Denver!
I think that it is always important to remember that writing and playing music are both individual forms of expression and collective forms of expression.
The important stuff happens in the air of a performance space, and not in its walls. Still, for the people for whom going to a concert is “a night out,” they want to be reminded by some kind of “stone building” that what they are hearing is indeed “good.”
Many people in the “great audience” that lies west of New York are skeptical of anything new. They lack the experience as listeners to listen with an open mind. (Just listen to an intermission conversation in any “public” bathroom of a concert that has “newer” music on the first half.) They need to be assured that a piece of new music is written by an “important” composer.