I’m cruising (okay, okay, more like trudging) through the end of next week’s blogger book club book: The Invisible Dragon, by Dave Hickey. I’ve found it to be a great read, brimming with ideas I want to try out in the context of music, but it’s also been a challenge. There are a considerable number of visual art scene insider references and grad-school vocabulary words. Seriously, it’s really only at times like these that I think I may have missed out by passing on getting an advanced degree. I haven’t done a lot of reading or argument analysis in this style of rhetoric, as the pace at which I have consumed this slim 120-page volume attests.
Still, Hickey’s thinking has brought out some interesting concepts that I’m greatly looking forward to exploring with the gang next week. I’ll give you a taste of what we’re in for with this quote from the book’s final essay (One of the more easily digestible ones, promise):
As Americans, we are citizens of a large, secular, commercial democracy; we are relentlessly borne forth on the flux of historical change, routinely flung laterally by the exigencies of dreams and commerce. We are bereft of the internalized commonalities of race, culture, language, region, and religion that traditionally define “peoples.” As such we are social creatures charged with inventing the conditions of our sociability out of the fragile resource of our private pleasures and secret desires. So, lacking the terms for communication, we correlate. We gather around icons from the worlds of fashion, sports, the arts, and entertainment as we would about the hearth. We trace infinite lines of transit around these strange attractors. We organize ourselves in nonexclusive communities of desire. We stay or go according to the whims of romance or the climate of the times. This “weather map” model of social organization may be construed as beguiling or appalling, but there us no denying its efficacy, its appropriateness, or its provenance.
Okay, yeah, obviously. But still, isn’t that a concept that our average audience expansion and development initiatives in the arts seem never to have fully acknowledged/integrated? Enjoyed, when it happens for them, sure, but not really taken advantage of or (successfully, artificially) engineered. Maybe it can’t be, but something about The Bachelorette still being on the air makes me think it can.
I agree that it is possible but I don’t believe the arts are ready to make it happen. The decades-old marketing model we use is rigidly linear and top-down. We package our messages (usually into neat rectangles), place them in media and send them to the public.
But this model calls for a fluid, immersive, holistic, flexible, non-linear approach that has no hierarchy, no defined shape and no ‘direct lines of communication.’
Until we’re ready to live in this messy, erratic, impulsive, fleeting, populist world and learn to use its own intrinsic energy to nudge and cajole it (I don’t think engineering is the right metaphor), we’re probably not going to coalesce the communities of desire we think we deserve.