Why not just increase funding? Maybe the N.E.A. is outdated and should be replaced by another system for funding the arts in the United States. Or maybe the people who are running the N.E.A. should be replaced.
It's a wonder that Mr Miller hasn't been given the Nobel Prize for economics with thinking like that. Nobody wants your product? Can't get an audience for your play even if you went outside and collected them at gunpoint? Then demand that the government increase your subsidies. Great thinking at any time, but in the middle of a recession when the very existence of government art bureaucracies are coming under the gun (*Cough* Pull the trigger. *Cough*)? Brilliant. Right up there with starting a land war in Asia or going against a Sicilian when death is on the line.I'm not surprised by any of this. When I was involved in theatre I was staggered at how few people understood the first thing about business. Money to them was a bourgeois convention that got in the way of their mission to enlighten the masses. Charge enough on the tickets to cover costs? Put enough of a mark up on the concessions to make a profit? Put on a play that someone other than your other actor friends would come to see? Get a licence to sell alcohol? Don't be ridiculous. They thought they were all serious "artists" and that they would be subsidised by ravens fluttering in clutching £20 notes in their beaks. If not that, then the government would step in and hand them other people's money to put on a play that the other people didn't want to see in the first place. And when they did get a grant, they used it to cover basic operating costs rather than for expansion. It's almost as efficient as setting fire to the cheque.
All of this, of course, in the service of self-indulgent agitprop productions that were just so much posturing, humourless, self-righteous preaching. Or nasty, vicious ad hominem attacks on whatever political enemy they wanted to make fun of that week in the cause of "satire". Then they acted all surprised when the bills came due and they had to close their doors inside a year. The irony of it was that the suburban theatres, whom the serious "artists" looked down upon as amateur houses, actually understood how a theatre works and often had productions where two thirds of the cast were professional actors because they could afford to pay them while the "artists" resumes began and ended in the one rundown little black box house.
You can't tell me that Burbidge wasn't counting the box office during the interval.
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It's a question that has nagged me for a number of years (yes, such questions---they nag me!). A society needs art. In a very Joseph Campbell kind of way: life is tough, we need stories to give it structure or we'll all go much even more mad than we are already. But while it is pleasant to doddle on one's notepad during a long meeting, or pluck on a guitar, actually becoming a competent artist requires forgoing opportunities to become, say, a computer programmer. And this is for a book illustrator level, or a ballpark organist level. If a hundred new illustrators can draw Chingachgook or John Carter with all the muscles and bony landmarks in the right places, you'll be lucky if one can actually make an artistic statement worth looking at.
It seems like a thing to give art modest subsidies, to help the struggling types along in hopes of finding one among them whom the muses love. But leave the distribution of these subsidies to the artists and you get artifacts that only the Professionals will appreciate, which is exactly the opposite of what is desirable. In music, I can't enjoy anything after Rachmaninoff, for instance, who is a century-plus out of date, even though I'm aware of Stravinsky and Bartok and Schoenberg and others, mainly so I can cringe when I see them on a program. On the other hand, proletarian control if the content of the arts is something that both Hitler and Stalin liked to do; in this case, nuff said.
What's the answer? Leave art funding to the artists, you get works that only Professionals will pretend to like. Leave it to the unwarshed, you'll get people asking why the painting of the nekkid young man who is on fire and falling out of the sky, should be in the art gallery at all, why not a nice bowl of daisies? It seems that the answer is, you need some minimal level of education to have an opinion at all, but set the requirements too high and you'll end up with something incestuous, shallow, and frankly, quite ugly.
Thoughts?
By the way, I checked out a couple of episodes of Project Popcorn on the Interwebs. Hm, meh. Same format, interrupting dialog with funnier dialog, or supplying sound effects. Sometimes amusing. Freer than an American show would be with the ethnic humor, and occasionally using language that I would not use in front of my mother. At the end, an "original idea" credit to some local dudes (not to Joel), but an English "in loving memory of MST3K" at the end. They even do a reading of fan letters at the end. Interesting: even though some of the jokes are obviously post-collapse (Putin-era? don't know), the technical production values are low-end 70s by American standards. We're talking, a fade machine that they paid so much money for that they use it for every scene transition!
Regarding music as art, I agree that, as Tom Wolfe put it, "classical" music for the last century has basically been a footnote to Schoenberg's theory of serial composition, and the tastes of the non-"intellectuals" can go hang as far as the "artistic set" is concerned.
To hear actual music that is intended to be something you want to listen to, you have to go to composers who work mainly in Hollywood, on movies. For instance, Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams, or James Horner. Their scores for movies fit the definition of "pop", but they have the reach and grandeur of genuine classical symphonic music. Listen to any of Goldsmith's or Horner's scores to the "Star Trek" films, or Goldsmith's score for "Patton" for proof.
As to them writing "on assignment", so to speak, so did Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, etc. The difference is, they all wrote to please (or fawn on) wealthy or royal patrons. As Holmes might say, a difference which makes no difference is none.
cheers
eon
Art is important. I always assumed that art institutions weren't supposed to be profit-making; they were supposed to make enough money to continue running, but they're not commercial enterprises. There's a good passage from Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, it refers specifically to opera but it works for a more general view of art:
'Money gets put in, money gets taken out...' said Salzella vaguely. 'Is it important?'
Bucket's jaw dropped. 'Is it important?'
'Because,' Salzella went on, smoothly, 'opera doesn't make money. Opera never makes money.'
'Good grief, man! Important? What'd I ever have achieved in the cheese business, I'd like to know, if I'd said that money wasn't important?'
Salzella smiled humourlessly. 'There are people out on the stage right now, sir,' he said, 'who'd say that you would probably have made better cheeses.' He sighed, and leaned over the desk. 'You see,' he said, 'cheese does make money. And opera doesn't. Opera's what you spend money on.'
'But... what do you get out of it?'
'You get opera. You put money in, you see, and opera comes out,' said Salzella wearily.
'There's no profit?'
'Profit... profit,' murmured the director of music, Scratching his forehead. 'No, I don't believe I've come across the word.'
But, obviously, that doesn't go against your point, Dave. Maybe Art is important but the government funding it isn't such a high priority when there are more vital services to fund (like healthcare or infrastructure).
Also, Sergej, yours are good points. But although I can understand the potential problems with making art a "Lowest-Common Denominator" thing (again, linked to the 'trying to make a profit' thing), try not to do things like this:
"On the other hand, proletarian control if the content of the arts is something that both Hitler and Stalin liked to do; in this case, nuff said."
This is Reductio ad Hitlerum and should be avoided. Explain why it is bad, don't just dispute its merit because of its proximity to hate-figures. Also, check out Hitler Ate Sugar. (Warning: Contains a link to TV Tropes, which has severe impact on productivity)
To be honest, I find movie music shallow and overwrought. Wannabe Wagner. Which in my opinion, is not a compliment.
Question: who is to call art good? Personal experience. My mother (humanities education) showed me Beethoven when I was a wee bairn. Didn't get it. Then she started me on Vivaldi, and within a few years of working through various composers, Baroque remaining a favorite, Beethoven seemed crystal clear. As he in fact is. Who tells the uneducated---either because they're children as I was or because they simply lack an education---what is good to look at? Bach's and Mozart's patrons were old-regime aristocrats. These (with respect to Mr. Szondy's stated views) ceased to be relevant when they started collecting recessive genes like regular people collect postage stamps. Brahms wrote for middle-class patrons, because taste in music and being able to play the py-anner or gee-tar were fashionable; this in turn because the middle-class types aspired to be like upper-class blue-bloods (see above, re: irrelevance). In this era of specialization, one feels like asking a specialist: is this difficult piece of music worth coming to understand? But if the specialist is an Important Music Critic, whose entire self-image is about being better than hoi polloi. Because he is a Music Critic. And Important... and this is what has been bothering me for several years now.
Now, the topic of this Ephemeral Isle post is government funding for the arts. So try putting all the preceding in the form of a piece of legislation---"art shall be defined as any substance, activity, sound or sequence of sounds, or unusual odor, which is deemed by a consensus of the art community (hereafter called simply 'the art community'), to be art".
Good points here, but my main concern is about government funding of the arts, which I vehemently oppose. The government may from time to time commission a work to mark a civic occasion or decorate a public building, but other than that it should stay out entirely.
As to how to fund the arts in general, the low arts (pop) can easily fund themselves at the cash box. High art (where taxpayer money is most wasted) should be funded by investors who expect a return or don't. Those who don't, we call "patrons". The real question is how do we fund middlebrow art, which has all but disappeared from the public square. That is where the real growth of art is, yet it is the most derided by the frauds who pass themselves off as art critics and academics.
Who decides what is art? That's a good question. Forty years ago we had the likes of Sir Kenneth Clark to give us that answer; knowledgeable scholars who understood their field, had a deep love of Western civilisation, and the eloquence to communicate it. Today, Sir Kenneth's successors are a load of ill-educated fools who openly loath the very idea of civilisation and whose articulation is only exceeded in vileness by their hygiene. I have no perfect answer to that, though I do recommend that we revive the idea of the gentleman scholar to act as a bulwark against a new dark age. In their case, their weapons should be the Harvard Classics, Great Books of the Western World, and the documentaries of Sir Kenneth Clark and Dr Jacob Bronowski. If we can't rely upon the universities to provide us with a liberal education, we must provide it for ourselves.
Gentlemen scholars don't cut it these days. Unless you're on a level with Leonardo, you are not going to be enough of an expert to preserve culture and still keep a day job. It is a property of complicated, civilized life: you need specialists. In this generation the specialists for keeping tastes good, are not doing their job; information goes dormant. But not dead, unless we hit some new dark ages and the libraries burn (and all the digital copies, or the means to read them). Maybe a new fashion for olden learning will revive good taste. On the other hand, I think it took a smaller private library to be known as "the learned" back in King Alfred's day. Maybe culture inevitably ends up growing too top-heavy to fit in any one head, and requires a periodic airing out.
Sergej, I hear what you're saying, but you don't need a comprehensive knowledge of the entire culture. That hasn't been possible since Goethe managed it. But you can gain a strong enough footing that you can make sense of the rest. That's why I recommend, as one example, the Harvard classics. The famous five-foot bookshelf is small enough to easily fit on a Kindle with loads of room to spare and a fast reader can get through the whole thing in a year–though I'd recommend ten for proper study.
The reading is the important part because the purpose isn't just to preserve knowledge, but to make sure that there are enough people who possess it in their heads to keep the culture going. By having a solid reading in Voltaire, Faraday, Shakespeare, Aristotle, Milton, etc., you'll have the intellectual armament to know when someone is talking rubbish and the rhetorical weapons to tell them so.
Sorry, David, I think I'm going mad; but didn't I post a comment here? Was it removed? Did it never post in the first place?
Pleasant way to spend an ice storm-filled morning! Except for Wunderbear's comment going walkies for some reason.
And my reply to Wunderbear, apparently. I suspect that the Fourth Dimension is involved.
That is my quote from THE NEW YORK TIMES at the top of your post, but it was taken out of context. It sounds very funny the way you've presented it.
Durango Miller
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