Thinking Big Thoughts
We were closing a production this past week so I was occupied with that project and didn’t have too much time to create entries. However, as I wandered through the lobby between acts, I did have time to ponder various subjects. One of the things I thought about was issue of arts as a way of cultivating various goals within community vs. arts as a profit making venture. I am constantly thinking about issues related to whether arts organizations should exist in their current form, the type of fare they should be offering, what philosophies they should be embracing in an age of technology and a whole host of related ideas.

That is a pretty big concept to tackle, thus my note in yesterday’s entry that I didn’t think I could and meet my obligations last evening. I continued thinking about it today while catching up on the blogs whose feeds to which I subscribe.

It turns out that Don Hall and Adam Thurman both addressed this topic two weeks ago. I won’t reiterate what they and the commenters discussed at length.

Well, except for one person.

Too Much Cake
The point made by Nick Keenan really summed up the problem we face. You can argue judgments about art are a result of snobbery and relativist visions of quality and I think it is important for these conversations to continue. But to me Nick seems have cut right to the heart of why the environment is unsustainable.

Here’s the problem: On an industry-wide scale, equating popularity with quality is a dangerous game. It fuels volatility and kills innovation, which can often lead to a lack of flexibility in the industry…

To put our playing field another way, the Jukebox musicals and reality-TV-fed downtown spectaculars may be wildly popular, but they are like Cake and Frosting. Eat too much of them, and our patrons will get a stomach ache and associate that stomach ache with the theater. We need to serve people a well-balanced meal as well as the meal that they want to buy. To me, that means innovation as entertainment, rather than fluff as entertainment. They are not generating new artists and new forms that will lead to connecting with new audiences. The R&D for that new audience solution is being done in our storefront theaters, but especially the largest theaters in our community (Broadway in Chicago) are foregoing a great deal of commitment to this R&D so that they can focus on profits.

Nick makes no claims that the storefront theatres are creating works that are more or less worthy to be called art than the product presented by the large spectaculars. He points out where the investments in the future are being made which to me is a good rational for supporting those places.

Constructive Use of Free Time
One observation I wanted to make that no one really preempted was that despite how broken (and increasingly going broke) the existing system of funding the arts is, it seems to me that since about the beginning of the 20th century the arts world has been given the breathing space to discuss these issues on a large scale.

This may be news to those actors, musicians and visual artists who are waiting tables, watching kids and working as customer service reps at insurance companies for as their first through third jobs in order to support their creative activities.

Artists may have always complained about audiences having low tastes since the Greeks but they were still beholden to patrons, be they aristocracy or townspeople gathering around their wagons and in town squares to earn their living. They had to performed what was valued to survive.

It wasn’t until relatively recently in the last century or so that those who were doing the performing (as opposed to scholars) had an opportunity and breathing room to stay in one place long enough to ponder and discuss these things among themselves and begin to comment and theorize on the state of things as a group. The Internet has merely closed the geographic gaps and allowed the conversation to become more widespread.

This freedom and flexibility was funded by Carnegie, Rockefeller and the Ford Foundation. But the model they helped introduce doesn’t seem to be viable any longer. The next model may manifest itself out of the conversations these entities enabled. It is important to cultivate and participate in them.