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November 10, 2003
TT: Sign from the Times
Here's John Rockwell, writing about New York City Opera in yesterday's New York Times:The City Opera has been aggressively lobbying to be named the flagship institution in the new cultural presence at ground zero. To its evident surprise, it has encountered resistance. As of this writing, no decision has been announced, but the downtown powers seem to want a greater diversity of artistic expression....
American culture has changed radically in the last 65 years. It is that change, rather than the virtues or failings of City Opera in its current condition, that is causing it problems downtown....
By now, for all the lip service still paid to high culture and for all the genuine passion and pleasure that millions still derive from it, the revolution is complete. The current issue of Vanity Fair, for instance, has a foldout cover of celebrity photographs by Annie Leibovitz trumpeting "American Music" without one classical musician in the group. American music in the minds of most Americans today is popular music. We're a democracy, and the majority votes for what is most popular. Opera ain't it.
To some extent, opera's current marginality is its own fault, in failing to sustain the blend of creativity and popularity that distinguished the operatic past. And to some extent, one might wish for a little more responsibility on the part of our politicians.
But the fact remains that the new art that excites people these days is likely to come in the form of film or literature or popular music or visual installations, not from an art like opera, whose best days seem well behind it. If an artist today is to celebrate the common man or lament Sept. 11 effectively, it will most likely be – it has already been - Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young. When it comes to art forms based on a blend of song and instrumental accompaniment, Mr. Springsteen's album "The Rising" has touched more people, and is better art besides, than a high-minded classical score like John Adams's "On the Transmigration of Souls."
Maybe City Opera will wind up at ground zero after all, sharing the space with other arts institutions. Perhaps that would be good for all concerned....But no one, least of all those who run City Opera, should be shocked at resistance. We live, for better (say I) or worse, in a multicultural society in which a European-based consensus as to what constitutes "good music" is long gone. Few corporations and politicians feel obligated to improve the populace with high art anymore. The best that beleaguered partisans of opera can hope for is that they won't be ignored altogether.
Read the whole thing here.
Much of what Rockwell says is unexceptionable, at least in the narrow sense that it accurately describes American culture today...but oh, my, those planted axioms! Note, for instance, that his only musical alternatives are Bruce Springsteen or John Adams, as if classical music in the post-postmodern era had nothing better to offer than the sooooo-Eighties banalities of Official Minimalism. Note, too, how embarrassing it is to watch an aging baby boomer try to get down. I mean, really--Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young, exemplars of edgy pop culture? What decade is it, Muffy? It's almost as bad as watching presidential candidates do the yes-I-inhaled pander at a Rock the Vote "debate."
All teasing aside, I think John Rockwell is a smart man. But what I miss in his analysis of the current situation is a more exact sense of the changing role played by Big Media in the erosion of the fine arts in America today. Yes, ours is a popular culture, and always was, even at the height of the middlebrow moment. But the difference between then and now is that the mass media once believed they had the power--and responsibility--to lead our democratic culture. Now they acknowledge no responsibility whatsoever. Instead, they merely seek to shore up their shrinking ratings and market shares by any means necessary, which means slavishly following the cultural election returns. Forget Vanity Fair (which in any case isn't exactly an agenda-setting organ these days, is it?). Consider instead the cultural abdication of PBS and NPR, our allegedly "public" radio and TV networks, which are walking away from the fine arts as briskly as possible, making no bones about it as they head for the exit.
So what do we do now? We blog. For as I've said in this space in contexts too varied and occasions too numerous to link, it's the blogosphere that offers the most potentially powerful alternative to the cultural auto-lobotomizing of Big Media. I no longer feel like bitching about That Which Is. I'm more interested in shaping That Which Will Be--and that means above all helping to create and encourage a richly varied, fully interconnected on-line presence for the arts. As far as I'm concerned, the future of arts journalism is here, and on the other arts blogs listed and linked in "Sites to See." We're not big, but we're growing. We don't convene focus groups in order to decide what to write about. And we're here to stay.
UPDATE: For an interesting response from Tyler Green (who blogs at Modern Art Notes), go here. "Longer, more thoughtful, bigger-picture writing doesn't work so well on the web (unless you're writing about Cecily Brown and sex)," Green argues. "This, presumably, is why Slate focuses on small ideas and why publications such as Harper's, The New Yorker and The Atlantic focus on big ideas." Yes, no, maybe....
Posted November 10, 2003 12:02 PM
