TRIFLING WITH THE MET

With impeccable timing last night, a friend wrote: "This season ChevronTexaco will end its 63-year sponsorship of the Metropolitan Opera Saturday afternoon live radio broadcasts. It's appalling that this immensely popular and significant cultural activity will be terminated, even though it costs only $7 million, a mere bagatelle for this humongous petrochemical empire. That's about the cost of running a few commercials during a superbowl game. What does this say about cultural priorities in this country?"

This friend, Alan M. Edelson, who is an avid opera-goer and Met subscriber, wants to drum up "indignation over the termination and enthusiasm for possible replacement of this oil firm by another sponsor." The Annenberg Foundation has given $3.5 million to the Met to help keep the live broadcasts on the air next season (2004/2005). He points out, "The gift was made in the hope that it will encourage a new sponsor to take things from there. It's incredible that this live broadcast, heard around the world by an estimated 10 million people, could end."

Why was the timing impeccable? Because Anthony Tommasini makes exactly the same point this morning in The New York Times: "It's hard for opera lovers to imagine that the Met broadcasts might be jeopardized for want of a sum that would be a pittance in the world of commercial entertainment or sports. In major league baseball, $7 million would not pay the salary of a decent pitcher. The six stars of 'Friends' make $1 million each per half-hour episode. Compare this to the absolute top fee for a singer at the Met, Amercia's most prestigious opera house: $15,000 per performance. No one, no matter how big, not even Placido Domingo, makes more."

Mere bagatelle or pittance indeed. When Chevron acquired Texaco, as Tommasini points out, the deal came to $45.8 billion. And Texaco's then-chairman promised that the sponsorship would continue because the Met broadcast "has become part of our DNA." Unfortunately, a gene mutation occurred upon his departure, or as it's put in corporate parlance, "the priorities at ChevronTexaco have shifted."

Meantime, by coincidence, another friend, William Osborne, sent the first draft of an article he's preparing on the differences between arts funding in the United States and continental Europe. He writes: "In Germany, for example, any city with more than 100,000 people generally has a full-time orchestra, opera house, and theater company that are municipally and state owned. A good deal of funding for these groups is set aside for new music. Europeans also administer this arts funding locally, and not from a remote federal organization such as the National Endowment for the Arts. ... The European view is not based on elitism or a dismissal of popular culture, but with understanding that an unmitigated capitalism is not a seamless, all-encompassing paradigm, particularly when it comes to cultural expression.

"In continental Europe, classical music often out-sells pop. This is not merely a matter of history or coincidence. Europeans use their local public cultural institutions to educate their children and this creates a wide appreciation for classical music. The popularity is also based on a sense of communal pride. They support their local cultural institutions almost like they were sports teams. European society illustrates that music education leads to forms of creativity and autonomy that are often antithetic to mass media."

American proponents of private and/or corporate sponsorship of the arts "claim that alternatives to the European cultural paradigm exist," Osborne continues. "[But] in reality the large majority of U.S. cultural offerings come from Manhattan and a few other cities, even though the country has 280 million people. Even the other boroughs of New York City, such as the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island are largely desolate cultural wastelands, to say nothing of the lack of intelligent culture in almost all of our heartland cities. In contrast to Europe, the live performance arts are largely denied to a vast majority of Americans.

"Most Americans do not even consider that alternatives could be created. With only one percent of the U.S. military budget, or $3.8 billion, we could have 127 opera houses lavishly funded at $30 million apiece. (That much funding would put them on par with the best opera houses in the world. In reality, the U.S. does not have any year-round opera houses. Even the Met only has a seven-month season.) The same sum could support 254 world-class spoken theaters at $15 million each. It could subsidize 190 full-time, year-round, world-class symphony orchestras at $20 million each. Or it could give 76,000 composers, painters and sculptors a yearly salary of $50,000 each. Remember, that's only one percent of the military budget. Imagine what five percent would do. These examples awaken us to the Orwellian realities of our country and how different it could be."

Why haven't Americans considered alternatives? Because "the problem is seldom the topic of serious political discussion." And that's because "the cultural system has become isomorphic." Iso-who? Osborne defines cultural isomorphism as "a social order where artistic expression is strongly shaped by conditions such as a totalizing economic system, a powerful religion, hyper-nationalism, or a dominating state of affairs such as long-term war."

"Cultural isomorphism was especially notable in the 20th century's systemic forms of social and economic organization," he explains. "We saw, for example, culturally isomorphic art in the 'Gleichschaltung' of the Third Reich, in the Social Realism of the East Block, in the commercialization of culture in America, and in the 'Cultural Revolution' of Maoist China. Like the political divisions of the 20th century, these aesthetic orthodoxies reduced human expression to systemic concepts that tended toward the formulaic and reductionist, and were often developed by modernist artists in the role of aesthetic prophets who served a more or less transcendentally justified patriarchal function within their societies. These aesthetic systems tended to be culturally isomorphic with the political and economic structures in which they existed, and frequently allowed the artist-prophet or his image to be appropriated by totalitarian social structures."

What does all this signify? Many things, of course. But one of them is that "given America's wealth, talent, and educational resources, the U.S. could be the Athens of the modern world, but is fast losing that chance" and opting instead to be its Rome.