Messengers of the Gods

When Hermes, the messenger god, discovered language and writing and gave it to humans, he invited us to engage in the process of translating our experience and perception into words; in short, he gave us the gift of interpretation. In homage to Hermes, the Greek word for interpret (hermeneuō) focuses on the role of language: how we use it to organize our sense of the world by linking words into structures of thought; how those structures express, intend and signify other structures of thought until, at last, we have meaning.

But do we interpret in order to understand, or is understanding a function of a reflexive, elemental need to make sense of our worlds? Is this desire to make meaning and to share our thoughts with others what makes us human? As Paul Bloom notes in his fascinating How Pleasure Works,  developmental psychologists have “long marveled at how children naturally point, wave, and grunt to draw attention to interesting things in their environment.  This might seem like the simplest skill until you realize that no other species does this.”

When it comes to the interpretive process, we are all messengers of the gods.  We find real pleasure is making meaning, and by pleasure I do not mean comfort or ease but rather the deep satisfaction that comes from working something through.  It is satisfying to work at processing an opinion about the interesting things that surround us.  Especially art.  What can be more pleasurable for me as an audience member than experiencing a work of art not as a product with a fixed meaning but rather as a process of meaning making dependent on my participation?

Inviting audiences to interpret the art works we present (make, produce, critique) is not pandering. I wish we would stop this disingenuous habit of conflating an audience member’s inherent desire and cultural right to interpret the meaning or value of a work of art with choosing the agenda for artists or arts organizations.  Sports fans engage in some of the most active interpretation in our culture (and as a result experience real satisfaction and pleasure), but that doesn’t mean they choose the plays or create the roster.  I mean, come on.

It’s really about power.  (What isn’t?)  In the arts industry, most of what we call “audience participation” does not result in audience-centered meaning making or support the idea that the interpretive role belongs in the house among the spectators rather than solely on the stage or the wall (or in the mouths of outside experts). With few exceptions, there is very little evidence that arts workers are involved in processes that encourage audience sovereignty over interpretation.  And despite some noteworthy examples of organizational change, the arts industry as a whole is deeply ambivalent about its role in the democratization process, due primarily to the tension between our institutional (economic) structure and post-analog cultural practices.

Put differently, we aren’t really talking about a true democratization of the American arts ecology because that would mean dismantling the authority effect that continues to dominate our cultural life and the way in which our cultural institutions operate. The 19th century sacralization of the arts project (see Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow) is partially responsible, but 20th and 21st century developments also contribute, including the ever-present anxiety over “artistic excellence.”  Yesterday Trisha noted that “excellent is insufficient.”  I’d say excellence is not only insufficient, it’s a smoke screen. We see and hear it at every turn: on mission statements and grant proposals, at arts conferences, in board rooms, in the classroom, at talk-back sessions, and in advertising. The arts industry’s habit of hiding behind a concept like “artistic excellence” is at best a simplistic method of operation that makes it easier for dominant individuals to set the agenda and, at worst, a willful practice of social separation and segmentation.

I agree with Diane (“Audience participation has been waning because much of what is put on stage is formulaic, boring, conservative, and suited to the perceived tastes of middle-class, aging subscribers.”), but I’m going to take it in a different direction and claim that audience participation has been waning because we’ve taken away half of the fun. Let’s acknowledge what Hermes discovered: interpreting is pleasurable, it provides real and meaningful satisfaction.  Hermes gave us the capacity to make meaning and the 20th century arts apparatus took it away from us.

Comments

  1. I really like your thought that conceptions of excellence are sometimes “a willful practice of social separation and segmentation.” As the linguist Noam Chomsky once noted, the principle function of elite schools is socialization in elitism itself. Many of our arts institutions use similar conceptions of excellence as a “smoke screen” to create arts institutions with the character of rarified cultural country clubs for the wealthy.

    I’m an American who has lived in Europe for over 30 years, and so I notice how Europe’s public funding system creates a much more democratic sense around the arts than America’s private funding system. In America, there’s a feel that the wealthy take the good seats, and the rest of the community is let in as by-standers in the back rows. The admittance of the “by-standers” in the poor seats is defined as a “philanthropic gesture.”

    We also see that our funding system creates some good cultural institutions in a few financial centers where the wealthy donors live, while the rest of the country remains culturally impoverished. Germany, for example, has 83 opera houses, while America only has about six real houses for four times the population. We only have 3 cities in the top 100 for opera performances per capita.

    The Metropolitan Opera’s 300 million dollar budget for a 7 month season is about twice what comparable European houses spend for 11 month seasons. We see that wealthy Americans service themselves luxuriously while letting the rest of the country go to hell. And we see how arts administrators, who work for those wealthy board members, barely breathe a word about the serious problems our neo-feudalistic funding system creates. (For much more about this, see my comments in Kelly Tweeddale’s first blog entry.)

  2. Lynne,
    I love both of your posts–and thanks for raising ideas from Plato and Bourdieu. And I take your point (diverging from my point)! I suspect audiences are less engaged, in part, because they have been tethered and muzzled by our conventions. The popularity of So You Think You Can Dance (and the rest), one suspects, has more to do with the voting and picking favorites and arguing with friends over who should or shouldn’t win as the watching of the performances.