Engaging Art: a public conversation:

June 8, 2007

MP3s
by Douglas McLennan

Vanessa Bertozzi on audiences and participation

Vanessa Bertozzi on involving artists in work

Steven Tepper argues the historical context of arts in America

Steven Tepper talks about technology and the future of cultural choice

Lynne Conner on the historical relationship between artist and audience

Lynne Conner on event and meaning and sports

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JOIN US
by Douglas McLennan
by commenting this week, and then live and online here on the blog Thursday, June 21 from 2-5 pm CDT from Nashville at the American Symphony Orchestra League conference. We'll be live-blogging the event, and hundreds of those in the room will be on their computers contributing to the online discussion. You're invited to participate too.
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Chapter downloads
by Douglas McLennan
Chapter 4
In & Out of the Dark - (a theory about audience behavior from Sophocles to spoken word)

Chapter 7
Artistic Expression in the age of Participatory Culture (How and Why Young People Create)

Chapter 8
Music, Mavens & Technology

(all chapters in pdf form)
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by Douglas McLennan
Steven Tepper
Associate Director, Curb Center
Vanessa Bertozzi
Researcher, Producer
Ed Cambron
Philadelphia Orchestra
Lynne Conner
Department of Theatre Arts, University of Pittsburgh
Greg Sandow
Critic, Composer
Molly Sheridan
Journalist, NewMusicBox.org
Alan Brown
Principal, Wolf/Brown
Robert Levine
Violist, Milwaukee Symphony
Moy Eng
Program director, Hewlett Foundation
Russell Willis Taylor
President, National Arts Strategies
Laura Jackson
Conductor, Atlanta Symphony
Andrew Berryhill
executive director, Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra
Douglas McLennan
Editor, ArtsJournal.com
Continue reading ""

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THIS CONVERSATION
by Douglas McLennan
This group blog is built around a new book Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life examining the changing relationships between audiences and America's arts organizations. This blog is a lead-up to...
Continue reading "THIS CONVERSATION"

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Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life
by Douglas McLennan

Abstracts
Continue reading "Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life"

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June 12, 2007

Write Your Comments/Questions Here
by Douglas McLennan

Use the form below to submit your comments and questions. You can write as much as you want. But it will work best if you confine your post to one topic or idea. All contributions will be added to the blog online and archived as part of the permanent record of this event. We will be selecting excerpts from these comments/questions to project to screens in the room. Following our discussion online? Please contribute and tell us where you're writing from.

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June 13, 2007

Our Conversation Starts Thursday Morning
by Douglas McLennan

Welcome to the group blog Engaging Art. This is a discussion based around the idea that the ways in which audiences and artists are interacting are changing. We have 12 bloggers lined up to participate in our conversation beginning early Thursday morning. In the right column, you'll find links to bios of our bloggers, as well as excerpts and abstracts from from the book Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life. This discussion is actually a prelude to a live session in Nashville, Thursday, June 21 from 2-5 CDT at the American Symphony Orchestra League's annual conference. Readers and invited to join the discussion. Click the comments link at the bottom of any post. Your comments will appear under the entries as well as in a reader's forum. We'll also pull highlights from the readers' comments and post them in the main blog column.

Posted at 12:52 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (3)

Something Better Comes Along...
by Douglas McLennan

The pace and magnitude of change is so profound now and technology can accomplish so many extraordinary things, it's easy to think that we live in a special time unmatched by any other in history. While it's exciting, it's also scary, because the rules we used last week might not be the rules we have to use next week. For much of the past century, a big challenge for artists was getting art out to people. One of the founding missions of the National Endowment for the Arts was to bring great art to more people.

Bringing art to the people is hardly the problem these days. The choices are overwhelming, and, just as cheap prints of great paintings and recordings of famous artists revolutionized people's relationship with music and art, so too is digital distribution transforming audiences' relationships with all artists and arts organizations. If we can have whatever we want, however we want it, whenever we want it, perhaps we value the art we use in a different way. It becomes everyday, not special-for-company. The context of how we encounter art matters a lot, and clearly that context is changing for many people.

Then there's the paralysis of choice. How can I enjoy any one thing, commit to any one thing, if I feel like I'm missing out on the other 500 things I could be doing right now? I'm a last-minute decider anyway, but I find myself increasingly stymied by the choices available to me. Even when I do decide, I often spend much of the time wondering if what I chose lives up to other choices I might have made.

It's all enough to change my expectations about where I invest my time. In some situations I'm less likely to take a chance on something. Sometimes I find it comforting to partake of a monolithic blockbuster, where I can be anonymous and nothing is expected of me. But I also have less patience for big organizations that don't speak directly to what I'm looking for. You're doing too much Tchaikovsky this season? Boring! I'm outta here. I insist on peak experiences. But guess what, it's harder and harder to find those peaks.

Like I said at the beginning of this post, it's easy to feel this is all new in human history. But one of the comforting things about the book we're talking about here is that many of these changes have historical parallels. The technology might be new, but the ways we use it, and the things we find useful about it are ultimately subject to longstanding human nature. Indeed, some of the more interesting points in the book seem to argue that some of the ways we interacted with art in the 20th Century might be the anomaly rather than the time we're in now. We might, in fact, be returning to more traditional principles. Still, it's a scary time to be creating "content" of any sort. There isn't a creative industry that isn't seeing its business model being reinvented, the rules being changed. I wonder - how do you engage an audience when it's constantly looking across the bar for something better?

Posted at 3:49 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (3)

So many changes, so many questions...
by Vanessa Bertozzi

I was struck by Doug's comment:

Indeed, some of the more interesting points in the book seem to argue that some of the ways we interacted with art in the 20th Century might be the anomaly rather than the time we're in now. We might, in fact, be returning to more traditional principles. Still, it's a scary time to be creating "content" of any sort. There isn't a creative industry that isn't seeing its business model being reinvented, the rules being changed.

What is the future of the arts--its place in our society, how it's funded, who participates--when boundaries between amateur and professional break down? When the rules of arts consumption change and business models break down? Do we have a meritocracy when it comes to deciding who gets heard and seen? Do we have a popularity contest? Or do we have a folk art?

Henry Jenkins' and my chapter in Engaging Art looks specifically at the ways in which today's young people interact with art and participate in fan cultures. We compare it to a time before mass-media, when an art being "grassroots" wasn't self-consciously trying to salvage something lost. Today see a very active and engaged generation coming up. But who will be a professional artist if changes in the way Americans create and access art continue along such a trajectory? What will our culture and way of life look like if the institutions and ways of doing business in the arts change radically?

What's the root of this feeling that something "scary" is happening at this particular moment? Perhaps it is that the financial mechanisms for the arts may be altered--the scary glimmers of bankruptcy. Or perhaps it is the fear of unknown degradation of a nuanced, sublime art, resulting in a corporate manufactured, homogenized, popular art. Perhaps these two things go hand in hand. Is there some other possibility? The changes are happening. I'd like to discuss roles supporters of the arts can play in making sure change can be something positive--and a little less scary.

Posted at 9:11 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (0)

So you think you can dance?
by Alan S. Brown

Hi all. First of all, this is a great book with some really fine essays that are relevant to both artists and administrators. I had the opportunity to participate as a reviewer earlier in the book's development process, and there's a lot of good stuff here. I especially recommend the pieces by Lynne Conner and Barry Schwartz.

While the various authors look at many aspects of the changing landscape of cultural participation, I would like to focus initially on the unifying construct of engagement. What does "engage" mean to you? That word seems to be on the tip of a lot of tongues lately, though I'm not really sure that we have any sort of shared understanding of what it means. Engage has many different meanings. To have an engaging conversation means that you were meaningfully involved and found it especially interesting or spirited. Getting engaged is a pre-nuptial tradition, which, at its core, is about expectation and mutual commitment. The word also has a business sense (to be engaged to perform), and also a mechanical sense (the gears engaged). Looking across all the senses of the word, I find several core elements of meaning:

• mutuality of intent; common cause
• unusually high level of interest, involvement or participation
• collaboration and partnership
• both parties accepting risk for an uncertain outcome
• to become interlocked or intertwined

Do you accept that these are the new precepts of cultural participation? If so, how will that affect how you make programming decisions? Do you see your audience as a beneficiary of your curatorial prowess, or as a partner and co-creator of meaning? When did education get separated from core programming? How does the job description of the artist change? How does the structure and governance model change? How can you be relevant to consumers in the settings where they create meaning? Developing answers to these questions is proving to be profoundly challenging for all types of cultural organizations.

Witness the rise of the citizen artist, whose home is a museum, whose automobile is a concert hall, and whose bedroom is a cinema. It's an amazing revolution. That artistic expression has entered back into common practice and achieved a new relevance in society is truly heartening. It makes me wanna dance. So why has this phenomenon largely bypassed our nonprofit delivery system? Whose job is it to nurture and engage the citizen artist?

Posted at 10:46 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (1)

June 14, 2007

What If Video Saved the Radio Star?
by Molly Sheridan

Hi, everyone. Thanks for including me in this great conversation. I've been wondering if we're getting carried away by this "broadband is changing everything" supposition. I'm under 30. Too old for Facebook, perhaps, but young enough to have made my only career out of online content delivery. Yet I still buy tickets to real plays, museums, and concerts, even if I make the purchase online because I followed a link from flavorpill.

If the little sphere I walk around in indicates anything, the technology isn't dictating a drastic overhaul in what artists want to create or cultural consumers want to experience at the base level--no fundamental truths about the human condition have been nullified by the clips posted on YouTube. (Yet, anyway.) What current circumstances are forcing is a massive overhaul in access. Right now, you can go back and experience that video whenever you want, whether or not MTV ever broadcasts it again. You can adapt it. You can see what they're doing to it in Japan.

In the chaos this explosion is currently creating, the traditional institutions that will step to the fore are the ones willing to truly learn the language and concentrate on how they can grow and position themselves to lead the pack. Because yes, after years of massive domineering corporate control, maybe we're a little punch-drunk on the power that we've gained to create and promote the art we love, regardless of the $$ potential. Hey, ever dreamed 22 million people would watch you rock out on your guitar? Think you can make a better TV show than the network channels? Try it. You're guaranteed it will be better than The Bachelor, at least.

Yay! I can take photos for everyone, not just mom's fridge. Creative culture is more a part of the everyday lives of Americans because they are being encouraged to create. Isn't this what we wanted? But so far it still takes a name like Will Farrell to make it profitable online. No matter how great access to 6 billion options sounds, we're paradoxically on a hunt for the cream and access has made us very tough critics. This is where our established institutions can take their street cred and step into the fray.

Not sure how to proceed while you're learning this new language? Sad that the local paper has fired your arts critic? Take a step, open a door, start small and simple. Find three popular bloggers in your town and offer them press tickets to your next show. See what happens. Access doesn't have to mean giving away your art for free.

Posted at 5:42 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (0)

La plus ça change . . .
by Lynne Conner

Doug has opened this group blog with the question: "how do you engage an audience when it's constantly looking across the bar for something better?" And Alan Brown has volleyed by asking: "Whose job is it to nurture and engage the citizen artist?"

Both are great questions, but I'm not going to try answering them. Instead, I'll ask yet another question that I think reflects the true thinking of a lot of arts professionals (producers, administrators, artists), even if they don't dare say it out loud (at least not to me).

Who cares whether the audience is "engaged" or not? And furthermore, why is that my problem? Making (or delivering or professionally evaluating) art is what I do. How audiences connect with it is up to them.

If we think of our jobs as being restricted to providing the arts event, then this whole discussion on "engagement" will seem extraneous (or worse, the product of yet another cynical incarnation of marketing science).

But, if we see ourselves as part of a larger cultural operation in which the quality of the audience's experience is as important as the quality of the arts event we deliver, then we can have a meaningful discussion about the role and function of today's audiences. As I argue in my chapter, "In and Out of the Dark: A Theory About Audience Behavior from Sophocles to Spoken Word," this notion of audience sovereignty over producing the meaning of an arts event (what I call "co-authoring") is not new, but rather both ancient and long-standing. Only in the late 19th and 20th centuries did the hierarchal idea of arts reception--in which great art will automatically find its true audience without mediation of any kind and without opportunities for public discourse--emerge as a kind of industry truism. In fact, this notion that we need to let the arts event speak for itself is simply ahistorical. If we take the time to look at the histories of our art forms, we'll see that there is an historical relationship between a given community's interest in attending an arts event and the opportunity to inform its meaning; it is a reciprocal status that reflects a healthy balance among the needs of artists, producers, and audiences.

I'm a playwright, a critic and a theatre educator. In all of those capacities I have come to understand that it is simply not enough to hand over my product (play, review, essay) to my audience and expect that to be the end of my responsibilities in this relationship.

I have to be there, listening, when the audience talks back.

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How do we deal with choice?
by Ed Cambron

As one of the bloggers working in the trenches trying to put butts in seats, and keeping them there, I hope I can add something to the dialogue that gets us thinking about actions, especially in the orchestra world.

Reading through the essays, I kept coming back to the issue of choice, and Barry Schwartz's thoughts on the subject in the essay Can There Ever Be Too Many Flowers Blooming? How do we help audiences make choices? What are the unique barriers in the orchestra world? Could we learn something from other institutions which seem to be doing a better job of helping people make choices, or at least rising above the noise of all the choice in the marketplace?

As any good marketer knows, word-of-mouth is your best friend. Technology has only made word-of-mouth even more important, as people can communicate instantly and to many, many people at the same time. The press is no longer local, but global as people pick up and spread whatever someone says. So what is word-of-mouth really doing for us? I'd argue it is helping people make choices. If Barry is right when he says, "The twin phenomena of buying only the culture that you want, or relying on filters to tell you what you should want, is becoming pervasive - a response, I believe, to overwhelming choice in the world of culture," then the viral power of word-of-mouth is the ultimate filter.

What does this mean for orchestras? First of all, we rarely present programs that run long enough to even begin to leverage word-of-mouth as a tool to make a choice. Museums, on the other hand, have had major success in mounting exhibitions which have long runs, creating the opportunity to leverage audiences and their voices. Imagine for a moment what might happen if a major American orchestra took a risk and scheduled the same concert for six months, or repeated a program five times in a year. Could they create an opportunity for audiences to make a choice based on the music, and not just the generic choice of going to the concert hall? Does the fact that we don't allow for this kind of choice explain why a very large percentage of people go to a concert and wait years to return? Are those people viewing the experience in a very generic way?

Posted at 9:20 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (0)

The new world
by Greg Sandow

I'm not always fond of these conversations, even though the book that provokes this one seems pretty interesting.

But I'm wary of all the pontificating arts people do, including me. We've all got opinions, but do we ground our opinions in facts? By facts, I don't just mean anecdotes, or the occasional study, but instead a truly accurate, thorough view of what's really going on in the world.

Case in point: Barry Schwarz's essay in the book, unfortunately not available for download from the blog site. I'm afraid I have to disagree with Alan Brown (hi, Alan). To me, Schwarz's piece was mostly sound and fury, with nothing much underneath. Schwarz worries that we now have too much cultural choice, and that therefore we'll only choose the culture that we like, ignoring things that we ought to know about, or that might challenge us.

And his authority for this? Nothing but studies, which appear to show that people faced - under certain limited conditions -- with too many choices end up choosing fewer things, instead of more. But what actually happens out in the real world, and especially when people make cultural choices? (Which, as Schwarz himself notes, almost none of the studies deal with.)

And here the mountain disgorges a very tiny mouse. His students, Schwarz says (he teaches at Swarthmore), don't make critical judgments about the movies they see.This is his only real-world example of the problems he sees. I can't argue with his experience (or with what he thinks is his experience), but as a global observation -- or something we're meant to expand into one -- this is just crazy. People make critical judgments about everything these days, more than they ever did, and beyond doubt a lot more publicly. A few weeks ago, as I amused myself by watching one of the really tacky movies the SciFi Channel produces, I went on the IMDB movie website, and found well over a hundred posts about exactly how bad the movie was, some of them written in considerable detail.

A far, far better approach: the chapter by Henry Jenkins and Vanessa Bertozzi. Here we learn what's really happening. It's raw data. We don't yet know what it means. But teens are finding their own kind of art -- recording songs on their computers, using oddball sounds they themselves invent. (And then getting a record deal, and going on tour.) Or they're writing and drawing comic books about pivotal things in their lives. (And getting their work published.)

Or they're inventing things that can't be classified, because they're so new:

Fourteen year-old Antonia...wears a different "look" to school everyday....Her love for the Harry Potter books led to a major Hogwarts phase. For an entire year, she wore British school uniforms to her Massachusetts public school. Now Antonia reads the webcomic Megatokyo and uses its imagery for her patterns.While she has become more active in meeting people with common interests online and at conventions, her main outlet is high school. Antonia finds the jeers and dirty looks of her classmates "amusing" and enjoys playing with people's expectations in an environment that often defines people through their external appearances. Because of her level of self-reflection, one could see her activity as performance art....Antonia goes online to learn more about periods, genres, or media properties that she wants to emulate through her work. She wants to master every detail of these imaginary worlds, and as she does so, she moves from the specific details--the colors of a herald, the buttons on a coat, the Japanese droopy socks--towards a larger understanding of the cultural traditions that shaped those details.

This -- from everything I've seen -- really does show us the new world that's emerging, This past fall, my wife (Anne Midgette, the New York Times music critic) and I spent a few days in residence at Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. We were asked to sit in on a meeting of an interdisciplinary faculty committee, charged with inventing a new core arts curriculum.

And the people on this committee talked very much like Jenkins and Bertozzi. They were dazzled by their students -- students who might not respond to traditional ways of teaching the arts, but were self-motivated, full of projects of their own, and eager to learn everything they could, to make those projects work.( I'll add that it's well-known -- an old story by now -- that college students, in introductory music classes, actively resist learning about classical music. Their teachers might just as well try to teach them Latin. But this doesn't mean that kids are unmusical. Just the opposite -- they're making their own music, on a scale we've never seen before.)

I'll leap to a grand proclamation. (See? I can't resist pontificating.) The arts -- as traditionally understood -- are over. It just doesn't make sense, any more, to talk about some grand collection of plays and music and poems and paintings, which uniquely express our human condition, which stand apart from everyday life, and which we all ought to learn about. We're learning about ourselves in many other ways now; we're forging the uncreated conscience of our race (to use Joyce's phrase from the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in many other places.

And in fact arts studies take a defensive, even alarmist tone these days. (See, for instance, the Wallace Foundation/RAND Corporation study, Gifts of the Muse, or the scathing study of arts organizations and their failure to involve younger people, from the Hewlett Foundation.) Where do we fit? What's our future? How can we prove that the arts still matter? (The book we're masticating here is surely another example.)

The truth, I'm afraid, is that we don't matter all that much, and that we've become an interest group, angling for support and market share, almost as if we were a failing corporation (Kodak, maybe, trying to survive after coming far too late to digital photography).

But art survives. God, does it ever! It takes new forms. And along with these new forms, the old forms will coexist. And surely mingle. We don't know what the future of all this will be; it's too early to tell. We might be entering an age when art isn't removed from everyday life, as it wasn't in traditional African culture, and wasn't in our own 18th century, when the very notion of a work of art (as we understand that today) didn't really exist. (See Lydia Goehr's book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works for an astounding view of that history, as it applies to music.) But to think we're in trouble, just because not enough people care about our kind of art, is point of view that's wildly restrictive -- and, I think, transparently self-interested.

Posted at 10:41 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (3)

...same as the Old World?
by Robert Levine

I'm not used to not having a lot to say on a subject, but that's where I am at the moment. So let me add some comments on what's already been written.

Greg Sandow wrote:

I'll leap to a grand proclamation. (See? I can't resist pontificating.) The arts -- as traditionally understood -- are over. It just doesn't make sense, any more, to talk about some grand collection of plays and music and poems and paintings, which uniquely express our human condition, which stand apart from everyday life, and which we all ought to learn about. We're learning about ourselves in many other ways now; we're forging the uncreated conscience of our race (to use Joyce's phrase from the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) in many other places."

I think it makes as much sense to talk about canonical art as it ever did. There's always been lots more art than just the canonical works, and creators of what became canonical borrowed freely from that fast-flowing stream. Bruckner and Schubert stole landler, Bach stole hymn tunes, Mahler stole from everything around him. The difference between now and then - or even between now and 30 years ago - is that it's as easy for some unknown composer in a basement to make his/her works available to a worldwide audience as it was for, say, Stravinsky at the height of his career.

The fact that there is still a canon of art music is implicitly recognized by its repeated use in popular culture to signify "classiness."

Ed Cambron wrote:

"As any good marketer knows, word-of-mouth is your best friend. Technology has only made word-of-mouth even more important, as people can communicate instantly and to many, many people at the same time. ..
What does this mean for orchestras? First of all, we rarely present programs that run long enough to even begin to leverage word-of-mouth as a tool to make a choice. Museums, on the other hand, have had major success in mounting exhibitions which have long runs, creating the opportunity to leverage audiences and their voices. Imagine for a moment what might happen if a major American orchestra took a risk and scheduled the same concert for six months, or repeated a program five times in a year."

Aside from the fact that the musicians would go out of their minds? This is, in fact, what the major American opera companies do (not to mention theaters and movie houses). Either there's a qualitative difference between a drama (opera, musical, play, film) and a symphony, in terms of the nature of the audience experience, or orchestra audiences are simply a lot smaller.

Lynne Connor wrote:

"Who cares whether the audience is "engaged" or not? And furthermore, why is that my problem? Making (or delivering or professionally evaluating) art is what I do. How audiences connect with it is up to them.
If we think of our jobs as being restricted to providing the arts event, then this whole discussion on "engagement" will seem extraneous (or worse, the product of yet another cynical incarnation of marketing science).

But, if we see ourselves as part of a larger cultural operation in which the quality of the audience's experience is as important as the quality of the arts event we deliver, then we can have a meaningful discussion about the role and function of today's audiences."

I see myself as a musician who'd like to remain employed for the next decade or so and who'd like to see my younger colleagues employed for a lot longer. So I do care about audiences. I'd love to not have it be my problem, but that's not a choice I get to make these day. Orchestras will never be able to pay the bills solely from earned revenue, but it'll be impossible to raise funds to cover the difference if butts aren't in seats. People don't want to fund failure.

But she does allude to something I think is fundamental in this discussion. Orchestras do one thing very well; we perform that small segment of our musical history written for orchestras. If we are going to survive and thrive, it will be as orchestras, doing what we can do well. There are severe limits to our ability to morph ourselves to meet public taste. If there aren't enough people who want to hear that small segment - even though it represents one of the highest achievements of humanity - we won't survive. But if there are are - and I think there are - then the question does become how to engage them.

Lawrence Kramer wrote an article in the New York Times two weeks ago on the subject of orchestras as museums, asking in essence "so what's wrong with that?" He wrote in part:

Whenever people discuss the familiar plight of classical music in America - financial problems; aging audiences; above all, a loss of cultural authority - someone is sure to bring up the museum analogy. Classical music, we are told, may be old and valuable, but it is as remote from contemporary life as an old fiddle. Its culture is a museum culture. The public doesn't care about new works, and the old ones have been worn out with reuse like antique coins with faded faces.
But the museum analogy shortchanges both the music and the museum. ... The classical music world may have something to learn from the success of today's museums, where the art of the present elicits fascination, and the art of the past impresses visitors as the very reverse of stifling, myopic or merely out of date...

...concerts and museums purvey the same experience: revival. As collections, museums house objects - paintings and sculptures, artifacts and the paraphernalia of past life - that people often go not just to visit but to revisit. Many of us have favorite objects in museums. When in Philadelphia I generally make sure to spend a few moments with Thomas Eakins's "Concert Singer"; in Chicago I try to spend at least part of Sunday in the park with George: Georges Seurat and his "Sunday La Grande Jatte - 1884." Building an assembly of such favorite things is a primary means of experiencing and sustaining cultural values. In this way a museum visit can refresh our feeling for the meaningfulness of experience.

But that is exactly what classical music is supposed to do, and in the same way. The work of art does not change on the wall, and the fully composed work of music, though it does change from one performance to another, remains recognizably and durably itself. We keep returning to these works as cultural resources.

Now that's someone who gets it.

Posted at 4:33 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (1)

Victorian Zombies & Opera Freaks
by Vanessa Bertozzi

In his post, Robert Levine refers to Lawrence Kramer's article in the New York Times about classical music as analogous to the museum and their cultural significance as sites of "revival." I'd like to comment a bit about revival--specifically about what brings the life back.

Perhaps it's true that classical music is just one niche among many now. It will attract its segment of the population, just as there is a thriving subculture right now called steampunk. The people who choose this style, aesthetic, and guiding lifestyle theme (one choice out of so many!) are buoyed by interest in all types of gadgetry steam-powered, made of brass. Think oily Victorian leather waistcoats, goggles, and jaunty, hand-built machines that chug along on steam. On the surface, steampunk seems anachronistic, oddball, "totally random" (...why this choice out of so many?). But when you talk to people who consider themselves steampunk and observe them, they don't just "like steampunk." They dress up in it. They invent gadgets and build them themselves. They write and illustrate manuscripts of science-fiction set in an alternate 19th century universe. Many of their friends met through steampunk activities--or rather, they and the people whose company they happened to enjoy in the first place found others and created this subculture from scratch. And so you can start to read expressions of identity from the ways that these people create and access media, art, and social situations. They value intellectual curiosity, an engineer's hands-on capability, a quirky difference from the mainstream-- born of a realization that their way of life is teetering on the edge of complete technological obsolescence.

When talking to opera fans, I get a vertiginous feeling, similar to meeting steampunks: these people are fascinating--because of their knowledge, dedication and fascination with opera, steampunk, manga, baseball, etc. People within these interest groups have so many stories to relive with each other, so many activities to partake in, so many opportunities to boast about their esoteric knowledge, so many ways of relating specific experiences into guiding principles for a way of life. The present day interpersonal dynamics and expressions of meaning are the very things that bring the Victorian imagination back to life. Or a certain performance of Aida in a particular theater as vivid as it might have been in the 1870s.

When looking at a subculture from the outside, things look very different than when you're inside and fond of a certain way of doing things, when you get the inside jokes. I think part of the problem here is that for people who haven't grown up with classical music, they have understood it as high culture which others tell you ought be good for you--that is, dead. For those who live inside the looking glass of classical music, what brings the music back to life for you? What are the expressions of identity from this subculture and what do its participants value? Maybe romantics are different from modernists, and opera freaks are different from chamber music fans. I can't quite say, though I'd be interested to hear from those of you who would know.

Posted at 9:41 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (1)

Response to "Something Better..."
by Laura Jackson

In response to Doug McLennan's post: Something Better Comes Along...

It might be helpful to distinguish between live artistic experience and the exposure to art and music through technological means.

Doug writes:
"Bringing art to the people is hardly the problem these days. The choices are overwhelming, and, just as cheap prints of great paintings and recordings of famous artists revolutionized people's relationship with music and art, so too is digital distribution transforming audiences' relationships with all artists and arts organizations."
He continues,
"If we can have whatever we want, however we want it, whenever we want it, perhaps we value the art we use in a different way. It becomes everyday, not special-for-company..."

I agree that digital distribution has a tremendous impact on us and connects us more deeply with artists and ensembles because we can listen repeatedly and become familiar with the nuances of their interpretation, phrasing, and quality of sound. However, I think the conclusion that having such easy access to "whatever we want" might lessen our perception of its value implies that a CD or a digital download of a piece of music gives us the same experience that a live performance offers. While I agree that one can have a profound experience listening to recorded music, I think it is different than the experience one has sitting with others in an audience experiencing the spontaneous interaction of a group of people realizing a work of art.

I would argue that our access to recorded music makes listeners want live performance even more. If a twenty year old has five CD's of their favorite rap star, they are probably going to knock themselves out to attend a live performance if the opportunity arises.

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June 15, 2007

New cultural divide?
by Steven J. Tepper

Sandow's post -- "The New World" - is very provocative and, I think, correct on most issues. He celebrates the critical, engaged, and inventive young people who are blogging on the IMDB movie Web site and the teens in Jenkins and Bertozzi's chapter who find and create their own forms of art. But he is also right that we do not yet have the data and research to know how pervasive this "critical" engagement is, nor how pervasive the negative consequences are that Schwartz speculates about in his chapter about the paradox of choice. The best data we have comes from the Pew study of teen media creators, which demonstrates that a majority of teens are posting, remixing and creating content online. My concern, and the concern of many in the book, is that the type of critical engagement that Sandow celebrates may not be evenly distributed across the population. I suspect that for many Americans, Schwartz's cautions might be appropriate - we know that the majority of Americans buy their music at the big box retailers - Wal-Mart, Target and Best Buy; many still watch network television in spite of the availability of hundreds of cable channels; and still others are tuned into Clear Channel radio stations that have very narrow playlists. I think the purpose of the book is not to try to come up with yet another argument to justify the arts; but rather to examine how policy can and should respond to the potentially transformative changes in our midst. We can stand by and do nothing and have faith that enterprising kids will figure it out. Many will. But, can we be more deliberate about ensuring that the type of participatory culture described in the book is available to every citizen?

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Should we all care? No... But...
by Steven J. Tepper

I like Lynne's framing of the question - "who cares if audiences are engaged?" And, I agree with her that many more organizations need to see themselves as part of a larger cultural operation in which the quality of the audience experience is as important as the quality of the art. Nonetheless, I think there will be some organizations and some arts leaders who will read the book and will opt out of the "engagement" mandate. And, that will be o.k.... for some. There is probably a place for certain organizations to focus only on artistic innovation, with little regard for audiences. These organizations might be doing critical R&D which has little day-to-day relevance. Good for them. In the end, some will be serving a public interest if their innovations take hold and animate a new generation of audiences and artists. But, we likely do not need 30,000 such organizations in the country, most of whom make some claim on public money. If you have access to enlightened patrons, then ignoring "engagement" is a reasonable strategy. But, for the vast majority of organizations, this is not possible and "engaging" audiences will be the only way forward. And, engaging, as Conner suggests, is not about marketing or simply getting people to attend an event. It is about co-authoring meaning.

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Inconvenient Entaglements
by Steven J. Tepper

I love Alan Brown's parsing of the word "engage" (see entry "So you think you can dance?") And, I think he has, in his typically perceptive way, identified a core set of concepts that help clarify our thinking (at least mine). What perplexes me is the contrast between Alan's notion of "commitment" - common cause; collaboration; shared risk; interlocking - and the concurrent trends of individualization, personalization, and self-centered media consumption. As Alan's own research on college students has shown, the greatest barrier for many students when it comes to attending the arts is the notion of "opportunity costs" - many students don't want to commit to an event because they want to wait and see if something better comes along. People want convenience; they want to leave their options open; they want to "drop in and drop by," they want to be able to customize their play lists rather than trust someone else to curate their experiences. How do we square these new habits with the notion that true engagement sometimes requires inconvenient entanglements. If you play in a string quartet, your fellow musicians expect you to show up to rehearse at the scheduled time. You must make a social commitment, which, while reaping social benefits, might be personally inconvenient at times.

In an article I wrote several years ago with Jason Kaufman on the benefits of group membership for social capital in the 19th century, we found that not all groups spurred social capital and civic participation. Rather, those groups that seemed to require mutual commitment and "entanglements" had the greatest positive consequences for democracy. I think the same is true for culture. The challenge is to get audiences and participants to move from convenience to commitment.

Posted at 6:07 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (0)

Brave New Inconveniences; same old people
by Robert Levine

Steven Tepper wrote:

...the greatest barrier for many students when it comes to attending the arts is the notion of "opportunity costs" - many students don't want to commit to an event because they want to wait and see if something better comes along. People want convenience; they want to leave their options open; they want to "drop in and drop by," they want to be able to customize their play lists rather than trust someone else to curate their experiences.

Isn't the last statement called into question by the great success that at least some museum exhibits seem to be having these days? They are as much "curated by someone else" as were exhibits 100 years ago.

The issue of potential concertgoers wanting to keep their options open is not restricted to students. Nor is it new; it seems to be behind the near-universal trend away from the subscription ticket model (which has been going on for a couple of decades now).

There is a trend amongst "big thinkers" to believe that people want different things in the 21st century than they did in the 20th ("people want to 'drop in and drop by'" and such). I'm very suspicious of that notion. People don't change. But what's available to them does. If, for example, 500 channels of cable had been available at the dawn of the TV age, people would have subscribed in droves. The three-network model only existed because of lack of alternatives.

There have always been people creating music, and other forms of art, in their garages (or stables). We used to call it "folk music," among other things. But now it's both easier to create (or to cobble together from pre-existing art) and to distribute new art (although now we call it "content").

Steven Tepper also wrote:

There is probably a place for certain organizations to focus only on artistic innovation, with little regard for audiences. These organizations might be doing critical R&D which has little day-to-day relevance. Good for them. In the end, some will be serving a public interest if their innovations take hold and animate a new generation of audiences and artists.

The problem is that it's hard for orchestras to take those risks. And the non-orchestral organizations that can afford to do so provide models that aren't really "on point" for orchestras. So we get stuck in old models (of concert presentation, for example) that seem to be working less well, but we don't have the resources to take the risks to innovate our way out of the old models.

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Of zombies, freaks... and the other 90%
by Robert Levine

Vanessa Bertozzi wrote:

For those who live inside the looking glass of classical music, what brings the music back to life for you? What are the expressions of identity from this subculture and what do its participants value? Maybe romantics are different from modernists, and opera freaks are different from chamber music fans. I can't quite say, though I'd be interested to hear from those of you who would know.

Opera fans are most definitely different than chamber music fans. But most people who attend concerts, and even operas, are not hard-core fans. I think the problem of engaging audiences (or, in management-speak, putting butts in seats) is less about the hard-core fans than about everyone else.

The question of "what brings the music back to life" is both interesting and hard for me to answer in a way that's helpful to answering the "butts in seats" question. I know why I go to concerts (aside from the ones I get paid to perform, of course). It's not why most people go. Generally I go either to see friends perform or to pass judgment on another orchestra's technical proficiency. I find myself constantly frustrated at not understanding why normal people go to concerts. That makes it hard to figure out what changes in presentation or content could make more of them want to go.

One thing that I have noticed, however, is that people do seem to want, in the live experience, things they can't get in the recorded version. When I watch the Vienna Phil play every New Year's Day, for example, I'm struck both by the physical intimacy of the situation - with the audience practically on top of the orchestra - and the evident mutual engagement between the performers and the audience.

Laura Jackson wrote:

... our access to recorded music makes listeners want live performance even more. If a twenty year old has five CD's of their favorite rap star, they are probably going to knock themselves out to attend a live performance if the opportunity arises.

That's only true because the live performance is a very different (and in some ways better) experience than the download. In some respects that's often not true in our business. For example, most concert halls, even the new ones (and I am speaking about you, Frank Gehry), just don't sound very good as compared to live recordings made of the same orchestra, sometimes in the same hall. It's positively embarrassing how much better my orchestra sounds on recordings made in concert than anywhere in our hall except on stage.

That sure doesn't make it easier to sell tickets to come see my orchestra.

Posted at 7:36 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (0)

A Brief History of Dropping In and Dropping By
by Lynne Conner

I know I'm setting myself up as the history geek in this conversation--but I just can't help pointing out yet another connection between present and past. Steven Tepper identifies an important truth about today's audiences: "People want convenience; they want to leave their options open; they want to 'drop in and drop by,' they want to be able to customize their play lists rather than trust someone else to curate their experiences." This is also an important truth about audiences of the past, who from the ancients and up through the 19th century consistently curated their own cultural experiences as a normal course of action. And, they did it without apology. In the prologue to his play The Brothers, the Roman playwright Terence (whom we revere today as among the greatest ancient comic playwrights) made a plea to his audience to for the gods-sake please stay for the whole play this time. He did this because during the first production of his play Mother-in-Law the audience left in the middle of the performance to go see a rope dancer and to watch the gladiators. We know that Elizabethan theatre-goers routinely moved from one playhouse to another over the course of a day--a little Hamlet at the Globe, a round of bear baiting next door at the sporting ring, a comic dance and a cup of ale at a tavern, topped off with yet another revival of the gloriously bloody fifth act of Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy at The Swan. And what about the first concert and opera audiences? It's the same story, as is pointed out in Susan Wollenberg and Simon McVeigh's Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain: "An individual would often attend several theaters in an evening, arranging to see favourite scenes, players or singers or meeting with people in different halls and boxes . . It was not though obligatory to sit through it all."

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Is it the Art or the Artist?
by Ed Cambron

In thinking about what's been written so far, my thoughts turned to the stage. If we are on a path where audiences need to be more engaged with the creation of the art, does that mean they need to be more engaged with the artists onstage too? Are we treating our orchestra musicians like artists? Do they treat themselves and organize themselves like artists?

It wasn't so long ago that orchestras debated the simple act of having a musician speak from the stage. That says a lot about how we view the creative process and the role of musicians. If you think about it we have opportunities few other performing arts disciplines have; a large collection of artist who commit to the creation of art for an institution, day in and day out, usually for a lifetime. Imagine the power of exploiting their individual musical talents to engage audiences, their power to engage in musical discourse with audiences, one on one, on the stage, off the stage, online, and in our communities. Imagine for a moment if they viewed their role primarily as an individual contributor to the art form, and not as part of a collective contribution. Imagine for a moment if orchestra administrators viewed their role as encouraging and facilitating the work of individual artists. Would this create a more open and creative environment with greater opportunity for audience engagement? Would it allow us to be more flexible in a changing cultural landscape? Maybe.

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The Infinitely Recordable Me
by Douglas McLennan

To Laura: I was with you when you were describing differences between live performances and recordings. But then you had to go and say this:

I would argue that our access to recorded music makes listeners want live performance even more. If a twenty year old has five CD's of their favorite rap star, they are probably going to knock themselves out to attend a live performance if the opportunity arises.

I think that this largely used to be true. But I think for many people the recorded experience might now be preferable to the live one. Live pop for example almost never delivers in purely musical terms. The sound isn't mixed well, the crowd is noisy, and the acoustics are terrible. I suspect the attraction of these events has more to do with having an encounter with someone famous or plugging in to the energy of a crowd than it does an appreciation of the music. Not to say that isn't important, but it's very different. Watching sports on TV is also a different experience. With replays, multiple camera angles and constant stats and analysis on the screen, one can participate in a deeper way in the pure game.

Except you can't. You might know more about what's going on in the game. You might be able to hear the layers of the music better in a recording, but I think most people would identify an essential "being there" experience that generally trumps the comfort of your own living room.

Okay - I realize I've just argued against my initial point. But perhaps not. I think the recorded experience - one which we increasingly have more control of (think Tivo, iPods, etc) - is increasingly different from the live experience, and speaks to entirely to different needs. No more is the recorded experience a shadow of the live version; it offers different things, speaks to different needs. Most people's encounters with artists these days comes not from a live experience, but through a screen or speaker. Even if you're a big music fan, your bulk relationship with music is through recording. Live has largely become the boutique experience.

I have a friend who's an audiophile. For him the sound is everything, and witnessing his fanaticism about the minute placement of expensive speakers and super special wiring sometimes makes me question what he really finds important in music. At the other end, I know music critics who seem to be quite content listening to music in crappy MP3 files on lousy equipment. For them, the sound is not so relevant as the ideas or artistry expressed in those ideas. Sound be damned.

We live in a visual age. One of the things that has happened with computers and video in recent years is that the sophistication of our video language has moved away from the visual language that can be employed in real life on a stage. If our primary visual language is now that of the screen, and live linear story-telling is increasingly a foreign language (the theatre audience is much smaller than the TV or movie audience), how do you hook people on the live experience when they have less and less encounter with it and may no longer find the language familiar?

I can buy an argument that the live musical experience is about participation and being involved. But if that kind of involving experience is increasingly a foreign experience for someone who's used to using recorded music to accompany their day, how do you convince them that it's important? Their experience of music in the recorded world might not require them to have the live experience to be a music fan.

Posted at 8:14 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (0)

No just "reviving" art...
by Andrew Berryhill

Lawrence Kramer's New York Time's article was also one I found of great interest as an orchestra administrator (who like Robert mentioned in his piece) looks forward to a number of years of continued employment in this field. However I'd like to offer a slightly different take on Mr. Karmer's idea. I believe we are already, especially when we do our job's well, acting in some ways as the best museums do and doing so in a more challenging manner than just as a institution dedicated to "reviving" art.

We, like museums, we have a vital role to serve as the best curators of our art. When you visit a great museum, you usually only see a fraction of their collection at any one time. Similarly, at any given time, we in the orchestra business have out for public consumption only a fraction of our collection.

But the comparison also goes deeper. What sets great orchestras and museums apart from others is how well they present their collection for the public's consideration. What is the context? Monet and Manet created beautiful paintings and are often hung together. Similarly there are plenty of good reasons to play Beethoven and Brahms on the same concert. But don't we do our curatorial job a little better when we challenge our audience to think a little more? The Chicago Art Institute is currently presenting a show that explores the Islamic world's role as an intermediary between the East and West. It isn't just the presentation of the art itself, but the context of that presentation that makes this show compelling.

My orchestra here in far northern Minnesota just finished its concert season with a unabashedly exuberant staging of Porgy and Bess. It was insanely expensive and challenging for us to present, but even more wildly successful. And the reason we did it was because we loved the idea of presenting to our substantially homogeneous Scandinavian-descended audience the idea that Catfish Row had a compelling story worthy of their consideration. It was this juxtaposition of context that I believe made this show so special for us in Duluth (aside from the wonderful music!).

So in response to Mr. Kramer, I would say yes, we happily accept the challenge of engaging our audience with our art. And perhaps we've been doing it already for some time now and see it as more than just a practice of revival.

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Steampunks and the world we live in
by Greg Sandow

Fascinating.

I'm much in sympathy with Vanessa Bertozzi (as if anyone would be surprised by that). Opera fans...steampunks...both showing up, in a new kind of cultural map, as subcultures that can seem very strange to anyone outside them.

Which is a big surprise, according to official -- canonic -- notions of high and low art. Opera, we've long assumed, is important. Steampunk is curious,weird. And probably won't stick around as long as opera did, right? So opera is worth more, right? (Not that I'm posing those rhetorical questions in my own voice.)

First corrective to this: look at Billboard, the trade paper of the recording industry. Look at their charts and commentary for innumerable musical genres. See how classical music shows up as one of these -- as one of the lesser ones, in fact, a genre they don't feel they need to touch base with every week. From a culture-wide point of view, then, the canonical arts can easily look like just one activity of many, with their own demographic, it's true, and their own rules, but easily viewed as part of the larger (and definitely not high-art) culture.

Second corrective: A group of twenty-somethings (to judge from their appearance), overheard talking as they came out of a performance of Tosca at the Met. "I didn't like it," said one of them. "I could tell he was really going to get shot at the end. That was dumb!" Popular culture, to make this point quickly, has gotten so smart that some things in high culture look dumb by comparison. We can't assume the superiority of high culture, just because we always have.

And then Robert Levine: there's still a place, he says, for the canonical arts. I agree. But that place, in the future, will demand (at least as I see it) that they get stripped of their canonical status. That doesn't mean we devalue them. Mahler, who's been with us a long time, deserves some deference. But only because of what's actually in his work, and what it actually means (and has meant) in our culture. We need to take away the aura, and let canonical artworks fend for themselves in the modern world.

Some people, of course, will find that horrifying. These artworks are special. They can't be understood without special preparation. (That thought is endemic in classical music, and goes a long way toward killing that artform.) They need to be nurtured, funded, protected.

But why? How does anyone argue for that? How do we justify, to our fellow citizens, all the money that goes for high art? These aren't academic questions. We're actively fighting those battles, as the arts studies I mentioned in my last post demonstrate. (Along with many others.) So supporters of the canonical status of traditional high art can huff and puff all they want (sorry; got a little carried away there). But they're still facing the present-day reality, which is that high art needs to show why it still matters -- and why its high status should still be maintained -- in the present=day world.

A thought. I've seen some figures on the proportion of the population of certain major cities that the orchestras in those cities reach on a regular basis. We're not talking now about the people who show up for Fourth of July parks concerts, but the people who come regularly to the core subscription concerts these orchestras give. I can't quote these figures , because they were told to me in confidence. But I can tell you that they're shockingly low. So low, in fact, that it becomes hard to justify the amount of money and prestige that these orchestras have. Opera companies, I don't doubt, would show the same disparity. So, opera and steampunk. Opera gets special care and feeding. Steampunk takes care of itself. That's a virtue in steampunk, a defect of opera. (Though I'm not closed to the argument that opera has been with us a long time, and plays an important role in the history of western culture. But does that really mean -- just to be devil's advocate here -- that we need live performances? Maybe we should just archive all the opera DVDs.)

Finally, Steven Tepper, so cautiously wondering what proportion of kids actually do create culture on their own. Studies haven't been done, he says. And I certainly should be sympathetic to that caution, because I so strongly said that we don't base our pontifications strongly enough on facts.

Still, I wonder if there's not a double standard here. Steven hopes that a majority of young people, maybe all young people, will participate in the ways Vanessa Bertozzi and her collaborator described. But we don't need that level of participation before it's clear that a major trend is at work. Rolling back the clock a few decades, did anyone ask -- when Andy Warhol was getting big -- how many people actually cared about pop art? Or saw Warhol's films? (That last was surely a small number.) Nobody asked. It was clear that something new was going on, and because it happened in the area of high art, we had a model for the emergence of new styles. We'd been clocking that emergence for centuries.

Or here's an example from the history of rock. The Velvet Underground (a Warhol connection there, parenthetically) is now ranked as one of the greatest of all bands, and certainly as one of the most influential. It's also understood that not many people heard them when they were new. In fact, there's a hoary old rock joke: "When the Velvet Underground came out, 12 people bought their records. And then all 12 started really important bands."

Why can't we have a model like that, at least provisionally, for current developments in culture? It's odd, I think, that we might not even think of it. At the same time, by the way, that most of us here are in the business of supporting the canonical arts, which are definitely a minority enterprise.

Besides, it seems hard to doubt that participation -- creating your own cultural stuff -- is a huge trend right now, whether or not any large number of teenagers are making the kind of really interesting art Vanessa and her collaborator described. Have we forgotten the hundreds, or maybe thousands, of Brokeback Mountain mashups? Have we forgotten the three commercials shown during the Superbowl (I think that's the right number), that were made by customers of the companies that showed them? Certainly the New York Times, in its business section, has run many pieces about how advertisers now solicit their customers to create or help create the ads.

Have we forgotten Time's person of the year -- who, precisely because of these participatory trends, was all of us? (Symbolized by a mirror on the cover of the magazine, instead of a picture of someone.) I'm all for studies, but while we're calling for them, let's at least grant that the conventional wisdom currently says that participation - creating your own cultural stuff -- is a big, big thing.

My final thought. We in the arts often don't have a clear sense of what people who don't participate in our kind of art are actually like -- what they think about, what they do. That's certainly true in my own field, classical music. The many smart, educated people who don't go to classical concerts might as well be on Mars, we understand them so poorly. And studies aren't the answer, I really must say. You have to know these people (who, after all, are our families, friends, and neighbors). You have to live among them. (As in fact we do, if we'd only open our eyes.) The reasons they might give for not going to classical concerts are only the slightest tip of an enormous iceberg. These people don't really know enough about classical concerts to know why they don't go. But when you can feel in your gut -- because you know it from your own experience -- what they actually do like, the reasons for their non-attendance start to seem very clear.

Posted at 9:26 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (1)

Ars longa, vita brevis (visual or otherwise)
by Robert Levine

Doug McLennan wrote:

" If a twenty year old has five CD's of their favorite rap star, they are probably going to knock themselves out to attend a live performance if the opportunity arises." I think that this largely used to be true. But I think for many people the recorded experience might now be preferable to the live one. Live pop for example almost never delivers in purely musical terms. The sound isn't mixed well, the crowd is noisy, and the acoustics are terrible. I suspect the attraction of these events has more to do with having an encounter with someone famous or plugging in to the energy of a crowd than it does an appreciation of the music.

But why does it matter? In purely musical terms, a recorded performance by artist X of concerto Y with orchestra Z is almost bound to be superior in many respects to any live performance they'll give together, but people come to see artist X etc. anyway. It's a superior experience in some ways and not in others. And it's been like that for a long time.

Doug went on to write:

Not to say that isn't important, but it's very different. Watching sports on TV is also a different experience. With replays, multiple camera angles and constant stats and analysis on the screen, one can participate in a deeper way in the pure game.
Except you can't. ... most people would identify an essential "being there" experience that generally trumps the comfort of your own living room.

Opera and baseball (and movies like "Titanic") are best experienced in their native habitats rather than at home, purely on the merits. One problem that orchestras face is the absence of a similar level of spectacle.

Okay - I realize I've just argued against my initial point. But perhaps not. I think the recorded experience - one which we increasingly have more control of (think Tivo, iPods, etc) - is increasingly different from the live experience, and speaks to entirely to different needs. No more is the recorded experience a shadow of the live version; it offers different things, speaks to different needs. Most people's encounters with artists these days comes not from a live experience, but through a screen or speaker. Even if you're a big music fan, your bulk relationship with music is through recording. Live has largely become the boutique experience.

But how is that any different from the past 50 years?

I have a friend who's an audiophile. For him the sound is everything, and witnessing his fanaticism about the minute placement of expensive speakers and super special wiring sometimes makes me question what he really finds important in music.
As my wife once said, audiophiles are people who listen to the hiss.
At the other end, I know music critics who seem to be quite content listening to music in crappy MP3 files on lousy equipment. For them, the sound is not so relevant as the ideas or artistry expressed in those ideas. Sound be damned.
We live in a visual age. One of the things that has happened with computers and video in recent years is that the sophistication of our video language has moved away from the visual language that can be employed in real life on a stage...live linear story-telling is increasingly a foreign language (the theatre audience is much smaller than the TV or movie audience)

Again, how is this different from the past 50 years?

I can buy an argument that the live musical experience is about participation and being involved. But if that kind of involving experience is increasingly a foreign experience for someone who's used to using recorded music to accompany their day, how do you convince them that it's important? Their experience of music in the recorded world might not require them to have the live experience to be a music fan.

There is a school of thought (made famous by the monumental James C. Petrillo, president of the American Federation of Musicians through the 1940's and 50's) that, for a musician, making a recording is like playing for one's own funeral. I think the problem is more that, as Doug said earlier, we live in a visual age. That's the one shift above all others that TV has brought us. And orchestras aren't visual experiences.

Posted at 9:32 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (0)

Not so Different, Yet All The Difference
by Douglas McLennan

Robert: How it's different from the past 50 years is the amount of control people now have over the experience. Yes we've had recordings for a long time, but the ease of access and portability now makes it different. Yes we had Walkmen and portable CD players, and before them the radio and record player. But being able to find the things you want and access them whenever you want is different I think.

I also think that (particularly in visual culture) there's been more of a separation of experience between live and recorded. In other words, as long as the video experience was a pale representation of a performance - second best except for its accessibility - there was no question as to the supremacy of live. But as video has evolved it stopped trying to recreate/mirror/represent the live version, and created something of its own that is increasingly different from live.

I would say, for example that the Met's moviecast operas in movie theatres is a different artform than staged opera. It's based on the staged opera, but by virtue of its ability to reinvent the visual language in ways that in some cases are much superior to what you can see in the theatre, it has become a different artform.

What I'm arguing that is new is that there's a separation of experience that's taking place. There are concert halls where you just can't hear an orchestra as well as you can in a well-done recording. If what interests you is aural clarity, it's not at all certain that the concert hall is the best place to experience that. Again - nothing particularly new about that. But my ability to control most of the aspects of how I'm going to encounter art might mean that I'm less willing to give up that control to somebody coughing or a bad seat. And I would argue that encasing the live experience in temple-like garb is also a turnoff for many people. There's much about the temple experience that is wonderful. But there's also something about the physical experience that can seem arid, too.

Yes we live in a visual age, and I'm not arguing against live performance or for spicing up the visuals. What I'm trying to question is what is the essence of the live experience and why performers think its charms are so immediately obvious. The list of inconveniences associated with being an audience member at a live performance is long - from ticket cost and transportation to the things I mentioned above. What is the essence of live that is going to keep me coming back, especially if I encounter a string of performances that cost me much to participate but failed to deliver on my heightening demands for "peak" experiences?

Don't get me wrong - I love live experiences when they work out. There's no substitute, to my way of thinking. But I do seriously want to know: as my calculations about how I spend my time get more and more complicated, what's the indisputable can't-get-anywhere-else ingredient of live performance I just have to have? Or (I worry), perhaps there isn't any such a thing?

Posted at 12:22 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (1)

Phone Salesman's "Nessun dorma" Leaves Them Crying In the Aisles
by Molly Sheridan

Earlier this week, Alex drew my attention to this clip from Britain's Got Talent. The singer was a phone salesman by day. His performance was clearly not Corelli, but the powerful combination of the piece and the situation stunned the audience, the members of which seemed to have forgotten that opera existed. They were clearly engaged. Why are professional opera productions not attracting them? Do they only want 4 minutes of opera before they move on to the next thing? Are they afraid of the art form because otherwise their only association is a badly produced PBS (or in this case BBC) concert special?

I consistently wonder if (and unscientifically find to be true that) it's simply a question of the presentation, not the art and performers themselves. It's so simple it's scary, but the Wordless Music Series in New York this season finally made a success of that idea we've been tossing around at conferences for the past few years but haven't truly implemented. The shows mixed up great performers from both the new music and the indie rock/experimental sides. They were held in rented churches and played to consistently sold out houses. There was wine and the tickets were hand stamps, but there were also programs and pin-drop quiet because everyone seemed to sincerely want to hear what the musicians had to say (not because that was some kind of rule).

If the audience isn't engaged (and engagement doesn't require the audience to necessarily like/agree with what you're doing--ever been to a play at the Fringe Festival that pushed you too far in a direction you did not what to go, but still left you feeling engaged with the experience?), doesn't that signal a serious flaw in the art or in how it's being performed? I mean, it's a performing art. What is it without the audience? Isn't a major piece of the performance missing for both sides?

What has set apart the most affecting performances you've experienced in the last couple of years? Can any of those elements be implemented by other institutions where such audience enthusiasm is lacking without harming to the artistic purpose of the creators?

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On the proper identification of meteors
by Robert Levine

I believe, as a general rule, that the past is not so different from the present. No doubt that could be seen as a defensive posture on the part of someone entrenched in the orchestra industry. It may also be a by-product of spending most of my working hours with guys that have been dead for 200 years. If a transporter glitch were to materialize me into the viola section of Mozart's "Magic Flute" orchestra in 1791 at the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, I'd be back to work in no time. Not many workers in any field could make a statement like that. Living in that kind of tradition has definitely colored my thinking about many things.

I also tend to the contrarian, so that the above belief is likely also a reaction to the tendency of "big thinkers" (and we have several in our midst) to emphasize change over continuity. Change is far more interesting to think about than is continuity, it's impossible to deny that there's a lot of it going on, and refusal to deal with change is a very poor survival strategy. But our job as analysts is not to think only about change, but to figure out what's really happening. That means, in part, making sure that what looks like change really is change, and not simply old phenomena in new clothing.

Few institutions in our society have the longevity of our major orchestras. That doesn't make them invulnerable. But when people call orchestras "dinosaurs," I remember that dinosaurs had a pretty good run - a few hundred million years or so (or maybe longer; some scientists believe that what you had for lunch was Kentucky Fried T. Rex Junior).

Some specific quibbles with what Greg Sandow wrote:

... Opera, we've long assumed, is important. Steampunk is curious,weird. And probably won't stick around as long as opera did, right? So opera is worth more, right? (Not that I'm posing those rhetorical questions in my own voice.)..First corrective to this: look at Billboard, the trade paper of the recording industry. Look at their charts and commentary for innumerable musical genres. See how classical music shows up as one of these -- as one of the lesser ones, in fact, a genre they don't feel they need to touch base with every week.
However, on iTunes, classical has done very well - much better than it's doing in CD format. And conventional wisdom is that the iTunes audience is younger and more hip than the CD audience. So put a hold on those assumptions about how badly our canon is doing with Gens X and Y.
And then Robert Levine: there's still a place, he says, for the canonical arts. I agree. But that place, in the future, will demand (at least as I see it) that they get stripped of their canonical status.

That's what I get for using a term without defining what I mean by it. Our canon is music that has not only stood the test of time but is the basis for our musical culture, both high and low. It's no accident that John Williams writes film scores for huge blockbusters that sound an awful lot like Elgar and Holst and Vaughn Williams, or that commercials still use music from the canon or derived from it.

That doesn't mean we devalue them. Mahler, who's been with us a long time, deserves some deference. But only because of what's actually in his work, and what it actually means (and has meant) in our culture..

Again, that's not news. Mahler has had his ups and downs, depending on how audiences perceive him, based on what's actually in the music. Music that consistently doesn't speak to audiences is not going to get programmed by an orchestra concerned with selling tickets.

. ..Some people, of course, will find that horrifying. These artworks are special. ... They need to be nurtured, funded, protected...But why? How does anyone argue for that? How do we justify, to our fellow citizens, all the money that goes for high art? These aren't academic questions...

High art has always required subsidy in a way that popular culture doesn't. But I don't think that Beethoven per se has ever needed protection. There's a reason why there are, say, revivals of 19th century popular art, but not of Beethoven. Beethoven never went away and never needed to be "revived."

I've seen some figures on the proportion of the population of certain major cities that the orchestras in those cities reach on a regular basis. ... I can't quote these figures, because they were told to me in confidence. But I can tell you that they're shockingly low.

But weren't they always pretty low? They might be somewhat lower now, but that doesn't mean the numbers have fallen off a cliff in the last decade or so.

As Mark Twain might have said, there are lies, damned lies, statistics.. and historical audience data about orchestras.

Posted at 3:13 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (0)

Audience as Orchestra?
by Laura Jackson

To Sasha:

I promise to continue marinating on your comments over night but I must say that at the moment....I don't get it.
I agree with you conclusions that we need to respect audiences and see them as partners rather than ignorant consumers. However, when you say the following I am left confused: "I realized that we musicians were most emphatically not the orchestra. The orchestra was plainly those folks in city after town all around the state whose eyeglasses reflected stage light from the darkness of the house night after night. They were the orchestra. We - musicians, managers, stagehands, conductors - were the hired help ....Why is this paradigm important? Because we are always talking about how we can sell what we have to them, but they are not them - they are more us than we ourselves."

Sure we are hired help but we have to be careful about who we identify as "boss." The art we create needs to be intrinsically connected to the community in which we live and our audiences need to be among the constituencies from whom we carefully weigh feedback of all sorts. We mustn't forget, however, that our primary service as artists is to the composers and creators of art moreso than audiences. An audience may hate what we do from time to time, and although this can't be our goal, it can't and shouldn't be completely avoided.

Posted at 9:44 PM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (1)

June 16, 2007

The European model
by Robert Levine

William Osborne wrote (in a comment):

I hate to speak in such blunt terms, but the naivety of this discussion is appalling, even if based on very common American delusions. You refuse to admit that our problems with the performing arts are systemic, due to our lack of public arts funding. It really is a form of willful denial with the result that your views are not only blinkered, they reflect a chauvinistic ethnocentricity.
...The USA is the ONLY industrial country in the world that does not have extensive public funding for the arts. You all accept this extremism as if it were normal and confine your thinking to this absurd paradigm. As arts journalists you should be the first to protest our lack of public funding for the arts. You should be the first to open discuss how the lack of public funding contextualizes all of the problems and challenges you are discussing. So why all the silence?

Actually the US does have extensive public funding for the arts. But it's done by tax policy rather than direct funding. It probably doesn't provide as much funding for the arts per capita as does the direct subsidies in some (not all) European countries. But it provides far more money for the arts than any other mechanism that any conceivable constellation of political forces in the US could achieve.

I'd love to have the kind of public funding that German orchestras have. It's going to happen in the same millennium that the Berlin Bombers have the best record in baseball.

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An audacious new world of creativity?
by Moy Eng

I am witnessing the redefinition of artmaking and cultural engagement at the beginning of the millennium. A redefinition fueled by technology and the internet where everyone is creative; anyone can be an artist; and creative expressions have expanded far beyond the standard art idioms to encompass anime and machinima. Compared to jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman whom could not readily find support or an audience after music critics claimed he played out of tune instead of hearing the crafting of a new language, experimentation with new forms can find a global audience/community with virtually one click. As articulated in Jenkins and Bertozzi's article Artistic Expression in the Age of Participatory Culture and my personal observations with teens and young adults, many have bypassed formal intermediary institutions such as nonprofit theaters for validation, and support. As a result, they are changing not only how art is created and disseminated but fundamentally redefining what constitutes art, culture, an artist, the artistic/creative experience, its role in daily life and where it's experienced.

Will this trend radically change the way in which arts and culture is funded? Quite likely for supporters who care about artmaking or cultural participation. For institutional funders such as The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, it will be a challenge to figure how to adeptly shift resources to support new ways of artmaking and cultural engagement. IRS tax code regulations and established philanthropic practices have long focused the bulk of foundation support to the creators, producers and presenters of art via nonprofit arts organizations. Quite simply I am awed and thrilled by the proliferation and breadth of diverse cultural engagement. I believe that the most important step for the Hewlett Foundation is to learn more, listen and be open to what is unfolding to determine how we could more fully respond with the right strategies to support this new world of creative expression.

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The Arts Experience vs. The ARTS (Warning!-- this entry contains a sports analogy)
by Lynne Conner

I'd like to argue for another definition of engagement from the one that we seem to be focused on in this discussion and in much of the current industry literature (e.g., Gifts of the Muse).

What I mean when I talk about engagement is NOT what happens in the moment of reception, when we are the butts-in-the-seats at a concert (play, ballet, opera). For me, the most significant opportunities for engagement come before and after the arts event, when audiences are invited to formulate and express an opinion in a public context. I believe today's potential arts audiences don't want the Arts; they want the arts experience. They want the opportunity to participate--in an intelligent and responsible way--in telling its meaning. Like their forebears in the amphitheaters of fifth-century Athens and the vaudeville palaces of nineteenth-century America, they want a real forum--or several forums--for the interplay of ideas, experience, data, and feeling that makes up the arts experience. They want to retrieve sovereignty over their arts-going by reclaiming the cultural right to formulate and exchange opinions that are valued by the community.

Consider, for instance, what it means to engage as a football game. I acknowledge that sports--with their emphasis on competition and tribal affiliations--serve a set of individual and collective impulses arguably distinct from those serviced by our contemporary definition of art. (Though I also take the opportunity to note that many forms of western art, including theatre, began in a competitive, tribal environment.) But perhaps sports attendance is so high in the United States because of the felt value of participating in the sports experience rather than in simply watching the sports event itself. Sports fans are constantly invited to co-author meaning and are regularly provided with experiential opportunities that facilitate that co-authoring process. The enormous amateur sports enterprise--enabling children and adults to participate on a physical level--supports a connection to and engagement with the professional industry. But even non-athletes can participate in significant and meaningful ways. Every day they can read in newspapers about their game of interest: its current conditions, its people, its politics. Every day they can watch and listen to expert analysis of their game on the television or the radio, and every day they can debate their own opinions with a coworker or a neighbor or make a call to radio and television talk shows. In our society opportunities for the analysis of and debate about sporting events are so abundant, in fact, that we can be democratic in how we field those opportunities. We have the cultural space, so to speak, to listen to everyone's opinion.

The distinction here is obvious: We do not have the same attitude or approach to arts as to sports. We rarely carry the energy of an arts experience into our work environment, and we seldom, if ever, feel knowledgeable or empowered enough to debate the meaning or value of an arts event. Sports fans, unlike their arts counterparts, have been given permission to express their opinions openly and the tools they need to back up those opinions. The experiences that surround the sporting event--from talk shows to twenty pages of sports writing in the daily newspaper--help the audience to prepare, to process, to analyze, and to feel a deep sense of satisfaction.

I ask you, if you put your average passionately engaged football fan in a room with a tv and turned out the lights, told her to be quiet, didn't give him any accessible background information (no newspaper, tv, radio or internet coverage), and didn't offer him or her any opportunities to talk about it before (no tailgate parties, no sidewalk or over-the-fence encounter with the neighbors) or afterwards (no call-in shows, no water cooler chats)--what would happen to the sports industry?

As every sports fan knows, the real pleasure, the deep satisfaction, of the sports experience is not limited to watching the game--it's in those public opportunities to prepare, to process, to analyze. Throughout the twentieth century, the sports industry has understood its responsibility to promote opportunities for public debate and civic discourse. The arts industry has largely neglected that task, and we are paying for it now.

Posted at 6:45 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (2)

Death of an expert
by Russell Willis Taylor

Difficult to know what to add to so many insightful observations, so have been reading rather than writing. It is gratifying to see that we are beyond the "we don't want the world to change" stage, if not perhaps all at the same stage of acceptance that the delivery systems that we have invested untold millions in just may not meet the needs and wants of the next generation. This is not to say that there isn't a role for wonderful music beautifully played by professional musicians in a glorious concert hall, but is rather to say that perhaps we need to get to grips with the fact that this is far from the only experience of classical music that people want, and they may not want to experience as much of it as we wish to produce.

One of the respondents early on in this blog commented that "I'm not a great watcher. . . I like to be singing or playing." And there it is - a succinct affirmation that the unmet appetite is the participatory one. I think it goes much deeper than just the American Idol syndrome, or everyone wanting their fifteen minutes of fame. Some of you may have followed the story in both Wired and The Washington Post about a respected journalist who found he could not interview bloggers for a story, as they refused to have their words filtered through him as a professional journalist. This goes much further than just the curatorial me, it is an example of the zeitgeist telling us that the role of the expert is shifting rapidly. New technologies are not just helping people explore ways in which to be creative, they are giving people the outlet to be heard and are providing a powerful vehicle for the democratization of expression.

A recent study by five university psychologists analyzed results from the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (I'm not making this one up, folks) and demonstrated that since 1982 young people are experiencing an inexorable increase in the "positive and inflated view of the self." The academics speculated that technology may have something to do with it, but the point is that the next generation of viewers see themselves differently than our current audiences do, and in a pretty fundamental way. If we want anything we do to be of relevance, we have to see ourselves and the role we play in their lives differently to the same degree of radical change. This is not one for tinkering at the margins - this is a complete shift from being the expert to making each and every audience member the expert, and living with their freely expressed opinions.

The organizational structure of most of our business doesn't lend itself to change in this way, but Doug has admonished us to stick with one topic per posting, so I will save that for later.

Posted at 7:13 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (1)

Was the past really like the present?
by Greg Sandow

This is fun.

Some brief responses. (Well, not so brief. I don't seem to have "brief" in my repertoire, for which I apologize.)

To Robert Levine (hi, Robert): I think, if you were plunked down in Mozart's time, yes, you'd find other violists playing music you know, but I don't think you'd entirely recognize the musical world you'd suddenly be in. Parenthetically, I'll note that the classical music world seems to have forgotten some of its history, especially the parts that suggest that classical music practice has changed rather drastically over the centuries, so that the classical music world we now have isn't much like the classical music world of the past. It's really bracing to dig into the real history -- which, Robert, neither you nor I were taught anything about in music school, so it's not our fault if we don't know it now. The current generation of music historians, though -- or at least some of them -- are all over it.

So -- Mozart's time. The first thing we'd find surprising (to put it mildly) would be the behavior of the audience. They wouldn't be quiet. They'd talk while the music was playing, and applaud the moment they heard something they liked, right in the middle of the performance.

Secondly, performances would be, by our standards, pretty disorganized. There wasn't much rehearsal. (Robert, you'd be way ahead of the game. You'd already have played the Magic Flute viola part, while your colleagues in the viola section would be hacking their way through more or less at sight.)

And third, the orchestras improvised. This was a shock for me when I read it. One authority on this is Neal Zaslaw, the leading musicological authority on the Mozart symphonies. He's written an eye-popping paper on improvisation by 18th century German orchestras. Sometimes the entire first violin section would all improvise at once, each player making up his own version of the music. (They all would have been male back then.) All of them, that is, making up independent versions of what they saw written in their parts, no matter how discordant the result would have been. (Berlioz complained of this when he visited Italy in his own time, a couple of generations after Mozart. The violinists at Italy's leading opera house, La Scala, did what 18th century German orchestras did, and Berlioz hated it.)

There would be other differences, too. What it adds up to is a much more populist, much less canonic, much less "artistic," much more populist musical world than we have now, at least in classical music. It was noisier, more audience-based. Much more, in fact, like the pop world is today. One painting form the time, by Canaletto (this is discussed in Christopher Small's book Musicking) shows an 18th century performance that in some ways looks very much like what goes on in a rock club now. There's an orchestra on stage, and in the rest of the building, people are talking, walking around, and eating. Right in front of the stage is a knot of people listening intently. This is the world you'd be in, Robert, if you were transported back into the 18th century. If you happened to be in Prague, and played viola in the world premiere of Don Giovanni, you would have heard the singers playing Don Giovanni and Leporello improvise parts of the second act finale. (This is documented, very tastily, in Thomas Forrest Kelly's book First Nights at the Opera.)

(The Zaslaw citation: John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, "Improvised Ornamentation in Eighteenth-Century Orchestras," Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 524-577. I don't mean to be a pedant, but this stuff is so new to people in the classical music world that some may doubt it really exists.)

And about classical downloads: Yes, it's well known that younger people are downloading classical music, far more than they ever bought it in record stores. This is part of a larger phenomenon -- a wonderful trend toward interest in a wide variety of music. But let's not exaggerate it. It doesn't mean that kids are listening to entire symphonies, and especially it doesn't mean that they're going to classical concerts, or that they'd want to. Who doesn't like the sound of classical music? Its appeal, simply as something you'd listen to, isn't in question. What's worth pondering, rather, is the way in which we're asked to listen to it -- entire concerts of old classical repertoire, played in formal dress, with an older, largely passive audience.

Footnote about Bill Osborne. He keeps popping up in these discussions, always saying the same thing. The question for him -- especially since, for God's sake, he lives in Germany! -- would be why he doesn't note that government funding for the arts in Europe has been falling for many years now. The Berlin Philharmonic, for instance, now gets only half its funding (if that) from government sources, As a result, the Berlin Philharmonic and other European orchestras are out there scrambling for cash much like American orchestras, even if they don't yet need to do it to the same extent. But they're certainly bringing in American consultants to teach them how to raise funds, and how to do marketing.

Posted at 9:24 AM | permalink | email this entry | Comments (2)

A voice we should hear
by Greg Sandow

[These are comments posted in response to a discussion on my own blog. They come from Eric Lin, a college student, whom I don't know. The first part is what he originally posted. He offered the second part as an expansion and clarification. I think what Eric writes is especially relevant to what we're saying here. Lynne, I think you'll really like this!]

I'm still in college studying music (among other things) if that helps: The only 'classical' concerts I regularly go to these days are those with new groups like Alarm Will Sound (or other Miller Theatre concerts which George Steel dreams up). Zankel Hall concerts in New York aren't bad for the most part. The BoaC Marathon this year was fun too--and far from being a traditional concert.

Now, lest anyone accuse me of only likely contemporary music since I'm a composer, I'll admit that I love many works in the Canon. I recently went to hear the Emerson String Quartet play some of the late Beethoven quartets at Carnegie with a friend and I was expecting to really enjoy the concert. It was one of the most horrendous concert experiences I've ever endured, and I'm pretty sure my friend didn't enjoy the night out much either.

We found ourselves surrounded by an audience whose average age is anywhere from 40 to 50 years older than my friend or myself. I'm not in anyway being age discriminatory, but the discomfort was real. I love the late quartets and I was certainly excited to here Rihm's 'contemporary' quartet, yet when the old lady next to me started dozing off, I found myself getting sleepy too. I never would've imagined that I would start falling asleep during a Beethoven quartet.

Sadly, the most energetic period during the whole concert was the standing ovation given to the quartet at the end of the concert. (Some fearless soul gave a timid-yet provocative-clap between the first few movements of the Op. 132...only to give up after he/she was greeted with awkward silence and a few odd gazes. I should've started clapping too.)

I don't think I'm going back to another purely "Classical" performance anytime soon. It's expensive and suffocating. And I like Classical music. My poor friend.

***

From a musical level, I though the Emerson Quartet's performance was superb. But the disconnect between the energy level on stage and the lack thereof in the audience was rather painful. Honestly, I thought a lot of people looked rather bored; it's a subjective observation, yes, but it's my honest opinion.

I certainly don't attend concerts to nitpick and 'find' what's wrong with them. The cheapest ticket for the concert was 35 bucks, they didn't offer student tickets and I'm a poor college student. I certainly do not have that sort of money or time to do so. I went hoping for an enjoyable night of music.

I've been to concerts where the audience members (both young and old) walked out ACTIVELY talking about how exciting the music was. I remember overhearing some kid my age at a performance of Music for 18 Musicians talking to his kid brother about all the other Reich pieces he's heard and how cool they were AND how the music works (i.e. how phasing works, what minimalism is etc !!!!). There were also older audience members (some of whom we

June 8, 2007

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Engaging Art: The Next Great Transformation of America's Cultural Life

June 12, 2007

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June 13, 2007

Our Conversation Starts Thursday Morning

Something Better Comes Along...

So many changes, so many questions...

So you think you can dance?

June 14, 2007

What If Video Saved the Radio Star?

La plus ça change . . .

How do we deal with choice?

The new world

...same as the Old World?

Victorian Zombies & Opera Freaks

Response to "Something Better..."

June 15, 2007

New cultural divide?

Should we all care? No... But...

Inconvenient Entaglements

Brave New Inconveniences; same old people

Of zombies, freaks... and the other 90%

A Brief History of Dropping In and Dropping By

Is it the Art or the Artist?

The Infinitely Recordable Me

No just "reviving" art...

Steampunks and the world we live in

Ars longa, vita brevis (visual or otherwise)

Not so Different, Yet All The Difference

Phone Salesman's "Nessun dorma" Leaves Them Crying In the Aisles

On the proper identification of meteors

Audience as Orchestra?

June 16, 2007

The European model

An audacious new world of creativity?

The Arts Experience vs. The ARTS (Warning!-- this entry contains a sports analogy)

Death of an expert

Was the past really like the present?

A voice we should hear