Walking

 

Walking in New York; hot weather, the temperature up as high as 99. Walking is good for me, says the current fad, echoed by my body, which feels toned and alive after walking miles on shopping trips. But then I’ve breathed enough exhaust to give me cancer faster than a lifetime of second-hand smoke. The air is foul.

 

As I’m walking downtown on Broadway, I stop at Lincoln Center to buy some bottled water. I want to sit and drink it by the fountain. They’re charging $3 a bottle, for Aquafina—Pepsi-Cola water, a product of the Pepsi-Cola company—so cold that some of it is frozen.

 

$3 a bottle. That’s high, even ridiculous. Any deli (and I’ve passed dozens of them on these walks) would sell Aquafina for half that. So this is an art tax. The extra money pays Lincoln Center’s bills.

 

And that seems wrong to me. Sure, I go to the ballgame, and pay too much for beer that might be watered down. If I go to a Broadway show, the concessions are exhorbitant. Movie theaters make their money on the popcorn I might buy.

 

I know all that. And I know that if I buy anything to eat or drink at intermission at Carnegie Hall or the Met, I’ll be paying far too much as well. But outdoors at Lincoln Center? This seems like a mistake. It establishes to anyone who passes by and wants to drink some water that they’ve entered an elite space. Lincoln Center—don’t even think of coming here unless you can afford to pay $3 for a small bottle, not even of Evian, but of Aquafina. (Which, by the way, isn’t even mineral water. It’s distilled, and on the bottle Pepsi has the nerve to claim that this unneeded purity makes it taste better, as if Evian and Perrier and, for God’s sake, New York City tap water were dangerously loaded with impurities.)

 

Is this the message Lincoln Center wants to send? (Note that their outdoor space is home to their most populist activity, the wonderfully lively Midsummer Night Swing dances, attended by people who mostly never go to Lincoln Center’s arts events. Sometimes Lincoln Center wonders how to get this new potential audience into the Met, or the New York Philharmonic, or Lincoln Center’s own productions. Well, first let’s charge them $3 for some water, just to weed out the undesireables! I’d call this incoherent messaging.)

 

On another note, and maybe biting the hand that feeds me, I saw that Juilliard has some posters that try to give the school some sizzle. “Refining virtuosity!” says the one about chamber music (and if the exclamation point isn’t really present—I don’t quite remember—certainly it’s there in spirit). “Exhilirating originality!” flares the one about jazz at Juilliard.

 

And those phrases fascinate me. Let’s forget the meaning—if there is one—of doing ads like this at all. Some people might say that anyone who advertises this way forfeits the right to also claim the arts are special, but I won’t go there. I also won’t ask if the phrases really mean anything, or, rather, have any tangible connection to the music Juilliard students actually make. Are the students playing chamber music all virtuosos? Are the jazz performances always so original?

 

What interests me is the implied contrast between jazz and chamber music. Jazz gets called original, perhaps because the players improvise. Chamber music does get to be both exciting (all those virtuosos) and refined (or in other words artistic), but even advertising copywriters know that it’s not likely to be innovative in any way.

 

But why not? The grain of truth in this upsets me. Both in reality and perception, jazz appears more likely to do something new than chamber music. Too bad. What would chamber music be like, if we all expected “exhilirating originality”?

 

August 14, 2005 12:52 PM |

Categories:

Resources

Age of the Audience 
Conventional wisdom: the classical music audience has always been the age it is now. Reality: It used to be younger -- dramatically younger, in fact. Here's some evidence -- actual texts of old studies, links to NEA studies -- plus my blog posts on this subject. more

earlier resources

Things I like

Frank O'Hara... 
...or rather these lines from one of his poems, quoted today in the New York Times Book Review: more

The Ten-Cent Plague
 
To paraphrase the old quote about the Nazis: "They came for the comic books, but I didn't read comic books..." more

Improvisation Games
 
An inspired book... more

Elektra 1957
 
Seismic recording.  more

Carmen Sings Monk
 
It's piano music, but she'll sing it anyway...
more
more things

About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Sandow published on August 14, 2005 12:52 PM.

Good time was the previous entry in this blog.

Walking further is the next entry in this blog.

Find recent content on the main index or look in the archives to find all content.

AJ Ads

Introducing
AJ Arts Blog Ads

Now you can reach the most discerning arts blog readers on the internet. Target individual blogs or topics in the ArtsJournal ad network.

Advertise Here

AJ Blogs

AJBlogCentral | rss

special
Program Notes
the blog of the National Performing Arts Convention
culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
blog riley
rock culture approximately
CultureGulf
Rebuilding Gulf Culture after Katrina
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude

dance
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

jazz
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

classical music
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
On the Record
Exploring Orchestras w/ Henry Fogel
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Stage Write
Elizabeth Zimmer on time-based art forms

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary
Modern Art Notes
Tyler Green's modern & contemporary art blog
Creative Commons License
This weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons License.