In a New York Times op-ed, Laura Raicovich and Laura Hanna call for a generous increase in the way the government, in particular the federal government, funds arts institutions: As policymakers in Washington gather to draft a new budget for fiscal year 2025, they could solve culture’s current financial crisis and radically reshape how we think about sustaining the arts. They could do this by tapping into abundant appropriations that already enjoy bipartisan support. To make this possible, first we need to stop treating museums, theaters and … [Read more...]
We cannot quantify the richness of a nation’s literary life
In the English-speaking world, is there a decline in our literacy and in how people live with literature? For the past while there has been a debate on whether we are losing our literary culture - James Marriott thinks we are at the “dawn of the post-literate society” and has a forthcoming book that extends the argument. I’ll write up a review when I get my copy, but Henry Oliver has already obtained it, and gives some thoughtful pushback on Marriott’s analysis. Who’s right? I’m not sure. My intuition leans towards … [Read more...]
The Personal Brand Generation
Last week I learned that Arizona State University had launched a new degree program, a Bachelor of Arts in Content Creation, which can be taken either online or in-person: Do you dream of monetizing your video channel or making social media your career? Arizona State University’s online Bachelor of Arts in content creation prepares you to become a strategic storyteller who thrives in the rapidly evolving creator economy. This online program teaches you how to create powerful content across video, podcasts, social media and emerging … [Read more...]
Reading Isaac Butler’s The Perfect Moment
Isaac Butler has written a history of the controversies - dubbed the “culture wars” - that arose in the United States around the arts and arts-adjacent fields from the mid-1980s to around 2000. These were fights over state censorship of art, and the separate issue of restrictions on the content of art that could be available for government funding, even if quite indirectly. Butler tells a vivid story with good portraits of the artists whose work was at issue. He is especially good at defining the bind that National Endowment for the Arts … [Read more...]
Free Speech on Someone Else’s Stage – An Update
A few months ago I posted about a controversy in Australia, where a musician had a future appearance with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra cancelled because he had, contrary to MSO policy, made political comments during a performance. He sued, and the New York Times today reports (gift link) that he lost in court: The pianist, Jayson Gillham, claimed in a lawsuit that the orchestra had violated the country’s Fair Work Act and his right not to be treated unfavorably in the workplace because of his political beliefs. But the judge, Graeme … [Read more...]
What is it Like to be a Professional Musician?
There is no simple explanation for anything important any of us do, and the human tragedy, or the human irony, consists in the necessity of living with the consequences of actions performed under the pressure of compulsions so obscure we do not and cannot understand them. (Hugh MacLennan, The Watch Ends the Night (1958)). Some personal history When I was in high school, I found my place in the band room. I took up the French horn (never very well) and played in the concert band. I learned guitar and bass and played the latter … [Read more...]
Gut Punch
(Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock in the original Broadway production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, 1949). In a guest essay in the New York Times, former Washington Post theater critic Naveen Kumar writes that “Broadway is Serving Up Liberal Comfort Food.” His piece concludes: Not everyone goes to the theater hoping to be confronted with big questions, the kind that compel audiences to turn inward and disrupt their worldviews. But offering easy answers to those who do is its own form of injustice, … [Read more...]
Reckoning with Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Policy
On the weekend John Ganz had an interesting discussion of our rich tech-elites and aesthetic taste, of which they have little, and who would hope to destroy what for now remains that is human and beautiful. This leads him to consider Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790) and Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), where the latter book’s title is clearly meant to evoke the former. I won’t try to summarize Ganz - I recommend you read him yourself (not just this one … [Read more...]
Free Speech on Someone Else’s Stage
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports: Jayson Gillham believes artists have a right to bring their whole selves to the stage. “I believe that everyone has the right to freedom of expression,” the internationally acclaimed, London-based pianist says. That’s why the British Australian musician, 39, is suing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) for discrimination based on political belief, after it cancelled one of his scheduled performances in August 2024. His recital was cancelled after he … [Read more...]
Classical education will not turn students into virtuous adults
We would not have our Guardians grow up among representations of moral deformity, as in some foul pasture where, day after day, feeding on every poisonous weed, they would, little by little, gather insensibly a mass of corruption in their very souls. Rather we must seek out those craftsmen whose instinct guides them to whatsoever is lovely and gracious; so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, may drink in good from every quarter, whence, like a breeze bringing health from happy regions, some influence from noble works constantly … [Read more...]
Local earmarked taxes for arts funding: a checklist
I read a story yesterday about the attempts to make a local arts tax in Portland, Oregon slightly less bad, and since I used to teach about this sort of thing I thought it might be worth giving my personal quick-and-dirty checklist on local earmarked taxes for the arts. Here are questions anyone wanting to propose such a tax ought to ask themselves: What are we trying to achieve? The answer cannot just be “yay arts!” because you are going to be asking locals to pay more in taxes and they rightly will want to know what it is for, … [Read more...]