This past Sunday New York Times Magazine was all about the perceived struggle between market mentality and bold art-making or meaningful cultural experience. Weaving through the mournful essay by James Traub about museum flash versus museum substance, and again through A.O. Scott’s essay about Miramax and its rogue leader Harvey Weinstein, and especially through the institutional angst of ‘Where Have You Gone, Impresarios?’ — a historical look at Joe Papp’s Public Theater and its search for a new visionary or pencil-pusher — is a sense that business and vision can’t co-exist in the cultural world we’ve constructed, and that we have to choose one or the other. Says the Papp article:
In America, though there are plenty of talented directors and a number of exciting and savvy producers, and even a few who are both, it’s hard to think of a single figure who could make art, make news and make his way in the various nontheatrical venues (boardrooms, donors’ salons, City Council chambers) that a successful artistic leader would also have to master.
Traub sees the dark struggle of market and meaning in the Alexander Hamilton exhibition at the New-York Historical Society — where flashy video displays with modern-day images stand alongside historical documents and artifacts. Says Traub:
Apparently it was unreasonable to expect visitors to actually read. I had the feeling that the curators who mounted the show and the donor/board members who brought it into being assumed that few people cared about the objects and the history the way they themselves did, and so in order to attract the big crowds that would justify the show’s blockbuster status, they had to make it a user-friendly audiovisual experience.
Amid the tussle of the various authors and subjects in the magazine, however, there are a few inklings that the broadly accepted chasm between smart business and deep experience is a bit of a mirage — that profound meaning can be good business, and that long relationships have a place in a short-term world.
One paragon of such virtues is the Nonesuch record label…which seems innovative, ecclectic, and solvent too. And even Traub suggests, amid his dismay about the lack of descriptive labels throughout the Hamilton exhibit, that depth and accessibility may not be mutually exclusive, after all:
It is, at bottom, a question of belief: museums must start with the premise that visitors treasure the experience of seeing unique objects in a setting that deepens our understanding of them and then exploit that enthusiasm for all its worth.
