Andrew Adler in the Louisville Courier-Journal touches on a question that’s bubbling up a lot these days, not just in the arts, but in the entire social sector: given all the talk of need and crisis and funding, where’s the public conversation about the value and content of cultural activity? Says Adler:
…simply saying we “need” an orchestra isn’t sufficient. Same with the opera, the ballet, etc. Of course it takes money to keep these organizations afloat, and more than that, to make them thrive. But the aesthetic imperative continues to be obscured when financial concerns constantly occupy the foreground.
Adler encourages a broader conversation about the aesthetics and experience that communities should expect from their arts organizations. Others are questioning the larger public purpose of any institutions that receive fiscal privilege and public subsidy. These are fair questions, and juicy conversations. But they’re also another indication that the foundational belief in cultural enterprise as community good is growing thin.
We’d best all be ready to engage the debate.
Everyone dances around the important point.
The point is NOT that one world view is “right” and another “wrong” or that a belief system is “growing thin.”
The point IS that the “fair questions and juicy conversations” referenced here are MISSING.
Instead, we too often belabor our financial woes (garnering little sympathy or remedy) instead of engaging in the fair questions and juicy
conversations.
Andrew Taylor is at least within sniffing distance of the very important conversation we need to have. Adler is closer still.
Rather than converse about the conversation or what that conversation might be or ought to be, here’s my question (begging, pleading to our whole
industry):
Can we please set the agenda to HAVE that conversation about our place in the community??!!
The varieties of opinions bound to be expressed are all acceptable. But until we change the subject of the conversation, opinions that we are
too esoteric or too small a niche or whatever can go unchallenged in the absence of any real context.
Let’s provide a context.
Let’s provide a framework.
Let’s SET the agenda!
The alternative seems (so far) to be hand-wringing. We sorta kinda sense where that strategy leads, don’t we!
Why is this very simple concept so hard for our industry leaders to grasp?
If we do not initiate a conversation about our place in our communities, who will?
Tom Reel
Double Bassist, Virginia Symphony
How do I prove that I need bird song, sky, grass, wilderness, lake and rivers? I need to see the moon and our sun. Though I barely see them any longer, when I do see the stars, my heart aches. Is it because they “entertain me?”
Do I need the work of our philosophers, higher mathematicians, historians and English critics to entertain me? Does the work of any theorist who pushes their subject’s frontiers ahead, bit by bit have to be either utiliarian or entertaining? Classical music is in that camp with those “labourers”. Composers (and correographers, visual artists and writers of literature) absorb everything about the laws and world of sound, society’s latest (real) musical instrument techiniques, the edge of pop music and where folk music is taking us. If they are any good, these composers comment on our contemporary musical world by using it at a different, more philosophical level. They chew up and digest musical entertainments and musical theory and they serve us ourselves so that we can then experience ourselveles in sound, together. This is not pure commercial entertainment andy more than quantum mathematics is! Although, it is true, part of the composer’s labour is to deliver something that we can hear with deep pleasure, with our “eyes wide open”.
Art managers are so stuck on the market they’ve forgotten that all does not have to be made to glitter to be considered valueable as gold. Like stars and oceans.