This week’s best reads hover around existential questions. What arts organizations should exist? Does truth exist? Can theatre really change anything, and should it even try? Canada’s new government makes an existential bet on culture. And do our tools define art?
- Arts Organizations At The Existential Crossroads: Some have argued that when arts organizations have outlived their missions, they should be shut down. Instead, failing arts institutions often muddle on for years, wandering and propped up by funders and patrons on autopilot. Then when things get so bad failure is imminent, they inspire heroic “save-us” campaigns and communities rally. So this week come two stories of arts organizations at the existential crossroads, with very different paths taken. Minneapolis’ Theatre Collective decided that after a decade it had fulfilled its mission to give opportunities to Minneapolis-based playwrights, and disbanded. Admirable, even if from the outside you still think there was work to be done. Making an entirely different decision was Montreal dance center Studio, which after it lost its government funding, refocussed towards the creation-support and artistic-development activities the Studio had always done, and found itself revitalized.
- A Post-Fact, Post-Truth Society: It’s bizarre (in a macabre sort of way) to watch existentialism of another sort playing out in the political media, as pundits and reporters struggle to try to explain the Trump Republican meltdown. The New Yorker sees the split starting in the mid-20th Century: “fundamentalism and postmodernism, the religious right and the academic left, met up: either the only truth is the truth of the divine or there is no truth; for both, empiricism is an error. That epistemological havoc has never ended: much of contemporary discourse and pretty much all of American politics is a dispute over evidence.” Might one also broadly apply that idea to art and post-modernism in which a breaking down of established traditions and truths resulted in existential dilemmas over what art is and isn’t? Truths don’t matter when there are disagreements about what truth is. Technology is undergoing itself a definitional crisis in which technology is being redefined less as software or hardware, but as a “state of being,” a culture and a style, one that has spread into new foods and clothing, and all other kinds of non-electronic goods.”
- Canada Is Reinventing Its Culture (Go Justin!): Fulfilling a campaign promise, new Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau proposed massive increases in a new arts and culture budget. This reverses years of neglect and disdain for arts funding by the previous Harper government. “The Canada Council, whose budget will double by 2021, called it an unprecedented, once-in-a-generation investment, while the performers union ACTRA expressed the hope this marked the beginning of a new relationship between government and creators.”
- Theatre. (Yes, Theatre): Does theatre activism have any effect? Does activist theatre do anything more than preach to the already converted? How about challenging ideas generally? David Hare believes that today’s theatre is too safe and “middle-aged”. “The idea of a pioneering, cutting-edge avant-garde, I am afraid, has more or less completely disappeared from the British theatre, and now you just have every artistic director with his or her eye on the box office, because that is the mood of the times.” On the other hand, maybe we’re just not presenting enough voices. Ottawa’s National Arts Center has decided to launch a new Indigenous Theatre devoted to indigenous performing arts that is intended to be an equal to the arts centre’s long-established English and French Theatre companies.”
- The Tools We Use Shape Our Art (We Think. Maybe): If we think about this in terms of the language we use: “language is shaped by the culture that has produced it, which means that it, in turn, shapes those who go on to use it.” This could be illustrated by examples that are specific to a language such as English: What we see as the clear-cut dichotomy between “the writing of imagination and the writing of fact” doesn’t exist in many languages, and in others the equivalent distinction is drawn along somewhat different lines. (see our discussion in this week’s Story #1 about truth and “post-truth” societies). So let’s carry this discussion a bit further and conjecture about what happens when machines get to be really good at art. Think it won’t happen? It already is, and it will inevitably force us to reconsider our notions of what art is. “While it might seem tempting to pit man against machine to determine artistic mastery, perhaps the better approach involves combining human and AI skills, allowing real and artificial neural networks to flex their creative muscles in tandem.”
Perhaps the issues addressed are as much epistemological as existential. On one hand, the issues are associated with common themes of existentialism like the nature of consciousness, dread, freedom, and the meaning of life. On the other, they are as much about how we organize knowledge, and how we use knowledge to determine what we are as humans.
It is interesting, for example, to look at how AJ is organized. The categories of articles follow the major art forms (music, theater, visual arts, dance, and literature) along with some broad categories like Media, Issues, Ideas, and Audience.
Audience becomes a major category because it fits the American ideal of The Market as the arbiter of almost all endeavor. Audience stands in the place of concepts like Funding and Education which have become tainted by a whiff of socialism – if not the bigotry of the Age of Enlightenment.
We thus see that America is the only developed country in the world without a comprehensive system of public arts funding. And that arts education has been in decline for 50 years while it has grown in Europe.
We are to understand that the fresh, pragmatic, American virility of the market best supports the arts, not public funding and education.
To maintain this existential truth, we must properly organize knowledge. Education and Funding are no longer major categories of thought in the arts world as they were up until about 1980. Audience has become a much more basic epistemological category. We look to Hollywood and the Pop-Music-Industrial-Complex to see what humans truly are. We do not privilege the fine arts with funding or education to insure their continuance, because they do not fit into the market which defines our true existential nature.
William: I’m not convinced. You’re right that in the organization of stories on ArtsJournal, audience is a category unlike the others, which are all traditional divisions of art forms. Not only is it a category that isn’t an art form, it also functions differently as an organizational device. Any story that appears in the audience category is also found in one of the art form categories as well. Why include it (which we did about a year or so ago)? It was a recognition that one major thread through many of the stories we were collecting was how audiences are changing and how relationships between artists and audiences and arts organizations and audiences are changing.
Superficially you could include marketing and business as sub-categories here, as you could in any of the art form categories. But more important I think was our recognition that the digital age and new ways of communicating are causing many to reconsider the role of the audience, the artist, and arts organizations.
How is this different as a category from funding or education or marketing and not just a displacement of them, as you suggest? It seems to me that these other categories are not primarily artistic in the way that audience is. And here a little leap, implicitly suggested by our topic organization. How is audience “artistic”? I believe it is because art isn’t an inert thing, but a relationship that changes over time. Audience is about exploring that relationship. So the stories I see fitting into this category are stories that say something about that relationship.
You could say that funding says something about that relationship as well (as you repeatedly argue). But funding, it seems to me, is a consequence of audience relationship to art and society not an inherently artistic relationship itself. Which is not to denigrate its importance. We certainly link to many stories on ArtsJournal about funding – I can’t think of a week that has gone by where there haven’t been funding stories here.
But I have to disagree with your comment that “we look to Hollywood and the Pop-Music-Industrial-Complex to see what humans truly are. We do not privilege the fine arts with funding or education to insure their continuance, because they do not fit into the market which defines our true existential nature.” That’s a terribly narrow way of looking at it. I think we “define our true existential nature” in many many ways. Suggesting that legitimacy is only defined by what the mass culture decides to put dollars behind is no more true now than it ever was.
I think my post created an unclear distinction between what I believe and my (ironic) description of the philosophy I oppose. The centrality of the market and commercial art in defining American identity is indeed a terribly narrow view. And yet it seems to be the principle thrust of neoliberal concepts of cultural support which are becoming more and more central to our society.
In short, we reduce arts education and funding and make up the difference by pandering. We rationalize the lack of public funding and arts education with euphemisms about changing audiences. “Changing audiences” has become part of the jargon of neoliberlaism. and the attempt to commercialize virtually all cultural expression. The goal is to avoid “the evil European socialism of public arts funding,” by creating a “new kind of audience” more oriented to commercial formulations of classical music.
It’s not so much a question that audiences are changing, but who is changing them and why.