With impeccable timing last night, a friend wrote: “This season ChevronTexaco will end its
\n63-year sponsorship of the Metropolitan Opera Saturday afternoon live radio broadcasts. It’s
\nappalling that this immensely popular and significant cultural activity will be terminated, even
\nthough it costs only $7 million, a mere bagatelle for this humongous petrochemical empire. That’s
\nabout the cost of running a few commercials during a superbowl game. What does this say about
\ncultural priorities in this country?”<\/P>
\n
This friend, Alan M. Edelson, who is an avid opera-goer and Met subscriber, wants to drum
\nup “indignation over the termination and enthusiasm for possible replacement of this oil
\nfirm by another sponsor.” The Annenberg Foundation has given $3.5 million to the Met to help
\nkeep the live broadcasts on the air next season (2004\/2005). He points out, “The gift was made in
\nthe hope that it will encourage a new sponsor to take things from there. It’s incredible that this
\nlive broadcast, heard around the world by an estimated 10 million people, could end.”<\/P>
\n
Why was the timing impeccable? Because Mere bagatelle or pittance indeed. When Chevron acquired Texaco, as Tommasini points out, Meantime, by coincidence, another friend, “In continental Europe, classical music often out-sells pop. This is not merely a matter of American proponents of private and\/or corporate sponsorship of the arts “claim that “Most Americans do not even consider that alternatives could be created. With only one Why haven’t Americans considered alternatives? Because “the problem is seldom the topic of “Cultural isomorphism was especially notable in the 20th century’s systemic forms of social What does all this signify? Many things, of course. But one of them is that “given America’s With impeccable timing last night, a friend wrote: “This season ChevronTexaco will end its 63-year sponsorship of the Metropolitan Opera Saturday afternoon live radio broadcasts. It’s appalling that this immensely popular and significant cultural activity will be terminated, even though it costs only $7 million, a mere bagatelle for this humongous petrochemical empire. That’s about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-476","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-7G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nmorning<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A> in The New York Times: “It’s hard for opera lovers to
\nimagine that the Met broadcasts might be jeopardized for want of a sum that would be a pittance
\nin the world of commercial entertainment or sports. In major league baseball, $7 million would
\nnot pay the salary of a decent pitcher. The six stars of ‘Friends’ make $1 million each per half-hour
\nepisode. Compare this to the absolute top fee for a singer at the Met, Amercia’s most prestigious
\nopera house: $15,000 per performance. No one, no matter how big, not even Placido Domingo,
\nmakes more.”<\/P>
\n
\nthe deal came to $45.8 billion. And Texaco’s then-chairman promised that the sponsorship would
\ncontinue because the Met broadcast “has become part of our DNA.” Unfortunately, a gene
\nmutation occurred upon his departure, or as it’s put in corporate parlance, “the priorities at
\nChevronTexaco have shifted.”<\/P>
\n
\nOsborne<\/FONT><\/EM><\/B><\/A><\/STRONG>, sent the first draft of an article he’s preparing
\non the differences between arts funding in the United States and continental Europe. He writes:
\n“In Germany, for example, any city with more than 100,000 people generally has a
\nfull-time orchestra, opera house, and theater company that are municipally and state owned. A
\ngood deal of funding for these groups is set aside for new music. Europeans also administer this
\narts funding locally, and not from a remote federal organization such as the National Endowment
\nfor the Arts. … The European view is not based on elitism or a dismissal of popular culture, but
\nwith understanding that an unmitigated capitalism is not a seamless, all-encompassing paradigm,
\nparticularly when it comes to cultural expression. <\/P>
\n
\nhistory or coincidence. Europeans use their local public cultural institutions to educate their
\nchildren and this creates a wide appreciation for classical music. The popularity is also based on a
\nsense of communal pride. They support their local cultural institutions almost like they were
\nsports teams. European society illustrates that music education leads to forms of creativity and
\nautonomy that are often antithetic to mass media.” <\/P>
\n
\nalternatives to the European cultural paradigm exist,” Osborne continues. “[But] in reality the
\nlarge majority of U.S. cultural offerings come from Manhattan and a few other cities, even though
\nthe country has 280 million people. Even the other boroughs of New York City, such as the
\nBronx, Queens, and Staten Island are largely desolate cultural wastelands, to say nothing of the
\nlack of intelligent culture in almost all of our heartland cities. In contrast to Europe, the live
\nperformance arts are largely denied to a vast majority of Americans. <\/P>
\n
\npercent of the U.S. military budget, or $3.8 billion, we could have 127 opera houses
\nlavishly funded at $30 million apiece. (That much funding would put them on par with the best
\nopera houses in the world. In reality, the U.S. does not have any year-round opera houses. Even
\nthe Met only has a seven-month season.) The same sum could support 254 world-class spoken
\ntheaters at $15 million each. It could subsidize 190 full-time, year-round, world-class symphony
\norchestras at $20 million each. Or it could give 76,000 composers, painters and sculptors a yearly
\nsalary of $50,000 each. Remember, that’s only one percent of the military budget. Imagine what
\nfive percent would do. These examples awaken us to the Orwellian realities of our country and
\nhow different it could be.”<\/P>
\n
\nserious political discussion.” And that’s because “the cultural system has become isomorphic.”
\nIso-who? Osborne defines cultural isomorphism as “a social order where artistic expression is
\nstrongly shaped by conditions such as a totalizing economic system, a powerful religion,
\nhyper-nationalism, or a dominating state of affairs such as long-term war.”<\/P>
\n
\nand economic organization,” he explains. “We saw, for example, culturally isomorphic art in the
\n‘Gleichschaltung’ of the Third Reich, in the Social Realism of the East Block, in the
\ncommercialization of culture in America, and in the ‘Cultural Revolution’ of Maoist China. Like
\nthe political divisions of the 20th century, these aesthetic orthodoxies reduced human expression
\nto systemic concepts that tended toward the formulaic and reductionist, and were often developed
\nby modernist artists in the role of aesthetic prophets who served a more or less transcendentally
\njustified patriarchal function within their societies. These aesthetic systems tended to be culturally
\nisomorphic with the political and economic structures in which they existed, and frequently
\nallowed the artist-prophet or his image to be appropriated by totalitarian social structures.”<\/P>
\n
\nwealth, talent, and educational resources, the U.S. could be the Athens of the modern world, but
\nis fast losing that chance” and opting instead to be its Rome.<\/P><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"