Bathroom Celebs at the Met Gala. Photo: Courtesy of Twitter/victuuris95
On the recommendation of a couple friends who are artists I recently read Dave Hickey’s fantastic 1997 memoir Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy.
As I was reading a couple essays, in particular, I kept thinking about the recent tizzy over the behavior of a pack of celebrities attending the Met gala, who hid out in the bathroom to socialize, take selfies, and smoke. AJ blogger, Judith Dobrzynski, who commented on the incident in her post, If This Can Happen at the Met and the British Museum … We Have a Big Problem, suggests that the Met is just one (though perhaps an extreme and high profile) example of a growing trend: people who don’t know how to behave in cultural institutions. In her post, Dobrzynski also recounts that the British Museum suffers approximately 50 acts of “pencil graffiti on its ancient sculptures” each year (mostly by schoolchildren).
Her conclusion:
I’ve increasingly noticed the posting of Don’ts, and sometimes Dos, at museums. They do not seem to be enough.
Reading Hickey’s memoir this past week I was suddenly struck by the way arts organizations have set themselves up for this very situation.
There are a few essays in Hickey’s memoir that I suspect will become lifelong touchstones for me. One is called “Romancing the Looky-Loos.” Looky-loos is Hickey’s dad’s term for those who pay “their dollar at the door” for concerts or art experiences, “but contribute nothing”–spectators, rather than participants. Hickey distinguishes these two types writing, “while spectators must be lured, participants just appear, looking for that new thing.”
Participants show up (no luring necessary) Hickey argues, because they have a “passion for what is going on” and because showing up is a way “to increase the social value of the things you love.” Participants show up for the conversation (both literal and metaphorical). While participants decide what they love and then give it their attention, Hickey says spectators love whatever is the winning side—”the side with the chic building, the gaudy doctorates, and the star-studded cast. They seek out spectacles whose value is confirmed by the normative blessing of institutions and corporations.”
The very next essay in the volume—also a new favorite—is called “The Heresy of Zone Defense.” Among other themes, Hickey riffs on basketball and how it has evolved since 1891 from being a “socially redeeming” activity for recidivist, working-class youth to a sport that is “more joyful, various, and articulate.” That evolution, Hickey argues, is a result of “changing the rules when they threatened[ed] to make the game less beautiful and less visible.” Put another way, the rule changes in basketball over the past century all have been designed to improve the game’s aesthetics.
Hickey contrasts the sort of rules that seek to liberate from those that seek to govern and says that “nearly every style change in fine art has been, in some way, motivated” by the latter. He contrasts the evolution in basketball from that of art, writing:
Thus basketball, which began this century as a pedagogical discipline, concludes it as a much beloved public spectacle, while fine art, which began this century as a much-beloved public spectacle, has ended up where basketball began—in the YMCA or its equivalent—governed rather than liberated by its rules.
Putting the two essays together I’m left with a few thoughts on both the Met smoking-in-the-girls’-room scandal and the more general “problem” (as it is being framed) of people “misbehaving” at cultural institutions:
First, if our economic models depend on drawing exponentially more looky-loos than participants then is it really reasonable to expect those lured to our events by aggressive marketing or buzz to be sincerely interested in the arts experience and aware of the rules of the game, so to speak?
Second, while concerns around smoking in the building or drawing on valuable artworks are, indeed, warranted, it strikes me that the big problem is not that people are no longer following museum rules on how to behave. The big problem is that, in response to this situation, museums seem to think the answer is to post more rules–a strategy that has already taken much of the joy out of arts experiences. Of course the celebs that are forced to make a command performance at the Met gala, or risk the wrath of Anna Wintour, rebel in the bathroom. Of course the school kids, confused perhaps because in other areas of life they are encouraged to create and participate, mistakenly draw on the sculptures.
So what’s the solution if, as Dobrzynski suggests, over time an increasing portion of the culture doesn’t seem to get the rules, or seems to grasp them but not to respect them?
Perhaps to find a solution we first need to reframe the problem from a version of “How do we survive in this world that is clearly no longer good enough for us?” to something else. Rather than trying to figure out how to police the culture, perhaps arts institutions could ask themselves:
- Where are we aggressively luring looky-loos rather than inviting participation? and
- Where are our rules seeking to govern artists and participants, rather than liberate them?
And let’s be honest: How many arts organizations actually want or expect meaningful participation from their version of the looky-loos? I’d wager most are lured primarily for the optics and economic gains to the institution.We want to eat our cake and have it, too. We want everyone to show up but we don’t want to widen our conception of what makes for a great arts experience. Inviting everyone and then shoving a long list of rules in their hands is a short-term solution likely to result in many of those people henceforth looking elsewhere for an experience that is participatory, relevant, and joyful–the NBA finals, perhaps.
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Participants have that quality of being a part of what is going on, standing within what is happening, making it happen, whereas spectators are on the outside looking in, removed, uninvolved… Those are the opposite poles we need to make sense of. And courting ‘Looky-loos’ will only ever get us what we ask for. It is only because we do not really understand the difference, that this is also an issue of identity and values, of commitment and purpose, that we settle for less.
One of my obsessions, as you know, is the demand that the arts are justified. You have heard me drone on at length, and maybe some of what I said even makes sense. The thing that bears most on your essay is that when you are a participant, you are in part *defined* by what you are doing. The activity is not simply something that happens to you but something that *you*are*. You are an artist, for instance, a museum benefactor, a baseball player, etc (perhaps even a ‘spectator’, if that is the role you inhabit).
So if you are inside the cultural bubble where things make sense in a specific way, you are a part of what is happening, and your participation helps manifest the activity. If you are inside the game it is not a question whether the game is justified. You are already doing it. This is what YOU DO. This is who you are. The culture includes it as a source of value, intrinsically, rather than as something that needs to be tested for value, measured, or ‘proved’. Intrinsic just means that those of us who ‘get it’ do not have to go searching for justification. It describes what we think matters, and our lives move in specifically those directions. Our lives are the evidence that these things matter. They matter to us.
That was essentially the point of the essay I wrote for this blog a year or so ago:
(http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2016/03/the-value-of-intrinsic-value-in-the-arts-a-guest-post-by-carter-gillies/).
From the outside we just don’t get to see it that way. The value of what these others are doing is unknown to us. It is opaque to us. As if we were looking at a foreign culture with inscrutable ways of doing things. We just don’t get what they are up to. AND THAT is why it is so common to ask whether these things are justified. Our inability to *see* the value is our source of doubt. From the inside the question does not even make sense. From the outside it is the only thing that makes sense.
Our own sense of identity has everything to do with what we think matters. It points us in the direction of our values and the meaning of our lives. It shows us what things matter, because we *see* those values as self evident. And because this is who we are we are not in doubt that these things matter. They do not have to be proved to us.
So if we perpetually court ‘outsiders’ by trying to *prove* our values, what does that say about our own appreciation of being on the inside? Are we saying folks are right to doubt us, that doubt is a legitimate question? Where might our doubts end? Because if it is *not* a proper question, then we need to understand that our difference from outsiders is not simply a matter of having other facts, better facts. The gap between us is not ‘factual’. Rather, it is entirely the difference between standing on the inside and standing on the outside, nothing more, and nothing less……
THIS is what we need to understand, I think. Are we brave enough to make sense of it? Are we brave enough to make sense of ourselves? As insiders, that is? Because, when we treat ourselves as outsiders to the very things we value I can only imagine that we are in some sense asking the wrong questions………
Having spent my career doing what you call aggressive marketing and what I call persuading more people to participate in the arts, I’m convinced that looky-loos and new audiences are the same thing. Among all the people in the world who can be considered potential audiences, looky-loos are the only ones willing to show up. We can dream all we want about pre-motivated “participants” who don’t need to be lured, but they no longer exist in sufficient numbers to fill our theatres, concert halls and galleries.
I think you conclude your essay by saying we need to find a way to turn looky-loos into participants, and I agree, but I don’t believe that setting up looky-loo/participant dichotomies is necessarily useful. We need to respect curious but uncommitted audiences – whatever their reasons for giving us a try – and lumping them into unflattering categories doesn’t really help.
We also need to persuade under-motivated audiences to walk through our doors and the less motivated they are, the more persuasive we need to be. Your use of the word ‘aggressive’ to characterize the process of supplying the motivation they lack is unreasonable and intellectually dishonest. You may resent the fact that tomorrow’s audiences need to be lured, but nobody is out there beating a bunch of vacuous churners into buying tickets.
I think we agree on the essentials here, Diane, but I’ve spent my career in the marketplace engaging with “looky-loos” and I think they’re just great. The tendency among cultural sector elites to segregate and diminish them may be the first rule we need to relax.
Trevor, you have more practical experience with this issue in a single day that I have in my entire life, but I wonder if part of the issue we are addressing is what we understand it to be rather than simply what we are doing about it. Looking from the outside I consider it as much a difference in where people are standing, and how this motivates what they understand themselves to be doing. I agree that we can make too much of the difference and that how we talk about it can itself be divisive and counter productive, but I also wonder if we need to be more honest with what those differences actually are.
For instance, what makes a belief in the value of the arts different from a lack of such belief? Is it a matter of people having different facts about the world? Is it simply that some people have had one type of experience and others something different? In other words, is it simply a ‘lack’ that can be addressed practically?
My suggestion is that we have not made enough sense of how values are distributed through our lives. It *does* make sense in some cases to say that simply getting more facts will change how we feel about things, but with an issue like where people place the arts in their lives I am not always sure this is adequate to the task. What we have not done due diligence with is value that isn’t merely discovered out in the world but value that informs how the world is experienced.
To make this difference clear it might help to consider more obvious examples. What would you say is the difference between a devoutly religious person and an atheist? What would you say is the difference between a confirmed vegetarian and a meat eater? What would you say is the difference between a fan of Rap music and a fan of Opera? What would you say is the difference between a Celtics (basketball) fan and a Lakers fan?
The point I am making is that few of these differences can be put down to simply more facts or even having the direct experience of something different. The point is that we experience the world from a point of view, and therefor what we experience is often framed within a set of values. We experience the world AS valuable, according to how we have learned to measure things. And it just may turn out that one way of measuring EXCLUDES other forms of value. You can’t have the values of an atheist and at the same time be devoutly religious. And as long as we ignore that more fundamental difference we will be stuck selling Bibles to atheists and bacon to vegetarians…..
Hi, Carter. Is it OK if I’m an atheist who has the values of the devoutly religious?
I agree with everything you say. The world creates people who value art and people who don’t. Fifty years ago it created people who valued theatre, dance, classical music, opera, fine art, etc. in great numbers. Today not so much. The problem for people who want to sell theatre, dance, classical music, opera, fine art, etc. is that there aren’t as many people who value these things as there once were, and inviting them to participate doesn’t work.
We who work in these fields have to either find a way to make more people value them, which is a tall order, or we have to mine the population to extract the remaining few who do value them. Both require persuading as many people as possible to come to our venues and sample our wares.
Ultimately I think we have to market as vigorously as possible, love the people we bring through our doors irrespective of their motivations, and give them plenty of reasons to value what happens there.
Trevor, I actually do see arts marketing practices as, quite often, aggressively selling the “blockbuster exhibition” or the “box office hit”. Moreover, I believe such promotional tactics result in a certain kind of attendee. The kind who tends to show up and not return until the next hot show. The kind that isn’t familiar with the norms of arts participation. What I’m saying is: we should not begrudge these participants for only showing up once in a blue moon and we should not scorn them for not knowing how to “behave” when they arrive (which is often what arts organizations do, behind the scenes). Yes, the term “looky-loos” is a bit flippant; but honestly, if an arts organization is just looking to increase the number of attendees and is not all that concerned with the depth of engagement for those attendees, then “looky-loos” may pretty accurately describe how arts organizations themselves perceive such patrons: as butts in seats, and as people that need to be policed, rather than as people sincerely invited into a conversation. As much as I’d like to believe that all arts organizations want to invite participation with all audiences that walk through their doors, this hasn’t been my experience. The change in mindset you are suggesting has to happen – but it has to be real and has to happen at a deep level in institutions. Tweaking the mission statement or placing a long reflection by the AD on “participation” in the program notes, or on the website does not make it so.