{"id":1558,"date":"2025-10-28T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-28T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/scenechange\/?p=1558"},"modified":"2025-10-28T14:20:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-28T14:20:23","slug":"loneliness-and-the-arts-if-bringing-people-together-is-the-cure-what-is-the-disease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/scenechange\/2025\/10\/28\/loneliness-and-the-arts-if-bringing-people-together-is-the-cure-what-is-the-disease\/","title":{"rendered":"Loneliness and the Arts: If Bringing People Together is the Cure, What is the Disease?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Finally, a damaging health issue that could be solved and mitigated by the nonprofit arts sector, but where are the data? What are the outcomes? And how did the organizations make the solutions permanent?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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As technology continues to celebrate that which is not human, are people encouraged to be iconoclasts? (Image by Grae Dickason from Pixabay)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Henry Jaglom<\/a> died last month. He was a prolific director of weird, tiny, and personal movies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of those movies, 1987\u2019s Someone to Love<\/em><\/a>, isn\u2019t even mentioned in his obituary in Variety<\/em>. In it, he appears as Danny, a director of weird, tiny, and personal movies. He\u2019s rented the Mayfair Theatre in Santa Monica and brought all his friends and associates together on Valentine\u2019s Day. The details aren\u2019t important here, except for this one: all of the people he has invited are full-on adults, intelligent or attractive or both, and are choosing to be single. He wants to know why. And that\u2019s the whole premise of the movie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Among the guests was an actor of mythic proportions (both metaphorical and physical), Orson Welles. It was his final appearance in a motion picture. Near the end of the picture, in a direct conversation with Jaglom from what he calls \u201cthe cheap seats, not Mount Sinai,\u201d Welles predicts the kind of technological pouncing on the neck of human social interaction, while at the same time explaining in some morbid detail why people choose to be alone. The clip below is prefaced by Welles\u2019 introduction of the idea about \u201cthe great revolution of our times, which is the liberation of women. But by liberating women, we are freeing the last of our slaves. And for 15-20,000 years, there has never been a civilization, ever, even the great democracy of Pericles, Athens, there has never been a single civilization that has not been maintained by slaves.\u201d Then, bellowing his raspy bass voice from the back of the theater, he states this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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