{"id":399,"date":"2012-01-31T12:34:32","date_gmt":"2012-01-31T17:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/?p=399"},"modified":"2012-01-31T12:42:13","modified_gmt":"2012-01-31T17:42:13","slug":"how-theatre-artists-become-essential-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/2012\/01\/how-theatre-artists-become-essential-part-1.html","title":{"rendered":"How Theatre Artists Become Essential, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Before we can talk about the extrinsic value theatre artists ought to have in our society (what they get paid, \u00a0\u00a0what status they are given, what percentage of taxpayer dollars funnels their way, etc\u2026), we need to try to define their intrinsic value.<\/em>\u00a0 This encompasses both what they do uniquely well, and why what they do matters.<\/p>\n

The word \u201cvalue\u201d itself essentially means how we ascribe relative merit to things.\u00a0 Common measures of merit are something\u2019s material worth<\/strong>; it\u2019s excellence<\/strong>; it\u2019s importance; <\/strong>and\/or it\u2019s utility<\/strong>.\u00a0 I\u2019ll take a stab at each of these measures; and how they collectively add up to the definition of \u201cvalues\u201d as the ideals of our society, or our communal system of ethics.<\/p>\n

So, how do we measure what theatre artists are WORTH<\/strong>?<\/p>\n

When we talk about artist salaries in connection to their value, I think we spend way too much time focused on this particular definition, maybe because it\u2019s the easiest: what is the relative monetary exchange weight of an artist?\u00a0 That is, what price can they fetch in the marketplace?\u00a0 A Broadway casting conversation using this definition might reasonably compare a Hollywood star with little stage experience to a \u201cknown\u201d NYC actor who has won a Tony, asking how much people might be willing to pay to see this person do Shakespeare.\u00a0 As a corollary, a person with no film resume and no awards could be assumed to be less of a financial draw, and therefore warrant a lower paycheck.\u00a0 And so, the argument goes, non-commercial producers with less money at their disposal, in an effort to keep their ticket prices as low as possible, hire actors of equally high excellence (see below) but less recognition, and, de facto, pay considerably less than commercial producers because their worth is lower; even if the artist has the potential to be exchanged for large sums of cash, the non-commercial producer may not have the marketing dollar to leverage that potential into worth.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s a problem with relying on this definition. \u00a0Broadway producers are for-profit entities; it\u2019s sensible, even necessary, for them to measure artist value in terms of \u201cmaterial worth.\u201d\u00a0 But Off-Broadway, we\u2019re mostly not<\/strong> for-profit entities; we have to be for<\/em><\/strong> something else entirely. (I could talk about this language problem, of defining ourselves by what we\u2019re not, but Jaan Whitehead has done it better and more thoroughly than I could in her brilliant 2001 American Theatre<\/em> essay \u201cTo Have and Have Not,\u201d http:\/\/www.tcg.org\/publications\/at\/2001\/have.cfm<\/a>)<\/p>\n

So what exactly are we for<\/em><\/strong> in the non-commercial theatre, that we could measure the material worth of our artists against?\u00a0 The annual budget is the spine of an organization\u2019s belief system, and a non-profit can\u2019t justify its\u2019 existence by measuring the income it brings in at the box office (not that a robust box office is a bad thing; it just can\u2019t be your mission).\u00a0 This is one of many places where I think we have to be careful about applying for-profit logic to a non-profit business model. \u00a0Anyway, I think we can all agree that an artists\u2019 capacity to make a producer money can\u2019t be what makes them \u201cessential.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unable to use the simplest measure, we often define artist value using EXCELLENCE (or what we often call \u201cQUALITY\u201d).<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is certainly a common, convenient, and pretty constructive measure of value when it comes to artists.\u00a0 We all know what it means, and even though we disagree about it\u2019s measure, it\u2019s still a handy tool because we all have a language for discussing, and disagreeing over, whether or not someone\u2019s work is \u201cgood.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s also a fair<\/em> tool, because it\u2019s a matter of taste, which is not institutionalized or fixed; so any artist has the chance to change how they\u2019re valued within this measure.\u00a0 It\u2019s only dangerous when wielded by those critics, professional or otherwise, who lazily attempt to make their personal preferences seem like objective assessments, rather than rigorously measuring an artist against THAT ARTISTS\u2019 stated vision and goals.<\/p>\n

What makes it really constructive is that it does actually point to one of the things that I think makes artists essential.\u00a0 Excellence is not something that can be achieved without lots of hard work and consistent, rigorous self-reflection.\u00a0 You don\u2019t stumble into excellence.\u00a0 You\u2019re not born with it.\u00a0 You work on it, and the harder and more thoroughly you work, and the more awake and self-reflective you are as<\/em><\/strong> you work, the more likely you are to achieve it.\u00a0 When you\u2019re trying to learn to play the guitar, you play a note, you listen to the note, and you judge your note against an \u201cideal\u201d note.\u00a0 You set the bar high for yourself, against a standard that you\u2019ve heard and appreciated, be it Andres Segovia or Jimi Hendrix, and if you\u2019re an artist, you keep practicing and reflecting until you gradually achieve, or at least approach, that standard.<\/p>\n

David Shenk, in his book \u201cThe Genius in All of Us\u201d (Anchor Books, 2011) leads off with a story about baseball\u2019s Ted Williams \u201cgenius\u201d as a hitter.\u00a0 He shows how Williams and his peers ascribed his record-setting level of excellence not to an innate inheritance, but to the time he devoted to practice, to his tireless repetition of hitting baseballs: as a kid, as a young player, and throughout his career.\u00a0 As Shenk says, \u201c Greatness was not a thing<\/em> to Ted Williams; it was a process<\/em>.\u201d\u00a0 Like Williams, who prepared for each pitcher he would face individually, great artists are not \u201cgeniuses\u201d in the commonly-understood sense of the word: they are incredibly hard workers who have spent countless hours of rigorous practice and reflection to apply their craft to the next artistic challenge.<\/p>\n

We don\u2019t have nearly enough of this in our society.\u00a0 We often set the standards too low, like in some urban public schools, where, for many of the right reasons (the road to pedagogical hell being notably paved with good intentions), school leaders accept shoddy work from students who have \u201cadded cultural challenges\u201d like poverty or a less-than-nuclear family.\u00a0 Or we just accept that we failed to achieve the basic standards we all agreed on, with a shrug, or a sneer \u2013 like Snookie from Jersey Shore<\/em>!\u00a0 Or we never even attempt things that scare us, like talking about things we deeply care about in front of strangers, lest we be held to any<\/em> kind of standard.\u00a0 And in all these ways, we consent to complacency, which is anathema to the kind of active, engaged civic practice we need to sustain democracy in a country as diverse as today\u2019s America.\u00a0 Artists publicly exemplify, and thus promote, courage.\u00a0 Risk-taking.\u00a0 Honest self-reflection.\u00a0 And hard work.\u00a0 Excellence in art-making, as in baseball, is a model for self-improvement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Before we can talk about the extrinsic value theatre artists ought to have in our society (what they get paid, \u00a0\u00a0what status they are given, what percentage of taxpayer dollars funnels their way, etc\u2026), we need to try to define their intrinsic value.\u00a0 This encompasses both what they do uniquely well, and why what […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","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":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-a-strategic-approach-to-raising-artist-value","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/theatricalimperative\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}