Two Corrections

I kind of like The Guardian's blog's "Noises Off" feature. It always signals to me the moment a debate has been over for a little bit and it's time to summarize it. Journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, but the "Noises Off" feature is basically the second draft: rarely is The Guardian's blog a primary source of discussion, but it's a nice way to round up everything that went on. At any rate, if I want to link to a complex discussion (like the one we had about Quality/Diversity or the one we had about Thomas Garvey -- good times!), it's a lot easier to link to their index-of-important-moments than to try and hit all the original posts myself.

That being said, they don't always get it exactly right (as is always the case with the second draft of history. And I thought it would be worthwhile to correct two quick points, both in reference to myself.

Firstly, in this post, I'm described as an "actor-turned-playwright." That makes it sound like I don't perform anymore... contrary to popular belief, I do still act! In fact, if you want to see me act, my show is still running this week:

Thursday at 9:30 PM

Friday at 7:30 PM

Saturday at 2:00 PM and 8:30 PM

All at 721 Broadway's 2nd floor Shop Theater. I'd love to see you there, and you can see for yourself that I still perform. Granted, I also wrote the play, but I am a performer!

Secondly, in this post, my brief response to Nick Clegg's liking Samuel Beckett is summed up in the sentence, "Clegg did come in for criticism from some quarters." Actually, when I said that "As usual, liking theatre is apparently on par with the worst opinions of bigots towards black community members," I was not criticizing Clegg, I was criticizing the horrible cultural atmosphere we have that makes Clegg's statement so rare.

I'd much prefer if Clegg's statement was the norm, just one of many intellectual acknowledgments that politicians made. Instead, it landed in the cultural sphere like a bombshell -- Somebody cares about us! The implication behind all of the glowing praise of Clegg was, "How politically risky it is to approve of the arts!" That's what I meant. That's the problem. Certainly I didn't criticize Clegg for not playing into it.

Also, I do have to say that this mischaracterization of my meaning (which I will accept some responsibility for, because that was kind of a throwaway post) does come at least in some part because of the common journalistic formula that gets applied often, not only here but in many media. The formula goes something like:

Token Liberal said: XXXXX

Token Liberal 2 agreed, saying YYYYY. Token Liberal 3 explained further, ZZZZZZ.

Not everyone agreed with Token Liberal, however. Token Conservative said AAAAAAA. Another Token Conservative said BBBBBBB.

Obviously that's almost insultingly reductive, (and I'm using Liberal/Conservative in place of any reductive "with-us-or-against-us" mentality) but when I saw how I was quoted in the Noises Off it seemed to me that I was suffered by being shoehorned into the wrong paragraph.

Just setting the record straight.

Things You Can Learn from Canada

No, not Health Care, but dealing with audience response. It's kind of a long post, but it's a sustained examination of feedback -- even simple, knee-jerk responses -- to an evening of their theater. Now, I don't know these folks -- I just like their blog -- but I already get a sense of community and communication that most of us are striving for.

Profound

I just realized something.

Goodbyes are intrinsically designed to be an exponential (or maybe logarithmic?). It starts from a sentence length fitting to the warmth of the relationship, and then each statement is cut shorter and shorter until you reach the a-tom, the uncuttable unit, and then it the goodbye collapses to zero.

Allow me to demonstrate with a short scene:

Warm friend A: "Oh, gosh, look at the time? I really ought to be heading in the direction of work -- I've been late lately, so I should get going."

Warm friend B: "Oh yeah, it is late, isn't it. I hope you make it to work on time."

Warm friend A: "I hope so too. Good luck with your presentation tomorrow!"

Warm friend B: "Thanks! I'll see you soon!"

Warm friend A: "Okay, then -- bye!"

Warm friend B: "Bye!"

Conversation is now concluded.

If you don't observe this decay, it feels a little abrupt. Observe:

Warm friend A: "Oh, gosh, look at the time? I really ought to be heading in the direction of work -- I've been late lately, so I should get going."

Warm friend B: "Bye."

Conversation is now concluded.

I know some people who exploit this to make it impossible to get off the phone with them -- because if at any moment you reverse the decay, you are basically starting the goodbye over again.

My God I've cracked the code!

Conversation III: Beautiful Words

I drew some fire a while back for focusing on the tenor of a debate rather than tackling the debate itself (in the context of a debate about race), to which I responded that the thesis statement of this blog is that culture is a conversation, and the ways we have our cultural conversation about deeply important issues has gone deeply awry.

So, here's something via Andrew Sullivan:

(By the way, my favorite thing about this video is the out-of-context thumbs-up that YouTube uses as its still frame)

Three points about this video:

1. This conversation prompts not only a frank discussion about homosexuality and natural law, but actually a beautiful discussion of homosexuality and natural law. The quality of Andrew Sullivan's response is tender, and rendered beautifully. Beyond that, it is also insightful -- even though I agreed with Andrew Sullivan about homosexuality being equal to heterosexuality, its relationship to Catholicism is not one I could previously appreciate. Now, obviously, as an Athiest (but not a New Athiest, defined at NewAthiesm.org as "Intolerance of ignorance, myth and superstition; disregard for the tolerance of religion."), I disagree with a lot of Andrew Sullivan's interpretations of Catholicism, and he still creates a lot of contradiction and tension within his beliefs, but at the same time, everyone is full of contradiction and tension. It isn't always a bad thing.
2. The question, as posited by the questioner, is insulting. He tries to diffuse it as an insult, but at the end of the day, "I love my husband = I love the Golden Gate Bridge" is precisely the ignorant insult that refuses to accept homosexuality as being, at nature, no different from heterosexuality--that demands homosexuality be different, in some way, from heterosexuality. Somewhere behind it is lurking the whole "If homosexuality, why not beastiality? Why not polygamy?" canard--so in a way, the Golden Gate Bridge analogy is only insultingly silly, not insultingly foul. But the point is, by taking the question in good faith even though it is offensive, Andrew Sullivan gets the opportunity to really, truly provide an answer, and I think we're all richer by it. Now, this doesn't mean that all homophobia should be treated with politeness and acceptance -- some people can be comfortably told to fuck off and die -- but if a question is put forward in a forum that provides for a meaningful response, we all profit by that meaningful response. The questioner may not be budged in his thinking; but the listener may be.
3. Lastly, this sort of exchange is precisely the sort of exchange that cable news and print media both, for different reasons, completely fail to capture. YouTube is, perversely, the perfect forum for spreading this kind of well-reasoned argument. In Cable News, you could see all of the factors and really hear the conversation... except these days, CNN and MSNBC couldn't possibly sit quietly for seven minutes to hear an entire conversation out without talking over both participants to shout their objections and talking points. And FOX News would clearly not even begin to engage. Print articles rarely provide transcripts -- they'd just pick out what they feel are the "right" quotations. Which would destroy the entire flow and the question and answer, the tone, and everything else that makes it impressive. I think the only other venue I get to hear a topic this well discussed would be on National Public Radio.

Conversation II: You, Yourself, And Your Audience

Culture is a conversation. I keep saying that. Each of us puts forward our little bits of culture because we want to engage with each other (or the egotistical ones who just want to be heard; just as bad in conversation as they are in culture).

So obviously, I think that any time we actually engage in conversation, we're going to improve our artmaking as well as whatever else we gain in the conversation. In a previous post I mentioned Don Hall's nice approach of publicly communicating with critics. Next, via Rob Wienert-Kendt's The Wicked Stage, American Theatre uses Facebook to actually talk to the audience. Specifically, they decide to talk to the potential audience, as opposed to the realized audience. They ask the question: Why do you not see a particular play? The answers are not life-shattering, but are definitely worth looking over.

On The Meaning Of What We Do

Scott Walters picks up on an important question -- the important question -- posed by Tom Loughlin:

When you stack up the general public’s statistical disinterest in theatre against the general economic condition of the art and the artists themselves, the rational mind has to question why anyone would continue to pursue such a statistically trivial career. Or worse – why anyone would ever educate or train someone to pursue this career. You can choose to take the high road and produce aesthetic arguments supporting such a choice, but only in a first-world country where basic needs are by and large taken care of can this argument actually take place. There are many places in the world where no one is arguing about how many plays or whose plays get produced every year. You own career, stacked up against these statistics, makes for a sober reckoning.

Scott's answer:

Our society is built on stories. We communicate our values, our ways of interacting, our aspirations according to the stories we tell each other over generations. The idea that there is value in helping others who are in dire need, for instance, which underlies the Haitian relief effort, is passed on from generation to generation by the stories we tell that reinforce that value. Without that story, or with a more dominant counter-story, such admirable behavior would likely be scarce.

I think I'll take a crack at answering the question, because the question goes back to what my goal was when I began this blog, the philosophy that underlies how I try to approach theater, politics, and everything.

There's a lot of evidence to support the theory is that what drives humanity to create the complexity of our civilization is our ability to communicate. Mankind makes discoveries, and then it shares discoveries with one another, and passes them down. Mankind discovered other ways to encode that communication -- first carved into stone, then written on pages, printed, broadcast, and then finally put into the digital sphere.

You can look at the history of science. A theory begins with a single man making a statement. Someone responds to it. Someone adds on to it. Someone criticizes it. Someone corrects it, someone else rebuts the criticism. The conversation evolves the ideas, and it only evolves as we respond and add on.

That's what culture is. Culture is an aggregation of everyone's attempts to join a cultural, historical conversation about today, tomorrow, and the future. It's a big conversation, much of which is chatter -- Twitter, in a way, is a microcausm of the language. There are conversational threads like the permanent conversations about sex, about governance, about happiness. There are conversations that crop up and rage suddenly in a context and then fade away as people move on (is the Leno-Conan thing going to be important in 2011?).

I'm reading up on mimetics lately to try and support this idea but the idea is this: our society is built on two things: the fitness of our bodies, and the fitness of our ideas. In fact, at this point, we stress the fitness of our ideas more than the fitness of our bodies, because they are far more flexible and pay back to the fitness of our bodies much quicker.

That's what we're doing here in the theater: we're trying to enter this big cultural conversation in the ways we know how. We've got things to say, memes/ideas to spread, things that we hope will add to the survival of the species. We're a tiny shred of society's conversation, or a sliver of its imagination. We're just individual neurons firing inside the great mind of society.

Can we guarantee that our firings are doing something? I don't know. Ask a neurologist which brain cells are "vital" in the working of the brain. We lose some all the time. Often, it's the connections between brain cells which are more important than the neurons themselves -- and that's the conversation.

I forget who it was who first implanted the meme into my head that playwriting is the supreme act of arrogance -- writing as though people care about what you have to say. But the truth is, people are surprisingly interested in what everybody has to say. And we don't have to reach everyone ourselves -- we just have to be 6 degrees away from everybody.

One of the important memes that this conversation includes is, as Scott notes, generosity. That conversation goes so far back in history we can't remember where it begins, but you can see it in the Gospel ("Give to other people, and you will receive. You will be given much. It will be poured into your hands--more than you can hold. You will be given so much that it will spill into your lap. The way you give to other people is the way God will give to you."), and you can see it in the Gospel of Wealth ("In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to use the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all.")

As we debate the issues back and forth, in sermons and books and advertise and put on plays, the ideas evolve. They get more specific. When I was young, it seemed like people wanted to help Africa, so they sent food and clothes. Then African economists got together and pointed out that buying food and clothes and sending money was counterproductive in the long term. Nowadays, it seems like we've refined our tools for giving. All of a sudden there's microloans, we're debating whether it's more effective to use pesticides or mosquito nets, we're talking about how closely linked government reform is to international aid. A century ago, we didn't even have a movement that believed that people in other countries might be as worthy of our aid as people in our own.

How often is theater at the center of the debate? Not all that often. But then again, how often is any of the 6 billion people on this planet at the center of the debate? The new rabidly self-aggrandizing type of person typified by the Balloon Boy family or the Salahis is the compulsion of Americans who do not want to be at the edge of the debate, do not just want to be one neuron in a mass of coordinated neurons -- they want to drive the debate. The Salahis, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck; people who aren't content with chiming in with their two cents.

Let's just keep the conversation rolling, so that our ideas can literally evolve and hopefully make us more fit as a society.

Grassroots + Power VI: Separation Between Arts and State ctd.

So I was wondering the other day about the separation between arts and state, and I want to return to that subject, because I don't think I delineated exactly what I meant. The arts are, for instance, used by the State Department. They're used by the MTA. To discuss "arts" and "the state" blithely as though it's all the same is not the level of specificity I'd like to leave the discussion on.

Let's start with political content. One thing you'll notice is that many artists, even when they strive to be political, try not to be ideological -- they at least say they want to present "both sides" or "provoke debate." They certainly aren't out there to propagandize. I occasionally meet an artist who has an agenda, but rarely, so very rarely. It's a taboo. (I also tend very much not to like their work, so I'm definitely part of the taboo).

The reason I bring this up is because recently, I've been watching some vintage Capra with my family off of Netflix. Specifically, we saw Meet John Doe. What a fantastic, fantastic, film.

Also, a very blatantly ideological one. Most of the characters are incredibly one-dimensional, in a way that isn't bothersome -- the setting is basically that, in unstable and corrupt times, people are reduced to base instinct or strategy. The female protagonist will do anything to keep her job, the paper owner will do anything to sell papers, the politician will do anything for votes. The only character who doesn't fit into this is the film's "John Doe." But he doesn't have an ideology. He's just pushed around, a vessel. You spend the length of the movie debating within yourself which ideology he should allow himself to accept (a sneaky way of saying you spend the movie wondering which strain of thought is right). Finally, at the end, everything ends discredited except common human decency.

Or the Frank Capra we saw last night, You Can't Take It With You. (By the way, I think Eugene Jarecki should have used this instead of It's A Wonderful Life for the Move Your Money campaign -- here too the antagonist is an evil banker). The Turner Classic Movie synopsis says it all: "A girl from a family of freethinkers falls for the son of a conservative banker."

It's a far cry from the way politics is tackled in my favorite film, 12 Angry Men. There, each character is represented, and -- like the trial it mirrors -- each side gets to make its persuasive case. There are shades of emotional complexity and doubt in each character, and each character honestly believes he's out to do something good. The victory of 20th Century Realism over 20th Century pedagogy.

I'm mulling over: what are the rules of making a piece that emphatically asserts an opinion? I've heard before that art is about the question, not the answer. For a while I've believed that. And I still think it's usually true.

But a while back I spoke about my conviction that culture is a conversation, and each cultural act we perform, be it an ad or a play or a book is just a moment in the conversation.

If that's the case, then why the hell isn't there some way of asserting something? Just as we don't have to find ourselves trapped permanently in the passive-aggressive mode as we talk naturally, there has to be some way we can assert the things we believe in ways that are respectful, insightful, and useful.

It's surprisingly tough in spoken language. I've seen plenty a conversation where somebody had the gall to assert an opinion -- on some topics, not others -- and the conversation has ground to a halt.

When I was in Prague, I had the strange experience of living with one of those conservatives we're always seeing on the news. Someone whose approval of Sarah Palin grew when it turned out that she tried to ban books, and who didn't believe that we should have national health care. The fact that he supported Mitt Romney and Romney's health care reform didn't particularly sway him.

He was a very well-educated young man from a wealthy background, he was studying to be in the communications industry, and every time he went to downtown Boston he carried a concealed weapon tucked into the back of his pants.

We were all at lunch, and somehow the conversation turned to gun violence, and someone said something along the lines of how problematic it was that guns are so easy to get access to, and he hotly stated that anyone who wanted to limit access to guns was taking away his right to defend himself. There was a halt in the conversation. Slowly, we tried to discuss the issue. I was fascinated simply watching people slowly figure out what they could or couldn't say. Nobody wanted to argue, but they wanted to discuss, and clearly this was something he was very passionate about, and nobody wanted to say the things that would explode the anger.

At the same time, sometimes he would say things that were absolutely horrifying. I won't repeat them on my blog, but a lot of time people would simply let it slide because it was easier than arguing with someone that angry about issues. He felt persecuted, because every time he would drop one of these incredibly offensive statements, people would get angry at him.

It reminded me that sometimes -- just sometimes -- we have to stand by what we believe. Not on everything. I, for one, believe that a public option would be important. But it's not the battle we should fight to the death, certainly not at the expense of the health care bill as a whole. But on the other hand, the fight against torture is something that I'm willing to say is an imperative. There are some things that we can assert, decidedly.

Some of our most beautiful cultural legacies -- the Declaration of Independence, Edward R. Murrow's address from Buchenwald, the Pulitzer Prize-winning photo of the execution from the Vietnam war -- these cultural legacies are not handed down because they were a question. They also were not handed down because they were the "answer," a single, immutable, truth. They don't speak a single universal moral. But they speak to one moment, one crucial crossroads that our culture faces, and it passes a specific judgment, asserts a specific impact.

That's why I get mad about media equivalency, about headlines like Reid's Race Comments: Was There Truth In His Comments? Sometimes -- not always -- you just have to say what the hell is on your mind. There are times when it's simply not appropriate to use the question mark.

This doesn't mean we have to yell, or vilify, or engage in all of the rancor that is attached to fighting over passionate issues. It just means we sometimes have to find the way to make our case clearly, concisely, and with a period at the end of our statement.

Should Literary Managers Be Developing Playwrights?

Mead Hunter asks:

Do playwrights really want unvarnished honesty? If I say to you, “We passed on your play because we felt your ending was lame,” what subtext do you hear? If you rewrite that ending under the impression that now Theater XYZ will gladly produce it, and that doesn’t happen, then you will really feel had. The danger of specific criticism is that will be received as advice -- or even as a promise.

Isaac responds:

I will respond to this by telling a story, a story of rejection! Rejection of me!

The story is a pretty simple one about an agent who took the time to gave Isaac five pages of quality, incisive, honest feedback. Says Isaac:

This is the important part [of the story] here though: These notes were far, far blunter than I have ever seen notes given in theatre to anyone working in any field other than design. And I'll tell ya... it didn't feel awesome. It took a couple of days before I could get through that I was kind of upset at the rejection to actually see what the notes were. But at that point, I dusted myself and the proposal off and went to work. That project has laid dormant for awhile, because of other writing needs, but when it's time to go back, I'll reexamine those notes and see how I feel.

From Isaac's perspective, the downside from the perspective of playwrights is a bit of bruised feelings, and the upside is higher quality work.

I always favor the honest, polite, incisive commentary. The key, of course, is in the politeness. I believe that there is always a way to phrase criticism in such a way as to remove any of the personal rancor from it. There is no need for you to pretend that things are not wrong when they are wrong, but there's also absolutely no need for you to use the sort of language such as "your ending was lame." In fact, the more specific your criticism, the less likely the playwright is going to be insulted.

The times that criticism really hurts, emotionally, is when you realize it is both right and difficult to fix. If someone gives you a straightforward, clearly true criticism, you tend to just implement the change and be done with it. If someone gives you a complex and clearly wrong piece of criticism, we tend to ignore it. But when something cuts down to the core of what you're working on, boy, that hurts like a raw nerve. They don't have to insult you, or be brusque, or dismissive--the truth and the depth of the criticism does all the pain itself.

I had that recently myself. A friend of mine sent me back a draft with the note that, from moment to moment, the play stands very well on its own, but the logic behind the characters' motivations are confused and conflicted. I stared at the script for hours with a terrible, sinking feeling that the hours and hours of work I had put into it was worthless. It's a really painful feeling.

But what's the alternative? That I walk around with a terribly flawed script without knowing it? Without being so trite as to say "no pain no gain"... wait, I just said it.

Anyways, a separate issue is whether literary managers have some sort of responsibility to do this. And the answer is no. They are busy. It would be nice if they could. But they are not our parents, or our friends, or our mothers. If a theater decides we have potential, then we should be developed. But theaters and their literary managers have the right to decide how to spend their time. I know how much time I spend just responding to my friends' work, and I get something on the order of two or three plays a month. It takes me time to give good criticism. How much time are we expecting a literary manager to spend giving criticism?

Conversation IV: Excuses

99 Seats creates Holtham's Law (dubbed such by Isaac Butler):

If, in any discussion, particularly of diversity or style, you bring up Shakespeare, you lose the argument. Boom, that's it, you're done. Thank you for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you. You can shut the hell up now.

Isaac adds the Butler Corollary (my naming, not his):

Anytime you are defending a script (or a moment/theatrical gesture in a script) and use Shakespeare or Beckett as reasons why it works, you lose.

I would add that Butler's Corollary is actually a special case of a larger rule, which is:

Any time you defend your own actions or work based on its similarity to the actions or work of other people, you are talking out of your ass.

I've seen this in a number of contexts. There are, for instance, any number of post-modernists who hold that because Jackson Pollack threw paint against a canvas, anyone who throws paint against a canvas is an artist. This is not true; Pollack had a very specific style that happens to be very beautiful, and was revolutionary in a certain context. John Cage's 4'33" was perfect in the moment; if you go out and do it now, we all know you're just doing a bad cover version of the master.

Another context is the one in terms of Israel. Every time I try and bring up Israel's abuses of the Palestinians, I often get the retort of Guantanamo Bay, or Palestinian attacks against Israel -- both are variations on the theme of either "nobody is perfect so I don't have to be" or "why do we have to be the first ones to change?" Morality is relative, but it's not relative to other people's actions. There isn't a certain amount of morality you show based on the world average of morality -- morality isn't racing away from the proverbial bear, where you only have to be slightly more moral than the least moral person in the world.

So if someone says "I don't like the fact that nothing happens," you can't just say, "Beckett did it." You have to argue about why nothing happening works in your play, in your context.

Same goes for Pinter or Karen Finley or Thomas Friedman or whomever you want to blame your own shit actions on.

I wish I had something as punchy as "CRICKET BAT TO THE FACE" to end this post with.

Conversation III: Philanthropy SMACKDOWN

Createquity's latest Around the Horn features GiveWell launching a fairly sustained and intelligent criticism of Philanthropedia, as well as a two part response from Philanthropedia.

Honestly, the ins and outs of philanthropy isn't really so high on my radar, probably because I haven't gotten enough of an income to donate beyond supporting autism education in NYC in pitiful small change, a little bit of money to the Obama campaign, and regular contributions to public radio. What drew me to read the articles in full, however (and believe me, it is in full for blog posts) was the tone of conversation.

GiveWell thinks that Philanthropedia is dodgy people, relying on "Experts" who aren't fully disclosed or defined. But GiveWell doesn't write a 40 word post full of scorn and derision. GiveWell writes a long, clearly structured, point-by-point summation of their central concerns with Philanthropedia's approach.

Philanthropedia responds in an even longer, point-by-point approach. How? By thanking GiveWell for their efforts, and acknowledging the weaknesses that GiveWell highlights while respectfully disagreeing on their real impact -- basically, Philanthropedia wants us to look past the flaws, and look at the vision.

The one that left me more convinced was GiveWell. I certainly walked away from Philanthropedia thinking that they were an organization that cares, and that in a year or so they might be a really useful tool for philanthropy, but they had to concede too many points to GiveWell.

But really, I'm highlighting this not because of the actual philanthropy argument, but because of the tone of the conversation, the rigor with which both sides approached their points. I'd love to see GiveWell respond. And Philanthropedia respond with that. I want to see some of the information that Philanthropedia talks about in the future tense.

Hey guys, remember when David Cote asked bloggers to Enrage/Engage more? I was always thought that the "engage" side of the slash would be far more helpful to use than the "enrage" side. I think, if you're a philanthropist, you gained far more from this mode of conversation than if @GiveWell had tweeted "Who are @Philan-pedia's 'experts'? They're as qualified as FOX experts LOL" and then spent the next few weeks sniping at each other calling the other unserious organizations or whatever passes for philanthropy smack talk.

(Updated: Misnumbered my own series again)

Diversity VI: Quality is Interactive? No, Diversity is Interactive

This diversity thing is fun!

I fell asleep thinking of Scott Walters' post discussing quality last night. I want to take something he said as a jumping off point for a reflection this morning. He said:

I think quality is interactive. Like a rainbow, which exists only when rain, sunlight, and an observing eye are in proper relation to each other, quality exists when a play with certain characteristics in a production with certain characteristics interacts with an audience who recognizes, appreciates, and is able to interpret those characteristics.

I agree. But maybe that speaks to our problem in diversity: a problem that has just as much to do with the audience as it has to do with the playwrights and the artistic directors. I couldn't find any good statistics on the demographics of theater-goers (I found plenty on Broadway, but I don't know if that's representative of theater as a whole -- I mean, I bet it's not), so I'll try and research more when I'm not jotting this down in a hurry to get my ideas on the page.

The problem is, if a play is considered to be quality based on its interaction with the audience, what does it mean to have a dwindling, educated, homogenizing audience?

I will say this: one of my classmates is the child of illegal immigrants who grew up in South Central LA. When I heard on NPR recently that California's latest round of budget cuts had basically decimated what was left of LA's arts-in-schools program and its ground-breaking jazz in parks, my heart broke to think that I would have even less of odds of working with anyone else from that same background.

Before we reach the level of MFA or not MFA, there's a moment in elementary school where students either get involved in the arts, or they don't -- even if they won't become art-makers in the future, they will become the arts audiences. As budgets get cut and public school scale back their programs, increasingly that moment is becoming only available to school districts in wealthy neighborhoods, or to private schools.

If that's the case, then the cards are being stacked against the arts to begin with. If arts are something only the wealthy, educated few receive, then no duh the arts are going to be made by the wealthy, educated few.

Diversity V: Quality Again

I just realized now, as I was going through my media contacts figuring out who I should invite to my production of Hamlet in the Spring, and I realized that my feed for Scott Walters' Theatre Ideas blog was broken. No wonder I've been missing out on him.

I'm glad I did spot it, because he just put up a post answering the blogosphere's response to his lottery idea.

The post begins with a recap of the debate so far. He notes, not inaccurately, that he has largely been dismissed and belittled on the idea. Before I launch back in to disagreeing strongly with him, I want to say what I've been saying every time I've posted on the subject: that he's a very sharp and provocative thinker, and that my disagreement on this subject doesn't lessen my respect for him. He uses a lot of verbs like "howling," "decrying," "huffing," and "puffing" to characterize the blogosphere's response to his ideas. I have no idea if he's come across my post (he apologizes for not being able to track all of the comments he had read, and I don't blame him, considering the viral nature of the post, at least in the realm of theater-blogging).

Alright, meat and potatos time:

Which leads to the thesis for this post: quality doesn't exist.

Ho boy. The thesis of that post is exactly the opposite of the thesis I'm about to embark on for my degree. In a way, I'm really lucky he's advancing this argument. It's time to tangle.

Let's follow the argument:

The reason it doesn't exist is that we define it, when we bother to define it at all (usually it is some vague assumption), in contradictory terms that simulatenously reveal the arbitrary and ideological source of our concept.

I don't disagree that quality is very difficult to find, seemingly very arbitrary. I think the excellent book for this purpose is The Reasons of Love. Frankfurt's argument is very subtle, but the best way for me to recap it is thus:

1. Caring about things is inherent to us.
2. If we try to objectively define why what is important to us is important, we can't--because we can't evaluate importance without having some sort of standard of importance to compare it to.
3. The reason we care about things is because we need some way of determining how best to act.

That's the central important that caring -- love -- importance -- quality -- has to play in our lives. If we have no way to evaluate theater, how can we care about it? Why not just roll around naked in honey? Why would it matter if theater is diverse? Why would it matter that we participate at all?

Given our seeming attachment to the status quo, given our belief that this system of conscious "choice" and single-minded focus on "quality" leads to excellence, shouldn't there be some kind of evidence that the system works? Shouldn't there be a helluva lot more masterpieces around? I must say I don't see many. In fact, I can't for the life of me think of a really, really good, powerful, profound play that has been done on the stages of Broadway or the regional theatre since, well, since Angels in America almost twenty years ago. I see a lot of average, faintly interesting, or adolescently "provocative" work, but nothing that really stakes a claim to become canonical. Indeed, when I look at most new plays, they seem like they could have been written by Paddy Chayefsky or A. R. Gurney, or if they are "experimental," Frank Wedekind or Alred Jarry. No, if this system is so effective, we ought to be able to come up with more than a single masterpiece a generation.

Well, I guess here is the center of the problem. For Scott, apparently nothing worth defending has come out of the system at all. I guess I have to disagree: to take a random sampling of theater experiences that have really moved me, I'd go with Thom Paine (Based On Nothing), The Lily's Revenge, The Team's Architecting. I would be willing to put forward all three of them as a masterpiece of a generation. Scott is, of course, free to disagree -- I don't believe quality is absolute. But if I was involved in any of the theaters that produced that work, I would be proud of my work.

By the way, neither Taylor Mac's nor Will Eno's education isn't listed, Rachel Chaivkin comes from Columbia (in terms of MFA).

The problem with this argument, which is a form of relativism, is that, if every person has his or her own equally valid opinion as to what constitutes quality, then the claim that any play is better than another becomes by definition absurd.

I disagree that relativism reduces every argument to absurdity. I think that in our post-modern times, a false opposition was created: Objectivism versus Absurdity -- Objectivism versus nothing. If there's no objective truth, there's no truth at all.

I think both options are bollocks. I think we each have the right to have our subjective opinions, to stand for them, to argue on their behalf even knowing that they're wrong. Why do we expend so much time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff? Why does Ben Brantley show up to work every day, even knowing that he'll never prove that The Wooster Group did a good job and Julia Roberts didn't.

Think about applying this argument outside the realm of quality of theater, it becomes incredibly corrosive. Should we pull our political convictions out of a hat, because they're relative and therefore absurd? I can in no way prove that Barack Obama's health care bill will reduce the cost of health care in this nation. I can't definitively prove that it will increase coverage. I can't prove the opposite either. I guess that makes the attempt to lobby for or against the bill absurd.

So how can we reject for reasons of quality the use of a lottery to choose a play, when quality is an individual opinion and any given play is as likely to have its champions as its detractors?

To repeat my point: the difference between a lottery and an artistic director does not have to do with guaranteeing that nobody will have issues -- as though there has ever been an artistic director, from Oscar Eustis all the way down, who has ever produced anything that didn't have detractors. Hell, theater critics in the 1600s saw no distinction between Shakespeare and witchcraft (I took a whole course on that and boy howdy is that a fascinating discussion).

The point is that if you run an organization, and you are constantly striving for quality, and you're constantly failing, and you're constantly applying Beckett's Law ("Fail better."), then you may not be able to say that you've created the great masterpiece, but you can say one thing: you believe in the work you've promoted. Taking pride in our work, being passionate about it, and working to communicate that with the audience, sharing that moment.

That's the Ian Thal method of diversity: making the work we're passionate be diverse work, and championing it.

What we mean, really, is not that quality is totally s ubjective -- that the cab driver's opinion is as good as the artistic director's -- but that among trained, informed, knowledgable, and experienced people (i.e., experts) quality is subjective. Which brings us back to education again. There is, after all, a 2500 year conversation about what constitutes quality in the arts, and those whose opinions ought to matter more are likely to have absorbed enough of that conversation, usually through formal education or extensive independent reading (auto-didacticism being a respectable form of education) to arrive at an "informed opinion" about a play's quality.

No. That's not my position at all. After all, one of the great mysteries about Shakespeare is how a man with so poor an education wrote the works that he did -- which has lead so many to try to ascribe much smarter, more educated men with his works. My position is that if quality is subjective, passionate is the qualification. If your straw-man cab driver really, truly loves theater, and can really passionately engage in it, he will come to informed and interesting decisions about theater.

In other words, there has never been consensus, and so the best an educated person can do is pick and choose which part of the conversation they find most attractive.

I'm glad you used the word "conversation," because it's my favorite frame for thinking about the arts. It's a conversation. But whereas you're positing the that the artistic director's job is to select other people's parts of the conversation, I disagree. I think that when artistic directors select plays, they make a statement in the cultural conversation. It's how they participate in the artistic conversation that they care about.

That's why artistic directors (myself included) were emotionally upset by the proposal. It's basically saying, "Your participation in the conversation? Probably not as good as flipping a coin."

Now remember: I'm not pretending that artistic directors have used that conversation well. I'm not pretending that the MFA-centrism is not a problem. But there are better solutions. You proposed it yourself.

Then his argument shifts.

Which is why I say: quality doesn't exist. As a pure, usable, non-ideological, objective concept quality doesn't exist.

Unless we define it differently.

Alright, so what's the definition of quality that takes stands behind the lottery?

But I don't think that is true. I think quality is interactive. Like a rainbow, which exists only when rain, sunlight, and an observing eye are in proper relation to each other, quality exists when a play with certain characteristics in a production with certain characteristics interacts with an audience who recognizes, appreciates, and is able to interpret those characteristics. You need to have all three elements for quality to exist. It is a gestalt. An excellent play in an excellent production that is performed in front of an audience that has no interest in it is not an excellent play and production.

I agree. Quality is interactive, like a conversation. I don't see how this strengthens your point, however. You propose an equally, if not, more so, relativist standard of quality (I mean, "It is a gestalt"? That's the most relativistic thing you could say).

But your last sentence is key: "an excellent play in an excellent production that is performed in front of an audience that has no interest in it is not an excellent play and production."

When the artistic director does his job correctly (not those straw-men failures of artistic directors), then it is exactly that purpose that he serves. Should it be based on education? No. Should it be based on MFA connections? No. But if you take away the lottery, you're not only taking away those points, but you are also removing exactly that interactive element

You're right that we need to restore a set of common language in terms of criticism. How does that coexist with your idea that we should just pull plays out of a hat they'll be equally good or better than the work of an artistic director? I understand your frustration with certain large, established regional theaters, certain big non-profits. But I'm a small time artistic director, and there ain't a single artistic call I've made that I haven't felt passionate about, and which I wouldn't stand behind over a lottery.

That being said, Scott, I want to underline that I spent my time writing this post precisely because I want "to consider the validity of [your] proposal...as a pure abstraction ultimately productive of nothing more unpleasant than a spasm of conscience and perhaps something as pleasant as a whiff of scandal and a flicker of ire." Again, when it comes to bringing diversity, I still think of you at the top of my list of its advocates. It's just this one point.

(Update: forgot to link to the article I was writing about. Silly me.)

Conversation II: Feedback

This week, my company held a workshop production of a new movement work called Syzygy. Because the piece was a workshop, we held feedback sessions after each. Rather than being an artist-directed Q+A, it was a great experience of directing questions toward the audience and hearing surprisingly cogent, helpful feedback on design elements and movement choices.

But I started wondering about something, probably because I've been working on a report on The Search for Shining Eyes. That report includes an analysis of the research conducted by Audience Insight LLC about Americans' relationships to classical music. Specifically, the research was an in-depth look not at the audience that attends orchestra evenings, but at the audience that doesn't.

How do we reach the people who aren't coming to see our events without a market research staff behind our backs? Or even, how do we entice those who come to our shows and then sneak away. Our group has a Facebook Page and a twitter feed, and we always ask for feedback/reactions/discussion. Nobody does. Our Facebook page has the potential to be a conversation between our company and our audience, and I don't think it isn't happening because we aren't there--the moment we could get even one response to talk we'd have a discussion going. Instead, our Facebook is just another RSS feed to help you find out about events.

I'm going to keep stewing on this one. It seems very important. After all, we blab about "community" and etc. but if we can't get our audience to talk to us, then unless we pin them down and force them to speak we might lose opportunities to connect.

Conversation: Motives

99seats, who I sometimes disagree with but always appreciate listening to, has a post up about the quality of conversation in the theaterblogosphere, which mainly has to do with motives. Money quote:

When Theresa Rebeck writes about the lack of solid structure she sees in young playwrights, the conversation revolves around how it's really about why her plays aren't being well-received or something. When Roland Tec(o) accuses the O'Neill of being a rigged game, it's really about jealousy and sour grapes. When the O'Neill responds, it's really about covering their ass. When I write about the representation of black playwrights, it's really just a plea for more attention. Everyone's motives are questionable and we basically believe the absolute worst of each other. I'd say it's just out here in the blogosphere, but we all know how it is when we meet in the lobby, at the bar after the show, three blocks away from the theatre. (And that's even more gossip, isn't it?) The default is to not take anyone at face value. How do we build communities like that?

The conversation sparked by that piece was responded to by Isaac Butler here (basically, that the motives he's suspicious of are the motives of successful people, and usually he's not a suspicious guy) and by Spencer Ackerman here, who asks:

Would I have opened both barrels on a piece like that if a friend of mine hadn’t written it?

Well, in all honesty, probably, yeah. But that shouldn’t make me beat up on my friend. It should give me pause for when I go all-out on people who aren’t my friend. There should be one rigorous standard — no euphemism, no pulled punches, no intellectual sloppiness, but no unfairness either. Doesn’t mean I have to treat bad-faith arguments as good-faith ones, nor does it mean this blog can’t have fun. It certainly doesn’t mean this blog can’t have friends.

This is another reason I've not been happy about David Cote's "call to arms" for us to engage and enrage. When I look back at the blogosphere as I've been reading it, I haven't seen a reluctance for theater bloggers to spat over the things they feel like spatting over. I've seen all sorts of aspersions cast on the motives or standing of other bloggers--the insults I've seen thrown from Leonard Jacobs towards Isaac Butler or from just about anybody towards George Hunka haven't, in my opinion, served the conversation of theater much at all.

For me, it seems unproductive to question's people's motives when they make statements. For instance, in the example 99seats uses, Theresea Rebeck may be making her comments on the structure of plays because this is her personal belief, or because of her stature as a playwright. Does it matter? When it all boils down to it, even if she has the most corrupt reasoning in the world, if we can't dispute her points on their own weaknesses, then she is correct. If we can't find a cogent and persuasive counter-argument to her points about the structure of plays, then she is correct. If we can, then perhaps she is not. That's the "one rigorous standard" that Ackerman should be applying. That's something we can say to friends, right? "I love you, I respect you, but that last argument you just made has some faults in it."

This is one of the reasons the health-care debate has gone so awry. The Republicans are not debating the plan on its merits. They're simply railing about the "motives" behind the Obama administration. Why? Because it's so much easier! They don't have to make any substantive claims, or battle the Democrats in a forum where winning or losing is left up to the audience. They want to control the debate, so they aim for motives.

Now, I'm not saying we need to pretend that there are no motives. After all, sometimes motives can be part of the argument--if someone is interested in making profit and therefore their prescription for theater is profit-based, and you think that the prescription for theater shouldn't be profit based, then that's a legitimate debate about motives. It's very important to know what people's motives and biases are, as best as you can read them. That's why, for instance, I personally would prefer 99Seats not to be an anonymous blogger (although I can understand why he feels it to be necessary). It would help me understand where he's coming from.

But any argument can be reduced to its motives. If we didn't have motives, why would we speak? The argument itself, however, stands on its own. You can either engage it or ignore it. To fall back to character attacks rather than tackling the argument as put forward itself is not helpful. Liberals failed when they characterized Cheney as evil. When they stick to the rule of law, the systemic demonstration of how and where the law was violated, they can succeed.

In our own private domain, do we weigh other people's opinions based on our perspective on their motives? Sure. When I see a Ben Brantley review of a Richard Foreman piece, I can't help but think that he wants to feel "cool" and "with it" without really understanding the substance of the show at all, and when I see him cooing over a Broadway starlet I roll my eyes. But I still do read his reviews, because in context of his biases I do still often get something out of what he's saying. In fact, that's the power of Critic-o-meter, is that I can get a spread of different biases and imperfect reviews, get a senses to where they disagree and agree, and get a whole opinion.

The Future of Culture IV: War Memorial

In the Radiolab episode "New Normal" that I talked about in the last Future of Culture installment, the episode began with a discussion of changing cultural attitudes toward war. Specifically, it was about a man who was surveying people about whether they thought war would ever end, whether there would ever be World Peace. He says that in the early 1980s, the answer was overwhelmingly "Yes." And today, the answer is overwhelmingly "No."

This seems indicative of the modern cynicism about everything (although the early 1980s still exists in that post-Nixon, post-Vietnam era that I at least consider the modern cynical age), but what's interesting to me is that this mindset flies in the face of certain evidence.

Actually, before we go on, I want to quibble about the question -- the question should be more realistically phrased as "Will we ever reach the point where wars are rare, abnormal events." In other words, I don't know if we'll ever reach that asymptotic event, but I do think it is an asymptote--I think we will get closer and closer to having "no" wars.

Somewhere between 1900 and 2000, war left the cultural norm in Europe. In 1900, war was considered a measure of strength of nations. By the end of World War One, we were praying that this war was the "war to end all wars." It wasn't until World War Two that this seemed to be achieved in Europe. Now, World War Two is not the complete end of War in Europe -- there were some near-wars, such as the Soviet invasion of Hungary and of the Czech Republic, and two genuine wars (the last genocides of the former Yugoslavia), but those were considered to be abnormal, and in the case of the latter, Europe actually interceded and brought an end to the war.

I was thinking about this for a very specific reason. This Sunday, I walked through Grand Army Plaza at Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The centerpiece of the plaza, pictured above, is the grand triumph arch, topped with what I feel comfortable in assuming is Nike, goddess of Victory. I feel comfortable in assuming this because nearly identical arches can be seen at the Brandenburg Gate, in Brussels, and throughout New England and Europe. Every one is a memorial to victory, a triumphal memory of war.

And that's what gives me hope: we don't build those arches anymore.

If you compare post-WWI memorials to pre-WWI memorials, you'll note that they suddenly become not memorials to Victory, they become memorials to loss. Lists of names or headstones. Nearly universally in Europe. It's a sudden, 180 degree shift of our cultural conversation about war.

Even if we were to win in Iraq--win in the most unequivocal terms; a stable democracy, no car bombs, Al Qaeda surrendering in one moment "on the deck of a battleship," as they say, etc.--even the most incredibly fantastical of victory scenarios--there will be no arch of triumph. We will simply erect a memory of those we have lost.

This is just one aspect of our cultural conversation about war. There's also Rush Limbaugh, and Band of Brothers, and the Medal of Honor games, and the coverage out of Iraq. But I find it interesting that what once was a common, "cultural" expression of memory of war has suddenly shifted. It gives me hope.

Weak-Sense and Strong-Sense Atheism

In response to a discussion as to whether Atheism is a scientific or a philosophical position, Jerry Coyne says:

I’ll call “weak sense atheism” the position that, I think, most atheists hold. It is this: “There is no convincing evidence for God, so I withhold belief.”...Now I don’t know anyone who is a strong-sense atheist. Even Dawkins, as I recall, is a “70% probability” man — he thinks it pretty improbable that God exists, but adds that he can’t disprove the existence of some kinds of gods. I’m pretty much on board with him. You’d be a fool to say that you know absolutely that there is no being up there at all, including one that doesn’t interfere in the workings of the universe.

So let’s take weak-sense atheism (WSA) as the default stance. In its very weakest, “no-evidence-for-God” sense, WSA is absolutely scientific. After all, what is science but the claim that one needs empirical evidence before accepting something as a reality? When one says, “I see no evidence for a god, and therefore refuse to accept his/her/its reality,” one is saying nothing different from, “I see no evidence for the view that plants have feelings, and therefore I don’t accept the idea that they do.”

Now, I really enjoy this sort of article because it sharpens my thinking about things. Before I read that, I would have said that atheism is a philosophical position. But the distinction between WSA and strong-sense atheism (SSA) is a very good one, and I agree with Coyne that WSA is scientific and SSA is philosophical.

I agree with Coyne to say that you know absolutely that there is no being up there at all (we're looking at you, Hitchens). But that doesn't mean that there aren't SSAs like me out there who believe firmly that there is no being up there.

If you ask me what I believe (and that's the key word in that sentence), I'll say that I believe that there is no God. And I do mean that in a stronger sense than "I have seen no evidence, so I withhold belief."

Recently, the author of Why Does E=MC2 And Why Should I Care? was on the Colbert Report, and he said of Einstein that there's a high likelihood that Einstein was somewhat wrong, somewhere among his theories. He also said that this was okay, because Science was the story of slowly exchanging one model for another, making the models better and better as we go along. This fits nicely in line with the philosopher at the center of my heart, William James. Our world-view is a collection of suppositions based on our experiences and our reasoning faculties.

Do I know absolutely that there is no God? No. Would it be scientific for me to assert so? No. But on a philosophical level, the world-view with which I take a look at the world around me not only doesn't include a God or gods, but doesn't have room for one.

For instance, Coyne invokes the possibility of a "god" who does not interfere with the workings of the universe. From my philosophical perspective, what does "exist" mean if you do not interfere with the workings of the universe? After all, in order to be detected, you have to leave some footprint on the universe (we can't measure existence directly, we only measure existence by effect -- light emitted, heat emitted, spaced occupied). If there's a diffuse "god" that cannot be seen, cannot be felt, and does not affect the world, in what way could he be said to exist?

And then, if you have a god or gods who do affect the world, then not only have I not seen evidence for that (with the brief exception the uncanny choice of music my iPod makes when I put it on shuffle), but there is no room for it in my current philosophical model of the world. If evidence came along, my hope is that I would be open to it, but it would take a severe reconfiguring of the world as I currently see it. I would be, in other words, grievously wrong about my core assumptions of the universe.

This is what makes me a SSA and not a WSA. I recognize that this is a philosophical position and I would never confuse it for science. I would never use it as an opportunity to call other people's philosophical worldviews a dangerous virus threatening to poison our children (I'm looking at you, Dawkins).

And to make my pedantic point that I try to keep making, the more we make these sorts of distinctions, the more fruitful our discussions of the issue become.

Grassroots + Power III: Debating Reform

Just a quick post here. Now that I've talked about the current problem, and the direction the debate needs to go, I'd also like to briefly talk about what the new direction of the conversation could look like. I bring this up because I happened to read an article that addresses the sort of problem I'm thinking of properly.

The article is here, it's a discussion of the House of Lords, and how to better structure the House of Lords. The opening two paragraphs:

Since it is widely believed by those outside the House of Lords itself that it should not, in its present form, continue to exist, and since the only models of reform suggested – appointment, election, or a combination of the two – are open to compelling objections, the case for total abolition is strong. But the Lords also does invaluable work, particularly as a revising chamber and in the work of its specialist committees. To bring that contribution to an end without replacing it would adversely affect, in a serious way, the quality of government in this country. Time and again, not least in recent years, we have had cause to thank providence for the House of Lords, which on occasion seems more closely attuned to the mood of the nation than the popularly elected house. If the Lords were abolished, could it be effectively replaced?

I think it could, by establishing a body which – for want of any better name – I shall call the Council of the Realm ("the Council", for short). This body would differ from the House of Lords superficially in that membership would involve no outdated pretence of nobility, and it would differ fundamentally in having no legislative power. It could not make law. It could not (save in one respect which I shall discuss shortly) obstruct the will of the Commons. There would be no persisting democratic deficit.

From there, he goes on to lay out more details about his proposed structure for the House of Lords. The content of his argument isn't really the point of why I'm bringing it up (although his logic seems rather sound). I just want to point out how he's thinking about the problem: practically.

In the United States, our government was reformed in waves and waves ever since Andrew Jackson first introduced the concept of America as a Democracy, and usually the reforms have been aimed at making things "more democratic." Some of these steps were clearly good ones--steps toward universal sufferage. However, not everything done in the name of Democracy is necessarily a good thing -- the Republican aspect of our government is equally important.

This is the sort of discussion I'd like to see more often: how power will actually be worked, case scenarios of abuse.

Building Community And Its Creativity

In my time blogging here, my one honor has been being in communication with a small group of intelligent, passionate people who are interested in developing the cultural conversation in and around communities. Whether looking at it on a national scale, or from a theater angle, for from a rural small community scale, we've gotten to stretch our legs discussing the theories of arts development in the United States.

So. A friend of mine who is in the Peace Corps in Senegal mentioned to me that she is embarking on a set of projects in a small town in Senegal (approx 20,000 residents). She chiefly wants to tackle cultural gender issues, and create an outlet for creativity that she says is stifled in the local schools. She asked me for advice.

I am drafting her an email with my own pearls of wisdom, but I wanted to ask the general community its thoughts. If you're reading this blog, you've probably spent time thinking about issues related to this one. What's the practical advice/solutions/directions you'd want to pass along?

Contributions to Createquity

Hello readers,

My apologies for having left you behind somewhat, after a productive summer. I have lately been rather drawn in to the actual practice of the arts--putting up a show, working on publishing, etc. and therefore have not had the time to write at length about the things that go behind it.

Part of this, as well, has been that my time for writing arts policy was spent very productively: I'm pleased to announce that my first contribution to the fine blog Createquity is up. It's an analysis at length of a report called Breakthroughs in Shared Measurement, a report which I think is one of the most important reports to hit the public in recent days.

Createquity is one of the few extremely high quality arts policy analysis blogs, and it was an honor when Ian Moss contacted me about contributing. He has been very supportive of this little blog here, and it was great to get to write for him.

Anyways, stop reading this post. Go and see my analysis. I promise I'll have fresh content here soon.

Interpretation and Conversation

Never Bring Your Pet To A Devil Vet! has an interesting thing to say about interpretation:

Do not label the artobject. Rather allow the artobject to inspire investigation of oneself.

The goal of interpretation should not be the attempt to reach a hidden meaning within the artobject or to approximate an elusive objective meaning either.

The goal of interpretation...of meaning... should be the facilitation of conversation between two or more individuals so that they learn more about themselves rather than the piece of art.

Very true. I had read some other minor dissents against theaterfolks (and other artfolks) refusing to talk about the meaning of their work. That is how I used to interface with the work. I cite this little block of text (it's not an exceprt--it's the whole post) as having converted me. The meaning of the work should be discussed. So what if it makes the piece feel flat and explainable? It's how the artist starts a conversation about the work.

Now, the artist can't be tyrannical--if he says this is the one meaning of the work, then there is no conversation. So that's just as bad--maybe worse--than refusing to talk about the meaning.