A while back, I wrote a missive (aimed particularly at Scott Walters) about how to win public support for government arts funding again:
Kingston's stance right now is, the NEA is useless to my district, so it is way easy for me to rag on it. After all, how many people in my district have any connection to or value of the NEA? Why not kick it around? What would I lose?
And if you look at the political math, if the NEA's money is going mostly to large metropolises, then it will be undersupported in the House. And probably the Senate too.
As if on cue, there's been a fight a-brewin' amongst the mainstream blogosphere about New York's status as a cultural capital -- are we snobs and cultural imperialists, or victims of our own success? It started here; if you want to follow the conversation, go read Andrew Sullivan's blog (you have to be already -- how are you not?). Here's the post that stuck out to me, though:
The question to me is not whether centers of power or culture or economy are good or bad, but whether there are appropriate checks and balances on their influence, and whether that influence then results in (cultural/political/economic) growth across the country or whether it simply saps the rest of the country of its resources. Is New York robbing the rest of the country of its art and culture? Probably not. Likely quite the contrary occurs. Wall Street, on the other hand, is a lot more culpable when it comes to our financial situation and the drain bad finance has placed on people on Main Street as it were – and there is certainly a problem with letting one industry, largely centered in one city, become so dominant.
I don't know if New York can be said to rob the rest of the country of its art and culture, but I do think New York can be said to be robbing the rest of the country of its cultural support. Here's a breakdown of the NEA's music grants from the stimulus bill by state:
Almost 25% went to NY and CA. 18% of the population (according to Wikipedia) gets about 31% of the arts funding, and Texas (more populous than NY and with its own strong arts tradition, especially in cities like Austin) is getting about 3% of the funding compared with being 7% of the population. (Interesting to note, by the way, that Illinois is equally out of favor, despite being home to Chicago, part of the"NYLACHI" that Scott's sworn his life to balance against.
Just to clarify: I wouldn't call my position "Pro-MTA". I'd call me position "anti-shitty-management-practices". Based on the Times story alone, 3LD made some really bad decisions, and I'm sick of us all rallying around poorly managed theaters to save them because any theatre closing is the Worst Tragedy of All Time.
Now, assuming that what Kevin Cunningham says is true-- and honestly, we need to see the lease document to know that for sure--3LD has a better case than I initially thought. ALthough I STILL think a $20+K lease is a stupid thing to sign on to.
I'm responding to the comment as a post rather than with another comment because I think Isaac touches on the deeper issue here, which is -- to what degree should we bail out small arts groups?
I myself didn't have a particularly strong impulse to rally behind 3LD for the simple fact that, well, I hadn't heard of it at the time. So they're being evicted -- I have no frame of reference to if that's a terrible blow to our arts scene.
So, in the previous post, I talked about receiving the statement from Kevin Cunningham from the League of Independent Theaters. It was part of their May Update, the first story. The second story in the May Update was about the Ohio Theater's closing, and the community forum that NYIT and League of Independent Theaters teamed up to provide.
The closing of the Ohio struck me more personally as a tragedy because I've seen work there; I've had friends work there, and particularly the Ice Factory Festival stands for me as one of the cooler things that goes on in the year (even after having been rejected from it this year...). And I also have some insight into how it came to fail that doesn't have to do with poor practices: supposedly, they have a new landlord who doesn't want to give them the generous treatment that the last landlord did, and they have had trouble putting together the new, higher rent.
That combination of personal connection and not-their-fault-edness makes me predisposed to be on the side of those who would want to save the Ohio.
What determines whether or not the community should bail out an arts organization in trouble? If my theater company were to hit the financial rocks, I have no illusion that I would pretty much just go gently into that good night, nor would I expect anyone to fight for us. But what's the profile of an organization that should be fought for? When should we rage against the dying of the light?
Is there such a thing as being culturally too important to fail -- so that even if evidence of poor management came up, the community should protect the organization (perhaps while pushing for a change in leadership), because of the value of the works that get created there?
Is there such a thing as being socially too important to fail -- where the community relies on that organization even if there is poor management? Presenting venues, for example, that present work that may not get presented if they went out of business?
Is there such a thing as being to historically important to fail -- arts organizations that we bail out to preserve our history?
Are any arts organizations too economically important to fail? (I feel like the answer to this is probably MoMA, the Met, BAM, and little else)
The two-member Tax Appeals Tribunal held that the routines performed nude or nearly nude by dancers at the Nite Moves club near Albany were largely learned from other dancers or on YouTube and the Internet, and are not the kind of carefully arranged and practiced patterns of movement normally equated with the art of dance.
"We question how much planning goes into attempting a dance seen on YouTube," the tax appeals panel concluded in Matter of 677 New Loudon Corporation D/B/A Nite Moves, 821458. "The record also shows that some of the moves on the pole are very difficult, and one had best plan how to approach turning upside down on the pole to avoid injury. However, the degree of difficulty is as relevant to a ranking in gymnastics as it is dance."
I find this fascinating, because it shows what a bunch of lawyers and bureaucrats think about the arts. A few notes:
The legal frame of reference is rather muddled in the ruling. It says that pole dancing is not art because it is not "carefully planned and practiced." That implies that they are using the idea of art as a craft (a series of technical skills) as a lens for judgment. But then they also state that "the degree of difficulty is as relevant to a ranking in gymnastics as it is dance," implying that technical difficulty is not a qualification of art.
Also, check out this basic rejection of Postmodernism:
"The appeals tribunal held, however, that "[dance expert] Dr. Hanna's view of choreographed performance is so broad as to include almost any planned movements done while playing canned music."
"To accept Dr. Hanna's stunningly sweeping interpretation of what constitutes choreographed performance, all one needs to do is move in an aesthetically pleasing way to music, using unity, variety, repetition, contrast, transition," the panel concluded."
Luckily, it seems like the ruling is not, as the article makes it seem, a unilateral assessment that all pole-dancing is not art. We are used to pole-dancing in the stripper context, but having met plenty of people who now do pole-dancing as a fun workout, I wouldn't be surprised to see pole-dancing become its own sort of art form, in the way that flair bartending is, in my opinion, a performing art.
The ruling also makes it clear that there is a legal line between an arts organization and a "place of entertainment." I shudder to think what would happen if arts organization were legally barred from being entertaining...
B.C. today is incomprehensible (as the Comics Curmudgeon can easily attest to you), but did you know that in 1962 it was both incomprehensible AND incomprehensibly political?
If you remember our old back-and-forth about quality (Guardian recap here), here's Mission Paradox on value. RTWT, obviously, but the take-away is that all those extras theater companies are looking to do beyond shows aren't just icing on the cake -- they may be what justifies your existence.
This awesome, if mind-blendering, series of graphs documenting how psychology lags behind the markets. And a Bonus Graph from the Frontal Cortex.
Ta-Nehisi Coates lays out the three sides that fought in the Civil War.
Important facts:
Israel will confiscate your iPad. Maybe they're afraid of what happens if Hamas has easy access to their PDFs from their couch?
Obama can only be beaten by a generic Republican, not by most existing Republicans. (Scott Brown is not on that list, however, and considering as my only feelings about him is "Generic Republican," could he be that name?)
The price tag on a Public show, according to Oskar Eustice, is $600,000. (h/t Matthew Freeman who wonders if it's true that most of that is wages)
The best way to make revenue from your own music appears to be a self-pressed CD. It beats iTunes, retail sold CDs, etc. by a wide berth -- only CDBaby comes close.
Here's my job experience. Paying day jobs in Southern California (one of the more affluent parts of America):
Register at a box store for a way-above-market $9.00/hour, because it was a brand new branch in a nice new neighborhood
Intern (as an Assistant Assistant Stage Manager) for a Repertory Theater, for $150/week, which I once calculated as being less than $1.50/hour on average, sometimes more or less depending on rehearsal. This is one of the only paid internships I have ever seen in the arts field that was paying.
Popcorn salesman at a movie theater chain for $8.50/hour, but only because I worked until 3 or 4AM. I also got a second degree burn off the popcorn machine, which taught me what skin looks like when it bubbles; and I realized what it must feel like to be universally hated.
Intern for a software company for $17/hour.
Now, you'll notice two things. You'll notice that, as an intern for theater, I made pittance. And yet that is considered a great internship because it was paid. You'll also notice that as an intern for a software company, I was raking in dough. And I am far, far less qualified to intern for a software company than I am at theater company, because Stage Management is something I've done a lot a lot.
I am one of Scott Walters' plutocrats, unfortunately, there's no way around it, so his point stands.
But I guess what's being left out of the discussion between Isaac and J. is that the NYTimes article was about internships in general, whereas your discussion has been about theater internships. Do you know why theater internships suck? Because working in the theater sucks. You're talking about an industry in which the successful barely make less than half their income through their jobs.
My software company job (which I currently inhabit) considers me a steal at $17.50 for the amount of work I do. They have lately planned to make me full time, which is going to be slightly more money, and include benefits. And I'll still be one of the lowest paid employees at the company, of a company of about 140 people. Think of what they'd pay if I was qualified!
That's literally the one thing that not-for-profit means: it means that if you work here, you will not personally profit. You will get to do what you want with your life. You may find it personally fulfilling despite the hardship. You may, if you get really good at it, eke out a living. Or you'll do what I do, which is get a day job in a field where even the people at the bottom rung get paid quite well -- if you can (which goes back to Scott's plutocracy argument).
Suppose the state decides its going to enforce those internship regulations. You know what's going to happen? They're going to rename "internships" as "volunteer" positions, and nothing will change for us. After all, how many of us have seen a show by ushering for free for an evening? And nobody is going to bat an eyelid at a non-profit theater company taking volunteers. Hell, many non-profit theater companies are run by volunteers! (Some of my friends run a company called Eleven Benevolent Elephants that's been around for 3 years, and one said to me, "You know how we can afford to pay our actors and writers and playwrights? Because we work for free!").
When the crackdown comes, it's going to be at NBC Universal, which can pay its interns if it wanted to. I bet if they took the head of Price Waterhouse Cooper's salary, 30% of what he makes could go to pay the interns in his building living wages. (Don't run the math on that). It's not going to be at the Roundabout, or at the Public. Maybe Broadway will have to pay their internships. But unless the industry that the internships are preparing students to enter starts paying a minimum wage, interns are not going to get their fair share.
Well, they are getting their fair share. Their fair share of a shit pie.
It isn't that I don't have sympathy for the shitty conditions they work in. I have sympathy for the shitty conditions we all work in. But wringing hands about internships is really going after a trailing indicator of the fact that the economics of theater doesn't really work. And we knew that.
(Update: Adam Thurman puts his lawyer on hat to give us a right talking to on the issue. I guess I just wish I had the strength and skill to create that "strong revenue stream" he's talking about, as though those of us who can't pay anybody are just not trying hard enough.)
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez for NPR's local affiliate 89.3 reported:
Almost half the department’s full-time positions — 33 out of 70 — will be gone through layoffs, early retirement, or unfilled vacancies, Garay said. Fifteen people who work for Cultural Affairs will lose their jobs - some in two weeks, others in July.
(...)
The layoffs, Garay said, are part of budget cuts that include transferring the administration of city-owned theaters and art centers to other organizations. Under the plan, outside groups would assume control of the Madrid Theater in Canoga Park, the Vision Theater in Leimert Park, the Warner Theater in San Pedro, and the Watts Towers Art Center. The city will issue requests for proposals.
Last month, supporters of the cultural affairs department jammed an L.A. City Council meeting to oppose a proposal that would gut the department’s $10 million budget. Council members shelved the plan.
I don't know what the impact of the city getting rid of the arts buildings, but it was gratifying to see that there are a lot of "supporters of the cultural affairs department" (don't they just mean "supporters of the arts"?) in Los Angeles.
Scott Walters, of Theater Ideas and CRADLE(arts), has decided that he isn't busy enough and has started a new blog with Tom Loughlin to generate new ideas about a Theater curriculum, named TACT (continuing a love of acronyms...). I'm excited to see what goes on over there, because I'm interested in changing the curriculum of the arts.
Anyways, my first introduction to the new blog was this post, which contained a Modest and Tactless proposal: "Tie the salaries of theatre professors to the income of their students."
Before you get all up in a hizzy (there was a brief second where I did), I think it would be good to revisit the spirit in which this proposal is offered, which probably goes back to the Kushner quotation that Scott used during his last "modest" proposal:
I can take comfort, however, from Tony Kushner who, when he proposed in his outstanding speech and essay "A Modest Proposal" (American Theatre, Jan98, Vol. 15 Issue 1) that we "abolish all undergraduate art majors," recognized that "Since[undergraduate arts education] so very lucrative, I can say let's get rid of it and we don't have to worry that anything will actually happen. So my speech is rather like theatre in this regard, and this frees us to consider the validity of my 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." I should be so lucky.
Now, Scott's proposal this time around is a lot more fully fleshed out than the lottery idea, and it seems like it would work.
There's one huge, huge problem though: Scott notes that there is no profession (since the Actor's Equity salary median of all actors is $0), so tying professors' pay to students' performance in "the profession" may get professors to compete to turn out students into a system that won't support them. Even if some college out there figures it out, their incentives would now be aligned with a system that doesn't work. So what if professors are making sure that some of their students are earning over $8,000 a year? It's not a huge improvement over the current system, since the rules he proposes still allow a large number of students to fail.
But I take Scott's point in the context of the blog, which is that if professors were aligned to their students' interests, they would fight for curriculum reform. In fact, there's the possibility in this system that theater professors would suddenly find incentive to reform the theater industry -- trying to encourage students to make living wages at theater start-ups back home rather than pouring in to the over saturated market in New York.
I would like to point out, however, that there is a certain degree to which professor's salaries are tied to their profession. Now, before I make this point, I probably should make it clear that this is based on my own university, New York University, and is probably not representative of all schools.
But at the same time, it's clear that NYU pays its theater professionals a tiny fraction of what they pay (as a for instance) Business School professors. Although our school's financials are private, and therefore we can only speculate on much of the budget, public tax returns show that the highest paid NYU employee is a fertility doctor at NYU's School of Medicine, who makes something north of $2 million a year.
Why does the fertility doctor make north of $2 million a year? Because NYU feels it has to have the best fertility doctor in the field -- and therefore, it has to pay above the prevailing wage for fertility doctors (and in this case, above the prevailing wage for a top-of-the-line fertility doctor).
Our theater school also employs working professionals as our teachers (at least in our professional training classes) and, therefore, they have to pay better than what those teachers would be making in the field. Which, in our case, is basically tuppence. Whereas a business school teacher is probably forgoing a salary of $100k or more, the top-of-the-top teachers in our theater program would probably not really be making much worth talking about if they were outside of the school.
Again, this is probably a problem endemic to schools which seek to employ working professionals to teach. There's a different model for academics, since the competition there is almost exclusively other academics, and therefore isn't so moved by the economic fates in the market. And also, the difference between this process and Scott's proposal is that whereas right now, in general teachers' pay is linked to the success of an industry as a whole, Scott's proposal makes the individual teachers responsible to the success of students in specific.
One last point I want to make: Scott's proposal really only makes sense if the success of students really is affected in a huge way by teachers in the college level. Which of course to some degree it is. But if we look at the current problems in the American Theater (of which much ink/0101s have been spilled), then we can see that unless the system incorporates the change of the industry into it, the teachers will simply fail. The way the system is set up, there's too many artists for too few jobs, because the jobs are overly concentrated. As he points out, there's an 8:1 employment ratio within AEA, and I'm sure many of that 8 are just as qualified as that 1, but there's a glut.
The walk-away is that Scott once talked about needing to move the riverbed. I agree that tying professors' salaries to the success of the students is key. But to what success? In my last post I talked about how the market is incredible because it forces valuation on the intangible, because it can't deal with anything that isn't valued. When we structure the economy (the way that Scott's gedankenexperiment does), we need to choose what we value, because that's going to be the output of the system.
In my last post, I did something I frequently finding myself doing: ragging on Orange County, California. It is not a place I particularly like, although it is my home. The arts scene is rather small. But one thing it does have is South Coast Repertory.
Now, South Coast Repertory is, as Repertory theaters go, actually a fairly good one. It has originated a few Broadway plays in its time, it does fairly good productions of quality plays, etc. But every failing you'd like to accuse Repertory companies of, you can basically accuse SCR of.
When I worked with the Stage Managers there, briefly, they all swapped car notes because they all drove 1984 Volvo Station Wagons. I am not kidding. There were four 1984 Volvo Station Wagon owners, and all of them were fretting that their Volvos would not make the next emissions test and they had no idea if they could afford the fees or afford a new car. The actors almost all commuted from Los Angeles, and one of the actors made his primary income doing English voiceovers of Anime imports.
However, whereas SCR normally either commissions plays from prominent playwrights who've found success in New York, or they're doing standards, I do have to applaud them for this:
“South Coast Repertory is pleased to host this remounting of the Chance Theater’s acclaimed production of Jesus Hates Me,” said Associate Artistic Director John Glore. “This partnership is born of an idea that began to take shape among the members of SCR’s artistic staff almost two years ago, out of a desire to make greater use of the company’s Nicholas Studio (SCR’s former Second Stage), to create stronger ties with other performing arts organizations in Orange County and to offer alternative programming that might attract new theatergoers to both organizations. In presenting this Chance Theater production, SCR has an opportunity to try out an idea which, if successful, may well lead to further collaborations of this kind in the future.”
The Chance Theater’s Artistic Director Oanh Nguyen will again direct Jesus Hates Me, which will feature the same cast that appeared in the 2009 production. Chance Dean plays Ethan, Timothy Covington is Trane, Karen Webster is Annie, Jennifer Ruckman is Lizzy, Dimas Diaz is Boone and Ben Green is Georgie.
Now, the play itself, written by Wayne Lemon, is not indigenous to Orange County. It had its premiere in Colorado (according to his website -- it took me a bit to figure out which of the "premieres" was the first one).
But this is the first time in my personal experience or memory that South Coast Repertory has promoted the work of or partnered with another local theater company -- largely because the Chance Theater (only a decade old, billing itself as "Your Off-Broadway Theater in Orange County") is the only non-SCR theater company that I know of in the Orange County area (I may be wrong, there might be one or two others).
I hope that SCR does more of this. The Chance charges lower prices, has more experimental work--it takes more chances. So I hope that when they hit gold, they get some more transfers to SCR, and that money and respect flows back to the Chance. Maybe one day local people will get interested in the arts and find outlets for self-expression, a community to join...
So, if we can throw our minds back to the distant past, to a raging conversation about Diversity that blew across the like a hot wind, and specifically to Scott Walters' posts on the lottery (I and II) and the conversation it sparked, I'd like to continue mythoughts on quality that Scott and August Schulenberg helped sharpen for me, and expand a little further. The point I made about quality back there that I want to bring back to mind before I continue is when I said:
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.
The other day, a close friend of mine mentioned that he was starting to feel that, philosophically, he was a nihilist. I was concerned, because the idea that there is some sort of meaning in the world is very important to me. I asked him what he meant when he said nihilist (because obviously the term is one thing and the actual meaning of the term is another).
He said to me this: in the end, we all die, so what does it matter?
I told him my personal answer to that question, which is that although in an absolute sense, nothing we do matter, because on the scale of the absolute, everything we do turns to dust. (Those of you to whom there is another version of eternity -- whether it be the persistence of energy in the universe or a seat by the hand of God or a transcendent state of nirvana -- have already parted ways with me, assumption-wise. I beg you to indulge two atheists debate the theology of their atheism, if you will).
This is where my point above comes into play. Even though our lives might mean nothing in the absolute, it might still mean something in the relative.
Suppose I am at a moral cross-roads -- whether or not, for instance, to save a drowning child. In the absolute sense, this decision is meaningless. The child dies, now or later, happy or sad, whether or not I intervene.
But at the scale in which we live our lives, this moral choice has meaning. We live our lives on the minute-to-minute scale, and therefore the idea of a child dying now or dying after having lived many years of life is a huge change in both my life and the life of the child.
To some, it seems as though these two statements are a contradiction, or that one gets to the heart of the matter more than the other. To some, the meaninglessness of the absolute wins--all our attempts at meaning are just the pretensions of molecules. To others, the meaningfulness of the everyday wins, and they project that meaningfulness into the absolute -- creating an absolute whose sense of values are exactly the same as ours.
(This is my personal belief as to why advances in astronomy are treated sometimes warily by religion; man was made in God's image, because God is a concept that only makes sense in a human scale. What does the book of Leviticus have to say about Quantum Mechanics or Black Holes?)
At any rate, I happen to believe that it's okay for things to be desperately important to us and unimportant "in the grand scheme of things," for the same reason I think it's fine for theater to be so deeply important to me when, really, we know that we'll only touch so many people in our lives and who is to say how much it will actually impact our culture.
My ideas on this subject were largely shaped by Richard Dawkins. Not only his book The Selfish Gene, but more importantly, this TED Talk:
Middle-World. The scale in which we live our lives. Everything we do is based on those assumptions. And we have the capacity to understand the other scales, increasingly, but there will be limits. That's fine. At the end of the day, we live our lives here in Middle World.
And within middle-world, there's also differences in context, differences in understanding. I'm not saying we need to accept the limitations of our own little contexts, but at the same time, it's fine to have our own yardsticks and contexts. The degree to which people can share that context is the degree to which people can agree on common standards, can form a common culture. And our ability to bridge contexts and translate across contexts is one of our greatest strengths, and one of our highest goals.
When we talk about quality needing to be right from the perspective of the audience, what we mean is, it needs to at least on some level match the assumptions or understandings of that audience. We want to push boundaries, but we don't have to push all of the boundaries--in fact, if we make our desire to "provoke" or "surprise" too central, we'll lose that common context we share with our audience.
I once worked with a director who shared a very different perspective with me on this. We had a big argument, us the cast and him the director, on how we should relate to our audience. One of the cast-members said, "If we make this choice, it's going to hit the audience in the face with a shovel." To which the director responded, "YES! Exactly!"
This is what is wrong with trying to tear apart all of the structures and understandings a person has -- it just simply doesn't work. You can't communicate with them. In William James' Pragmatism, he discusses how people learn. He says that we slowly accumulate theories, assumptions, understandings, and facts, and cobble them together into a web of ideas. When a new theory or fact comes along that doesn't mesh with what we have, we make the smallest adjustment possible to make all of the facts and theories mesh together again. As an artist, you can massage along their understanding, but if you try to shake apart their web of ideas too hard, the easiest thing for them to do will simply be to dismiss you.
This, I think, is what commenter Kiley meant by saying:
... consumers tend to measure new products, services and ideas against that which they are most familiar with, rather than being open to experimenting with something new or unknown. This is despite how potentially beneficially those ideas or experiences might be to them personally or to their collective community. Under this premise, I believe that some / many consumers initially reject most art, consciously or not, particularly that which is not of the immediately pleasing or pacifying nature. Arts ability to prod, provoke, and challenge thus suffers in my mind when it is not wholly support by means external to the marketplace.
I don't know if I agree with the "wholly" part of that sentiment, but the core of it is what I agree with. When faced with an idea that is outside of their own personal "middle-world" (remember that we are all, literally, at the center of our own experiences), they will be hesitant and need some coaxing to come along. You can entice them outside of their comfort zone, but you can't beat them.
In America, this is made more difficult not only because of the market forces, as Kiley rightly mentioned, but also because of the competitive landscape. Consumers can choose what they entertain themselves -- and even if they decide to choose something intellectually stimulating, they can choose to be intellectually stimulated by people who agree with them.
That's part of quality, or of value, or of resonance -- finding that delicate spot where you entice people to some place they didn't think they wanted to go, showing them the other worlds while still resonating in the one they have to live in. Boy that is difficult.
