Unicorn Chaser

Grassroots + Power V: Power and Ticket Prices

One of those delightful rows that overtakes the internet every once in a while is upon us -- one of the ones that provokes very long and intelligent posts between people who all have valid points.

Basically, the conversation is about ticket prices: are dynamic pricing schemes fair, do ticket price caps kill the theater or the artists who work in it, is there a better way to price tickets?

I'll snip from 2AMt's recap/index:

[Y]ou might check out a series of posts I did in response to that conversation about different pricing strategies on this site.

You’d probably then want to check out a post on Parabasis calling Arena Stage to task for their use of dynamic pricing on a recent show that ended up spiking prices up above $100/ticket. That sparked a fresh #2amtTwitter conversation and this post from Gwydion Suilebahn about discussing prices in a civilized way. Which led to a lengthy (and highly readable) comment stream, which led to another post from Gwydion and then to a fresh post by Isaac Butler at Parabasis responding in kind.

Reading through it, I really don't have anything to add about pricing -- I suspect, in order to sort out whether Gwydion or Isaac or Trisha are right. I suspect it would take some actual economics research to untangle the effects of ticket prices on audience participation, audience satisfaction, etc. and I suspect I have little to add to it.

But there is one part of Gwydion's argument that I do feel like I need to mention:

The criticism of too much government funding of theater, for example, is that we’d end up having, well, government-approved theater: nothing that threatens the state, nothing very adventurous, etc. After all, they’d have some sense of ownership, wouldn’t they? The same might be said of corporate donations. Personally, the thought of big businesses “owning” theater frightens me even worse. I have a similar concern about individual donations; I don’t want America’s owning class “owning” the stories we tell, either. (If donations were always – or even very often – small and from large numbers of diverse donors, I’d have less concern).

The thing about this paragraph is that it starts with, basically, a classic slippery-slope argument. If the government starts by putting in a money, eventually we'll only have art that is compatible with the state.

A while back, I commented on Obama's arts policy by saying that they looked like they were looking for innovative ways to help the arts, but didn't want to go on a limb to actually create new programs or increase funding. In the comments section, I got swamped by anonymous comments from right-wing trolls who basically told me to reread 1984 because working with the government on the 9/11 day of service was equivalent to either A) bad prostitution or B) fascism.

I decided to try and take a more specific look at the relationship between arts and power. I laid out a number of scenarios of what sort of involvements with the arts the government could have:

• Government A buys art organizations and appoints NEA officers to run them.
• Government B gives the NEA powers to license performances: unlicensed performances are made illegal.
• Government C passes rules saying that the NEA can only fund Pro-America productions. The NEA evaluates grants based on their content.
• Government D creates a web listing of currently existing arts-charity programs, to help donors find them.

Let's do the same here. Suppose we have a hypothetical government which looks exactly like the United Nations, but whose NEA has the capacities to award $25 billion nationwide. I pulled that number out of my arse, but let's assume that it's enough to largely support a handful of mid-to-large sized arts organizations in every city in America as well as investing into rural and small-town arts in a scheme that bizarro-world Scott Walters is administrating.

Now, let's say I'm a performance artist who wants to create a statement about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I create an absolutely damning piece of work condemning the President, and I try to take it to bizarro-world Lincoln Center. But bizarro-world Lincoln Center gets too much money from the government, and doesn't want the wroth of an angry NEA chair! So they pass. As does bizarro-world BAM, and bizarro-world Taper Forum, and bizarro-world Seattle Opera.

What's probably going to happen? In the scenario Gwydion outlines above, we're just not going to have this daring and incisive piece of performance. But I don't think that's the real world.

In the real world, I would probably find other people who similarly can't get NEA-funded projects, and we'd get together in a warehouse somewhere and we'd form our own little enclave. And we'd fight and scrabble every bit like we do today, without NEA funding, and put ourselves out there. It should be every bit as possible for us to succeed in that endeavor in bizarro-world as it is here.

Remember in the health care debate? When people were told that we couldn't have a Public Option because it would drive all the competition out of business? And liberals pointed out that the Post Office has never driven UPS or Fed EX out of business? I doubt government-supported theater would be any different.

Now, if bizarro-world US Government decided to actively censor works, that would be different. If bizarro-world US Government restricted access to performance space, that would be different too. But the idea that increasing funding necessarily leads to a less-healthy arts atmosphere is not, on the face of it, true. The BBC is still capable of criticizing the British government; the BBC is internationally respected as being an independent arbiter of news information. It's more independent than privately-owned FOX News!

The point I'm trying to get at is that we should never, ever let someone say "If x relationship is established with government, then eventually government will control x" without demonstrating how it would achieve that. Government donations do not, in any way, force competition out of the market. It's connected to a widespread intellectual illness here that Government has a Midas touch, and everything it grazes turns to its bitch.

Remember the NEA Four? And how their government money got taken from them? Oddly enough, Karen Finley is still making work!

Still, go and read all those articles. There's a lot of fantastic thinking going on. I'd just hate to see it sullied by shorthand like that.

In Vitro Fertilization

The father of in vitro fertilization has won a Nobel prize.

How strange must it be to be a person who has tangibly led to the creation of particular individuals.

I mean, one of my very, very close friends exists because of in vitro fertilization. Imagine if she happened to run into him, and knew who he was. What a surreal experience. "You couldn't have existed without me."

Radio Ad: "Hypocrisy"

I'm not a huge fan of attack ads, but as they go, I think this is as close as you could get to shining a light on something related to the actual issues while going for your opponent. This isn't "She has a black baby" (which, as John McCain rightly said should earn those people "a special place in hell"), it's "her positions on the issues are disingenuous.

Legal Commentary: Williamsburg Yeti

So, the Williamsburg Yeti is basically a local group that, among whatever else it is they do (I don't pretend I fully follow) try to get theater to W-berg residents at affordable prices.

They've also just kicked off a project called "The Great Broadway Swindle" to try and alert people to the dishonesty in the Broadway pricing system. I'm not sure if I think it's a swindle -- the idea being that people in the know go to the TKTS booth and get tickets at half of what rich theater tourists come to town to pay. It's rather like airlines -- people pay the price they are smart enough to pay. One day, no two people will be paying the same price (I think Ken Davenport was in favor of that, but I can't find a post).

Anyways, the point is that they previously had a photo of the TKTS booth as their group photo (in the sense of "This is what we're protesting," and TKTS contacted them that they were inviolation of copyright and they should take it down.

One of my favorite uses of copyright: sticking it to people you don't like.

Legal Commentary: Facebook in the Court

New York has a good article about the New York State Bar Association doing research on what is and isn't ethical for lawyers to do some research on Facebook for a case.

It seems, actually, like most of the rules that work in the brick-and-mortar world can be fairly easily ported to Facebook -- if it's public, it's public, don't engage in relationships (i.e. friend) with an adversary or their lawyer, don't use false pretenses to gather information.

Three State Solution V: Contiguity

I laid out my case for the need of a three-state solution (at least in the medium term) a while back. Yesterday I spotted this interview with Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren (who I strongly dislike, but who somehow comes off looking rational next to Avigdor Lieberman):

Q: Do you want that for the West Bank or for Gaza as well?

A: We are proceeding under the assumption that some day Gaza will be part of this deal. Right now, it’s not part of this deal because it’s under Hamas. So when President Obama talks about a contiguous Palestinian state, that has two meanings. One, it means there being no settlement blocks dividing the Palestinian state, but also that there be some kind of connection between West Bank and Gaza.

It seems to me that all three parties are subtly trending towards the three state solution, whether they want to be or not, because they're punting on exactly the sort of issues that would need to be conquered to have a Two State solution.

My original case for a three state was based around the first part of Oren's comment -- the fact that Hamas is not a good-faith player for peace, and good-faith players should not have to be held up by bad-faith players.

But the second part of the statement is also a highly insurmountable one. Discontinuity. There are very few nations anywhere that manage to be cleaved in two, let alone a nation that is cleaved in two by a historic enemy. Even if Israel creates some sort of a corridor, Israel is a police state. We all know that if a single rocket or bomb made Israel skittish, there goes that corridor. And, by the way, I'm not necessarily condemning them for that -- it's just a terrible security and foreign relations problem.

Having two discontinuous parts of a country in this region doesn't remind me of Alaska and Canada, it reminds me of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh -- or as it was once known, East Pakistan. They also tried to have discontinuous governance, but the people grew apart too much and for whatever reasons -- including Indian interference -- they're now separate nations.

Even supposing one day we had a Gaza not administered by Hamas, or a Gaza administered by a Hamas who looks as innocuous as the Fatah does today, the issue of contiguousness is going to rear its ugly head. And I don't know if there's ever going to be a satisfactory solution to it.