Rocco at the NEA: The new arts czar shakes things up
What happens when you invite a rough-and-tumble whiskey guy to the vicar’s garden tea party? We’re about to find out. Last week President Obama nominated Rocco Landesman to be the next chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and suddenly crumpets beneath the arbor seem a little tame.
Landesman, who owns and runs Jujamcyn Theaters on Broadway, is no not-for-profit guy. He takes chances and he makes money (and sometimes he loses it). He likes baseball, country music and horse racing, and he’s never been much for touchy-feely collaboration: He likes to run the show.
This is a guy, it seems, who’d as soon smash the not-for-profit cup as paint it with pretty posies.
So why are so many arts types beaming at the possibilities? “Rocco is no diplomat, but he’d blow the dust off a moribund organization that has contented itself in recent years with a policy equivalent of art appreciation,” Portland theater guy Mead Hunter writes approvingly on Bloghorrea. Christopher Knight at the L.A. Times’ Culture Monster says the whole thing startled him because he’d almost forgotten there was an NEA.
And a friend in New York arts circles is ecstatic, even if Landesman turns out to be a short-termer. “A lot of the time the guy who kicks a hole in the wall is not the same guy who goes through the wall,” she says. Of course, she adds, kicking a hole is no guarantee. The next person can either walk to the other side, or patch the wall and return to life as usual.
Certainly Landesman’s record as a theater leader — and increasingly, as an industry spokesman — is strong. Jujamcyn has five shows on Broadway right now, including “Hair,” “33 Variations” and “Desire Under the Elms,” and Landesman’s had a hand in shows as important as “Angels in America,” “Spring Awakening,” “The Producers,” “Grey Gardens,” the great August Wilson’s Broadway productions, the revivals of “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd,” “Big River” and “Doubt.”
He raised both hackles and hopes when he accused the not-for-profit theater world of acting too much like the commercial theater. It was an elephant-in-the-living-room comment, and not calculated to keep things warm and fuzzy. Is it true? In what ways? What’s the difference between for-profit and not-for-profit in the cultural world? I have my views. It’d be fascinating to hear yours. Hit that comment button and let’s start a conversation.
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The National Endowment for the Arts is a federal bureaucracy, and that makes its chairmanship an intensely political position. What began in a burst of optimism in 1965 as a part of the Great Society — Lyndon Johnson’s push to expand the economic and cultural advantages of the urban East to all corners of the country — devolved by the 1980s into an unwilling infantry skirmish in the nation’s cynical “culture wars.” The NEA, a truly democratic bureaucracy, was targeted by right-wing radical warriors as a breeding ground of unAmericanism, and its survival was thrown in doubt, although enemies such as Sen. Jesse Helms and polemicist Pat Buchanan needed it as a whipping boy.
Oregon lawyer John Frohnmayer, appointed NEA boss by the first President Bush, quickly learned it was all about politics. Pressured from the right and challenged from the left, he tried to parse the difference and ended up pleasing no one, especially after fumbling the divisive “NEA Four” case in 1990. The upshot: The NEA was weakened further, Frohnmayer lost his job, and he was born again as a First Amendment crusader. Free speech, he learned, doesn’t come free.
In the new storyline Dana Gioia, George W. Bush’s NEA chief, is the nice boring guy who threw the tea party that Landesman’s about to smash up. And there’s no doubt, the NEA has been far more timid than most people in the arts world would like it to be.
But different times call for different politics, and Gioia was stuck with the time he got. The man was no dummy. Yes, he was a soothe-the-ruffled-feathers guy. Yes, he emphasized things like folk arts and tended to bestow honors on the obvious sort of people who get hauled out to perform on public television pledge week. Yes, he oversold the tried-and-true and ducked the controversial.
But he also saved the endowment’s skin. After years of shrinking budgets and Congressional threats to kill the agency off, he steered the NEA away from the culture wars and succeeded in getting some modest boosts in its budget. He emphasized spreading the money around to small-population states and rural areas as well as the country’s cultural capitals, and he finally succeeded in persuading most of Congress that the arts are a good thing, even if he had to slap a smiley face on the product to push the sale through.
One thing sticks in my memory. Oregon was going through yet another of its periodic budget crises a few years ago and the state Legislature, looking for ways to cut costs, was floating the idea of killing the already slimly financed Oregon Arts Commission, which among other things funnels money from the NEA to recipients in the state.
I called Gioia and asked him what he thought of it. Well, gee, he replied, the problem is, we have this federal money to give out, and if there’s no state agency to give it to, we can’t legally give any of it to anyone in Oregon. Oregon’s share would have to go to other states. And that would be too bad. But of course, legally, our hands would be tied.
Nice, quick, apologetic, to the point — and very effective. That’s politics.
If Landesman shakes things up, it’ll be because the time has come to do some shaking. That’s politics, too.
May 22nd, 2009 at 3:44 pm
That’s a good summary of the history of NEA administrators Bob, except you left out Jane Alexander, who got left holding the baby AND the bath water post John Frohnmayer. My hope is that Landesman can get some funding restored and therefore NEA site visits restored, so that those who serve on the panels that dole out the pennies every summer can have some eyewitness reports of actual performances,rather than relying on videos to make their judgements. I’m speaking only about dance here, but the regional companies such as the Eugene Ballet, Nashville Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre who apply for NEA grants generally speaking can’t afford to have decent videography done. I was a site visitor off and on for about ten years, went all over the country, and what I saw, from the hideous to the gorgeous, I think has made me a better critic–that’s the ripple effect of such a program.
I’m in total agreement with the for profit, not for profit argument incidentally.
May 22nd, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Excellent point about site visits, Martha. It’s one of those losses that seem small but really mean quite a bit. Deciding on grants without them is a lot like curating an art biennial from slides. It’s possible, and it’s done all the time, but you make a lot of mistakes because you’re not seeing the real thing. Performance videos are tricky: I’ve seen any number that look awful, even though I know the groups are very good when you see them live.
Can you talk a little more specifically about the meaning of the commercial/not-for-profit split? I’d love to get a conversation rolling on that topic!
May 24th, 2009 at 3:48 am
Excellent analysis. Landesman has a clear idea about non-profit versus profit. I hope he also has an appreciation of arts outside of the major metropolitan areas. Gioia was sort of boring, but he recognized that the NEA funding had become centralized and committed to distributing it more broadly and equitably. And folk arts are important, and deserved (and continue to deserve) strong support.
May 25th, 2009 at 12:07 am
I met Gioia and heard him give his pitch during a fellowship in NYC, and I can see why he was maybe uniquely able to protect the NEA. He was a Republican, a former corporate executive, comfortable in a suit, a poet, and a critic, so he could speak to multiple constituencies, and do so with smoothness and even slickness. His knowledge and love of American art seemed deep and sincere. Of course I lament the loss of the NEA’s role in supporting creative, original art, but I doubt whether anyone could have salvaged much of that, given the politics of the day. Gioia helped turn some big Republicans into major arts supporters, and cleverly extended the masterpiece-style program broadly to places that needed more exposure to great art, including military bases and rural communities, and that can’t be a bad thing. Given the political limits imposed from above, Gioia probably accomplished as much as anyone could have.
May 25th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Okay, here goes: I heard Gioia address the Dance Critics Assn shortly after his appointment and as I recall he didn’t even MENTION dance in his speech. Some of us found that both obtuse and offensive, even if he was trying to stay away from the controversies caused by Karen Finley smearing her body with chocolate (waste of good chocolate if you ask me, though I don’t know what kind she used) and more seriously the late Bella Lewitzky declining her grant because of the pledge applicants were asked to sign not to create work that would offend anyone.
That leads me right into non-profit vs for profit theater or anything else. Non profit arts organizations presumably are better able to take risks, present young artists, or god forbid older artists who might not be a household name but keep on exploring their field. In Portland my friend (very good friend and so this is a disclaimer of sorts) Gregg Bielemeier is a perfect example of that. White Bird, which is a non profit organization, did have the guts to present him on a split evening with Eric Skinner and Daniel Kirk last season, for which they are to be commended, and they will present Minh Tran and Tere Mathern in a split evening in the upcoming season. However, they present an awful lot of audience friendly, “accessible” dance in the main season, in part to support the risky stuff of course and I wish the balance were a little more even.
I think in the broader sense American culture has become highly commercial (for profit might be another term for that) and artists of every stripe are going to suffer. Success is measured in dollars, not aesthetic achievement. It’s not new of course–my favorite aunt commented to me several years ago that my father’s painting and sculpture wasn’t really much good–after all, it hadn’t sold very well.
So I’m glad Landesman is yapping about this and I hope he’ll be able to direct some bucks to the worthy. And ohmigod, you don’t suppose he’ll try to revive grants to individual artists, do you?
May 25th, 2009 at 9:36 am
Forgot to mention that you can read a little about him in this week’s New Yorker in a different context: he’s supporting a 19-year-old candidate for the NY City Council.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:15 am
Thanks, Martha and Brett — good context. And welcome, Scott, to the conversation: I think you’re absolutely right about the importance of folk arts and about the role of the NEA, as a federally funded organization, in spreading its benefits throughout the country. Gioia believed in that strongly, and it would be a step backwards to refocus the endowment’s impact primarily on the major cities.
By way of introduction, Scott Walters teaches theater at the University of North Carolina in Ashville and has a good blog, theaterideas.blogspot.com, that’s worth checking out.
On it he offers this quote from Rocco Landsman: “I realized when we were doing Caroline or Change on Broadway as a commercial production and a non-profit was doing Barefoot in the Park that something was deeply wrong.”
That’s a fascinating topic, and it gets to the crux of the conversation about the difference between the commercial and not-for-profit worlds. In addition to artistic depth, might geography be part of this conversation, too? On the face of it, the thought of a nonprofit theater company in New York doing “Barefoot in the Park” seems ludicrous. But would it also be ludicrous in, say, Rock Springs, Wyoming, where the legitimate goal of a non-profit company might be simply to make the production of any sort of theater economically feasible? Even here in Portland, Profile Theatre, a non-profit whose mission is to present a season of plays by a single playwright, this year’s season was dedicated to Neil Simon. Was that wrong for a nonprofit? Or did it, as it seemed to me, present Simon in a carefully curated light, bringing into focus his strengths and weaknesses in an intriguing analytical way? I don’t have the answers to the commercial/non-profit split, but I think the question might be a little more complex than it seems on the surface.
May 25th, 2009 at 11:17 am
I’m sorry, I mistyped the link to Scott Walters’ Theatre Ideas blog (switched the “er” and the “re”). Here’s the true link:
http://theatreideas.blogspot.com/
May 25th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Seems to me it is inherently commercially risky to present an entire season of any playwright’s work, including Shakespeare’s–after all the Oregon Shakespeare Festival does many more plays than the Bard’s, even, some years, in the outdoor theater. I just had a conversation somewhat to this point with Bart Cook who is staging Jerome Robbins’ The Cage (NOT a light-hearted ballet) on OBT, asking him if he thought choreographers today are creating what they want to see on the stage or what they think the public wants to see? He thinks the latter–ballet companies are non-profits folks, but selling tickets is de rigeur and it’s definitely affecting what choreographers create.
May 26th, 2009 at 4:20 am
Bob — Thanks for the shout out. This conversation is quite interesting. I would agree Martha Ullman West that Gioia seemed to be much more focused on literary-based arts and music (classical and jazz), but not so much dance or visual arts. I suspect each chair has his blind spots, which is why it helps to change chairs.
Yes, absolutely geography should be part of the discussion. I actually think a NYC production on Neil Simon makes MORE sense than one in WY. Why? Because Simon WRITES about NYC, not WY. My hero is Robert Gard, the late head of the Wisconsin Idea Theatre (author of “Grassroots Theatre”), who set out to find and encourage Wisconsin natives to write plays, and to write from their own experience. The same thing happened in NC with Frederick Koch and Paul Green. We have come to view plays as being non-specific and universal, and so a Neil Simon play in WY seems like a sensible business choice — the plays will be “popular.” But will they say anything to a WY audience about their lives? To some extent — human being share common experiences and feelings. But I also think there is great value to seeing represented on a stage the life circumstances and characters one might encounter in your own life. That has always been the argument for seeking more female playwrights, more Afreican-American playwrights, etc.: the importance of having your experience reflected. However, we have come to accept the idea that the American experience is monolithic, when in fact it isn’t. It is shaped by geography and community.
Theatre is not a mass media — it is local. What is good for NYC may or may not be good for TN or NM. I think theatres should be a part of their communities.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Scott, that last paragraph sounds like a manifesto, and a pretty good one. Yes, theater is, or should be, local, and far too many localities cede the definition of “good theater” to the tastemakers in London and New York. There IS a shortage of strictly local plays and playwrights (and there are good writers with regional bases whose work usually just doesn’t fit in New York: In the old days, the Humana new plays festival in Louisville was stacked with them).
In fact, some of our best contemporary national theater (I’m thinking of “Angels in America,” “The Laramie Project,” August Wilson’s great cycle of plays) is regional, and surely Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill were regionalists, too. In the 1970s and ’80s especially, Oregon’s Charles Deemer — http://www.geocities.com/cdeemer/ — carried the banner for an exciting Northwestern brand of theater. Is it fair to say that the Broadway musical in its heydey was a form of regional theater, its region being Tin Pan Alley and the streets of New York?
All of those writers are regionalists who wrote with such talent and insight that their works became universal (maybe Moises Kaufman and “The Laramie Project” is an exception; he was an outsider who came to Wyoming with his company and did some hard reporting, the way that people like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange did to the countryside during the Depression).
But why are there not more stage stories about specific communities, whether they be geographically defined or culturally — the plays about African Americans and Asian Americans and religious believers and women and gay communities, as Scott suggests? One reason might be that such works need strong communities of audiences to support them — and since in most cases there isn’t a strong critical mass of plays to support, the support isn’t there. So it becomes a chicken-and-egg thing.
Yes, theater should be local — and sometimes that means that even the classics should come with local flavor. So, no plummy British tones for Shakespeare in Ohio: Shakespeare is American, too.
In addition to being local, one of theater’s roles is to expand the idea of what is local, to stretch our understandings to people and places and times that are not on the surface our own. I’ve been rereading Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” the past couple of days, mostly because I’ve just seen a production that seemed off the mark to me, and I’m freshly astounded by the ways in which these strange people from a very different culture and time seem real and important to me. Part of it — only part of it — is the way they see their own regionalism as a curse and a trap that keep them from fulfilling themselves in the fantasy version of Moscow that they’ve spun in their minds. And I revel not just in the similarities of those Russians to me and my circumstances, but also in the differences, because to understand a little about those differences is to understand a little more about one’s own place in the world. When theater or any other art can do that, whether it’s in Chicago or L.A. or Tallahassee or a grange hall in Nebraska, the NEA should sit up and take notice.
May 26th, 2009 at 8:51 am
You know, back in the days when I was a site visitor for the NEA, one of the questions on the form one had to fill out and send back dealt with responsiveness to the community in which the work was performed. And I was sent to Bozeman, Montana, Eugene, Oregon, Boulder, Colo., Minneapolis, Ft. Worth, Denver, NYC because I happened to be there anyway. There is however a danger in adjudicating on those terms, because the grant applicants know that question is on the form. And so it came to pass that I was sent to assess a dance company in Eugene that shall remain nameless that performed a piece about so help me Paul Bunyan logging and the spotted owl. This could be construed as contracting the idea of what is local, Bob.
Could we get a discussion going about the value of returning to grants for individual artists, please?
May 26th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
I’m unclear what is so appalling about a dance about Paul Bunyan logging and the spotted owl. Is it any sillier than, say, a dance about toys coming to life? Is there something particularly universal about abstraction? About life in the northeast?
I would not advocate an entire diet of plays about a specific place — as you say, Bob, one needs diversity to add variety — but there needs to be some - no, more than some. But as you also note, there needs to be a community, and the fact is that artists tend to keep their distance from community, and that is extremely troubling. Partly, they keep their distance by never settling in one place and committing to it; partly they maintain their distance by huddling together in a form of aesthetic gated community. If you work to become part of a community, listen to what others have to say, learn to communicate in a way that is not so damn sure you know the right answer and they don’t, and don’t expect people to become experts on your art form in order to understand but make an effort to actually communicate, then I think you can strengthen a community and create an audience.
May 27th, 2009 at 11:33 am
Hmm. The idea of artists living in a gated community is interesting and provocative, and probably a little too true for comfort. Yes: How can you reflect your culture if you don’t feel you’re really part of it, or that you’re superior to it? Anybody else want to chime in on Scott’s thesis?
Martha, as for reinstating individual NEA grants — I’m not sure where I stand. Yes, I’d love to see deserving individual artists have their work supported, and someone like Gregg Bielemeier is a perfect example of the sort of artist whose work should be encouraged financially but who is unlikely to get much money funneled his way through an organization. From a practical standpoint, how should the NEA determine which individual artists it should support? And from a political standpoint, would reinstating individual grants just give fuel to the ideologues who started the culture wars in the first place?
Other voices, please: Let’s see where we can take these topics!
May 27th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
There’s a lot to think about here, folks. So, a couple thoughts.
One is that a lot of identity-oriented art that raised hackles in the Eighties–racial identity, gay identity, feminine idenity, religious identity–though still potent, provocative, and worth talking about, are much more a part of the mainstream political and artistic discussion today. Jesse Helms got all bent out of shape because Robert Mapplethorpe took explicitly gay photographs; now “Brokeback Mountain” wins Oscars and Iowa legalizes gay marriage. We live in a different landscape, even if bigotry persists.
Which opens a question about form, and that’s where I think someone like Landesman sounds exciting. Simply, there’s good art out there that deserves presentation/production money to be seen and discussed (because the ideas it puts forth, whether through content or execution, are worthwhile) but which may not be commercially viable. Being in theatre, I naturally think along those lines, but I think Landesman is absolutely correct that as money has been cut for non-profits, they’ve been forced to do more and more “audience friendly” material to pay the rent and are less able to serve as the arts R&D sector. It would be wonderful if individual artists could get grants again to foster new work from the grassroots, but, if that’s too politically explosive, it would at least be great to have an NEA chair who recognizes that a Portland Center Stage or Artists Rep should have the financial freedom to produce locally or regionally representative world premieres, and those works should be able to take thematic or structural chances that would be too risky under the current model.
Fund art that dares to fail. That’s where the interesting stuff comes from.
May 27th, 2009 at 2:12 pm
Arlene Goldbard wrote a really interesting post on the NEA and Rocco…
http://arlenegoldbard.com/2009/05/16/the-right-symbolism/
her main gist is an attempt to untangle the NEA’s mission, its significance and its actual work over the past several decades in relation to the public dialogue that surrounds it, and the personality and skills of it’s appointed leader during any given period…
I am excited to have someone with energy and fearlessness at the NEA- I am heartened by his comments about the role of Not for Profit Theater, and how it needs to not simply become commercial theater to survive.
But, Arlene’s points about his narrow sense of the larger role the arts play in American life, and about the notion of privilege that seems to pervade his personal relationship to the marketplace and what money can and should be able to buy…they give me pause. They contrast sharply with what i want a Chair of the NEA to have as core values.
On Friday, Holly Hughes, one of the ‘NEA Four’ in the 80’s, is speaking to a class of mine. I recently read her furious brief in response to the Supreme Court’s changing the ruling on her civil suit at the urging of Bill Clinton’s administration. I look forward to hearing her thoughts on Rocco, and on whether the NEA even plays a crucial role in the national arts and culture world these days…
May 27th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
What comes first, the chicken or the egg? The reason I was able to write plays about Oregon in the 70s and 80s is because I had the enthusiastic support of three directors, in chronological order, Steve Smith, Gary O’Brien and Peter Fornara. Because I was able to get work produced, I had things to show to get grant support. If I didn’t have this support, nothing would have gotten produced and I’d not have rec’d any grants.
When my support system in Portland retired, left town, and died, so did my “career” getting plays about Oregon produced here. For a while I continued to write plays that got done elsewhere but eventually I got tired of the hassle and turned to more self-sufficient, less collaborative, forms of writing. I still write plays but am permitting no productions of them until after my death, which is a personal way to deal with what may be my social frustration with local theater since my support system vanished. At the same time, I consider myself very fortunate indeed to have had the support I got from Smith, O’Brien and Fornara — and I should add the support of critics like Bob Hicks here, who welcomed and fairly evaluated new work.
But I guess I’m supposed to be talking about the NEA here.
I think the NEA (and other granting entities) should place greater emphasis on funding individuals and less on funding institutions: playwrights over theater companies, artists over galleries.
May 27th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Good stuff! We seem to rolling with manifestos, and I’m liking ‘em. Thanks, Steve Patterson, for this one:
“Fund art that dares to fail. That’s where the interesting stuff comes from.”
And Charles Deemer for this one:”Playwrights over theater companies, artists over galleries.”
And, Michael Rohd, thanks for passing along Arlene Goldbard’s column. It’s very much worth reading, especially for the way she details the differences in mindset between the commercial and not-for-profit worlds. (She also took the time to figure out the NEA budget over the years as adjusted for inflation, and it’s illuminating.)
Charles’ point about the importance of a few key individuals who will take a chance on you is potent: It doesn’t take an NEA for a theater artistic director to commission a play about life in a specific community (although money helps), it mainly takes the nerve and adventurousness and faith to just do it.
So: How to keep the good that Gioia achieved — regionalizing, democratizing, paying attention to folk traditions, keeping the zealots off the NEA’s back — and also reenergize the endowment and get it focused on those tough areas where artists have the right to fail?
May 27th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
There’s a quotation from J. D. Salinger that I have at the bottom of my blog: “An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.”
In this context, “success” or “failure” has no social measure. It’s an individual measure. The honest artist knows when s/he succeeds and/or fails. So funding should have nothing to do with success or failure.
It’s a leap of faith. You give the artist room because you trust that this is the best way to create art that may interest others than the artist. The best example of this in my own career was in the New Rose production of THE COMEDIAN IN SPITE OF HIMSELF, my play about Moliere. This play was commissioned. (I spent half my commission time writing CHRISTMAS AT THE JUNIPER TAVERN instead, initially to the horror of the company.) The 3-act play that resulted was liked by Gary O’Brien but not by me, so we struck a deal. We’d open on time but I’d continue to rewrite. I did this through the entire run: in other words, six different versions of the play ran on six successive weeks, and the last version was 40 minutes shorter than the first version. I still didn’t like it. I stuck it on a shelf for a decade, returned to it and rewrote it as a two-act play, SAD LAUGHTER, which I like very much. I’m sure Gary would prefer the original.
The point is, Gary O’Brien gave me the freedom to continue trying to get the play right *by my own lights*. He didn’t share my concerns but he respected them. He gave me rope. He knew what his role was and my role was in this special collaboration. I’ve met few directors with this understanding — but I was blessed to be able to work with three of them, right here in Puddle City.
We need to give grants without worrying about “success” or “failure” because those terms inevitably refer to audiences and popular response. Art is not about popularity. Art is about trying to find and express human truths in ways that, by registering individually with the honest artist, reach out and register with a few others. “Success” and “failure” are restrictive parameters to this quest. You have to have faith in artists. And you have to keep it.
May 27th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
When I said “art that dares to fail” I partly meant art that takes chances–experiments, if you will, in the sense that one tries something different, and you can’t really tell how well it’s going to work until it’s up on its feet…as opposed to a “safe” choice…a linear plot, a resolution that ties up all the loose ends, etc. But, as far as money and art, I think it also means doing work on its merit rather than whether or not it sells tickets, and, in some cases, doing work that’s important enough that it doesn’t matter if breaks even or loses money. One hopes that if it’s good enough, people will come, but, sadly, it doesn’t always work that way.
I’ve written plays that fail all over the place…sometimes you can’t fix them without turning them into a play you didn’t mean to write, and you just have to live with the damned thing. And you even find a certain affection for the weird, bent little beasts, with their endearing limps.
May 28th, 2009 at 6:48 am
I don’t know. I’m a little burned out on the idea that there is something laudatory about failure, and that the only thing that is important is an artist’s personal vision. I guess I think an artist, like every other member of society, has a responsibility to the Greater Good, not just to their personal vision. The desire to communicate, the desire to engage in dialogue, the ability to remain open-minded, the resistance to preaching — those are things I value in an artist. Michael Rohds is an excellent example of such an artist. The plays he creates are designed to be part of a community dialogue. One of the reasons we lost grants to individual artists is that the artists got so arrogant about their responsibilities to society. Government money is given to make the public better, and artists need to recognize those strings not only exist, but should be embraced.
May 28th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Well, Scott, just to take the flip side, I’m a little burned out on the tyranny of the “well-made play” and artists doubling up as social workers.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:35 am
Scott, this was Plato’s argument, which is why he would ban poets. Look at Ginsberg’s “Howl” — a powerful statement of a truth the society at the time did not want to hear. I agree there must be a connection to society but in the best art this connection goes inside-out, not outside-in. Personal revelations, discoveries, questions, anxieties, are assumed to be shared in the human family, somewhere, by someone, or many someones. The greater the sharing, perhaps, the more successful the art. But sometimes we come to art late, i.e. its insights are ahead of its time, as in “Howl.” In my reading of the history of art, the ground breaking artists were not in any dialog with community because the community at the time did not even comprehend what the artist wanted to talk about. If you put on a piece of music and the audience riots, this is not a community dialog — except, of course, on the terms of the artist. And this is how it should be. I think society deals with art the way it deals with education — we create institutions and procedures to lump everybody in an accomplished Middle, to the alienation of the Gifted.
May 28th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Charles — Your reading of the history of art must be confined to art since the Romantic Era, because prior to that time the artist was very much in dialogue with and service to the community. Aeschylus wrote “The Oresteia” as a celebration of the new Athenian system of justice, for instance; the medieval mystery plays were done by the people themselves; Moliere spoke directly to the people of Louis XIV’s court. And yes, sometimes they said things the community didn’t want to hear — “Oedipus Rex” is a warning to Athenians not to get so confident about man’s intellect as being all-powerful; Moliere’s “Tartuffe” offended the Jansenists — but they were OF the community, and spoke from a position of embeddedness. I wrote about this extensively on my blog Theatre Ideas: http://theatreideas.blogspot.com/2009/04/offending-audience.html. In addition, I’m not certain that being “ground breaking” is the gold standard of the arts. There are times when I wish somebody, anybody, would just try to perfect something that already exists. As far as the well-made play is concerned, they are as rare as hen’s teethe — we live in a world of magic realism. If “August: Osage County” was well-made, it would be about an hour shorter.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:35 pm
All we know about art in classical times is what has been handed down, which is what has been recorded, which by definition means what has had some kind of official sanction by the society. Yet Plato was quite clear about his displeasure with poets, which suggests energy of another kind at work. I think we can assume there were unproduced playwrights in ancient Greece and it may not be too big a stretch to suggest some of them didn’t buy the party line.
May 29th, 2009 at 8:19 am
A couple last points I’d like to make. How critics describe the intersection of art and society seldom has much to do with what the artist thinks s/he is up to. When Steinbeck wrote Tortilla Flat, his letters make clear that he thought he was retelling the Arthurian legend, that his characters were a kind of Round Table. Nobody picked up on that or describe the work this way. So what? It’s what inspired him, and that’s what matters. It’s the source of the energy that created the work. God bless that energy.
Moreover, when we look at the history of art, or any history, we have to remember that it was written by the winners. Consider what the U.S. will look like in 50 years or so when whites are a minority and the predominant ethic class is Hispanic. Will “American Literature” look the same then? Of course not. The classroom texts will list “major” authors and artists of our own times that most have never heard of today.
But again, so what?, this has little to do with what artists do. What critics do is not what artists do. At their best, critics are mediators between the artist and the society that doesn’t quite get it yet. At their worst, critics themselves don’t get it and go on to say it’s therefore not worth trying to figure out.
Many artistic paths and kinds of art exist simultaneously and it seems to me societies are drawn to art that is comfortable and artists who are dead. The good news is, no policy, critic, fashion, or gun can stop an artist from working. The best trait of artists is that they won’t shut up. God bless this energy.
August 8th, 2009 at 10:16 am
As a visual artist, I more and more feel distanced from the rest of the arts. Could a new name for it be perhaps “Two dimensional visual humanities??” From my perspective, the NEA was born from ideas of the New Deal. Most of the NEA money at this time (Look at history, the Great Depression.) needs to go to those who are good artists at the bottom economic ladder. Can Rocco do that? Can he go beyond his experiences in New York theater, horseracing and baseball teams? Taxpayer’s money given to those who are much better off is wasted money. By bad example, the x-appointed “president” Bush proved that.