“There’s a gap somewhere in the soul of the people that troops into the theater but never produces a folk drama, that crowds into the concert hall but never throws off the spark from a folk song like a spark from a glowing iron. The arts are vital, if in the years ahead we are to master instead of being mastered by the vast complex and swiftly moving technical civilization born of science and the machine. The education for the future must, in addition to the more obvious disciplines and diets of the mind, include those stimulations and disciplines that sensitize and enrich men’s capacity for worthy emotional aesthetic response to some of the overlooked needs of modern life. The art of theatre, like the art of literature, has been damned by professionalism. We have wandered far from the days of folk drama where even the great souls of simple folk found expression in the dramatic form. The next great dramatic renaissance in America will come when the theatre is recaptured from the producers by the people, when we become active in mind and rich enough in spirit to begin the creation of a folk drama and a folk theatre in America.”
This is from a speech by Dr. Glenn Frank, the president of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in 1925. Eighty-four years later, we have succumbed to exactly the “complex and swiftly moving technical civilization born of science and the machine” he warned about, and we as artists, instead of resisting being mastered, have come to serve it. We have allowed arts participation to be defined as buying a ticket, and artists have become hucksters, salesman trying to sell a product to these passive consumers who no longer think they have the right or the skill to tell a story, sing a song, dance a dance, do anything more than turn on an electronic dcevice.
And yet all you have to do is read books like Crowdsourcing and Here Comes Everyone to realize that the desire to create has survived and is reasserting itself. YouTube is filled with videos created and posted by amateurs, iStock has thousands of photos taken by amateur photographers, people are using GarageBand to create their own music and remix the songs of others. The music industry and the film biz are fighting a losing battle against this desire to share, to remix, to modify, that is the center of this resurgence — they want to keep everyone passively consuming.
Arts education is fighting this same battle, “training” young people to be arts specialists who create products to sell to consumers. They are taught that singing, telling stories, dancing, and painting pictures is something that requires extensive training, and that once they have that training they have become special people that are different than “the masses.”
Well, it is a new day, and it is time that education change, that artists change, that institutions change. The downward slide of sales of tickets and works of art reflects the rejection of this passive model of consumption.
Sir Ken Robinson says essentially the same thing in his TED talk, and his book The Element:
This is a remarkable post. I mean, I thought I basically “got” what the CRADLE project was about before, but the way you phrase it above has put it in a context that I didn’t fully see. Business models, the economy of entertainment, the underlying creative impulses, the construction of professionalism… My brain is now doing that tumbling thing where it tries to re-process a bunch of prior conclusions after finding an important piece that doesn’t fit.
(And I mean this in a positive way, not a negative way.)
A question, while my brain spins: where in the world did you find this excerpt from Frank?
Christopher — The quotation is from Robert Gard’s amazing book “Grassroots Theatre,” which is still in print after decades. I recommend it wholeheartedly. When your head stops spinning, I’d like to hear your thoughts about what you’ve discovered in this post that you hadn’t recognized before, and your reactions.
Also, this talk by Sir Robinson: pure gold.
I can’t really say it’s stopped spinning, but here are a few initial thoughts:
I didn’t previously see the parallels between theater companies and publishers. I’ve been quite happy to rail at the dying publishers (newspapers, books, music, film) for their willful blindness to their own death, but I hadn’t yet connected their hierarchical gatekeeper model to the world of theater companies. (On the other hand, one of the biggest problems for the publishers is that their greatest added value–producing objects to sell–is no longer very valuable. The creation and dissemination of writing, music, and images is no longer expensive or difficult. Theater does not appear to share this particular vulnerability.)
I’m also fascinated by the critique of the arts as a product to be sold, and specifically by the ticket as the manifestation of that perversion. On the one hand the ticket does seem to reflect the anemic economic model of transactions; arts companies who view their community as a simple consumer of tickets are breathing thin air. On the other hand, I hesitate to completely shun an artistic marketplace of creative activity. If I find value in the talent and time it took to produce a symphonic performance, isn’t it appropriate that I can transform my own talent and time in other areas into money which can then be used to support (and benefit from) those musicians? And if so, don’t I need some kind of packaged product or service to quantify that exchange? This isn’t to say that the old passive ticketing model is best, just that I think “ticketing” as a concept has room to be reinvented.
Another thorny issue: professionalism. Surely it reflects something valuable about skill and competency (even if the supposed correlation of these things to a living wage is tenuous). Is it fair to say that professionalism damned the arts? Doesn’t that ignore some significant benefits of professionalism, and some economic pressures that may have been more directly responsible? And isn’t it maybe a moot point anyway? Here Comes Everyone, after all. “Professionalism” as a construct doesn’t mean the same thing it used to mean, and the reason isn’t because Universities saw the light and decided to foster the creativity of the masses instead of the elites. It’s happening on a larger scale than could be mustered by all the universities combined, and it’s happening because of economic and technologic forces.
Finally, is this a “reassertion” of a creative force? Or is it something unseen in human history? The free time (on a massive scale) to be creative, and the tools to do it cheaply? And isn’t that what’s so cool about CRADLE? We’ve never had this opportunity to foster the human spirit quite like this before–which means we’ve never had an organization to fit the call of the times quite like we need right now. That, to me, represents a fundamental shift in my understanding of CRADLE. It’s not about “fixing” a broken system so much as it is about seizing an unprecedented and electrifying opportunity. It’s “bringing the arts back home”, yes — but it’s not just that. The arts are coming home, but they grew up while they were away. When they come home this time, it’s going to be different. And it’s going to be wonderful.
Chris — Thanks for your detailed analysis. You raise many excellent points.
As you note, my critique is of an arts system that has been built on a specialist–>product–>consumer model that, while having certain positive aspects (virtuosity, for instance), has had the unintended effect of shrinking awareness of and participation in the arts to the point where they are a part of the lives of only a small portion of American citizens. And our tendency is to forget that this wasn’t always the case. In fact, prior to the 20th century, as Steven Tepper points out in his marvelous essay in Engaging Arts, most people created their own entertainment — they played instruments, recited poetry, created plays in their parlor, had sing-alongs, carved wood, and so forth. And because they did so, they also appreciated the creativity of others. But today, we have taught the citizenry that they should let the experts create the art, and that their role is simply to buy it when they are told by the expert-critics that it is something they “ought” to buy. That this was done very consciously is powerfully demonstrated by Lawrence Levine in “Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.” In the process, we commodified what had previously been a participatory culture.
I have nothing against professional artists; I certainly am not advocating eliminating them. But I think virtuosity rests on a foundation of participation. I also think that “professionalism” has historically had less to do with talent than with economic privilege, which allows certain people to devote all of their time to developing their craft while others must do so in their spare time. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers , which questions the idea that success is based on talent, reinforced this for me. Gladwell discusses the “10,000 hour rule”: that it takes 10,000 hours of practice before someone can make a serious contribution to a field. That ruel privileges those who don’t have to work 40 hours a week to put food on the table and a roof over their head. As important, the full-time devotion to an art form I believe has a negative effect on one’s connection with the reason for that art form, with the actual conditions of day-to-day living that the arts are supposed to reflect and inform. Once you spend all of your time with other artists, and all of your time is devoted to the creation of art, you slowly lose touch with the Real World experiences that are your raison d’etre.
As far as whether this is a reassertion or something new — well, it is hard to say. Technology has allowed a lot of this to occur, and that is certainly unique in history. At the same time, active participation in the creation of artistic entertainment was much more prominent in previous times when life was slower and focus was more local. The rise of the mass media created the dominance of artistic specialists — why listen to Uncle Buck tell us a story when we can turn on the radio and listen to Jack Benny? That was the first step down the slippery slope to where we are now. But the impulse toward creativity was prominent in the past, and it is coming out in new forms today — and that’s the most important part of the story. Young people expect to participate and create, not just consume. Which is why TV-watching numbers are down and computer gaming and crowdsourcing is up.
But you are definitely right: the existing system is so busted it is irreparable. Best to start anew.
Again, thanks for your time in crafting your response, and if you have more, please continue the conversation.
Tickets are a convention, a symbol. Spectators “buy” an arts experience, which disconnects them from the artist
[...] the entire concept of tickets inherently damage the arts, by dividing us into art producers and art [...]