The thought-provoking title of this post comes from a commencement address given by Dana Gioia, NEA Chairman, at Stanford University in 2007. It is encouraging to know that there are people trying to start a dialogue about cultural impoverishment in our society. Here are some excepts from his address.
"I'd like to survey a cross-section of Americans and ask them how many active NBA players, Major League Baseball players and American Idol finalists they can name. Then I'd ask them how many living American poets, playwrights, painters, sculptors, classical musicians and composers they can name.
The Loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways...
When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few roles modes [do we] offer the young.
Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has become one vast infomercial...
But we must remember that the market place does only one thing: it puts a prices on everything.
The role of culture must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the prices of things, but their value.
Art is an irreplaceable way of understanding and expressing the world. Art addresses us in the fullness of our being; simultaneously speaking to our intellect, emotions, intuition, imagination, memory and physical senses. There are some truths about life that can be expressed only as songs..[emphasis added]."
Mr. Gioia's address discusses many of these ideas in greater depth and is well worth reading.
(I will add link to the full text soon. )
meb
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2 comments:
Well I am of the Nintendo generation. It is hard to remember back when computers used 5.25" floppies, but I can and that is as far back as my memory goes. I feel that I can offer a somewhat neutral opinion here because I am equally disinterested in network television and western art music [sorry mom and dad]:
Watching television is like replacing parts of your life with a synthetic one.
Art music on the other hand, sails cleanly over my head.
What we have is a negative feedback loop in which a generation is not brought up (by parents or mentors) to value and understand high art. As a result interest declines in the subject and even less is transmitted to later generations. I remember reading an article recently describing how the Metropolitan Opera in New York is desperately trying to attract younger audience members to replace its aging customer base. Honestly these days, good luck. Among my cohort, Opera is not likely to be given the time of day. As enthusiasm and training in high arts has declined, the void left in a liberal education has been filled by emphasizing technical knowledge, engineering stuff. And can that be anything but a response to a the changing landscape of the workforce, where engineers of the software and hardware varieties are so hard to find they must be imported? Who has time for the opera, I have to study trig. Or in other words, Opera the web browser has become more popular than the art for which it was names.
What is the remedy? My best guess as an unqualified outsider is that the art itself must adapt somewhat and that it must take on a more youthful marketing approach. Indie rock bands have quite a following these days, some even get so popular that the "indie: designation is only honorary. How do they do it? They aggressively use youtube, myspace, facebook, blogging and the like. Is there an opera blog? There must be many to turn the tide. That is what is so encouraging about this blog, be it in infancy. Now about the "adapting somewhat" part, well that is best left to the artists. As cool as the Marriage of Figaro is, it isn't what will connect with my generation. Yes contemporary operas must be written to enliven the genre, and they must be written to speak to my generation. Now, how to do that, what the subject will be, and how to remain true to art in the process is for another discussion. Let's see a thriving underground opera community soon, and let is be edgy.
The really scary thing is that even "rock stars" don't have the status they once did, if they have any. It's pretty much all about Hollywood in popular culture. The only popular musicians who are household names are ones that have a movie/tv career. The curiosity is kind of absent in our culture, as is the sensitivity to spiritual/transformative experience.
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