Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Curator’ post, which is riffs on articles from the ‘artistic/intellectual’ web.
Best,
Sam
THE END OF THEATER?
So many gloomy culture pieces I’m reading this beautiful July!
The New York Times claims flatly that “The American theater is on the verge of collapse” and reels off a slew of statistics to prove that that seems exactly to be what’s going on.
Several critical performance incubators have either shut down or laid off so much of their staff as to be ineffective. Isaac Butler, writing The Times’ piece, claims that the subscription model for theaters has been “withering away for the entire 21st century” and the pandemic, by “breaking the theatergoing habit for audiences,” triggered a “collapse” among the nonprofit theaters.
Fundamentally, Butler is right. And although I kind of know I should be on the side of his proposed solution — a New Deal-ish bailout for the nonprofit theaters — it’s both not going to happen and doesn’t address the underlying issues.
The real issue is that the way we think about theater in America is all wrong —and has been for about a century. Theater is fundamentally meant to be a local phenomenon — a pulling-together of a community. The advent of the Great White Way, though, produced a vision of culture that was top-down and that, ultimately, was a kind of pyramid scheme. It was possible to make a good living if you made it onto Broadway and then, from there, to Hollywood, and the entire substructure of local theater, rebranded with time as ‘Off-Broadway,’ ‘Off-Off-Braodway,’ and ‘Regional,’ was transformed into the minor leagues of the real thing. This idea has become so prevalent that Butler, a really estimable theater historian, seems somehow able to conceive of Off-Broadway theater (as well as the parts beyond it) only as incubation for Broadway “to develop material and support artists.”
A century in, the pyramid-scheme side of the arrangement is coming through. Broadway, which is supposed to be the majors for theater, has hardly any straight plays running at all, and, more and more, depends on theatrical extravaganzas that can be fully understood by tourists with limited English-language-comprehension. As Butler notes, “It might be easy to look at Broadway’s return to pre-Covid audience numbers and think it signals something like normal,” but, as in so much of the rest of art, the ‘long tail’ (which also is the premise for all labor negotiation strategies) yields basically nothing. The nonprofits are, at the moment, left holding the bag — which is to say nothing of theater culture in the tiers below that.
It’s telling that, in making his argument, Butler finds himself constantly comparing theater to things that theater is not — to banks, to the auto industry, etc — and arguing that, in some abstract way, nonprofit theaters are equally vital as a part of American commerce.
I don’t really object to Butler’s argument. This is the system we have. A key pillar within it is tottering. It’s reasonable to ask for money from the federal government — and Butler is right that if the collapse continues, casts will shrink, risks will be avoided, “a new generation of talent neglected.”
But the whole argument speaks to how poorly American theater was structured in the first place. Other countries have theater that’s far more tightly integrated into the culture. Other countries have kept prices down — in part by staying away from the impulse towards showmanship — so that theater remains a viable activity as opposed to what it is here, an odd status symbol or subscribers-only night out. And other countries have robust repertory systems, which, for some reason, never took root in the U.S. — with the idea that performers can remain loyal to a theater and develop with it artistically over careers as opposed to treating a theater entirely, in Butler’s terms, as “incubation” before moving on to the next tier.
The glory of American theater, in contrast to most Western countries, is that for the past century it did steer clear of government funding and did, by hook or crook, find ways to be solvent and, from time to time, to produce interesting art. If Butler is right and that system, via the pandemic, Netflix-&-Chill, and a sort of artistic price inflation, is finally breaking down, then the real answer isn’t to run to state funding, which produces its own gatekeeping and stratification, but to try to envision theater of a different kind, which is scrappier, less about production values, and less plugged into the Broadway hierarchy. It’s what Jerzy Grotowski called the ‘poor theater,’ of which a guiding principle is that “the budget is the play.” Grotowski wrote:
By gradually eliminating whatever proved superfluous we found that theatre can exist without makeup, without a stage, without lighting and sound effects, etc. It cannot exist without the actor-spectator relationship of perceptual, direct, ‘live’ communion. This is an ancient theoretical truth, of course, but when rigorously tested in practice it undermines most of our usual ideas about theater.
That’s the direction, ultimately, for theater to go in. There are, actually, all kinds of ‘poor theaters’ all over the U.S., but they don’t believe in themselves, and audiences, who have imbibed the Broadway pyramid-scheme, don’t believe in them either. It’s time for them to start.
THE END OF THE AVANT GARDE?
Moving in order from things that are in trouble to things that will probably be ok, The Drift has a symposium on the ‘avant-garde’ and what’s become of it. Most of the writers participating at some point start to take issue with the prompt — since, the more you think about it, the less coherence the idea of the ‘avant-garde’ has.
As Marta Figlerowicz puts it:
One cannot think about the avant-garde without committing oneself to a theory of history. The term ‘avant-garde’ was first applied to art in the early nineteenth century amid the euphoria of Europe’s accelerating technological and cultural domination over the rest of the globe. It became particularly associated with late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism, when European narratives of historical progress — from both the right and the left — pointed toward the near future as a potential civilizational apex.
It’s of course a military term, with questionable application to anything in art, but not just that — it implies that there is a band of lunatics constantly pushing the frontiers of taste and consciousness and then behind them is an orderly body of more 9-to-5 type artists who will then carry out the work of organizing society along the lines envisioned by the avant garde.
To create a timeline for the idea of the avant garde, there would be the Romantics, with the general ideas that artists were both more morally and sexually emancipated than society-at-large and closer to the revolutionary leftist spirit. Then, towards the middle of the 19th century, the analogy to industrialization and militarism becomes explicit, and Frank Guan quotes Baudelaire, who apparently saw through the whole idea of it right away, saying that “only minds made for discipline, in other words conformity, domestic minds, Belgian minds” — this apparently being Baudelaire’s worst insult — “minds who can only think inside society would be attracted to the concept.” Then the early part of the 20th century is the peak of avant gardism, where a series of breakthroughs are apparently all happening at the same time, in science, psychology, technology, etc, and it seems not unreasonable that artists discovering modernist techniques would also be paving the way for a better world. That notion starts to crash up against a harsh reality with the socialist realist and fellow traveler literature of the ‘30s, the theoretically-deterministic art of the ‘60s and ‘70s, where artists following the military metaphor instinctively assumed that they must be out in front of the Communist Revolution and fashioned their art accordingly. Our moment, similarly, serves as a refutation for the idea of art somehow standing in front of technological progress — which was a beloved notion with sci-fi and with certain strains of post-modernism. We’re now seeing what the technological progress looks like, and it’s machine-driven, self-replicating, oriented towards tech and profit, has precious little interest in the solitary process of artistic production and owes nothing at all to generations of forward-looking avant gardists.
Figlerowicz, following Walter Benjamin, points out the underlying fallacy in avant-garde thought — the attachment to the notion of moving forward. She writes, “We ought to ask, with Benjamin: is ‘forward’ really the most important of our cardinal directions? When we dream about moving forward, whom are we planning to leave behind?”
Other writers in the symposium try to save the idea from itself, arguing that the literal meaning of ‘avant-garde’ isn’t helpful but that there is a great need for artists who reject establishment taste and establishment careers and are willing to bravely explore their own aesthetics, wherever that may lead. Eugene Lim, who really is a great avant gardist, writes, “Avant-garde, experimental, innovative — all poor names for literary art that goes against the accepted and expected traditions of narrative — this kind of writing hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s just that our focus (as if by an infernal or destined magic trick) has been directed elsewhere.”
The task becomes about regaining a bit of that focus. Instead of believing that avant-garde just means weird or quirky or whatever and then being misled, as Dean Kissick is in another essay, by “nonsense doggerel” and “cultural malleability” in new corners of the web and opining that the internet age has shown us that “ordinary people are far weirder than artists and writers and more imaginative too,” real ‘avant garde’ work is about staking out a vision of what art is and what artists want to do with their careers and paying as little attention as possible to trends or to the imagined direction of ‘history.’ As Frank Guan puts it, “What art needs now is what it has always needed: new, firm perspectives on the world at hand.”
Somewhat predictably, the symposium turns into a debate on whether there is anything different, or special, about our time. Becca Rothfeld takes up the argument of the jaded, that our time is really just like any other, and with the artistic stakes no higher or lower. She writes:
I’m more persuaded by an unflattering diagnosis than I am by the grand narrative that positions writers, editors, and academics as heroic defenders of an unprecedentedly endangered art form. In our age, as in every other, there are both dark forces at work and a small but committed clerisy determined to resist them. Our perennial pessimism may be the product of a narcissistic need, common to every generation, to feel that one’s own epoch is beset by special dangers.
Which seems reasonable enough, except that I do find there to be special dangers in our era — AI being obvious enough — and some critical bulwark seems to be missing where people recognize that the key values are in interiority, integrity, the individual perception of the world (the domain of artists, in other words) as opposed to just listening to whatever the market, ‘progress,’ or historical determinism tells them they should like. As Eugene Lim puts it, with the utmost stateliness:
On the one hand, I think now is a fine time to despair….That is, it’s always darkest before it gets really really dark. Even as the nets of social media divide us into impotent sports teams, they herd and defang our wild imagination….Novels are produced (but hardly read) as aspirational props for performative values. Our natural resource of attention has been mined to near extinction and fabricated into an audience for endless corporate jingles….We are at an inflection point and the curve could go up or down. It’s not looking good.
THE END OF MUSIC?
And speaking of dark before it gets really really dark, on July 12th, the world’s music catalog doubled, with an artificial intelligence company called Mubert releasing 100 million new songs in a day — which equaled the number of songs currently on Spotify.
As the music critic Ted Gioia, in an apoplectic mood, writes, “It took thousands of years of human creativity to make the first 100 million songs. But an AI bot matched that effort in a flash.”
The silver lining is that the music — what I’ve listened to and what Gioia listened to — is astonishingly lousy. That was a real surprise to me — I’ve been traumatized by AlphaZero playing more games of chess with itself in an afternoon than have been played in the human history of chess and becoming, yes, far better than any human being — and Gioia takes hope from this that it will lead to a stand of human creativity. “The technocrats are overplaying their hand,” he writes. “The real end result of all these AI sausage factory projects is likely to be the exact opposite of what they intend. They’re simply reminding us of how much we love the music of actual human beings.”
But as Mubert points out, in the press release announcing its achievement, the AI had to train itself on a fairly-limited library of proprietary sounds due to copyright restrictions, with the result that Mubert is most successful at producing lo-fi, ambient, and chill. So, in other words, it’s really a revolution in Muzak, not music, but it hasn’t been a fair fight so far. Give AI a curated, high-quality music catalog and it will in time produce technically-great music of its own. I just can’t imagine that it really will go any other way.
Gioia’s normally a very classy, very witty writer, and it’s a bit startling to see him really lose it over Mubert. His point — he likes to talk in supply v. demand language — is that we have crossed a point where supply so vastly outstrips demand that the music business is basically not even dealing with the supply-side anymore but is just glutting the marketplace and then creating artificial bottlenecks on the demand side. Gioia writes:
The real defining fact of our era is that the largest richest corporations in the world are now operating as enemies of the music culture. They want to replace musicians with bots — to make more money. They want to replace quality with quantity — to make more money. And they want to do this as fast as possible — to make more money.
So. Yes. Here we are. Something like Mubert and its 100 million songs really does seem like the techie future that the more militaristic, utopian side of the avant garde was fantasizing about for a century-and-a-half, and in practice it means both a glut of machine-generated “creativity” and a marketplace that’s directly inimical to people doing what they love. As Marta Figerlowicz writes, following Benjamin, “What collective ‘we’ did we imagine racing into the future?”
The cognitive trick is just to decouple from that whole mindset — imagining both that there is some necessity for following ‘progress’ and (this is the language I like to use) that there is some irresistible pull to be at the ‘center of the culture.’ AI is the coolest thing around. It really is an amazing technological achievement. It’s very hard for people now to avoid feeling that it’s somehow their birthright, that they get to live in the era when AI came into being, but it’s just not worth it. The sooner it can be regulated the better, but the real work is to get away from thinking that it’s necessary to connect to the center of the culture, that ‘progress’ is irresistible. Sooner or later, AI music is going to be ‘better’ than human-made music, just as computer chess is indubitably ‘better’ than human chess. But so what? Our values are that great music, like all art, is hard to make, and comes from life experience, as an expression of the soul. If it’s easy — if it can be churned out by the hundreds of millions in an afternoon — then it’s valueless.
SAVING DFW
The point with overly-fixating on a cultural center is that it creates a gravitational pull that warps the person doing the fixating. For a vivid illustration of what this looks like, see two bizarre, fawning-yet-supercilious essays on David Foster Wallace, one by Lauren Oyler in Harper’s, one by Patricia Lockwood in The London Review of Books.
Part of what’s so strange about both pieces is that Wallace, in his writing, positioned himself very much as an outsider. He was always in places he didn’t belong — state fairs, luxury cruises, porn conventions, and much of his writing was a sort of snaking rendition of the kinds of thoughts people have when they’re off to the side of a party and madly trying to justify their own existence — but, with his death and literary martyrdom, he comes to serve as a lacuna at the center of high culture, and both Oyler and Lockwood, while taking every opportunity they can to say snarky things about him, are inexorably tractor-beamed towards that, their voice and style shifting, their pieces overwrought dances with their own ego in which they try to figure out if they’re worthy of writing about Wallace.
Both Oyler and Lockwood more-than-fully acknowledge that this is what’s going on. Oyler in particular gives herself a tough assignment, going on a cruise with the avowed intention of being lonely and dissatisfied and then writing about it for Harper’s, exactly as Wallace did. “The point, remember, is not to imitate DFW, but to occupy his place — in a female way,” she writes. This creates room to be just like DFW but better, or at least more morally-sound and better-situated within the freelance economy. “Anyway, I am getting paid about 50 percent more than DFW was, even adjusting for inflation, which is a win for us girls,” she proudly writes. But there is a bit of fretting about the exercise. Nervously, Oyler rereads ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.’ And is beyond relieved to discover that it’s “not that good.”
Lockwood finds herself engaged in similar literary assassination as part of her settling in to write, treating Wallace as a sort of citadel in the center of the culture and looking for weak points. There was the sham, she concludes, of having a literary-sounding middle name that he deployed to powerful effect. “David Foster Wallace – man, that name looked great. That’s part of it, right?” she actually writes. And there was the daylight robbery of conscripting the footnote for his own ends: “He somehow made footnotes famous although the footnote was a very famous thing already.”
Lockwood really believes that this method can get you somewhere. The idea is that there is some outsized force in the cultural center and you screamingly allow yourself to be subsumed by it even as you let it improve you. “If he made mutants of the next generation [of writers], it was largely to their benefit: they were a little bit taller, with bigger eyes and a voice that was piped in directly,” she intriguingly writes.
But the piece itself argues against its own techniques. Lockwood, as she proved in No One Is Talking About This, is a wonderful, original writer. And certainly a much better writer than, for example, this: “Many things I read online were just curiously gone. Betty White was either dead or a landlord”; or this: “What were the noughties? A time when everyone went to see the Blue Man Group for a while. Men read David Foster Wallace. Men also put hot sauce on their balls.”
This is what happens when writers get pulled into a vortex of thinking about other writers, get obsessed with status and centrality and — as in the avant garde discussion — about what’s next. What’s ironic about all this in relation to Wallace is this was adamantly not what Wallace was doing. He was influenced by other writers, he had his obsessions with pop culture, but what made his writing work wasn’t the encyclopedic knowledge, the referentiality, the footnotes (whether patented or cribbed), the literary pyrotechnics — it was the fact that, fundamentally, his writing was religious. It was about getting lost in the funhouse mirror of the American cultural superstructure and trying, somewhere in the reflection, to catch the outlines of himself. The sections in Wallace that hit me are a long digressive passage in ‘A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’ that discusses his frustrations with a skillfully-written but insincere piece of branded content written by Frank Conroy and concludes that, however “powerful, impressive, polished” the Conroy essay is, it can’t be of value because it is not given freely, because “it wants something from me”; the passage in the Kenyon commencement speech in which he seems to be kidding around, seems like just the sort of risqué speaker a commencement graduation committee would choose to push buttons and aggravate the professors, and then talks about “the people in the day to day trenches of adult existence,” which is the perfect way of describing to college kids what actually is coming for them; the passages in his campaign-trail piece on John McCain in which he is so numbed by the campaign bromides that all he can do is stare at Cindy McCain standing behind her husband “never getting to say anything” and imagine what she can be thinking about, what she can be looking at, what interiority there is behind "the ‘exquisitely manicured hands,” the polished sheen.
Lockwood is similarly capable of thinking religiously — the second half of No One Is Talking About This is a really beautiful discussion of learning to be present through an infant with Proteus Syndrome, a potent antidote to the snide Twitter voice of the novel’s first half — but there’s something about the form of the essay, something about this moment of the culture, that makes her snarky, status-y, insincere. There’s the feeling of a silly season in both Lockwood and Oyler’s pieces, of publications opening up their column inches wide for a ‘literary essay,’ but with the understanding that literary essays are meant to be cute, gossipy, insider-ish, neurotic and ultimately not-very-serious. As Lockwood diagnoses it, Wallace himself is somewhat to blame for this development — his complete lack-of-economy in writing, his willingness to inhale as much of reality as possible without regard for whether or not it’s ‘important,’ and, as she writes, that creates the “mutant” effect for the next generation of writers. But, ultimately, that whole phenomenon is based on a misreading of Wallace. It’s not about the accumulation of corporate swag (which is the main activity of Oyler’s GOOP cruise), not about snarky broadsides at pop culture, or the attempt to create a virtuosic literary priesthood. It’s about looking for God in the unlikeliest of places — and continuing to do so even when the culture-at-large has forgotten that that search is even possible.
I’m always startled by echoes of what ails academe in your cultural commentary. But since theater is part of the arts and humanities, this overlap is not surprising: “There are, actually, all kinds of ‘poor theaters’ all over the U.S., but they don’t believe in themselves, and audiences, who have imbibed the Broadway pyramid-scheme, don’t believe in them either. It’s time for them to start.”
My only exposure to proper theater was going to a production of Little Shop of Horrors. As such, my impression of the medium has been Movies without all the magic. But thirty years alter...I'm intrigued by the poor theater concept. The live-wire connection between audience and actors.
To tenously tie into your next item, it sounds very avante-garde, but not in the completely off-putting way that I've lost taste (and paitence) for as I've grown into a comfy middle class bureaucrat with slightly artistic leanings.