Arts and the Media: A Strategic Complaint
America’s mega-media establishment is ignoring the arts, and it’s time for cultural leaders to retaliate
By Frank Rich
Rich, columnist and former chief theatre critic for the New York Times, delivered the 2001 Americans for the Arts—Nancy Hanks Lecture on Arts and Public Policy on March 19 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. This article is adapted from his address.
The explosion of nonprofit arts institutions over the past 30 years is mind-boggling. From relatively new cultural centers like San Jose to rejuvenated grande dames like Cleveland, there is a huge wealth of museums, orchestras, dance troupes–energetic, home-grown arts organizations of all shapes, sizes and aesthetic disciplines. To watch hundreds of ravenous theatregoers drive, in some cases hundreds of miles, to attend the William Inge Theatre Festival in Independence, Kans.–to take just one recent example of my experience–is to realize how determined many Americans are to enjoy the arts and how dedicated many other Americans are to fill this need.
And yet for all this growth, there’s still a sense that something is wrong, that the arts are in tremendous peril in America, and that today’s children live in a sea of video games, possess an MTV attention span, and will never learn the difference between Britney Spears and Brahms. There is some truth to this point of view–as there is to most caricatures–but I would argue that the death of culture in America is seriously exaggerated. A country that boasts Paul Taylor and John Adams and Joan Didion and Martin Scorsese and August Wilson and Jennifer Bartlett and Maya Lin and Frank Gehry is far from a cultural wasteland.
Yet some perils are worthy of concern, and I want to talk about some of them and what might be done to counteract them–and what all of us can do to help.
I am not going to focus on Washington’s part in all this. At this point the government’s role is highly circumscribed. Much as I support the National Endowment for the Arts, the agency lacks the money, the clout and the freedom to have the huge effect on the culture that it once had–when it was not only a bigger fish in real fiscal terms but operating in a smaller pond besides.
For even if the NEA were at 10 times or at 100 times its current budget, it’s hard to imagine how it could challenge one of the biggest impediments to the American culture today. That impediment is not the noisy censors of the Religious Right, and it isn’t the limited public resources for culture funding. The biggest threat to the arts instead comes from the private sector–specifically, our mass entertainment media.
Don’t get me wrong. Entertainment is a vital part of American culture, high and low, and I treasure it. It’s in the very nature of our democratic society that commerce mingles with art, and always with both deleterious and advantageous effects. The broad entertainment marketplace has yielded goodies from Buster Keaton to Frank Sinatra, from The Godfather to Sweeney Todd. And it will continue to do so, just as it will continue to give us its traditional quotient of cynical, disposable junk.
But even as that fundamental and eternal ratio between valuable commercial culture and trash remains fixed, there has been a big change in this media world in recent years that radically affects the relationship of the entire commercial culture to non-commercial culture, otherwise known as the high arts. In a very short period of time over the past decade, the many movie, television, publishing and music companies of the for-profit culture industry have consolidated into a handful of megacompanies of enormous power.
These new megaplayers can now pursue their audience in almost every conceivable space and location–not just in the U.S. but the world–through media as various as a satellite dish, a computer screen, a Sony Playstation 2 and an old media relic such as a magazine printed on paper. Whatever cultural product one of these companies chooses to put its muscle behind becomes instantly ubiquitous. Whether it’s Survivor or Hannibal or Ricky Martin, you cannot escape the pitch. In such a marketplace, it’s very hard for non—pop culture to be heard at all, let alone compete, especially with the most desirable demographic to whom most products are sold–the young people in whose hands the long future of our culture resides.
What is to be done about this? A number of things, though not necessarily the ones you might think. For instance, it is a favorite tactic of cultural commentators and Washington politicians to decry the worst excesses of the entertainment industry’s products. Under this theory, every time there’s one less Temptation Island or Natural Born Killers and one more Touched by an Angel, our culture benefits. I don’t buy it.
I’m all in favor of venting–and certainly I believe that everyone’s entitled to be a critic–but I’m not sure what is accomplished when public or cultural figures grab microphones and rail against violent movies, offensive rock lyrics and salacious TV shows. It was always thus, it will always be thus, and hyperventilating, hypermoralizing adults are likely to make Eminem more popular with all their denunciations, not less. Publicity is publicity, as long as you spell the names right, and anyone who remembers his own childhood or has kids of his own knows that there is no better claim to coolness in the youth culture than notoriety.
Rather than expend endless energy in taking these companies to task on their money-making content, it might be more worthwhile to shame them about what they don’t do–about how little they give back to the higher arts in exchange for their untrammeled domination of the mass cultural marketplace.
At the local level, our media companies, large and small, should be shamed into giving more to arts in America than a financial donation or a public-service spot aired in some Nielsen twilight zone. The tuning out of our culture by broadcast media at the local level is just as scandalous as it is at the national level. When I began as a drama critic in the early 1980s, every local TV station in New York reviewed every Broadway play on the 11 o’clock news, and some Off-Broadway plays as well. Now, no broadcast channels do. And we’re talking about New York–the cultural capital of the country, and one where the arts, the high arts included, are a significant part of the local economic base.
The National Arts Journalism Program, in its recent survey, found that, with the exception of a few national papers like the New York Times, newspaper coverage of the arts is also largely dismal throughout the United States. Most of what passes for arts coverage in daily papers is syndicated gossip, mechanized listings, recitations of movie grosses and TV ratings, air-headed features by freelancers and TV news you can use (or can’t). Polls of newspaper editors in the 1990s showed that the arts came in next-to-last when they were asked to list their top 15 priorities for news coverage.
If nonprofit cultural institutions are going to have some chance of getting their message out to new audiences at a time when megamedia companies dominate and drive more and more of the culture, especially that which reaches young people, surely they need the help of local newspapers and broadcasters. It’s time for cultural leaders in American communities to complain about the paucity and inadequacy of their coverage to local editors, publishers and station managers. By this I don’t mean petty complaints–say, griping about a negative review or the inaccuracies in one particular story–but big-picture complaints. If non-cultural local industries, political institutions and schools can speak up when they feel they’re being shortchanged by their local news media, so can the local symphony, museum and theatre company. Ideally, the local arts institutions should band together and pool their views so they can speak clearly and as one about what’s missing to their local news media. And the complaints should not be vague but backed up by actual data. How many column inches or broadcast time is devoted to the arts as compared to other sectors? Are those amounts in proportion to what the arts contribute to the community–both in terms of actual dollars and incalculable benefits? Presented in this way, the complaints will not seem like special pleading but community-wide concern. Arts should not accept second-class media citizenship behind any other local sector–sports included.
If cultural leaders were to be more assertive in asking for their fair and proper treatment in the media environment, they might actually get some results. The leaders of media companies, national and local, big and small, often hunger for the prestige and cachet of being associated with the higher arts; they want to be seen as cultural figures in the country or their communities; they don’t want to be looked upon as vulgarians. In other words, there are some cards for cultural leaders to play against them in the game of shame. Unfortunately, too many of our cultural leaders today are cowed by these media moguls. It’s easier to decry or confront Jesse Helms or Donald Wildmon than it is ostensibly arts-loving executives, whether Democrat or Republican.
Worse, more and more cultural institutions are trying to emulate the ways of entertainment companies rather than trying to challenge them. While we’re past the point where we can or should upbraid museums for merchandizing schemes and advertising campaigns, which in some sad way may be essential to their survival, it’s defeating for cultural institutions to compromise their core mission, the presentation of culture itself, in the interest of mercantile self-promotion. But too often that’s what’s happening.
Whether it’s the nonprofit theatre that is turning away a serious play to produce some cynical musical that might (but probably won’t) have a crack at Broadway, or the orchestra that refuses ever to challenge its audience in its repertory, the results are inevitably stultifying and self-defeating.
Young viewers are going to have to be engaged if the high arts are to compete with all the electronic rivals for their attention. Kids aren’t stupid. They know when they’re being patronized. They are indeed far smarter than cultural barons, or their parents for that matter, often give them credit for. I am frequently asked by parents what play they should take their child to see in New York, and I always give them the same answer: Take them to something you would like to see yourself. A six-year-old child will certainly not understand all, or maybe even much, of Shakespeare’s language, but if it’s a decent production, the child will feel it in his or her bones. The same is true of any artistic experience. Trust a kid to get something out of a modern dance piece, not just The Nutcracker–to find something in Jackson Pollock, not just Monet.
This point was brought home to me in the past few Months as I took part in Open Doors, a program started by my friend Wendy Wasserstein through the Theatre Development Fund in New York. The idea of this program is to expose high-school students in New York to the theatre that is right in their midst but which many of them have not experienced. Every few weeks, my wife and I go with a group of eight teenagers to a play of our choosing, then spend 90 minutes or so talking about it with them afterwards. In our case, the students go to a city-wide public school for kids who test poorly. Most of them have never been to a play before, or at least a professional production of one, and some of them, though living in New York City, have never even been in the vicinity of Times Square.
I guess we could have taken them directly to Stomp or Blast or Phantom of the Opera or some other long-running Broadway spectacle, and no one would have complained. Instead, we opted for Proof, a four-character play by a new young dramatist that plays tricks with time and memory, and the new Edward Albee play, The Play About the Baby, in which the characters don’t have proper names. Our teenagers weren’t thrown a bit. Once they got over their shock about how white and old the audience around them was, they weren’t at all intimidated by what they saw and had perceptions that were as incisive as any drama critic’s and tougher than most.
Not one of them faulted a play like Proof for not being a movie or a rock concert or a video game or a TV show. They enjoyed it–with reservations, and proper ones–on its own terms. Listening to these students, I was taken back to my own earliest exposure to the arts, the theatre especially, back in the Washington, D.C., of the ’50s and ’60s. Like me, they came to the theatre with a whole set of expectations, a lot of questions and a deep sense of wonder. They wondered what the curtain would look like–and in the case of Proof were disappointed that the show didn’t in fact use a house curtain–an economic fact of life on Broadway these days. They explained in great detail how long it took them to adjust to the conventions of stage acting, so different from what they’re used to on the various screens of their usual cultural life. And then they were hooked–by the whole idea of theatre: In the case of Proof, they were delighted to discover a simple joy such as the convention that Act 1 can end with a blackout, just after a single shocking line of dialogue has upended the entire dynamic of the play up to that point.
In all of this, they reminded me of me, when I was first discovering the theatre as a child. Indeed, many of their perceptions, questions and thrills almost uncannily resembled those of my first visits to the theatre. But it was my good fortune, because of my parents and my relatively privileged economic circumstances, that I experienced these sensations when I was seven; they had to wait until they were around 10 years older, even though they, unlike me, lived in a cultural center, not a backwater.
This is unjust. I am not remotely worried that there will ever be a short supply of good and sometimes even great artists in this country; they just keep coming, no matter what our society does to discourage them or to make their lives difficult. Artists just happen; they are, if you will, God-given. Audiences, however, have to be created, and what’s amazing, and what we tend to forget, is that they can be created so easily. I was turned into an audience member at the National Theatre in Washington when I was seven because my parents took me to see Damn Yankees, a show they’d thought I’d like because it was about my beloved home baseball team, the Washington Senators. The teenagers going to the theatre with me were hooked because in this case a nonprofit organization, the Theatre Development Fund, enlisted the help of commercial producers to expose students to a form of art that is not along their beaten path and whose cost of admission is prohibitively expensive.
Will these students stop watching lousy movies, listening to empty music or trancing out to mediocre TV? Of course not. I might add that I didn’t stop doing any of those things either when I discovered the theatre as a child. But every one of these students is potentially an audience not only for good theatre but for the other arts. And maybe even one or two kids in this Open Doors program may be a potential artist.
we all know that arts education is in a sorry state in this country, and we all fight for its reinstatement in those school systems where it has been regarded as the most dispensable budgetary item in the curriculum. But with or without arts education, we must have arts exposure. Parents should do their part, but often don’t–affluent parents included. Without a large-scale effort to get kids access to the arts–whether through government programs or privately funded ones or both–it just won’t happen. And as part of this effort, and once again, we must pressure the powerful for-profit entertainment industry to ante up. If they’re not going to put ballet on television or recreate the NBC Symphony Orchestra–and I dare say they are not, unless castaways from Survivor are among the soloists–then they are going to have to help enable the nation’s children to see America’s arts first-hand. They’re going to have to help provide the cultural nutrients to counter the cultural junk food they largely dish out–if not in their own programming then certainly in their news media and certainly through programs like Open Doors and the many, but not nearly enough, like it.
Broadway’s commercial theatre is now more actively involved in New York’s schools than it’s ever been–and in part out of self-interest; if the commercial theatre can’t generate a new audience, it will be driven out of the Times Square district by market forces. In truth, the big entertainment companies in the movie and TV and music and Internet business don’t have this problem; they don’t have to generate new audiences for the arts to ensure their own survival. But again, as public citizens, they should do so–and it’s time for us to call on them to pick up far more of this burden than they currently do. Right now, all corporations only contribute just under five percent of the funding for nonprofit arts–that’s less than half what government does, even in today’s often tight arts-funding budgets.
The main point of exposing new generations to the best of American art is not, however, to assure a future for our existing arts institutions–or because it’s somehow morally right to do so. The calling is greater than that.
The arts have many rewards, concrete and not: In my case, the discovery of theatre as a child helped me overcome a somewhat stormy childhood, and I know from the mail I’ve been receiving reacting to my recent memoir telling that story, it is hardly an uncommon tale. At the civic level, as we all know, the arts can generate direct, practical rewards–tourism, spin-off income for surrounding businesses, a selling point to corporations that might be tempted to move in the community.
Yet the calling is greater, too, than the solipsism of personal salvation and the civic good of urban improvement.
At this moment, this country is more balkanized than ever. We’ve become a nation of niche markets, it seems at times, sharing a political system and two political parties that increasingly resemble each other, and little else.
But at the national level, the arts can bind us together in a way that perhaps no other glue can–not government and not our myriad of religions, and not even entertainment–which is also now balkanized by demographics and in most cases passing fashion. By contrast, the lasting, humane values that inform all the arts–the beauty and catharses that lift us well above the quotidian reality of our lives–are beyond category. They carry over from art form to art form, from generation to generation, from society to society. They speak in a language, that once understood, is never forgotten. It’s a language that, like any other language, is most easily learned in childhood. It seems to me a crime that in a country as rich as ours we don’t teach it automatically to every child we have.
As we begin the 21st century, I think we should spend less time worrying about the demise of culture and more time worrying about how more Americans can be introduced to the wealth of culture we do have, and at a younger age, especially at a time when the commercial culture blasted out by the mass media is more rapacious than ever in pursuit of us, our children and our leisure hours. State and local art agencies can play an enormous role in this, but it also must be a national mission. At that national level, this goal means a different kind of fight than the arts community has been used to in recent years–a fight with the mass media, not censorious zealots; indeed a fight with our cultured friends, not the usual rogue’s gallery of philistine enemies. It’s an idealistic fight that, if won, will not only benefit the arts community but the nation as a whole, and that can be won, with, but also without, government help. I look forward to seeing you all at the barricades.
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