If I Ran the NEA

Yesterday, I inveighed against the arts community for their superficial response to the LA Times' question "What would you do if you ran the NEA?" In case you haven't had an opportunity to click through the faces on the LA Times website, and running the risk of drawing Isaac's ire for "cherry picking" (apparently, to be fair, I should either quote everyone, or alternately, quote only those who say nice things), here are a few samples:

Phylicia Rashad: "I would invest the money in arts education in public schools. I would make it a priority." Really? All of it? That will make you some friends among the artists.

Neil LaBute: "If I ran the NEA, I would immediately dismantle all "artist" grants (solely because I've never been offered one myself) and use that money to create more diverse arts programs for inner-city schools. Just kidding. I'd definitely dismantle the grants because, as mentioned above, the awarding of said grants is obviously rigged and in desperate need of restructuring. I would not use the extra money in schools, however, because most kids wouldn't know "art" if it marched up and slapped them in the face. I would instead implement and fund various initiatives to examine "the sex lives of insects cited in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare" and collect "recipe tips from noted female writers -- Aphra Behn to Naomi Wallace." Now that's money well spent on worthwhile projects -- just like my esteemed predecessors used to do." He goes on like this, obviously entertaining himself, but I don't feel the need to quote further. This confirms my opinion of Neil LaBute as a smartass cretin.

Bill Maher: "If I ran the NEA? I'd abolish it. I'd be the Gorbachev of federal arts endowing and destroy my own job as the head of it. Artists are so self-important -- art is basic to human nature, it will always be produced and does not need the government's help." He seems like such a liberal on his show, but Maher is actually a libertarian who will one day flip out just like Dennis Miller did.

Neil Patrick Harris: "So long as they keep funding public television and radio, I'm good. I grew up learning lots from "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company" -- everything from the alphabet and numbers to sharing and a sense of humor, and I still listen to NPR daily. Ira Glass? "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!"? Great good times. Über-important. I can't imagine our world without them." Ahem.

Noah Wyle: "If I were NEA chief, I would hope to remember this: While the "nonprofit" arts industry enriches the cultural aspects of our society, we are not a charity. We are businesses that give fantastic return on invested dollars....I would tell everyone I meet to invest in us. We give great economic stimulus to every community where we work."

And so on. I'm sorry, but I don't find these responses thoughtful, innovative, or even mildly interesting. Here was an opportunity to discuss the impact the NEA could make on our nation, and these celebs decided to make a joke out of it. Others decided that their priority would be reinstating grants to individual artists (they need to tell Neil LaBute that there haven't been individual artist grants since the bruhaha of the 1990s, which is why he hasn't received one -- putz), asking for more money (which is not a vision for the NEA, nor even in the NEA's control, but it's like a reflex act for most artists, like the kid in D. H. Lawrence's short story "The Rocking-Horse Winner"), reinstate the WPA (it is so interesting to hear the WPA being mentioned again -- here's a challenge: the next time some artist friend of yours speaks admiringly about the WPA, ask them to name a WPA production other than Orson Welles' Harlem Macbeth, or ask them who ran the theatre wing and where she came from [hint: she was an academic, not an artist, perhaps an indication that it might be a good idea to have someone overseeing the project who had actually read a couple books]) and funding artists in schools (as long as they don't have to actually do that themselves -- those other artists, you know, the young ones who haven't made it yet, they ought to do it).

So what would I do if I ran the NEA? What if the L. A. Times had decided there might be actual thoughts from people who weren't celebrities?

First, I believe that the responsibility of the NEA should be to lead. I would be an activist NEA Chair, one who would use the alotted money to change the status quo significantly. Since my discipline is theatre, most of my ideas will be confined to this discipline. So:

1. Use 75% of the budget to fund institutions whose artistic staff has at least 50% who have their legal residence in the county where the theatre resides. It is time for the regional theatre to become truly regional.

2. Require that any institution who receives NEA funding provide ongoing educational opportunities for both young people and adults. And I'm not talking about subsidizing tickets, or doing school performances, or having backstage tours. I'm talking about the ongoing facilitations of community creativity. And not just classes -- performances, exhibits, readings, etc. All members of the artistic staff must participate -- no farming this out to the interns. And Robert Falls has to do double.

3. Reserve 90% of the budget for arts organizations in counties with populations under 500,000. This is generous to the metropolitan areas, since counties with populations under 500K represent over 96% of America. It's time to make arts funding look like America.

4. As part of the grantmaking process, require every member of an arts institution to submit a 5 - 7 page, double-spaced paper with bibliography outlining their beliefs about the arts place in American society, quoting at least five different books. We have to start somewhere. And Teresa Eyring: your paper has to be 15 - 20 pages.

Netbooks and Theatre

Over at The Artful Manager, Andrew Taylor writes about "What Can We Learn From the Netbook?" Be sure to read the article he links to as well.

I just ordered a netbook yesterday -- one with Linux, not Windows -- so this has been on my mind. Andrew quotes certain part of the article, and draws certain conclusions, but I would draw you attention to a different part. To wit:

Netbooks have ended the performance wars. It used to be that when you went to an electronics store to buy a computer, you picked the most powerful one you could afford. Because, who knew? Maybe someday you'd need to play a cutting-edge videogame or edit your masterpiece indie flick. For 15 years, the PC industry obliged our what-if paranoia by pushing performance. Intel and AMD tossed out blisteringly fast chips, hard drives went on a terabyte gallop, RAM exploded, and high-end graphics cards let you play Blu-ray movies on your sprawling 17-inch laptop screen. That dream machine could do almost anything.

But here's the catch: Most of the time, we do almost nothing. Our most common tasks—email, Web surfing, watching streamed videos—require very little processing power. Only a few people, like graphic designers and hardcore gamers, actually need heavy-duty hardware. For years now, without anyone really noticing, the PC industry has functioned like a car company selling SUVs: It pushed absurdly powerful machines because the profit margins were high, while customers lapped up the fantasy that they could go off-roading, even though they never did. So coders took advantage of that surplus power to write ever-bulkier applications and operating systems.

What netbook makers have done, in effect, is turn back the clock: Their machines perform the way laptops did four years ago. And it turns out that four years ago (more or less) is plenty.

What I learn from netbooks I learn by analogy: corporate regional institutions = SUV's and monster laptops; the theatres of the future (and of the past) = netbooks. Huge and expensive versus small and inexpensive. Providing more than is necessary versus providing what is called for.

La Times and the NEA -- Kill Me Now

Joshua Conkel drew my attention to this post on the Huffington Post by playwright Jon Robin Baitz, who apparently was asked, along with other "artists/cultural figures," by the L. A. Times "what they might do if they ran the N.E.A." The list of respondents: Bill T. Jones, Phylicia Rashad, Noah Wyle, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Frank Gehry, Tom Hayden, Tim Robbins, Tim Miller, Rachel Dratch, Neil Patrick Harris, Neil LaBute, Kurt Andersen, Kate Burton, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (?), Judy Fiskin, John Patrick Shanley, John Baldessari, Joel Wachs, Joel Stein, Eve Ensler, Edward Albee, Debbie Allen, Ann Coulter (WTF?), Bill Maher (abolish it), Bill Pullman (interesting viewpoint), Harvey Weinstein, Sandra Tsing Loh, and Rachel Maddow. No doubt Teresa Eyring will chime in in American Theatre next month suggesting more money for Facebook.

If you want to understand why the artistic life of this country is so superficial and unoriginal, I invite you to read the "contributions" of these assembled mental midgets. Let me summarize the lot: 1) more money; 2) more arts in schools; 3) more money; 4) money to individuals; 5) more money; 6) the WPA lives; 7) more money.

There were a few faintly interesting and vaguely original ideas from Tim Robbins, Bill Pullman, and Tim Miller. But for the most part, this should be seen as deeply embarrassing by the artistic community, who should hope that this isn't passed on to the Obama team (are you listening, oh great Obama-teamer Isaac?). Unfortunately, most of the artistic community shares this deep-as-a-kids'-plastic-pool philosophy, as any regular reading of the theatrosphere would reveal. This was an opportunity for artists to actually show themselves as worthy of funding, and instead we got Neil Patrick Harris burbling, "So long as they keep funding public television and radio, I'm good. I grew up learning lots from "Sesame Street" and "The Electric Company" -- everything from the alphabet and numbers to sharing and a sense of humor, and I still listen to NPR daily. Ira Glass? "Wait, Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!"? Great good times. Über-important. I can't imagine our world without them." For Chrissake. "Uber-important"???

Could we get some grownups to speak, please?

I'm Being Followed

In my email this morning: "AmericanTheatre Wing (TheWing) is now following your updates on Twitter."

I suspect that TCG has put a contract out on me, and TheWing (TheWing???) has gotten the job. If I suddenly disappear, you all know where to look.

Don's Right (Yes, You Read That Correctly)

When all is said and done, Don and I are in agreement about the central point of Don's latest couple points: "I'm not saying that the mere presence of money mucks things up. It's when the primary motivation for the creation of the art is to make money. That's when that slippery slope that leads to rampant mediocrity and shallow horseshit theater gets all slidey." I agree entirely.

Furthermore, like Don, I would extend this to non-arts jobs as well: "Here's a clue - don't take the job because of how much money it pays you. Take the job that you want. Find a job that seems like it will be challenging, fulfilling and pays you some kind of wage and then work hard to do it well. If you take a job because it gives you benefits (and that that is the main reason to take the job) then all you will end up having is benefits." Nicely said.

I even agree with him -- brace yourself -- that art is not a job: "The quality and value of a work of art has absolutely nothing to do with the economic status of the artist and everything to do with the honest endeavor to create something new and personal to share with the world."

I know you're all think I'm saying this to lull Don into a false sense of security so I can bash him in the nuts, but I'm not. Oh, sure, I don't buy his analogies, whether prostitution or poker, but life is too short for arguing about analogies and metaphors. What's most important is the central idea: art is an end in itself, not a means to something else, whether that something else is fame (yeesh) or wealth or whatever.

Don isn't saying, nor am I, that you shouldn't get paid for your work, or that your art isn't worth anything. What we're both saying, I think, is that once you start thinking about your "career" and "putting food on the table," you are thinking instrumentally, and you're starting to lose your way.

This isn't about purity, it is about focus and priorities. And perspective.

I'm going to go a step further -- although I think Don would agree with this, and may have himself said something similar in the past -- and say that I don't think it is a particularly good idea when artists make their entire living from their art. I think non-arts jobs keep artists in touch with the regular, non-artistic world and with regular, non-artistic people who they need to understand in order to create things that illuminate their reality. Oh, sure, there are artists whose total focus is on their own inner world, and whose ability and willingness to communicate with the world is negligible, and those artists will do what they do regardless of what people say. They need a different way of living, one either based in independent wealth, or extremely spartan. But aside from those outliers, I believe most artists benefit from keeping a foot in the quotidian.

Does that cut into their available time for artmaking? Of course it does. But when all is said and done, how much time can anyone spend making art nonstop. The creative imagination needs some rest, some time for processing things unconsciously, some new experiences to serve as raw material. But Don's right: choose the job carefully, so it doesn't deaden and abuse your soul, but rather enhances it.

Another step, this one I doubt Don will follow me on, but I could be surprised: I think artists need to give back. I know that in many ways the art that they create is a gift in itself, and I agree with that. But I think they need to share their talents with others. This might be teaching, or mentoring, or working in a school, or being a Big Brother or Big Sister, or volunteering at a neighborhood center or a nursing home, or any number of things where an artist can share the richness that is in their soul. This is another way of spreading the wonder of the arts, and is another way for the artist to add to their rootedness in reality. If at all possible, the focus of this contribution should be on helping other people connect with their own creativity, help them identify the meaningfulness of their lives, tell their own stories, share their own richness. In other words, it shouldn't be about the artist, but rather about others.

It would help enormously if Obama could create a program for universal health care -- the effect on artists of that single change in their lives would release more creativity than any increase in NEA funding could ever do. This isn't a pre-req for what I am saying above, just something that would help it to happen more easily. Nevertheless, the basic message Don is communicating is good advice: keep your eye on the ball.

Tom Loughlin On a Roll

Tom Loughlin at Poor Player has been writing some thought-provoking posts recently, and I hope to respond to one or two as soon as I can think carefully enough to meet Tom's level of reflection. But in case you haven't seen, them, here are the links.

http://poorplayer.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/why-i-teach/
http://poorplayer.wordpress.com/2009/02/01/what-i-teach/
http://poorplayer.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/tyranny-of-dead-ideas-theatre-edition/
http://poorplayer.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/my-mfa/
http://poorplayer.wordpress.com/2009/02/19/the-critical-mind/

I am also very excited to say that Tom and I will be pairing up at the Southeastern Theatre Conference in Birmingham AL on Friday March 6th to present a panel and discussion entitled ""What Are We DOING? Rethinking the College Theatre Major." The more Tom writes, the more I look forward to finally getting a chance to meet him!

On Prostitution, Art, and Other Absurdities

I'd like to say there is an interesting conversation going on at Angry White Guy between Don Hall and Adam Thurman, but I can't. I could say there is an energetic argument, full of sound and fury, but...well, you know the rest of the quotation. And the fault lies with Don, I'm afraid. Now, my inner Camille Paglia loves Don's melodramatic style. It's clear, it's strong, and it is a lively read. But my inner Descarte rebels. If I have my crap detector turned on at even the lowest setting, it starts going off almost instantaneously.

Let's start with Don't analogy: theatre is like a brothel. This one, which bookends his "theatre is like poker" analogy of several months back, is something we've been dealing with since St. Augustine turned against the theatre a little over 1600 years ago, taking the Catholic Church (and later the Protestant Church) with him down the anti-theatrical road. Don does a great job rehashing that argument:

"Prostitutes sell themselves - their bodies and their submission - to the person who will pay them to perform. Theater artists put themselves on display and display themselves - their bodes, ideals, ideas, and submission - for cash. Not that difficult to grasp."

At the risk of pedantry, let me just point out that this isn't true. Prostitutes do not sell their bodies, they rent their bodies. It's a limited-time offer. One might argue that selling your body and submission wouldn't be prostitution, but rather marriage, which is another institution entirely. It is the temporary nature of the transaction that has always landed prostitutes in hot water. So let's get our definitions straight.
With that out of the way, the fact is that anyone who is a wage laborer -- which is pretty much most of us -- rents their bodies and their submission in exchange for money. Not just artists, but cab drivers, longshoremen, college professors, and even lowly NPR employees. One might argue that prostitutes pretend that they like you and want to do what you want to do...but that's what we do as employees, too. Nope, it's just hard to get the definition of prostitution that Don offers to reduce down to something that pertains only to whores and artists. Unless the issue is that whole "display" thing, which was a big part of it for medieval and Puritan anti-theatrical writers, as well as some Islamic justification for certain rules about dress for women. So if Don's issue is "display of the body," would that leave off, say, radio drama? Or what about film, which is really the display of shadows of bodies who did something in the past? Or what about, say, the performers in Beckett's Play, who are disembodied except for their heads? Man, this is getting harder and harder.
The discussion continues:

Adam: "The idea that art is so damn fragile that if it gets near anything that smells "business related" it will lose it's luster is a product of childish and immature thinking."

Don: It's as old as the Bible, brother. Money corrupts the process. It ain't the art that is fragile. It's the artist.

This is the 1 Timothy 6:10 argument. Let's take a look at that Biblical passage upon which Don is basing his economic theory: "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." Hmmmm. So it isn't money that "corrupts," but rather the love of money, coveting, "to desire wrongfully, inordinately, or without due regard for the rights of others," in other words the excessive and wrongful hankering after money, which has caused some people to abandon their faith and, as a result, suffer pain. In Don's usage, read for "faith" the word "art," and maybe we're on to something. The artist is fragile, so saith Don -- he or she is easily tempted away from straight-and-narrow pathway of art by the love of money. When they sell their ideals for money, then they have sold their souls, strayed from their faith, and are cruisin' for a bruisin'. So preachest Reverend Hall.
But the Biblical injunction is against excessiveness. Like most classical philosophy, it is all about moderation in all things. One suspects that excessiveness has led a lot of people, artists or otherwise, down the forbidden pathway. For instance, excessive love of sex might just as easily lead one astray, or the excessive love of alcohol or drugs, or gambling, or...Facebook! Does Don recommend that artists equally avoid all these things (no! not Facebook!)? Or does he see, say, having sex with one's wife or husband as something that condemns the artist to corruption? Perdition on my soul, what are we to do?
The point is that it is the love of money, not money itself, that is the root of all evil. It is an overvaluing of money, placing it above all other things, that corrupts. It is arguable whether artists are "fragile" in this regard, or more fragile than anyone else who makes a living and puts food on the table. I doubt that most of us are making deep moral compromises in order to pay the rent, but maybe Don lives in a different world than I do and they ask him to do horrible stuff at NPR. When I look at the people who are doing theatre that some of us might find less than exemplary, I suspect that most of them have not, in fact, sold their soul, but rather either have a preference for that kind of theatre (yes, that IS possible), or have no preference about what they do as long as it is theatre. We all make choices, and Don's belief that all temptations should be removed lest artists stray smacks of paternalism bordering on puritanism. Artistic Amish-ness (Amish-itude?). I'd say we don't need anyone to protect our artistic soul for us. Some saint, quoted I believe in Herbert Blau's The Impossible Theatre, says something to the effect that she prays better when her stomach isn't empty. I suspect artists feel the same, and the the cost of doing so is not soul destroying.
Frankly, this discussion of Art versus Money, especially framed in simplistic terms like prostitution and instant corruption, creates a lot of heat and not much light. It takes a complex question about the relation of money and values and turns it into an all-or-nothing, good-versus-evil melodrama. Yes, some Big Institutions put Money ahead of Art; some Little Guys do the same. Money is not an economic Tar Baby that, once touched, leads directly to destruction. It is a complicated tool for living in this world that requires the development of deeply held principles to manage the balance, not the spartan rejection of all things monetary in the interest of some artistic virginity, pure as the driven snow. Don proposes an economic chastity belt. The choice is not between artistic Madonna or Whore, an opposition that has proven itself as absurd when it comes to women as it would in relation to art.
What needs to happen -- and this is why I am a strong proponent of arts education that intellectual content and not just how-to skill development -- is that young artists need to be explicitly and repeatedly required to develop a thorough philosophy of what they will and won't do for their art -- an artistic creed, if you will -- that can serve as a touchstone for later decisions that touch on artistic and economic integrity. That way, they can make thoughtful decisions in the moment, because they will have thought through what they stand for.
But I've always been in favor of education over abstinence.