Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

I hadn’t decided whether or not to blog separately about Monday night’s performance of Siegfried at The Metropolitan Opera or not. I’ve written about it before and didn’t have a whole lot of startlingly new things to say about it. The billed cast all showed up for the first time in Cycle 2. Robert Lepage’s machine set, continually underwhelming in a myriad of new and different ways, malfunctioned in Act II, leaving an rebellious Plank 24 (or Plank 1 depending on your perspective) at the far right side of the stage fully extended toward the audience throughout the whole act with an apparent case of Wagnerian priapism. Even in the strongest Act of the whole cycle so far, Act II, one wonders why there’s so often so little to look at. Bryn Terfel, the Wanderer, sounded better and better. Jay Hunter Morris in the title role was wonderful vocally and acting wise even when he began to lose steam at the end. Patricia Bardon’s Erda still had on that blinding mirror paneled dress. Eric Owens (Alberich) and Gerhard Siegel (Mime) were both superstars. Katarina Dalayman’s Brünnhilde abrasively shrieked her way through the final act over Fabio Luisi’s surprisingly light touch with the score.

None of this seemed compelling enough for a post, though, until the story broke yesterday in the New York Times when Daniel Wakin reported that local classical radio station WQXR removed a blog post from their site critical of the Met’s new production of the Ring at the specific request of Met Opera general director Peter Gelb. Clucking has ensued over this subject all over the intertubes. Assuming that what is stated in the report is factual, I can’t say I would much blame Mr. Gelb for making such a request if he did so. As head of the company he has an interest in maintaining a positive image for his company’s product, especially with other organizations that the company has sponsorship and other financial arrangements with. Such a request certainly makes business sense. Whether or not such a request should be honored by an independent media organization is an entirely different matter, however, and here the charges of censorship certainly make sense.

What this got me thinking about, though, was about the role of bloggers like myself overall in the media equation these days. It was a large media organization that reportedly removed the piece to begin with. It was another large new organization that discovered what had happened and reported it. And it was one of the Internet’s largest opera bloggers, James Jordan, who subsequently again made the original piece widely available for everyone to read online in much greater numbers than they would have originally.

What’s the meaning of all this? Well if you ask Lisa Hirsch, and you should because she knows an awful lot of things, the incident supports an argument about why a robust independent blogosphere is important for the arts, allowing varied and independent voices to have their say. And I agree she has a point. In the above alleged scenario, one major media organization caved under pressure to one of the largest arts organizations in the country over something that said organization didn’t like. It’s something to think about. There’s been a lot of moaning about what’s been lost with the shrinking ranks of arts journalists along with the declining fortunes of print media in the last several years. And while I won’t disagree that something has been lost with this change, one of those things is not necessarily a free and independent perspective unbridled by the influence of the organizations that this same media covers. No speech is free, nor has it ever been. Small independent bloggers are often accused of being easily bought and sold by the interests that they write about. And while that’s true, don’t believe for a minute that arts journalists for major media organizations aren’t subject to a plethora of political and ethical pressures often from the largest and most powerful organizations they are asked to cover on a regular basis. If the above scenario doesn’t convince you, there are plenty of others, and I’ve heard critics for major papers bitch regularly about things like where their free seats are in the auditorium or what a tragedy it would be if their organization actually had to pay for the tickets for the very programming they are writing about. And this from those with the journalistic morals most beyond reproach.

This is also not to say that big media journalists are somehow more susceptible to influence than small independent voices on line and elsewhere. Of course, the same sorts of political pressures can be brought to bear on smaller voices just as easily, and powerful arts organizations have in many circumstances targeted independent bloggers just as easily as big media organizations. It’s also true that large media organizations sport resources that may help ensure what independence its journalists have against corrupting influences. The point here is that having both types of voices may actually proved some benefit. Part of the reason I started Out West Arts six years ago was because I wanted more critical voices in my local arts scene, not less. I’m not trying to outdo the larger media voices that existed at the time I started and still do. I would never be able to do that for a variety of reasons anyway. But I’m with Lisa in that it's the very fact that there are more voices—and ones that speak from a variety of points of view, expertise, and political perspectives—that an arts scene becomes stronger. With a variety of smaller voices added to the media mix, the diverse plethora of thinking and opinions hopefully can allow for ideas and opinions less encumbered by forces that may want to censor or unduly influence what gets written. Silencing one or two voices is one thing, silencing a great many is much harder.

So I am writing about Siegfried even though I’ve had more to say about other topics, because I think it is important that I do so. Sure you can read about it elsewhere and hear about all kinds of issues regarding the show that I might not even think about bringing up. Still I think what I write here matters if only because it’s one voice among many, and more voices in and of itself is an important thing.

Labels: Met opera reviews 11/12, rant

Last week the Spring for Music Festival, an annual New York-based concert series at Carnegie Hall celebrating adventurous programming by North American orchestras, announced a contest to pick the best English-language culture blogger in North America. The contest involves bloggers writing responses to a series of prompts while a panel of judges and the voting public slowly whittles away the dross to determine a virtual champion. As a member of the likely target audience for this endeavor, I wasn’t particularly taken with the idea for several reasons. Chief among these was the first writing prompt. To wit: “New York has long been considered the cultural capital of America. Is it still? If not, where?” This strikes me as a proposition so preposterous that not even the most myopic Park Slope hipster would take it seriously. It smells like bait to me; the kind of thing intended to inspire vigorous debate but instead almost automatically squelches it. But maybe it’s to be expected from an organization whose mission statement touts that they “provide a vehicle for orchestras to showcase their artistic creativity in a concentrated and highly competitive format in the world’s most renowned concert venue.” And as innovative as the American Idol model of concert programming development and online arts commentary may be, I think I’ll pass. But then The Washington Post’s Anne Midgette is all, like, bring it. And thus, it is brought.

I suppose I should speak as a Southern Californian, and in the great tradition of California, refuse to play by rules set out for me in advance. While I may be writing in response to this and perhaps all the other prompts, I will not enter the contest. If drafted against my will, I will not accept any prize, choosing instead to leave it like Brando’s Godfather Oscar, unclaimed with only @FernBri or @FakeNLebrecht to use the occasion for their own form of protest. But on a less melodramatic note, there is the matter of that rather uninteresting prompt itself. What in heaven’s name does “cultural capital” mean? Why would someone want his or her culture capitalized to begin with? If the implication that there are places with an abundance and variety of cultural commodities to be consumed by the bourgeoisie, I suppose New York is one. It is true that if my house-arrest anklet prevented me from leaving the isle of Manhattan, I’d want for little in the culture department. (That is, something other than great opera, cutting edge theater, and a hometown orchestra that plays somewhere besides the local Home Depot.)

But I digress. Tearing down the New York arts scenes or building up some other city’s isn’t the kind of Marxist examination of political economy I care to engage in. And as much as I love the benefits of a “highly competitive format” as much as the next guy, I think there are far more important and interesting questions and considerations to make about the culture of North America. (I’ve always considered myself a Mille Plateaux kind of guy if you know what I mean.) Still there is an invitation here to think about my own beloved, schizophrenic Los Angeles, and the way it has created itself and the rest of America–if not the world–up until recently. Although it’s an era that is rapidly drawing to an end, it is Los Angeles, in a geographic sense, and Hollywood in a metaphorical one, that has been preeminent in the latter half of the 20th century, not so much as a site of access to culture, but as the source of creation for all of the consumers of that culture to begin with. The advent of mass-oriented film and television businesses that make L.A. an industry town has done more than just create cultural artifacts to be consumed by a worldwide audience. In fact, it is the euphemistically titled “entertainment industry” that has itself created America and the Americans that inhabit if for several generations.

Of course, I don’t mean this physically, but more in a subjective, ideological sense. It is Los Angeles that has been the primary source of mass-produced images that have defined virtually every aspect of American lives psychologically until perhaps just the last few years. For example, Verdi and Wagner both had plenty to say about families that still resonates with audiences today. But I would argue for better or worse a string of images from The Cleavers to the Karsashians have exerted far more comprehensive power over how Americans imagine themselves a part of a family or not. Yet whether these images are validated or rejected by individual viewers, in the end they define the very terms of debate on a full range of sites of contestation.

This is a living, dynamic process where the means of image production and distribution have remained relatively constant for several decades. It is only recently as the mass part of the mass media has started to wane, that the relevance of these references, or better yet the increasing multiplicity of images Americans are asked to process and contend with, has started to recede. With the cultural capital of the filmed image returning less and less, the identities of Americans and their very subjectivity is being contested in new ways. There are so many more voices in an increasingly technologically interconnected world. How do we locate intellectual authority and how do we continue to know what we thought we used to? This is as true in arts commentary and criticism as it is elsewhere. And perhaps this is part of the thinking of the Spring for Music blogger contest. We’ll sort out who knows what they are talking about and who doesn’t with a panel of judges and a voting public like some televised singing competition. But I suspect the blue ribbons have already been handed out elsewhere and will continue to be so. Smoke on your pipe, and put that in.

Labels: rant