The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America

Why is art failing in this country, in this world?

According to author and Harvard psycology professor Steve Pinker in his essay A Biological Understanding of Human Nature, the art world, as it has developed in the modern and post-modern era, is not fulfilling a societal obligation, and that is at the roots of its failure.

In the twentieth century, modernism and postmodernism took over, and their practitioners disdained beauty as bourgeois, saccharine, lightweight. Art was deliberately made incomprehensible or ugly or shocking—again, on the assumption that our predilections for attractive faces, landscapes, colors, and so on were reversible social constructions. This also led to an exaggeration of the dynamic of social status that has always been part of the arts. The elite arts used to be aligned with the economic and political aristocracy. They involved displays of sumptuosity and the flaunting of rare and precious skills that only the idle rich could cultivate. But now that any schmo could afford a Mozart CD or go to a free museum, artists had to figure out new ways to differentiate themselves from the rabble. So art became baffling and uninterpretable—unless you had some acquaintance with arcane theory.

By their own admission, the humanities programs in universities, and institutions that promote new works of elite art, are in crisis. People are staying away in droves. I don’t think it takes an Einstein to figure out why. …many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature. The aesthetic and emotional reactions we have to works of art depend on how our brain is put together. Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. And the insights we hope to take away from great works of art depend on their ability to explore the eternal conflicts in the human condition, like those between men and women, self and society, parent and child, sibling and sibling, friend and friend.

Some theoreticians of literature have suggested that we appreciate tragedy and great works of fiction because they explore the permutations and combinations of human conflict—and these are the very themes that fields like evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics and social psychology try to illuminate. The sciences of the mind can reinforce the idea that there is an enduring human nature that great art can appeal to.

CAFA occasionally receives a particular and peculiar response to the strange and distressing features of contemporary artistic failure that we point out week after week. It is this: “Well, yeah, things are fucked up in the arts. But that’s always been true. Things are no different now than they’ve ever been.”

Well, actually, I would argue things are much worse now for artists and the arts than they’ve ever been. In fact, it is a key part of the mission of CAFA to document exactly how they are worse.

As a case in point, consider these two stories, which reveal how human attitudes about art and cultural treasures have worsened over the past two hundred-odd years.

First, in 2004, just a bit more than four years ago, on the first anniversary of the war in Iraq, I wrote an essay about why, despite having every reason to be gloomy, I still loved art. I had been to Paris a year earlier, soaking up the arts ambiance of the place just as our national brain trust was making its ill-fated decision to open up the bomb works on Iraq. Here was the crux of my argument (for still loving art despite the dispicableness of humanity):

Toward the end of the trip I took a train out to Chartres to see the famous cathedral. Once there, I latched onto a tour with local British historian Malcolm Miller. He pointed out the stories in the cathedral’s stained glass, which windows had been restored at what cost, and so on. He… took us outside to look at the Gothic sculpture that adorned the exterior of the building. We examined the flying buttresses, learned how many steps were in each tower (and when each tower was built), and came to a part of the cathedral accessible to a small town square. Here, he pointed out sculptural figures that were armless, occasionally headless, chipped in leg and foot, and asked us if we knew what had happened. One person guessed that was the ravages of time, but Miller shook his head.

“In 1793,” he said, “revolutionaries converged on the cathedral to remove the sculpture and rededicate the building as a palace of enlightenment, or some such.” Such fanatics had knocked many of Paris’s cathedrals to the ground in the early 1790s, and some wanted to do the same in Chartres. They began hacking at its statuary, Miller explained, only to be stopped by a local official. “They had already done some damage, as you can see, knocking off heads and other elements that they could reach. The official stopped them by simply saying in one hundred years people will want to come see the cathedral.”

Here I was, more than two hundred years later, thankful to the nameless official for his insight. The simple answer to why I love art, why I continue to seek it out despite all the distressing and depressing things of the world, is that it is in art then that we rise above it all… In the long run, art outlasts all the tiresome and anxiety-inducing aspects of living; it outlasts the arguments, the blood feuds, and the sectarian squabbles. Art is the way we reveal ourselves as somehow more than ordinary.

Now, compare Story 1 with Story 2, which recently appeared in the L.A. Times, about all the priceless and irreplaceable antiquities and ancient artistic treasures that were taken, damaged, or destroyed from Iraq’s National Museum at the onset of the Iraq war. “Five years ago this week,” the story by Johanna Neuman begins,

looters ransacked the Iraqi National Museum, stealing centuries-old artifacts that celebrated Iraq’s role as the cradle of civilization… Today, investigators say that about 15,000 pieces were either stolen in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 or went unaccounted for in the months and years before the conflict began. About half have been recovered. But the impact of the thefts — amulets, Assyrian ivories, sculpture heads, ritual vessels and cylinder seals — is still being felt in art circles and black markets throughout the world.

“The numbers can’t tell the whole story,” said U.S. Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos, a New York assistant district attorney who has made the hunt for antiquities his specialty. “These things remind us of our common beginnings.”

Plus ça change, plus d’art échoue…

According to an April 13 story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, that city is facing a looming $119 million budget shortfall. And of course, as any good CAFA reader would expect, the city is poised to make an assault on its cultural institutions.

“When city budgets get tough,” the story begins, “arts and recreation programs are typically among the first to get cut…

“If the City Council approves the across-the-board cuts, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution analysis of the city’s current budget shows that the Parks, Recreation and Cultural Affairs department will lose more money than any nonpublic safety department — $8.1 million.”

Said one commentator: “The arts are generally the service to get cut because many people don’t see the value.”

A FEW WEEKS AGO, over tropical cocktails at a party at my home, I spoke with my old friend and colleague Caroline Palmer. Caroline and I first met about ten years ago, when we both started writing around the same time for the alt-weekly in Minneapolis, City Pages. She was a dance critic, and I was a writer on visual art, but we had certain key things in common that guaranteed we’d become friends: we were both in our early thirties at the time, and nowhere as cool and hip as the average alt-weekly writer; we both had come up as practitioners, in our twenties, of what we wrote about (she a dancer, me a visual artist); we both had made a conscious decision to give up professional pursuit of artistic practices in favor of more secure and stable work and income (she a nonprofit lawyer, me a book publisher); and we both were, despite our giving up the practices, completely dedicated to and fascinated by our respective fields.

For various reasons, Caroline and I hadn’t seen each other for several years. I had been forced to stop writing art criticism for City Pages four years earlier, when the newspaper began to struggle with declining advertising income and space became a premium, so I no longer saw her at social events related to the paper. Then, in short order, I got divorced, moved across the country, got several new jobs and a graduate degree (in arts management), moved back, got engaged to someone new, got married, got another new job, and remodeled a house.

Eventually, we reconnected. Caroline has continued writing for City Pages, in the process becoming—after a year-long littany of layoffs, staff turnovers, firings, and other guttings (that started with the firing of the editor who first cut back on my visual arts writing) decimated the paper in 2007—the currently longest continously employed writer at City Pages.

At the party, I congratulated her on her longevity. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m still doing things with them. You wouldn’t believe how much things have changed over there in the past year. It’s a completely different place. I don’t know. The atmosphere is different… It used to be fun and lively, but now it’s just glum.” We talked a bit about writers we knew in common who had been let go by the papers corporate masters—whoever they might be now—and how poorly they had been treated by the outsourced management. A few of the (unceremoniously) shit-canned writers—like film critic Rob Nelson, and music writer Jim Walsh—had an actual national following and cred.

“Well, at least you’re still writing,” I said. She smiled wanly. “Yeah, but it’s not the same. All they let me do now is write A-List blurbs,” (this is the same deal I was offered by the arts editor when he told me they’d no longer be taking visual art stories or reviews), “I really miss writing reviews. Saying something significant about dance, you know? I wish I could just find a place to write dance reviews. It’s really all I want to do.”

A LOT OF ARTISTS profess to hate critics, their inconstancy, their unpredictability, their lack of support of artists (read: of them), their recalcitrant independence. Some artists say “good riddance” to the critic who gets downsized out of the local papers and publications, and they exclaim, “so what? Things are tough all over. What have you ever done for me?” Then, in time, many of these same callous artists turn around and bemoan how hard it is to get attention from an ambivalent, overtaxed, overstimulated public.

It’s looking now, more and more, in this Web 2.0 mob-rules age of user-generated content, that artists won’t have to worry about being frustrated by professional critics anymore. Even though a 2003 report saw a huge lack of cultural coverage in the nation’s daily papers, things have grown worse. Among national and regional publications of late, we’ve seen significant layoffs in every field of artistic and creative endeavor. It’s been true in visual arts criticism, literary criticism, classical, jazz and other music criticism, even movie criticism. It’s gotten so bad, that the venerable national weekly news magazine Newsweek recently fired its entire cultural staff.

At the party, I had no answer for Caroline’s dream of writing reviews about dance. Though I still write occasional art reviews for local publications and several national ones, it’s true that the local media landscape has become increasingly denuded. It also seems that things will only be getting worse in coming years. The weeks since Caroline’s lament have seen two major firings of prominent professionals in Caroline’s field—both Laura Bleiberg of the OC Register and Deborah Jowitt of the Village Voice have lost their dance critic jobs.

And lest you pull out a gut-wrench “good riddance,” or “you’ve never done me any good,” or “you’ve never written anything worth reading anyway” (translation: you’ve never written anything about me), consider: Fewer working experienced critics means less opportunity for being written about (not more); fewer regular publication venues for arts criticism and writing means almost no opportunity for young writers to learn their craft, hone their judgment, and develop professional future careers as critics; and, ultimately, the loss of arts criticism means that the forces of blind commerce and bottom-dollar, high-yield economics will be dictating to the rest of us, for many many years to come, that our culture will be grayer, drabber, less vibrant, less diverse, and generally less understood and appreciated than it otherwise could have been.

So word from United Press International is the voiceless, weightless shadow of cancer-victim Roger Ebert can’t wait to get back to writing movie criticism again.

“I am at last returning to the movie beat,” Ebert announced in the letter published Tuesday. “I’m looking forward to opening night of my annual film festival at the University of Illinois on April 23, and I will resume writing movie reviews shortly thereafter.”

The critic said he underwent his third surgery in January, but revealed his ability to speak was not restored; that would require another operation.

“But I still have all my other abilities, including the love of viewing movies and writing about them,” Ebert said.

We here at Art Failure Central certainly wish Mr. Ebert a speedy recovery and many long years of out-thrust thumbs. However, we also suggest that perhaps it might be a different kind of cancer—the cancer of art failure, and the failure of newspapers and of daily arts criticism—that ultimately ends his critical career. If you don’t believe me, check out what David Carr of the New York Times recently had to say about the impending demise of the movie critic.

The continual drumbeat of news that film critics are being laid off at daily and weekly newspapers across the country has kicked up some quotable reviews.

“A dire situation!” Scott Rudin, independent film producer.

“A terrible loss!” Tom Bernard, Sony Pictures Classics.

“Puts serious movies at risk!” Mark Urman, ThinkFilm.

Those men …. were upset by the departures of movie critics. Nathan Lee, one of The Village Voice’s two full-time critics, was laid off last week by Village Voice Media, a large chain of alternative weeklies that has been cutting down the number of critics it employs across the country.

The week before, two longtime critics at Newsday — Jan Stuart and Gene Seymour — took buyouts, along with their editor. And at Newsweek, David Ansen is among 111 staff members taking buyouts, according to a report in Radar.

They join critics at more than a dozen daily newspapers (including those in Denver, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale) and several alternative weeklies who have been laid off, reassigned or bought out in the past few years, deemed expendable at a time when revenues at print publications are declining, under pressure from Web alternatives and a growing recession in media spending.

R.I.P., art/movie critics (and newspapers)!

A recent story by Scott Russell called Setting standards, cutting funding for arts education that appeared in the online news aggregator Twin Cities Daily Planet reports that once-vaunted local arts education standards are currently being threatened. 

For many Minnesota art students, the author writes, “arts seem to be a thinning palette.”

This is because while Minnesota state standards in education focus on the value of art in the curriculum, the actual requirements for art, starting this year (and perhaps due to the No Child Left Behind laws) in a student’s education are minimal: only one art credit is needed to graduate from Minnesota high schools.

“Unlike reading, math and science,” Russell writes, “there is no high-stakes state arts test. Each district sets its own measure of art success. If students pass the art class that could be enough to meet the graduation requirement. That means arts can get the brush-off in the budget process, as schools focus resources on reading and math where success is measured by highly publicized, quantitative test scores.”

This means that statewide, according to Michael Hiatt, director of professional development and research at the Perpich Center for Arts Education, in “traditional schools” art teachers are “getting stretched to cover more and more students.” “It is more of a case of the haves and have nots,” in arts education, he said. “The gap is widening.”

Mary Schaefle, executive director of the Minnesota Music Educators Association, studies equity in arts education. From 2000-2006, she found, the number of “public school students dropped 1.5 percent” while the number of “public school music teachers dropped more than 11 percent”–indicating a drop-off in quantity of music lessons provided. In addition, the story sites the replacement, over this time period, of regular school arts instruction with more supplementary guest artist programs. “Obviously it saves some schools some money,” said one such instructor, “rather than hire a full-time teacher.”

One high school art teacher suggested that currently in Minnesota arts funding is “hit and miss, depending on what district you happen to be in, what part of the state you happen to live in, what the resources happen to be at any given moment.” The results, predictably, are a decline in talent levels among kids as they move through the education system, an ongoing deterioration in equipment and facilities for the arts in schools, and a resulting deterioration of interest among students in these subject areas.

When downturns happen, when people are shocked out of their regular ruts, when the bombing starts and buildings are knocked down–whenever something bad happens on a large scale in the country, the arts are the first thing that goes out the window.

Case in point for today (March 4, 2008), as the collective economic hand-wringing mounts to a deafening pitch:

• Critic Sasha Anwalt, on the NAJP blog, yesterday pointed out that the L.A. Times is canning its long-time dance critic Lewis Segal. Anwalt writes, “this signals a gigantic disconnect between the people and press…. and his loss is worth protesting on many fronts.”
• Last week, Douglas McLennan wrote on the same blog about the Hartford Courant’s buyout of its television critic. McLennan also posted, a few days ago, an analysis of the ongoing failure of newspapers in this country.
• Andrew Taylor, on his Art Journal blog on arts management, wrote about the need for nonprofit mission-driven organizations to consider when to close their doors. (This relates to a story CAFA has been following out of Boston, where the Boston Foundation has suggested that the directors of “struggling arts groups” should perhaps begin seeking “exit strategies.”)
• The arts & architecture blog of the Guardian Unlimited recently posted about the inevitability of suffering for artists, and, appropriately, about the British Arts Council’s painful upcoming funding cuts to arts organizations.
• And, to top it all off and tie it all together, a recent story in the New York Times examines the quaint American habit to eschew all things intellectual. To quote the main subject of the story, Susan Jacoby, author of several books on this subject of American anti-intellectualism: “Now… something different is happening: anti-intellectualism (the attitude that “too much learning can be a dangerous thing”) and anti-rationalism (“the idea that there is no such things as evidence or fact, just opinion”) have fused in a particularly insidious way. Not only are citizens ignorant about essential scientific, civic and cultural knowledge, she said, but they also don’t think it matters.”

Be wary of walking under windows, lest you be hit in the head with all the art and culture we’re tossing out.

Things are really beginning to get bad for the arts these days. So bad, that even our enlightened and genteel northern neighbor, Canada, has undertaken an American-style slash-and-burn approach to spending on the arts in its current budget. According to the Globe and Mail online edition:

In short, yesterday’s budget, in the name of maintaining what Finance Minister Jim Flaherty called “strong fiscal management,” seemed to duck virtually every concern that the Canadian cultural community has been voicing in the past five years.

According to this story on the CBC’s website, arts groups are bitterly disappointed in the budget’s disregard for spending on arts and culture. “Cultural investment generates economic activity,” said one artist representative, “provides opportunities for performers and other creators and generates high-quality Canadian programming and films audiences want to watch… In tough times, that’s exactly the kind of investment government should be making, but they’ve failed to act.”

Meanwhile, not to be outdone by Canada’s new-found “Americanness” in regards to the arts, it appears our very own lame-duck president’s parting policy shot will be to eviscerate an arts community already deeply struggling to survive. According to a story called “National Endowment for the Arts budget cuts should be met with outrage, not complacency,” from the Louisville Courier-Journal, Bush is attempting an arts funding end-around in the last budget that he’ll ever sign off on:

Tucked away in the thousands of pages covering $3 trillion worth of proposed expenditures was a $16.3 million cut in support for the National Endowment for the Arts. That would reduce its operating budget from $144.7 million during fiscal 2008 to $128.4 million in 2009.

You heard right. Barely two months after signing off on a $20 million increase in the NEA’s budget — the largest in the endowment’s history — our nation’s chief executive quickly shifted into fiscal reverse. In budget-speak, this is called a “rescission.” In plain-speak, it’s an outrage.

First, some rare good news: The Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America has learned that one of its blog postings, the first of a two-parter about the Colorado artist Dean Fleming, was picked up this week by the website of the Minneapolis-based magazine, The Utne Reader. Thanks to the Reader for their interest in this unusual artist, and in the Chronicle of Artistic Failure in America.

To read more about Fleming, you can also go to this post. To read more in general about struggling, aging artists go here.

Meanwhile, the bigger news this past week in Minnesota was the demise of the monthly feature magazine The Rake. Now, some would say–in a market where the local papers have downsized significantly over the past few years (cutting numerous arts and cultural writing position), where the local newsweekly has fired and replaced its entire writing/editorial staff over the past year, and where the local media market is constantly in flux–the loss of The Rake was just another blip on the path to local media/cultural/practical illiteracy.

It’s not putting too fine a point on things to say that all local publishers (and media professionals) are running scared. “Things have changed radically in the last six years, and I think it’s going to get worse long before it gets better,” Rake Publisher Tom Bartel said. “It’s too expensive to produce journalism and then have Google come along and take all your advertising.” “At best, these are challenging times, maybe even recessionary times,” said John Rash, a senior vice president at advertising agency Campbell Mithun who follows the media market and writes a monthly column for the Star Tribune. “While there is some tremendous journalism on websites and in smaller publications, it is more difficult to monetize it, both locally and nationally. Newspapers themselves have struggled.” “We think the next 18 months are going to be tough for advertising in general,” said Deborah Hopp, publisher of Mpls.St.Paul magazine, based in Minneapolis. “Our expectation is that, around here, weaker players will fall by the wayside.”

For purposes of our interest in artistic failure, however, the loss of The Rake hits home because this publication was particularly invested in and involved with the arts locally—initiating a quarterly arts insert (and a celebratory event) called 10,000 Arts, hiring a former arts writer as their editor-in-chief (which meant lots of interest in arts writing), and partnering with and supporting a number of local arts organizations on a range of projects.

The Rake will be missed…

By the way, as a separate, but related note: I wasn’t even aware that the Utne Reader still existed, were you?…

An inevitable result of any widespread economic downturn in America are rumblings and stories of politicians and policy-makers seeking to cut arts funding in their state. Never mind that the arts take up a rather miniscule part of any given state’s budget, and that diversion and distraction (in the form of the arts) are often what we most need in times of economic downturn, the great American impulse is: when the pocketbook constricts, it’s time to kill off the artists.

And so we’re seeing such stories start to roll out over the virtual transom:

• In New Jersey, which faces $32 billion of accumulated debt (and a $2.9 billion project budget gap this year), Gov. Corzine has announced plans for “deep cuts to higher education, health care and the arts…,” as well as to state employees’ jobs. This despite the fact that New Jersey’s art budget makes up only about $40-$50 million of an annual $33.5 billion state budget.
• Indianapolis, meanwhile, is facing its own budget woes and so is looking to cut the $1.54 million the city distributes to 75 local arts organizations. This has resulted, understandably, in a lot of nervousness among Indy’s arts community.

CAFA will continue to monitor these budget-cutting developments as more stories are published.