I mean, how could you not?
I'll be providing more extensive data in an upcoming GNXP post on how people these days do appreciate good art, contra the declinist complaints that our culture is devolving in a cult of Britney Spears music and American Pie movies. For starters, though, here is a nine year-old Reason article on the non-decline in public enjoyment of the arts during our technological age.
Some still worry that, even if more people can spot a Renoir painting after touring a blockbuster museum exhibition, the more aristocratic art forms like ballet are in danger. Well, at least in Britain, this is not true. What about those youngsters held in constant bondage to their computers, mindlessly absorbing YouTube videos? Let's set a threshold of roughly 100,000 views and see how many videos are this popular, using the following search terms in YouTube: "Paris Opera Ballet" gets 4, "Kirov" gets 7, "Bolshoi" gets 9, and "Semionova" also gets 9, including one with over 1 million views.
Obviously, searching for "Swan Lake" or "Nutcracker" returns even more videos exceeding the threshold, but the above four searches show that even ballet videos that aficionados would look for are quite popular. Of course, we have no way to compare popularity on YouTube across the decades, but there should be no such videos if our culture were in such disrepair.
It's also true that there are more "one hit wonder" pop songs that exceed the threshold, and by a larger amount, but it is a mistake to expect liking ballet to ever be as common as digging pop music. That is sheer Utopianism, the artworld equivalent of No Child Left Behind. (I don't doubt that some group of morons has, in a vain struggle to alter human nature, squandered tax dollars on ensuring "a Beethoven in every CD player.")
What we should really focus on is the degree to which potential ballet lovers are being converted into actual ballet lovers. And for anyone whose financial means or location do not allow them to be touched by the world's top ballet performers in person, they can still be moved at a distance via YouTube.
1. Literature is struggling. People, even the educated, just read less. Students entering and leaving major universities are far less well read than their predecessors. Both Harold Bloom and Frank Kermode, our best critics, and who generally like to fight about things, have been quite eloquent in their agreement on this.
ReplyDelete2. Classical music is struggling. Classical music used to be a big part of middle brow culture. Its not anymore. Most people used to be able to get the Wagner and Rossini references in a Looney Tunes, but do they now? Compounding the problem for orchestras is that people who do like classical music, tend to listen to it on recording.
3. Ballet is not as important a part of popular culture as it used to be. Nureyev's appearance on The Muppet Show essentially launched that show. That a ballet star or classical singer could launch a popular TV show seems like something from another galaxy. However, at least ballet, like opera, is pretty hard to reproduce well via recording, so ballet companies are not going to go out of business anytime soon.
I think the big problem with this post is that you have to distinguish between the absolute number of art consumers and the relative importance of high culture to the general culture. The former may be increasing, but only because of an increase in overall population. The relative influence of the high arts on the general culture seems to be going down.
Also, if you will read that Independant article you will notice that ballet choreography like classical music composition is in serious trouble. I big part of this switch is that the arts are about status and the high arts do _not_ have the status they used to so the greatest talents don't go into them anymore. People often go into the high arts anymore because they want to be a big star and now the only way to do that is to enter the movies or pop music. The high arts are now a niche market. You can't get famous like Toscanini by being a conductor anymore, nor as famous as Leonard Bernstein by being a composer.
On the other hand, as I noted, there are bright spots; movies are as great an art form as any of the above and they have been mostly thriving. The same with more popular forms of music.
BTW Terry Teachout has a good overview of the problems facing the high arts here:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/selling-classical-music-10934
I'll say more later, but one thing to bear in mind is that lots of previously elite institutions have been opened up, for better or worse, to a broader swath of society.
ReplyDeleteThat's one reason why university-educated people don't read as much -- they're dumber than before, by about 9 IQ points (according to a recent Inductivist post).
This applies to just about anything that has been watered down, but we shouldn't worry since the people who would've read a lot 40 years ago are the people who read a lot now.
Classical musicians and critics may be struggling, but as you point out, that's due to the popularity of CD recordings. I'm focusing more on the traits of the audience, not on the performers.
Classical music used to be a big part of middle brow culture. Its not anymore.
ReplyDeleteFrom that Reason article:
In 1985, according the National Endowment for the Arts, 3 percent of adults reported seeing an opera within the previous year, 22 percent reported going to an art museum, and 56 percent reported reading literature. In 1997, those figures had risen to 5 percent for operas, 35 percent for art museums, and 63 percent for literature. Nineteen ninety-seven also saw record levels reported on the activity side, with 16 percent of adults drawing, 17 percent taking art photos, 35 percent buying art work, and 12 percent doing creative writing.
These are percentages, not absolute numbers.
You're right that high culture isn't taken as seriously as before, but that doesn't mean that the audience doesn't like or appreciate it. That's for the better: less emphasis on listening to Beethoven to show off your status, and more on listening to him because he's great.
Classical music is struggling. Classical music used to be a big part of middle brow culture. Its not anymore. Most people used to be able to get the Wagner and Rossini references in a Looney Tunes, but do they now? Compounding the problem for orchestras is that people who do like classical music, tend to listen to it on recording.
ReplyDeleteSymphony orchestras seem to have a lot of problems with unions. It's as if the boards of directors are congentially incapable of saying "no" to union demands.
In 1985, according the National Endowment for the Arts, 3 percent of adults reported seeing an opera within the previous year, 22 percent reported going to an art museum, and 56 percent reported reading literature. In 1997, those figures had risen to 5 percent for operas, 35 percent for art museums, and 63 percent for literature.
ReplyDeleteDid Reason even bother to get their facts right on this one?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/07/08/national/main628194.shtml
Here is the latest NEA report on reading:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.PDF
I haven't read it myself.
The New Yorker has a summary of some of the other research:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2007/12/24/071224crat_atlarge_crain?currentPage=1
Just a technical note that you have to use html to get links to appear.
ReplyDeleteI'll dig through all this in more detail, but on first glance literature seems to be an outlier, since the NEA notes that inflation-adjusted spending on attending the performing arts has either increased slightly or remained constant, but not declined.
ReplyDeleteAnother thing that jumped out of the several reports I skimmed over is how anti-cultural the Hispanic population is -- reading, attending the performing arts, all of it. There was a huge surge of Hispanic immigration during the '90s that continues to today, so that may be a confounding factor.
I think the GSS (that Inductivist always looks at) will allow me to break apart Whites by themselves.
Another bit of speculation: if, as it seems, the visual and performing arts are either not struggling or are doing better, while literature is tanking -- in terms of attracting an audience -- this could be a part of what some perceive as a shorter cultural attention span.
ReplyDeleteLet's say the average person's reading speed is 3 minutes per page for a work of literature, where some care must be taken to what's going on. Multiply that by 250 pages, and you get 12.5 required hours.
Seeing all the great works of a Big Artist in your museum's blockbuster exhibition takes, at most, 4 hours, maybe more like 2. Same is true for attending an orchestral music concert or watching a dance performance. Also true for watching a great movie.
They used to serialize novels in print, but that's not going to happen nowadays. They should serialize them on TV, doing a good job of course. I haven't seen it, but people say the 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited is really good.
Hmm, I still think there is some real decline in the realm of classical music. According to the Reason article classical music _is_ down somewhat as a percentage of sales.
ReplyDeleteDance is probably least affected, though there are some disturbing signs there too. (That Independant article mentions that most of the dancers are foreign.) Still, girls do love to dance, so for some the dream of being a ballerina will never die. I would guess that the biggest decline of balletomania is among heterosexual males. Straight flight and all.
Let's say the average person's reading speed is 3 minutes per page for a work of literature, where some care must be taken to what's going on.
Wow, what do you know about reading speed? What about correlation with IQ. I read about 1 page per minute.
Critic Harold Bloom claims that at his peak he could read at a rate of about 8 pages a minute.
Steve Sailer has some commentary here:
ReplyDeleteBallet schools, for example, need male dancers to partner all the little girls who want to be ballerinas, but they've given up on finding enough American boys. Instead, they try to recruit lads from immigrant families from more class-ridden lands that are attracted to the old snob appeal of ballet.
It sometimes seems as if every other strip mall has a dance school. As far as I can tell, however, their students are almost entirely children (and almost entirely girls, for that matter). Popularity of an activity among children does not necessarily translate into popularity among adults. Consider soccer: millions of children play it, and hardly any adults have the slightest interest in it. Dance is probably the same.
ReplyDeleteYou're talking about performing -- adults will dance less than kids because their bones are weaker, they're less flexible, and have less energy. I'll bet that adult attendance at dance classes is up, though.
ReplyDeleteIn any event, I'm talking about consumption -- like, do people still appreciate dance. It's not exactly dance, but look at Cirque du Soleil. It started out as nothing and skyrocketed in popularity, now being one of the most bankable brands in the world.