Enemies of the People?

Journalism, The Arts, and Arts Journalism in a Tempestuous Era

BY STEVEN LEIGH MORRIS

The Gulf of Incomprehension

Stage Raw is embarking on an equity and inclusion initiative for arts journalism, funded by philanthropist Z. Clark Branson.

We’ve recruited seven high school students who’ve expressed an interest in the field. We’ll be guiding them through issues of journalism’s larger purpose, and of ethics.

What do we tell them? How do we lay out the case for journalism, for the arts, and for arts journalism to enthusiastic teenagers curious about a sector they’re only starting to dabble in?

Let’s start in the stratosphere, and then gently descend to terra firma.

Part 1: Journalism — Why write, post, or publish a story?

Last Sunday, the New York Times broke a story that the Justice Department’s Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, suggested to colleagues that he wear a wire while speaking to President Trump, in order to better record the president’s mental fitness. If true (or even if not), such a report would obviously infuriate the president, who has railed against the “witch hunt” investigation of his friends and family by Independent Counsel Robert Mueller.

Rosenstein happens to be the direct supervisor of Mueller, who is investigating, among countless financial improprieties, alleged illegalities and collusion with the Russians by Trump aides and kin (and possibly by Trump himself), during and preceding the 2016 presidential election. Whether or not the termination of Rosenstein is coming, it was obvious that the NYT story would provide cover for the president to fire Rosenstein, should he wish, and thereby help derail Mueller’s investigation. This is akin to some drama critic of yore feeling the adrenaline-rush of closing a Broadway show with a few scathing swipes of his pen.

Fury against the newspaper ensued, based less on the story’s validity than on the judgment of the editors to release the article at the very moment when Mueller’s investigation appears to be rounding third base. The dissemination of the story indicting Rosenstein – ostensibly to reveal a truth — risked incalculable harm to Mueller’s lengthy and agonizingly intricate search for a larger pattern of corruption and collusion by people associated with The White House.

Perhaps it’s not part of a newspaper’s higher calling to employ political considerations when deciding whether or when to publish a story. If it does consider the political fallout of its stories, it’s just a tool, or so goes the purist argument.

But here’s the conundrum: If a newspaper doesn’t take into account the politics and larger context of the moment when breaking a story, it may be a tool nonetheless – as was abundantly argued in the NYT comments after the story broke, with suggestions that the article’s anonymous sources were lobbed over from the White House. But more to the point: Even if those sources weren’t lobbed over from the White House, they might as well have been.

The Founding Fathers enshrined a free press into the U.S. Constitution (“Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of the press”) in order to ensure an independent check on government overreach. The mainstream press has at times failed miserably in meeting that responsibility, such as when, with a pack mentality, it cheered on the U.S. government’s second invasion of Iraq, which later proved to be predicated on false intelligence. However, with the Washington Post and the New York Times and Politico on the front lines, it has more recently served up some inspiring fact-based challenges to government tyranny.

What we have in late 2018 is a federal government saddled with corruption and galloping towards authoritarianism. Governmental checks and balances have proven largely impotent over the 18 months. Only the Civil Liberties Union, the lower courts, and the independent press have created some barrier of resistance against the government’s more draconian and barbaric impulses against so many of our citizens and residents who are not white males, though the actual results of those challenges are mixed at best.

And then there’s the Mueller investigation – a work-in-progress that’s proven to be a strikingly efficient and credible searchlight upon corruption within the government and by its beneficiaries. The Whitewater investigation, seven Benghazi investigations, and the Hillary email investigation took a combined 12 years to result in zero convictions and zero indictments. In one year, Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation has netted five convictions, 31 indictments and seven guilty pleas. This is not an administration. It’s a crime syndicate.

One can only speculate that in this one story on Rod Rosenstein, the New York Times succumbed to its lesser angels – the needs for attention and to sell newspapers or, as one of the paper’s commentators put it, the needless need to “create drama.” As though, in this sliver of history, our very democracy isn’t hanging in the balance.

But as heady as it may be to influence, or to try to influence, the course of events, click–bait journalism sometimes comes at the cost of eating one’s young. Because if the New York Times aids this government in its continued attempts to hobble investigations of itself, and to enforce secrecy around its attempts to impose its own values, bigotry, and religion on the rest of us, our free press may well be next on the chopping block.

Part 2: The Arts — What for?

And what has any of this to do with the arts, you may ask?

A lot.

The sometimes inspired, sometimes pathological cravings for attention fuel both the newspaper industry and people who create and promote the arts. One industry is largely for profit. The other industry is largely non-profit. One group traffics in verifiable facts. The other group traffics in credible fictions. Both groups aim for the revelation of larger truths. Both are essential for a viable democracy.

Last week, in a rehearsal hall of the Mark Taper Forum Annex in downtown Los Angeles, The Society of Directors and Choreographers Foundation (SDC Foundation) gave its first-ever Gordon Davidson Lifetime Achievement Award to Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York’s Public Theater.

In introducing Eustis, director Tom Moore invoked the quintet who founded America’s regional theater movement: Zelda Fichandler (Arena Stage, Washington D.C), Tyrone Guthrie (The Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis), William Ball (San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre), Gordon Davidson (Mark Taper Forum/Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles), and Joe Papp (Public Theater, New York). The purpose behind the movement, Moore explained, was to counter the value system of Broadway – a theater system predicated on the relationship between popularity and box office returns. As Davidson himself once explained, those early regional theaters were created to produce world classics, which would rarely be seen on Broadway, and later that purpose shifted to the development of new plays, which, because of rising costs, Broadway could no longer afford to nurture and develop.

Upon receiving his award, Eustis opined on the people who collaborated from the 1950s through the late 1960s to forge a national system of non-commercial theater, a non-“transactional” art form — people who believed that the theater could contain a larger vision, a forum for discussion of the most prevalent ideas searing the culture at any given time. They all understood that such an art form could not be predicated on box office returns, and they made their case to the National Endowment for the Arts, to their local state and city funders, to the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, to the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, to the Shubert Foundation, etc., all of whom subsidized them and provided relief from restrictive box office mandates for survival.

And then, from about 1980, these funders and their resources trickled away. Not entirely, but largely, because philanthropy shifted from the arts to social emergencies (such as homelessness and mental health) that had been exacerbated by growing inequities in the distribution of wealth.

This would go a long way to explaining the growing commercial impulses of our regional theaters, and how – even as non-profit entities – among their most common activities was either to prepare musicals for commercial runs in New York, or to receive productions of commercial hits from New York – what many have decried as our regional theater’s crisis of purpose. Meanwhile, a growing share of innovative and interesting new work was built in the off-off-Broadway theaters of New York, in the garage theaters of Chicago, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, and in the Equity Waiver theaters of Los Angeles.

But the challenges of what Eustis called our “transactional culture” have never been more pronounced. There simply isn’t much money for the arts, creating the kind of dependence on box office revenue that structurally, inherently, restricts the nature and purposes of the work being created. According to ArtsBistro, California spends the least money per capita (.12 cents per year) on the arts of all the states in the nation. (Washington, D.C. heads that list, giving $11 per resident to the arts, followed by Minnesota at $5.79. New York state weighs in is at #5, spending $2.50 per capita.)

Since that 2010 report, California added $6.8 million to its arts budget, yet Los Angeles (“the cultural capital of the world,” as our boosters like to say), with its 10 million residents (that’s half the population of the entire state of New York) and over 250 professional theaters, and hundreds of galleries and museums, receives less money for the arts than the counties of either San Francisco (870,000 people) or San Diego (3.3 million). In Los Angeles County, almost all intimate and mid-size theaters alike are struggling week to week, just to keep their doors open. So if, for those who have been around a while, you observe that the work on our stages isn’t as daring as it once was, look first to economics.

Though journalism and the arts remain vibrant as activities, both the newspaper and performing arts industries across the U.S. have largely imploded over the past two decades — though clearly some regions are faring better than others. Both industries are struggling to reinvent themselves.

How do we avoid the temptation of click–bait journalism in the arts? How do we rise above mere craving for attention?

How do we gather the strength to pursue an idea worth pursuing?

How do we avoid financial dependence on ticket sales?

How do we avoid emotional dependence on “likes” for all we do?

How do we define accomplishment with terms including but also expanding beyond popularity and profit? It is unlikely in the history of theater that anybody created a production with the aim of being unpopular; however, it’s folly to conflate a lack of popularity with a lack of value.

How do we summon the strength to strive for excellence and relevance, despite the temptations of popularity?

How do we summon the strength to risk artistic failure when we have no money?

How do we convince our impoverished selves that artistic failure is worth the effort?

How do we make a case for the value of people gathering in a room and engaging in a ritual, shared among actors and audience breathing the same air, with dance, with music, with poetry?

How do we answer the tyranny of metrics and media that feed us only what we’ve reported we already like?

How do we answer the tribalism that such metrics forge?

How do we chip away at cement walls of certainty, including our own, that box us in?

How do we use the arts to engage our passions with our opponents’ passions, and theirs with ours?

How do we use the arts to provide some buttressing for our ever-so-fragile democracy?

How do we use the arts to talk to each other again?

To listen and to hear?

Arts Journalism: What for?

And what has any of this to do with arts journalism, you may ask?

A lot.

Again, as industries rather than activities, the performing arts and arts journalism have both imploded with the expansion of social media, though the causal relationship between arts journalism’s downfall and social media’s rise is complex and nuanced. Both the performing arts and arts journalism are struggling to make a case for themselves in a digital age.

There’s a presumption about “old school” arts journalism that might inform a fresh approach. It goes like this: Critics imagine themselves as arbiters of public taste when their view represents only one opinion.

It’s true that in “old school” journalism, critics were writing as arbiters of public taste. Go see this. Don’t see that. This is why this play is worth your $100 ticket. And this is why it isn’t. And this is a standard that cuts deep into the history of the mainstream press, which once had significantly more influence over public taste than it does today – before the populism of social media diminished the influence of experts. The opinions of Frank Rich in the New York Times or Dan Sullivan in The Los Angeles Times, could make or break a production, on Broadway or at the Pantages. In addition, personal or social or political essays by Clive Barns relating a production to the larger world appeared in a weekly New York Times Sunday column, until the quality of reflectiveness fell out of style in newspapers competing with new media for subscribers. That antique reflectiveness aside, the power to feed or kill a theater production must have been a heady and perhaps pernicious thrill for a drama critic to possess. And this is how drama critics came to be so despised by theater artists – for the gross inequity in the power structure. That is now ancient history, though some of the animus lingers. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram seem to do just fine as platforms for consumer guides. What, then, is the use of critics, and other knowledgeable arts journalists?

However, this analysis gives no credence to the alternative press – outlets such as the Village Voice in New York (founded in 1955) and the LA Weekly in Los Angeles (founded in 1978). Each was created as a means to challenge the opinions and values of the mainstream press – in news, culture, and the arts. The alternative press was created in journalism for much the same reasons that the regional theater was created in the United States – to challenge the hegemony and value systems of, respectively, the mainstream press and the Broadway system.

The same funneling of wealth into fewer and fewer pockets that created the growing swaths of poverty, homelessness and mental illness that stymied continued philanthropic funding of the regional theaters similarly stymied the alternative press in the fulfillment of its purpose – though for entirely different reasons. (The alternative newspapers were eventually sold off to private equity companies with the aim of maximizing profits.)

The death knell of the alternative press grew increasingly loud in the 21^st century, along with the death knell for alternative values in general. As somebody noted in the comments section of the Washington Post, the Village Voice didn’t collapse because there was suddenly a lack of corrupt landlords to write about.

Whereas the mainstream press insisted and insists on a certain consistency of form and style, tied to the impression of objective analysis, the alternative press encouraged its writers to be idiosyncratic and to forge enlightened opinions that were their own and nothing but their own, revealing how a production influenced their personal understanding of life. One LA Weekly editor went so far as to create a sarcastic letterhead for the paper, renaming it the Me Weekly.

Back to the Future

His Girl Friday (1940)

So what do we say to a 15-year old kid who’s shown some flare for the arts and for the journalism that covers it?

Why do the arts matter? Because they provide alternative perspectives in a world of diminishing perspectives. The arts have the potential to be an open marketplace of ideas and emotions that buttress the vibrancy of our fragile democracy. They enhance the public conversation.

Can one arts journalist speak for the public. Mostly no. The public is not some monolith. The public consists of varied sensibilities and predispositions, as do arts journalists. The arts journalist is speaking for one person.

Should arts journalism guide the public to the best performances? That depends on how one defines “best.” Consumer guides are handled just fine on social media. Boosterism is handled by chambers of commerce and tourism bureaus. Sending patrons to venues is not the primary purpose of the arts journalist. The underlying purpose of arts journalism is not transactional. Sending patrons to performances might be a happy after-effect. As news journalism aims to enlighten us with new facts, arts journalism aims to enlighten us with new insights.

What are the qualifications of the arts journalist? To be an authority in the field and enlightened in related fields, in order to interconnect performances in an accessible way to other fields and to the larger world beyond the arts. The ideal response of a reader to a work of arts journalism is, “Oh, I never thought of it that way.”

Should an arts journalist write about a work he or she doesn’t like? It depends. The first goal is to identify the aim of the creative artists, and then to assess if and how that aim was met. Perhaps the author had one intent, which was undermined by the director, or vice-versa. That’s helpful to know. Perhaps all of the creators were working in harmony towards a single intent. In that case, if the arts journalist has no respect for that intent, it’s his/her responsibility to explain why. If the arts journalist adores that intent, it’s his/her responsibility to explain why. If there is no explanation, no insight, if it’s just some facile liking or disliking, it would be more helpful for the journalist to write about something else. Artists may love the boosterism of journalists, but over time, boosterism creates a credibility problem for the journalist.

What’s the difference between boosterism and support? Boosterism is the act of shilling for a production company. Support is the act of expressing respect for the endeavor of the artists and for the relevance of the field.

Artists and arts journalists can use a whole lot of support right now. Because the arts are not an indulgence, a plaything, an irrelevance. The arts hold in their palm the quality of the culture we inhabit. They feed local businesses. They can save lives in after-school programs as much as a clinic or a shelter. And arts journalism supports that endeavor, arm in arm.