The reports of our death...

My boss over at ArtsJournal.com, Doug McLennan, has a fascinating post up on his blog today, in which he discusses the exponential growth of the arts in America over recent years (and decades.) This huge expansion points up a strange disconnect in the way journalists have chosen to cover the arts (and, in particular, classical music) in America.

Certainly, the building of countless new museums, concert halls, performing arts centers, theaters, etc. has been well documented in the arts press. But when it comes time to assess the overall health of the arts, the same reporters and critics who have covered the boom are frequently found to be writing commentaries in which they decry the woeful state of American culture, the inability of the arts to connect with some mysterious mass demographic, and even declare classical music (and orchestras in particular) to be dying a slow death. (It must be particularly slow, since such commentaries have been circulating for at least 70 years now.)

Doug points out, correctly, that in the past half-century, America has gone from supporting one full-time orchestra (defined as an ensemble that pays its musicians year-round, regardless of salary) to supporting eighteen, including, of course, ours. And despite the regrettable folding of a few small regional orchestras (bankruptcies which are always trumpeted by arts writers as if the New York Phil itself had up and vanished, even if said writers had never heard of the orchestra in question until it filed for Chapter 7) during tough economic times, the overall size, scale, and quality of the orchestra industry today simply dwarfs the one that existed in the supposed golden age of Toscanini and Mitropolous.

The other interesting point Doug makes is that, while the arts are constantly criticized for not being attractive to a wider swath of the public, there is really nothing left in our entertainment world that does reach anything like a plurality of the population. Even in the vastly profitable and popular world of professional sports, the National Football League (far and away the gold standard of pro sports leagues) is of interest to less than half the population.

To me, all of this speaks to a larger issue that's been eating at me for quite a while, and a topic I'll return to in greater detail before long. In the age of globalization and instant communication, it has become far too easy to forget that much of the arts world remains intensely local. Audiences in Minneapolis are not comparable to audiences in, say, Philadelphia, for any number of reasons. There are good theater towns and bad theater towns, just as there are good and bad markets for hockey or baseball. No one city is really capable of embracing every conceivable type of entertainment with equal fervor - there are just too many options to choose from.

And yet, much of what passes for analysis in the arts press these days lacks any sort of context or sense of scale, and focuses on national statistics of dubious value, while ignoring the unqiuely local realities that most cultural groups inhabit. Essentially, it comes down to lazy journalism, the equivalent of you assigning me to write about the state of football in America, and me coming back to you with this:

NEW YORK, November 21 -- A comprehensive investigation has revealed that the vast majority of American cities and their citizens are so disconnected from the National Football League that they cannot even support a local franchise. A study of the 150 most populous U.S. cities showed clearly that only 21% currently have NFL teams in residence, and despite the fact that each team plays only eight home games per season, several franchises have been unable to sell all their available tickets. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell says that he is confident that the league is a stable presence on the American sports landscape, but for how long?

Absurd, isn't it? Yet this is the type of overly general, dubiously sourced, and statistically manipulative report that those who work in the arts wake up and read in the paper on an almost weekly basis. There are commentators who have devoted their entire careers to explaining, in depth, how classical music is dead, finished, kaput... and they continue to be taken seriously even after all of their dire predictions have fallen flat in the face of the public's continued appetite for orchestra concerts, chamber music recitals, and even amateur music clubs. It's enough to make a guy glad to read a story declaring that no one of his generation reads the newspaper anymore. (Of course, if the quality of national media analysis is anything like the quality of national arts reporting, you can expect the Star Tribune's circulation numbers to go through the roof shortly...)