Scarcity / Game On

Jason Grote, yesterday, in comments:

I kinda think this is an infuriatingly bullshit argument. You know that saying about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic? This is like that, except everyone's fighting over a single deck chair.

While I wouldn't go as far as him (I don't think it's a bullshit argument, obviously, as I wrote a follow-up post on it yesterday and I actually think it's interesting and definitely worth talking about) I get what he's saying, and it echoes what Mike Daisey said in the comments to my post about Blogger Ethics and Honesty in Conversation, namely that a lot of this comes out of resource scarcity.

This is one of the many reasons why I tend to blog about arts advocacy issues and why I am a big fan of govenrment arts funding... the other problems become easier to solve when we're not all competing for a shockingly small pool of resources. And no, I don't just mean money. I also mean space. I also mean media coverage. I also mean development opportunities. I also mean free time to do our art. 

Right now...Right fucking now there are two extremely important issues that could help in small ways to alleviate that resource scarcity and set the stage for dramatic alleviation in the future. They are increased NEA funding and health care reform. Both are also the subject of extremely dishonest and offensive attacks from the Right and both will take an enormous effort on our part to pass. 

Congress is in recess right now. This is the time for them to hear from you. I'm excited by the conversation going on in the comments about form and content, I think it's valuable. But I still gotta ask...  What are planning on doing this week to help the arts in America?

Comments

[Jason Grote]

Good points. To put it another way, there are lots of lame mainstream theaters whose programming I find utterly boring -- I don't care that they exist, any more than I care that there are 15 CSIs, or Mark Millar is doing another comic, or that rappers have fallen in love with auto-tune. I can just avoid it if I want. What sucks is when these places suck up all the resources, or are even openly hostile to experimentalists or experimentalism, which I've seen in a few cases, and which seems to be the subtext to this whole aggravating conversation. Do people really believe that Joe and Jane America stopped going to theater because they saw a Rich Maxwell piece at The Kitchen and it wigged them out? I know a LOT of people who never see theater, and to the extent most of them even know why they stopped going it was because (1) it was too expensive, and (2) it was too boring. Now, there's good boredom (see: John Cage) and bad boredom (I think we all know what that is), but I think they mean standard theater-boredom. And really, say what you will about The Wooster Group, but they're never going to be boring the way an Ibsen play can be boring. Which is to say slit-your-wrists boring.

As institutions go, my ideal is a theater like the Denver Center (not just because they produced 1001 and gave it a ton of support). They're a huge institution and vast majority of work they do is pretty standard mainstream fare, but they devote a lot of their resources to local-interest work, experimental work, and so on.

[99]

Give up blogging for the week.

[cgeye]

(spammer spill on aisle 1:42 PM)

Jason,
What's opened up the DCTC is more than the Summit, or Kent Thompson's instincts. DCTC now hires local actors and directors (e.g. Equity actors not exclusively employed by the theatre), which didn't happen so much, back in the day.

Also, they allow their actors to work in smaller Denver theatres during the Summer. Before, there was an unspoken rule that they had go to skitown theatres for summer work, which meant not seeing them rock out in works they were ready for, but seasonal choices would not allow.