The true power of the performing arts Ben Cameron

I am a cultural omnivore one whose daily

commute is made possible by attachment

to an iPod an iPod that contains vogner

and Mozart pop diva Christina Aguilera

country singer Josh Turner got gangster

rap artist Kirk Franklin concerto

symphonies and more and more I’m a

voracious reader a reader who do deals

with Ian McEwan down to Stephenie Meyer

I have read the Twilight tetralogy and

one who lives for my home theater a home

theater write of our DVDs

video-on-demand and for a lot of

television for me Law & Order SVU Tina

Fey and 30 rock and Judge Judy the

people are real the cases are real the

rulings are final now I’m convinced a

lot of you probably share my passions

especially my passion for Judge Judy and

you fight anybody who attempted to take

her away from us but I’m a little less

convinced that you share the central

passion of my life a passion for the

live professional performing arts

performing arts that represent the

orchestral repertoire yes but jazz as

well modern dance opera theatre and more

and more and more you know frankly it’s

a sector that many of us who work in the

field worry is being endangered and

possibly dismantled by technology while

we initially heralded the internet as

the fantastic new marketing device that

was going to solve all our problems we

now realize that the Internet is if

anything too effective in that regard

depending on who you read an arts

organization or an artist who tries to

attract the attention of a potential

single ticket buyer now competes with

between three and five thousand

different marketing messages a typical

citizen sees every single day we now

know in fact that technology’s our

biggest competitor for leisure time five

years ago Gen Xers spent 20.7 hours

online and TV the majority on TV Gen Y

are spent even more twenty three point

eight hours the majority online and now

a typical in a typical university

entering student arrives at college

already having spent twenty thousand

hours online and an additional ten

thousand hours playing video games

a stark reminder that we operate in a

cultural context where video games now

outsell music and movie recordings

combined moreover we’re afraid that

technology has altered our very

assumptions of cultural consumption

thanks to the internet we believe we can

get anything we want whenever we want it

delivered to our own doorstep we can

shop at 3:00 in the morning or 8:00 at

night ordering jeans tailor-made for our

unique body types ex expectations of

personalization and customization that

the live performing arts which have set

curtain times set venues attended

inconveniences of travel parking and the

simply cannot meet and we’re all acutely

aware what’s it gonna mean in the future

when we asked someone to pay $100 for a

symphony opera or ballet ticket when

that cultural consumer is used to

downloading on the Internet 24 hours a

day for 99 cents a song or for free

these are enormous questions for those

of us that work in this terrain but as

particular as they feel to us we know

we’re not alone all of us are engaged in

a seismic fundamental realignment of

culture and communications a realignment

that is shaking and decimating the

newspaper industry the magazine industry

the book and publishing industry and

more saddled in the Performing Arts as

we are by antiquated union agreements

that inhibit and often prohibit

mechanical reproduction in streaming

locked into large facilities that were

designed to ossify the ideal

relationship between artist and audience

most appropriate to the 19th century and

locked into a business model dependent

on high ticket revenues where we charge

exorbitant prices many of us shudder in

the wake of the collapse of Tower

Records and ask ourselves are we next

everyone I talked to in performing arts

resonates to the world of aid words of

Adrian rich who in dreams of a common

language wrote we are out in a country

that has no language no laws whatever we

do together is pure invention the maps

they gave us are out-of-date by years

and for those of you who love the arts

aren’t you glad you invited me here to

brighten your day

now rather than saying that we’re a bit

brink of our own annihilation I prefer

to believe that we are engaged in a

fundamental Reformation a Reformation

like the religious Reformation of the

16th century the arts Reformation like

the religious Reformation is spurred in

part by technology with indeed the

printing press really leading the charge

on the religious and Reformation both

Reformation czar predicated on fractious

discussion internal self-doubt and

massive realignment of antiquated

business models and at heart both

Reformation I think we’re asking the

questions who’s entitled to practice how

are they entitled to practice and indeed

do we need anyone to inter mediate for

us in order to have an experience with a

spiritual divine Chris Anderson someone

I trust you all know editor-in-chief of

Wired magazine and author of the long

tale really was the first for me to nail

a lot of this he wrote a long time ago

you know thanks to the invention of the

internet web cell a web technology

minicams and more the means of artistic

production have been democratized for

the first time in all of human history

in the 1930s if any of you wanted to

make a movie you had to work for Warner

Brothers or RKO because who could afford

a movie set and lighting equipment and

editing equipment and scoring and more

and now who in this room doesn’t know a

14-year old hard at work on her second

third or fourth movie similarly the

means of artistic distribution have been

democratized for the first time in human

history again in the 30s Warner Brothers

RKO did that for you now go to youtube

facebook you have worldwide distribution

without leaving the privacy of your own

bedroom this double impact is

occasioning a massive redefinition of

the cultural market a time when anyone

is a potential author frankly what we’re

seeing now in this environment is a

massive time when the entire world is

changing as we move from a time when

audience numbers are plummeting but the

number of arts

participants people who write poetry who

sing songs who perform in church choirs

is exploding beyond our wildest

imaginations this group others have

called the pro Am’s

amateur artists doing work at a

professional level you see them on

YouTube and dance competitions film

festivals and more they are radically

expanding our notions of the potential

of an aesthetic vocabulary while they

are challenging and undermining the

cultural autonomy of our traditional

institutions ultimately we now live in a

world defined not by consumption but by

participation but I want to be clear

just as the religious Reformation did

not spell the end to the formal church

or to the priesthood I believe that our

artistic institutions will continue to

have importance they currently are the

best opportunities for artists to have

lives of economic dignity not opulence

of dignity and they are the places where

artists who deserve and want to work at

a certain scale of resources will find a

home but to view them as synonymous with

the entirety of the arts community as by

far too short-sighted and indeed while

we’ve tended to polarize the amateur

from the professional the single most

exciting development in the last five to

ten years has been the rise of the

professional hybrid artist the

professional artist who works not

primarily in the concert hall or on the

stage but most frequently around women’s

rights or human rights around global

warming issues or AIDS relief or more

not out of economic necessity but out of

a deep organic conviction that the work

that she or he is called to do cannot be

accomplished in the traditional hermetic

arts environment today’s dance world is

not defined solely by the Royal Winnipeg

Ballet or the National Ballet of Canada

but by Liz Lerman’s dance exchange a

multi-generational professional dance

company whose dancers range in age from

18 to 82 and who work with genomic

scientists to embody the DNA strand and

with nuclear physicists at CERN today’s

professional theater community is

defined not only by the Shah and

Stratford festivals but by the

cornerstone Theatre of Los Angeles a

collective of artists that after nine

Levin brought together ten different

religious communities the Baha’i the

Catholic the Muslim the Jewish even the

Native American and the gay and lesbian

communities of faith helping them create

their own individual plays and one

massive play where they explored the

differences in their faith and found

commonality as an important first step

toward cross community healing today’s

performers like we’re deaf salons work

in women’s prisons helping women

prisoners articulate the pain of

incarceration while today’s playwrights

and directors work with youth gangs do

you find alternate channels to violence

and more and more and more and indeed I

think rather than being annihilated the

Performing Arts are poised on the brink

of a time where we will be more

important than we have ever been

you know we’ve said for a long time we

are critical to the health of the

economic communities in your town and

absolutely I hope you know that every

dollar spent on a performing arts ticket

in a community generates five to seven

additional dollars for the local economy

dollars spent in restaurants from

parking at the fabric stores where we

buy fabric for costumes the piano tuner

who chooses the instruments and more but

the arts are going to be more important

to economies as we go forward especially

in industries we can’t even imagine yet

just as they have been central to the

iPod and the computer game industries

which few if any of us could have

foreseen 10 to 15 years ago

business leadership will depend more and