Alan Jacobs, Ross Douthat, Margo Jones, Tony Kushner and the Fate of (Pop) Culture
Friday, December 20, 2024
Alan Jacobs responds to Ross Douthat’s NYTimes question as to whether we can make pop culture great again with a blunt “Nope. Absolutely not.” His reason for this dour assessment is the “algorithmic culture,” which cannot be replaced by a more fragmented, individualized culture. Douthat sort of feels the same, bemoaning a film scene that is “completely fragmented, with forms of creativity that are all intensely niche, like the podcast-splintered marketplace of news consumption.” He looks at “Barbenheimer” as an example of two great pieces of film art being created at the same time and capturing the attention of the general public. Couldn’t that happen more?, he sighs.
Again, Jacobs brings the hammer down: “Great works of art can still be made,” Jacobs writes, “but if they are great their social status will be marginal at best; anyone capable of appreciating them will be hard put to find them. (It’s not impossible, mind you; but it’s not easy.) And many people who could in time make great work will be deterred and, reasonably enough, give up before they get started and work instead for hedge funds.” Bleak.
Jacobs’s suggestion echoes that of critic Lionel Trilling, who said, in a 1974 Commentary forum entitled “Culture at the Present Time,” when pressed by Norman Podhoretz’s question as to what the critic ought to do during a “bad time” like the 1970s, responds “You become historical-minded.” Podhoretz was outraged: he wanted Trilling to say critics ought to go on the attack; but Trilling was right, as is Jacobs, who says, “I’d bet a large sum of money that if you were to spend a year breaking bread with the dead, immersing yourself in the great works of the past, then at the end of that year the truth of my assessment would be obvious to you.” He then goes on to give us the good news, which is that there’s never been a better time to do this, considering all the online resources available to access the classics of past culture.
And there is a big part of me that enthusiastically agrees. Because the fact is that I just can’t find much to celebrate in popular culture these days, nor in my own area of expertise, the theater. Broadway is a bigger wasteland than it usually is, and the regional theaters across America are either collapsing or trying to remain afloat by becoming a pale reflection of Broadway. That four of the offerings of a season at the heavily-subsidized Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis are Dial M for Murder, ART, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Mousetrap is a clear indication that you’ve reached rock bottom. So personally I’ve followed Jacobs’s inclinations, revisiting the classics of theater, novels, philosophy, music, poetry, and visual art. And it’s been great, and that’s great for me as an arts consumer, but as Jacobs himself admits, it is pretty awful for the artists. And ultimately what is bad for the artists is bad for our culture, and what is bad for the culture is bad for our society. Heck, we have Trump because pop culture invented the wretched genre of “reality TV,” without which Trump would likely be sleeping under a bridge right now.
But I am reminded of the words of Margo Jones, arguably the founder of the regional theater movement, who argued in her inspiring 1965 book Theatre-in-the-Round that a commitment to the now is vitally important to the health of the theater:
I believe it is imperative in creating new resident professional companies to take a violent stand about the choice of plays. Personally I believe in the production of classics and new scripts, with emphasis on new scripts. Our theatre can never be stronger than the quality of its plays. We must, therefore, have a great number of good plays. The classics have proved their value throughout the history of the theatre, and I believe we should draw on them as great literature and great theatre. But if we produce only classics, we are in no way reflecting our own age. Our theatres must not only be professional, they must be contemporary as well. The most excellent seasons in New York are those which bring forth exciting new play-writing talent.
She goes on:
Too many people are saying, “I’ll do a new play if I can find a good one.” Certainly you must find a good one, but this attitude is not good enough. The plays can be found if you look hard enough. And if you take the violent stand I have spoken about, you will feel obligated to search and search and search until the scripts are discovered. I have a belief that there is great writing in America today and that much of it has not yet been unearthed.
In other words, quit being so damn passive. Is it hard to find great contemporary art in our fragmented, algorithmic culture? Sure. So what? Stop being like baby birds in the nest with their beaks wide open crying out for some Mama Bird to bring the worm of great art back and shove it down their little throats. Do some damn work! And when you find it, celebrate it–tell your friends, write on your blog. That’s what social media ought to be good for–telling the world. Yes, sure, read Eliot and Auden and Mann and Dostoevsky, AND look for today’s incarnations and bring them to the attention of the world.
Jones:
Great theatres have always had their playwrights. Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Ibsen—all these were men around whom theatrical companies were functioning. The Moscow Art Theatre had Chekhov; the Abbey Theatre had Yeats, Synge and O’Casey; the Provincetown had O’Neill; the Group had Odets. We must have our new playwrights, and we will not have them unless we give them many outlets to see their plays produced. This is the best way in which they can learn to write better plays.
Great theaters were not created by doing productions of middle-brow hits of the past. And a great culture isn’t created that way either.
That said, young artists need to listen to Jacobs and spend considerable time “breaking bread with the dead.” Playwright Tony Kushner put it well back in 1997 when he said:
I travel around the country doing lectures…and I am generally tremendously impressed with the students I meet and talk with, and generally unimpressed with what they know, and among these impressive and impressively undereducated students the worst, I am sorry to say, are the arts majors. And it isn’t simply that they seem remarkably non-conversant with the pillars of Western thought, with the political struggles of the day, with what has been written up in the morning’s paper–these arts majors know shockingly little about the arts.
Forget literature. How many theater majors do you know who could tell you, at the drop of a hat, which plays are by Aeschylus, which by Sophocles and which by Euripides? Or the dates of any of those writers? How many undergraduate playwriting majors, for instance, know even a single sentence of ancient Greek, just to have the sound of it in their ears and the feel of it in their mouths? How many really know what iambic pentameter is? How about alexandrines? How about who wrote what in alexandrines? How many know the names of a single Chinese playwright, or play? Or of more than one or two African playwrights? How many have read Heiner Miller? Suzan-Lori Parks? How many have read more than one play by either of these writers? How many have never heard of them? How many know who Lessing was, or why we should care? How many have read, I mean really read and absorbed, The Poetics?_ The Short Organum_?
By not having even a nodding acquaintance with the tradition I refer to, I submit that my students are incapable of really understanding anything written for the stage in the West, and for that matter in much of the rest of the world, just as they are incapable of reading Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Kristeva, Judith Butler and a huge amount of literature and poetry. They have, in essence, been excluded from some of the best their civilization has produced, and are terribly susceptible, I would submit, to the worst it has to offer.
So yes, artists need to pry themselves away from Netflix and break bread with the dead. And then we consumers, and professors, and critics need to sing at the top of our voices whenever we find even a glimmer of greatness in a living artist.
Not that I think Ross Douthat would know a great work of art if it bit him in the ass…