Are certain forms of cultural performance necessarily elitist? Are certain ways of consuming culture equally one percent? New York Times music critic Antony Tommasini recently worried that OWS reinforces the perception of classical music as “elitist and inaccessible.” His counterargument was based on such examples as the free Liederabend concerts at the Juilliard School in Manhattan. What, though, are the cultural requirements of admission? What are the politics of music performance?
I had to Google to find out that “Liederabend” means “song recital” and that the Juilliard is part of Lincoln Center: admission to such events requires cultural capital, even more than whatever price is being charged. While these events are listed on their website, they are not advertised as free until you click through to a specific event, so I would never have known. The Juilliard as a school is unabashedly elitist, according to its own website, admitting 7% of its applicants and charging $33,000 tuition.
Tommasini goes on to worry about the elitist patronage of the arts by people like the toxic David Koch, who uses the “arts” as the respectable side of his financial activism, otherwise devoted to the Tea Party and similar causes. He worries that such “dependence would seem to make the performing arts a natural focus for the Occupy activists.” Indeed, there were two notable actions this fall, one at Julliard and one at Lincoln Center.
At Lincoln Center, Philip Glass presented his new piece Satyagraha, an opera based on Gandhi’s non-violent theory of resistance. As it happens, I was today sent a link to a video by Jean Thevenin of the OWS protest at the première in which the NYPD and Lincoln Center refused to allow Occupy to use the space in front of the Met, on the grounds that it is “limited public space.” Philip Glass himself and Lou Reed joined in the action. You can see some OWS regulars in the crowd but also bow-tie types, listening to the presentations, set here to Glass’s music.
Visible Shape (Philip Glass & Lou Reed occupying Lincoln Center) from jaune! on Vimeo.
For Tommasini: “it was easier to understand the issues that the Occupy Wall Street protesters care about than what policies they were seeking in relation to the arts.” At the low-point of the article, he makes the time-worn argument that the Metropolitan Opera is not elitist because some seats in the highest balcony are available for $40.
Occupy was not talking about the financial price of admission. The question at stake is whether the aestheticisation of politics in designated arts spaces can continue to be acceptable, in a climate where only passivity is permitted in social space.
At a performance by the Israel Philharmonic in London in September 2011, activists intervened inside the arts space, calling on Israel to “end the occupation” by singing words set to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” over the orchestral performance. Composer Janice Misurell-Mitchell, reporting on the happening, felt she could not have joined in but empathized with the “brilliant concept examining ways we may take power through sound.”
It is the sound of Occupy that seems to return here: the use of sound to occupy three-dimensional space that counters both the flattening occupation of monetizing everything and the “politics of verticality” that constitute Israel’s occupation of Palestine.
More on this tomorrow.