The Role of Art Today

Before Eurydice at the Preservation Theater our first week in Juneau, a theater administrator talked about funding declines during economic hard times (though he did say a long time funder AT&T was standing by them) and he mused, "What is the role of art today?"

That got me thinking. And it hit me like a flash. Art today is what connects us to truth. Art, true art, not the ubiquitous commercial art, is a glimpse into the soul of its creator. In today's world where reality is plastered over with literal and figurative makeup to hide truth, it's art which pokes holes in the facades created by Madison Avenue, by Hollywood, and by Washington, etc.


For example, here's Anchorage Channel 2's Juneau announcer, Ted Land.  He's young, he's good looking, and yet when I saw him one evening preparing to go on the air, I noticed his face was covered in make-up.  Would it hurt if, God forbid, a pimple showed?   Apparently.

But art shows up without makeup and shows us what the powers-that-be  don't want us to see.

And so it's no wonder that funding for the arts is drying up.  The truth is inconvenient or even dangerous.

Art can survive in our capitalist society (that's not an epithet, just a description) when it can be mass marketed.  Putting on a play with live actors performing for a relatively small audience is a dicey economic proposition.  So is a live singer in a small venue.  Or an original painting.  But, as Christine Vashon  said (Conversation with Julianne Moore and Christine Vashon)

"Somebody asked him if Hollywood was homophobic and he said, 'It might be, but who cares?  Money isn't.'"

So, if you can digitize the actors and the singer and sell their digital image to millions, you can make some money.  But as investors want to minimize their risks, they also make demands on artists to package their art into proven genres and formats.  And often the flash of truth is edited out. 

Or so I mused in answer to the question.  A week or so later, I came to the end of the book I was reading, Jo Tatchell's The Poet of Bagdad:  A True Story of Love and Defiance (Thanks Catherine) about  artist Nabeel Yasin who defied Saddam Hussein's henchmen to tell his truth through his poetry.


In the Afterward (p. 347,) Tatchell answers the art question a little differently than I did when she writes about Nabeel, who eventually fled Iraq for Europe, and then returned to Bagdad after 27 years in exile,

Behind closed doors, avoiding the curfews, small groups, sometimes no more than three or four people, were staging theater shows, reading and writing literature, painting, sculpting, talking, and sharing their stories.  In these nascent communities, Nabeel found the lifeblood he had always hoped he would find.  Art, it seemed, was still a symbol of defiance of the violence and bloodshed everywhere.

Beyond the obvious effects of destruction gripping Baghdad he found people filled with a yearning to reclaim the true spirit of Iraq.  He found that art, unlike violence, is a way of asking questions about what has happened and what might still be to come for the country (emphasis added).